Obermayer Award

Finding history in forgotten places

With few witnesses left, the Zeitlupe educational project focuses on important places

by Toby Axelrod

Slow down! Not an easy directive to follow in our rushed world. But that is just what the Zeitlupe project – literally “slow motion” in German—is asking of its public: Take a step back and look at your history if you want to move forward.

Based in the former East German city of Neubrandenburg, this educational project uses local history to shed light on the totalitarian regimes of the Nazi era and East German communism. It builds curriculum for educators of students of all ages, using “forgotten” sites of history as its classroom. 

The aim of Zeitlupe, which also means “to look at time through a magnifying glass,” is to provide skills for learning from history in order to protect human rights and democratic values today.

A model of on-site learning, Zeitlupe focuses on such locations as the former Nazi prisoner of war camp at Fünfeichen and the former Waldbau and Retzow-Rechlin concentration camps; and Lindenberg, the local hub of East Germany’s secret police. The site of the notorious concentration camp for women, Ravensbrück, is about 30 miles away. The Zeitlupe website search engine allows teachers to select a location; a time period; and type of media, from photographs to field trips to lesson plans.

Thus, these sites become like classrooms for various groups, from teens to military officers and even nurses in training. 

Zeitlupe also advises city administrators, initiatives, and victims' associations on questions of historical policy and remembrance culture. Its philosophy is to make experiences meaningful by connecting them to the life experiences of participating young people and adults. 

With a “Lupe,” a magnifying glass, you can find the traces of lesser-known history, says Zeitlupe founder and director Constanze Jaiser, a PhD in German studies and Protestant theology, who learned the hard way that it takes time to deal with difficult topics. You can’t jump in headfirst.

“As a girl, I was shocked by movies, the documentaries my teachers showed me in ninth grade. I was interested in history, but I could not be involved in studying this history [on my own],” she says. “If you want to present the reality of these atrocities to pupils without overwhelming them, it is important to take it slow. … People have different abilities and work at different speeds.”

For example, a high school group spent an entire week exploring Germany’s 19th century colonization of African countries. Pupils visited a regional museum with an extensive exhibit on colonialism; the pupils learned about Germany’s current relations with former colonies and made videos, exploring such topics as fair trade and Germany’s policies toward refugees today. It was “cool to see them growing during this week,” says Jaiser, noting that at least six different languages were spoken by the students. “In the end they were able to get emotional and have arguments and discussions about how history influenced their lives.”

It’s also important to start small, says historian Martin Müller-Butz, a member of the Zeitlupe project team. “What touched me was that in these local places, these memorial sites that are not so famous or popular, you can also see the traces of big, macro history.” For example, during World War II, production machines from occupied Poland were transported to the Waldbau concentration camp site in Neubrandenburg. “Women had to do forced labor and produce weapons for the Wehrmacht there,” he says.

Zeitlupe has helped make such sites as Waldbau visible, as microcosms of the bigger picture of history. Plans are under way to turn it into an official memorial site. 

Zeitlupe also tackles societal issues facing students today, such as exclusion and forced migration. In all its work, Zeitlupe aims to link remembrance with the promotion of democratic values and with tackling contemporary challenges, including right-wing populism and fake news. Working with local cultural and educational institutions, memorial sites, and civil society groups, Zeitlupe develops educational approaches and materials. It also takes a creative approach, supporting the work of artists who access history with emotions through music, theater, video, and sculpture.  

The project gets financial support from the Berlin-based Freudenberg Foundation and is under the umbrella of the Regional Office for Education, Integration, and Democracy (RAA) Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Art Brings History Closer

One recent project is “NamensTropfen“ (NameDrops), in which the names of women and girls who were incarcerated in the Waldbau camp were etched onto brightly colored acrylic glass drops. In the fall of 2021, some 500 drops were hung from steel frames placed in the forest where the prisoners had lived in semi-underground barracks.

“The connection between creativity and nature is an exciting basis to discover this historic place in a sensitive and meaningful way,“ says Imke Rust, the German-Namibian artist who created this installation and another one at the site: “Silhouettes of Women” (2019).

Local students took part in the NameDrops project, researching the biographies of prisoners and helping to etch the names onto the drops. As part of the project, they also talked about their own names and biographies. “It deepens the connection to such places,“ Rust says. 

The project turned “numbers into individual fates,” says one of Zeitlupe’s biggest fans, Neubrandenburg Mayor Silvio Witt. “In addition to historical research, there is always an emotional confrontation with history,” he says. Zeitlupe “has made the past much more accessible, bringing children and youth closer to their city,”  he adds, lauding their “passionate work to make the former Waldbau camp visible again.” 

