Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Wilfried Weinke

Hamburg

The two aims driving Wilfried Weinke's work as a historian are, on the one hand, to confront a young, mainstream German public with the Holocaust in ways that bring the country's former Jewish legacy to life, and, on the other hand, to rescue the names of forgotten German Jewish artists and intellectuals from the past. As J. Joseph Lowenberg, the grandson of the early 20th century poet Jakob Loewenberg, said, "Without Weinke's efforts, I doubt that my grandfather's literary reputation would receive any recognition in Germany today."

"I try to write as a journalist and as a historian so that ordinary people can understand what I'm saying, in a language and in a style that interests people to learn more," says Weinke, whose essays and articles have appeared in Aufbau, Tribüne and Antiquariat, and whose talks on anti-Semitism fill school lecture halls throughout Germany. "Jewish history and those biographies connected to our history—about emigration, about exile, about deportation—weren't taught in school. They were a neglected part of our history. [My work] is an offer to an unknown public, saying, 'If you're interested in history, if you don't want National Socialism or the violation of human rights to happen again, you can learn by reading or listening to this lecture or going to this exhibition.'"

Weinke, who was born in 1955 in the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein, grew passionate for German Jewish literature as a teenager, partly in reaction to his family's silence about the Holocaust. "My father was a soldier in a tank. My uncle was a member of the SS," he remembers. "When I was 14 I started getting curious and thinking in political terms. I asked my parents, 'What have you done, what was your responsibility [in the war]?'" It was when they "slammed the door" on his questions and his teachers refused to speak that Weinke rebelled. He wrote his high school thesis about Jewish ghetto life; then, after earning a literature degree from Hamburg University, he abandoned his teaching career in favor of full-time research and writing about Hamburg's Jewish past.

In 1986, Weinke worked with the Hamburg History Museum to produce Ehemals in Hamburg zu Hause: Jüdisches Leben am Grindel (Formerly at Home in Hamburg: Jewish Life on the Grindel), an exhibit about the city's former Jewish quarter that "astonished" local residents, he recalls. The show traveled to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and in 1991 Weinke used the material to write a book. He published a second book based on his 2003 exhibition—which drew 25,000 Hamburg and Frankfurt visitors—exploring the lives and works of four Jewish photographers from Hamburg, called Verdrängt, vertrieben, aber nicht vergessen: Die Fotografen Emil Bieber, Max Halberstadt, Erich Kastan und Kurt Schallenberg (Displaced, Expelled but not Forgotten: The Photographers Emil Bieber, Max Halberstadt, Erich Kastan and Kurt Schallenberg). 

Motivating Weinke is "a strong feeling of justice and of wanting to set wrongs right, [by giving] a posthumous voice to intellectuals who perished," says Mark Lissauer, a descendent of Hamburg Jews who Weinke contacted for his research on the Grindel. Indeed, for Weinke it's not just about producing an exhibit or writing a book but about making "personal contact" with the people, and their descendents, whose work he is uncovering.

And then it's about bringing those individual stories to life in the museum, and on the page.

"My Jewish friends like to joke with me, 'You are verjudet,' You've become too Jewish," Weinke says. The way he sees it, though, "It's responsibility, it's curiosity and it's my training as a teacher [that pushes me]. There is so much material, so many people waiting to be interviewed and to have their biographies told, so many books unpublished."

Despite the odds, Weinke, who has lectured in London, Zurich and South Africa, is doing what he can to see that no story gets forgotten. In the case of Holocaust survivor and U.S. resident Lucille Eichengreen, for example, Weinke and his wife Ursula Wamser arranged the translation and publication of her three books in Germany-not to mention organized a speaking tour for her at schools across Germany. 

Finally, though, it is Weinke's own research and writing that drives him. In December of 2006, he published an expanded version of the Grindel book under a new title, Eine Verschwundene Welt (A Disappeared World). More current is the biography he is completing and the first-ever exhibition he is preparing on Heinz Liepman, a Hamburg journalist and author from the 1920s who fiercely criticized the Nazis, fled to America and returned after the war to write about the Auschwitz trials. Yet how is it that Weinke is able to engage young Germans in these people and events of long ago?

By making their histories personal and by using the tools of a creative historian.

"We can talk about six million Jewish deaths, but you have to convey to people what it meant to be a 13-year-old Jewish student in the Grindel. You have to make this connection and explain history to the generation today. This is my profession," says Weinke, "combining archive documents, photos, interviews, and [survivors'] written words to produce an essay, an article, an exhibition or a book. This is the most wonderful work I could do."