Obermayer German Jewish History Award

“I want to…tell people the truth”

Roland Müller brings to life the Jewish history of a Polish city that once was part of Germany

For someone who spent 40 years as a civil engineer, Roland Müller has published a long list of acclaimed articles and books on history, in particular the Jewish history of Wroclaw, Poland. 

Müller holds a doctorate in economics, with a specialty in the construction industry, from the Technical University of Dresden. But these days he prefers to talk about the book he wrote on the Wroclaw synagogue community before the Holocaust or the plaque he had installed recognizing Adolf Heilberg, a celebrated Jewish lawyer, peace activist, and city council president prior to the Nazis assuming power. Or the map and guide he creating detailing a Jewish history trail in Wroclaw. 

In fact, as a youth Müller yearned to become a historian. But the reality of living in East Germany, where history was seen exclusively through the lens of communism, dampened that dream. 

Born in 1942 in the southern Brandenburg town of Elsterwerda, Müller grew up without his father, who had died toward the end of the war near Krakow. When he was 12, Müller began a pen pal relationship with a Jewish girl in Warsaw named Tamara Burstyna, whom he visited two years later during Christmas break. Burstyna’s father had been a commander in the Polish army, and the family survived the war living in the underground. Müller was the first German that the family had met since 1945. 

When Burstyna introduced Müller to her Jewish friends, the experience impacted him deeply. “That’s when I first became interested in Jewish history,” he recalls. “I began to think and ask and read about the Jewish past and the daily life of Jews, the Holocaust, the concentration camps.” 

On a visit to Wroclaw in 1961, he came across an old teachers’ manual on Judaism, written in 1877 and published in both German and Hebrew. It contained a stamp from a Jewish reform school. The school detail fascinated Müller and drove his curiosity to find out more. “It was the first book where I got to learn something about the Jewish religion and Jewish life,” he says. Until World War II Wroclaw was known as Breslau and was part of Germany. In 1925, Breslau had the third largest Jewish population in the country.

Müller returned to Wroclaw several times over the next decades. He liked to visit the city museum, where he learned more about the history of its Jewish schools before the war. When he was laid off in the late 1990s due to a downturn in the building sector, “I decided to make the best of the situation and go into the field that had always interested me so much—history,” he says. Müller dove into research about the city’s Jewish schools in the 19th and 20th centuries, mining the Polish State Archives to document stories of the untold individuals, institutions, and synagogues that contributed to Wroclaw’s rich cultural tapestry of the pre-War era. 

In  2003 Müller published his first book, The Breslau School System During the Weimar Republic (Das Breslauer Schulwesen in der Weimarer Republik). It focused on the period between the end of World War I and the rise of the Nazis in 1933, and it was accompanied by an exhibition at the Architectural Museum of Breslau. Ever since he has been almost single-handedly rediscovering and reviving Wroclaw’s Jewish past, bringing to light both the greatest achievements and the tragic disappearance of the community under Nazi atrocities. Without any institutional or financial support, Müller has published articles in journals and magazines, organized exhibitions, and given lectures about the city’s Jewish history.

“I thought it was very important to...show how the Jews of Wroclaw were doubly affected by the Nazi regime—not only through the Holocaust but through their eviction and displacement as Germans after the war,” he says. At that time Germans were forced out of Silesia, Bohemia, and other formerly German-occupied areas. “I wanted to show that the fate of the persecuted Jews from Wroclaw must not be forgotten.” 

He contacted survivors and family descendants from Wroclaw, and in 2006 he traveled to Israel. There he met former citizens of the city, some of whom had studied at its Jewish schools. On that trip, Müller got to know one émigré from Wroclaw, Werner Ansorge, who told him his life story. Müller published it as My First 80 Years: From Breslau to Israel (Meine ersten achtzig Jahre: von Breslau nach Israel). 

In 2012, Müller published a biography of Wroclaw’s last democratically elected mayor in the Weimar era, Otto Wagner: Otto Wagner (1877-1962) in the Conflict Between Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord Mayor in Breslau and Jena (Otto Wagner (1877–1962) im Spannungsfeld von Demokratie und Diktatur: Oberbürgermeister in Breslau und Jena). It told the larger story of Wroclaw’s democratic history. 

In 2014 Müller created a city map and guide showing Jewish places of interest, “On the Trail of the Wroclaw Synagogue to the Shoah” (Auf den Spuren der Breslauer Synagogengemeinde bis zur Shoah). In 2018 he added additional maps and a guide to Wroclaw’s sites of Jewish activity and published the guide in book form, called On the Trail of the Wroclaw Synagogue to the Shoah: Facts, People, History (Auf den Spuren der Breslauer Synagogengemeinde bis zur Shoah: Fakten-Personen-Geschichte).  

Müller was instrumental in 2019 in raising funds to establish a plaque on the wall of the Jewish cemetery of Wroclaw commemorating Adolf Heilberg, a prominent Jewish lawyer, politician, and philanthropist. Heilberg was also founder of the German Peace Movement. Müller had previously profiled Heilberg in an article. 

Helen Breslauer of Toronto, a great-granddaughter of Heilberg, appreciates Müller’s dogged efforts. “[He] works tirelessly through his writing and his public presentations to bring his beliefs about social democracy, the rule of law, and peace to as wide an audience as possible,” she says. 

Müller continues to discover new material to write about Wroclaw, which now has the second largest Jewish community in Poland after Warsaw. He anchors his research with real people whose real stories he brings to life on the page. By connecting with audiences today, particularly young people, he hopes to show the diversity and tolerance in Weimar’s democratic society, revealing people’s “contributions not just as Jews, but as Germans and normal citizens of Wroclaw. Jews of that time could be Jews and Germans; they were both, and it’s important to show this. We must not distinguish wrongly between Jews and Germans,” he says. 

For Müller the past isn’t as far from the present as many people might think, making his work as urgent as ever. “I want to make a contribution,” he says, “to commemorate Jewish history as far as it is in my power, to counter anti-Semitism in its current form, and to tell people the truth about what happened in the past.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2020