Another site recently came into focus: A group of nursing students spent an intensive week in March 2021 at the former Nazi POW camp at Fünfeichen, which also had been used by the Soviet Union as a post-war internment camp. The students—women from Germany, Asia, and India—were there to learn how people in healing professions were bent to the genocidal, racist purposes of the Nazi regime, says historian and nurse Anja Katharina Peters, professor of the history of nursing at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Dresden.

Peters and a colleague designed the weeklong program with Constanze Jaiser, tapping into historical documents. Participants then “chose topics to focus on, such as medical experiments, suffering in the camps, medical facilities, and treatments,” and developed concepts for a video presentation.

“Nurses in the concentration camp took care of SS staff and soldiers, but they were also responsible for running the sick bay for prisoners and treated them absolutely horrendously,” says Peters. “They assisted in medical experiments. They actively killed babies who were born in the camp. So my profession was actively involved in one of the hugest crimes in the history of humankind, and this is something we have to face—not just to honor the victims but also to prevent it from happening ever again. We have to educate future nurses to think before they do what they are told to do.”

For the students from Asia and India, this history was quite new. “I told them before we started that if you want to work in Germany, it is important to know this part of our history, because… it really still influences our way of thinking in the fields of medicine, nursing, and midwifery.”

Peters was astonished to find the German students “very open, very interested… You usually have a couple of young adults who say ‘I have heard enough about this.’... But there was none of that in this group.” She attributes this in part to Jaiser’s pedagogical style: “Constanze meets students on eye level. She never overwhelms them; she develops a mindset together with them.”  

When it comes to learning about Nazi history, says Jaiser, “Young people are interested. What they don’t want is a moralistic attitude that forces them to think in a specific way, and they don’t want a very academic approach. They need space to develop their own ideas or find their own arguments, and they need support for all the things they cannot know because they are young.

“It creates a problem for pedagogical staff,” she adds. “They have family biographies, and unfortunately in Germany it’s not usually from the persecuted side [during the Nazi period] but from the bystander side—or even worse.”  Or they carry the burdens of having grown up in former East Germany, which officially detached itself from the history of the Holocaust.

“As a facilitator I have to balance the individual, the group, the topic, and then the surrounding globe,” says Jaiser, who has explored her own complicated family history, too. “Two words are very important in my professional life, and they are strongly connected with my family biography: one is denunciation and the other is justice.”

Jaiser, who grew up in former West Germany, considers Zeitlupe, which was founded in 2016, “the perfect place for me” after decades of work on this chapter of German history. It started during her university years in Berlin, when she wrote a dissertation in 1995 on poetry and art by inmates in concentration camps. She has since worked as a social scientist and educator with many different organizations, mostly dealing with Holocaust history. From 2006-2013 she was on the staff of Germany’s national Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, where she was responsible for its youth-related website. 

She thrives on working with colleagues of all ages, and is quick to note that there is a generation between herself and Müller-Butz, who was born in 1984 in former East Germany. 

“I am one of the last children of the German Democratic Republic,” quips Müller-Butz, who grew up close to the German border with the Czech Republic. He studied Eastern European history and political science in Jena, in the state of Thuringia, after German unification.

When he came to work with Zeitlupe, he was unfamiliar with the local sites. And for the teenagers who took part in the NameDrops installation last October, “it was the first time they were really touching [Nazi] history, particularly in Neubrandenburg.”

The act of writing someone’s name on the Plexiglas drop “was quite an emotional moment for me,” he says. The pupils “realized what can happen to someone if their own name is taken away and they get a number. These are quite drastic questions, but you can also work with young people by asking what their name means to them… Some told me that they didn’t like their names, or that they didn’t know why their parents chose their names… We hope that these workshops start a process of thinking about these things.”

By confronting our own identities in the context of history, “we understand each other better, and that brings us together as a society,” says Mayor Witt, who has looked at his own roots as well. “We humans are not only rational; above all, it’s our emotions that make us human.”

That’s especially clear for Witt when it comes to confronting the history of the East German dictatorship, since “both victims and perpetrators are to a large extent still alive and can encounter each other in everyday life... That is why a great deal of sensitivity is still needed, 32 years after the fall of communism.”

Zeitlupe is brainstorming with the city on ways to use the abandoned former East German secret service prison as a site for confronting history. “We have to take the time for this, and we will do so,” says Witt, who has called Zeitlupe “an indispensable player in the city's remembrance landscape.” 

When it comes to facing the history of the Nazi period, Jaiser says, “We have entered a new era, and it’s sadly necessary.” With the loss of eyewitnesses over time, “historical sites became more important. In recent years, all over Germany you can see greater engagement with forgotten historical places.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2022