"If she wants to do it, she does it.”

Anja Listmann brings passion and determination to her work highlighting Jewish history and life

by Toby Axelrod

Anja Listmann wears her heart and soul on her sleeve. And she has touched the hearts of many in the city of Fulda and beyond.

As a teacher, she has taken countless students with her on a journey to discover the city’s Jewish history. She has built connections with Jews who have roots in pre-war Fulda. And she has helped ensure that the fate of Jews in the Holocaust is not forgotten.

Over the years, Listmann’s activism has earned her a place of respect. 

In 2021 Mayor Heiko Wingenfeld invited her to become the city’s first commissioner for Jewish life. She’s the go-to person when it comes to historical issues and current challenges. The part-time position comes with an office in the historic Jewish community building. Each time she climbs the stairs to her office, she thinks about how the Jewish community was based here until the deportations of 1942. Very few Jews survived.

Listmann was born in Fulda and raised in nearby Bad Salzschlirf. She became interested in local Jewish history in the 1990s when a guest at her mother’s bed and breakfast said, out of the blue, “I don’t like Jews.”

Listmann, who was in her early 20s at the time, experienced a strong and instant reaction. “It was like someone hit me on the head,” she recalls. 

She decided to write her final college exam paper about the Jews of Bad Salzschlirf. She was encouraged by her grandmother, who remembered her former Jewish neighbors. Cassette recorder in hand, Listmann first interviewed her grandmother, followed by her grandmother’s friends and neighbors. “At first people were nice — because I'm ‘the cute Anja.’” But later, when they saw how serious she was, she says, “Doors were shut.” 

While she was away at college in Heidelberg, people rang the bell at her parents’ home and said, “‘This girl, she has to stop. This is not a topic for a girl. She can write about traditional customs,’” Listmann recalls. “When my parents went to the butcher or the baker, people stopped them to say the same thing: This is not something she should talk about, write about.”

Her father would answer: “If she wants to do it, she does it.”

Listmann was not deterred. “I'm the kind of person, if you threaten me, it doesn't work,” she says.

She put an ad in a global German Jewish newspaper, the Aufbau, seeking Jews with roots in Bad Salzschlirf. “And letters came,” she says. They came from people who wanted to know the fates of their relatives. Listmann shared what she had learned, and began to build ties to Jewish families living around the world.

In 2000 her exam dissertation was published as a book, “Almost Forgotten: Jewish Life in Bad Salzschlirf” (Beinahe vergessen: Jüdisches Leben in Bad Salzschlirf).

Despite the worries of people in her community, she says, “My goal was never to accuse perpetrators but to save the Jewish history for the descendants.” She even disguised the name of a convicted SS war criminal from the town. Today, the name Herbert Hübner is well known, but some residents still ask Listmann how they can remove the Wikipedia entry about him. They say: “It gives bad vibes for our health resort in Bad Salzschlirf.”

“Anja, no one will come.”

Listmann married her high school sweetheart, Klaus, in 1996. They live outside of Fulda and have two children, a daughter and a son.  

In 2001 she became a teacher of history and German at the Bardoschule in Fulda. Then she turned her attention to the story of Fulda’s Jews. 

Gradually, she got to know the current Jewish community; the majority of its members are emigres from the former Soviet Union. “They didn’t trust me at first,” she says. She asked for their help in locating books and documents, and eventually they said, “She's okay.” 

In 2011 she asked her principal at the Bardoschule whether she could initiate a school project on local Jewish history. At that time, local schools for college-bound students offered such opportunities, but at the less academically oriented schools, she says, “No one cared.” 

The principal told her, “Anja, no one will come.”

But they did come, even though the project didn’t offer extra school credit. The pupils, age 15 and 16, met weekly for 90 minutes. She introduced them to the biographies of Jews from Fulda, and they went into the streets together to find out where these Jews had lived, worked, and gone to school. 

Listmann wanted her students to understand the Holocaust in human terms and to see that it is not something far away. “It happened right in front our doors. So this is something they connected to. And they said [of the victims], ‘Oh, she's like my age,’ or ‘She looks like my grandma.’”

Elena Varntoumian, a student at the University of Würzburg, was in Listmann’s 8th grade class in 2016. “If you read about [the Holocaust] in school, in books, it sounds fictional,” she says. Listmann made it much more real. 

“We interviewed the children of Jews who had lived in Fulda,” Varntoumian recalls. She spoke with American Jewish filmmaker Ethan Bensinger about his mother, who had fled Fulda in the 1930s. Varntoumian and Bensinger are still in touch, and he visits Fulda each year. “I've found friends through this project … for life,” Varntoumian says.

By the time Listmann accompanied her students on a weeklong trip to the memorial at Auschwitz, they already knew a lot about Fulda’s Jewish families. “They knew what [the families] endured, if they survived, if they were murdered,” she says. The journey was profound and served as a powerful bonding experience. “You cry together, you laugh together. Those students are amazing. You can't imagine how driven they are. I adore them.”

“I just started sketching.”

In 2019, Listmann transferred to the Winfriedschule Gymnasium, which adopted her Jews in Fulda project. 

During her January 2023 class visit to Auschwitz, Listmann noticed one of her pupils, Johannes Matl, sitting with his sketchbook. Before the trip, recalls Matl, 17, “She was always saying we should find a way of documenting it because it's an experience you don't do often in life, maybe only once. She told us we could write a text, do a blog post, take some photos, do a podcast.”

For Matl, drawing has long been a way to connect with a place. “I just separated a little bit from our group, just for me,” he says. “And I just started sketching.”

Listmann asked him: “Johannes, what are you doing? This is so amazing. I would like to make an exhibition with your work.” And so she did just that, featuring work of the students on the trip. “We had an exhibition in the castle here in Fulda with exquisite paintings and stories,” she says. “[The students] captured their feelings in the paintings and in the words.”

The entire program was “a really, really deep experience for me,” Matl says. “That was maybe the beginning of our special connection.”

A new opportunity for connections came when Mayor Wingenfeld asked Listmann to suggest an Israeli sister city for Fulda.

Listmann connected with Merav Margolin in Petach Tikvah, Israel. Margolin’s grandfather had attended Rodges, an agricultural training project in Fulda for young Zionists, in the 1920s. He later cofounded a kibbutz in Palestine.

A twin city alliance is being organized, says Margolin, who works for the Department of Foreign Relations in Petach Tikva. Meanwhile, she and Listmann have created an exchange program for high school students in their respective cities. For now, their exchange is remote. “They talk to one another, they collaborate with one another,” Margolin says.

Listmann’s pupils were supposed to come to come to Petach Tikva during the 2023-24 school year. The teenagers had been communicating via Zoom for many months. But then the October 7 attack occurred, derailing the plans. 

“All the [Israeli] students on October 7 got a message from their German friends that they're worried about them, and [asking whether] they're okay. Some of them said, ‘If you want to come to my house now, you can come.’ Of course, they couldn’t go,” says Margolin. “But to hear the support and the love, it means a lot in these times.”

“OK, then I will do it.”

Listmann’s accomplishments have touched many.

Since 2017 she has organized Fulda’s annual commemoration of the November 9 Kristallnacht pogrom. She launched a website, Jews in Fulda, where her students’ work is presented and updated. She is historical advisor to a new commission aimed at restoring Fulda’s historic Jewish cemetery; in her publication "The Old Jewish Cemetery from the Middle Ages Until Today," she shared her research on where the now unmarked graves are located.

In 2023 Listmann organized a five-day reunion in Fulda of some 170 former Jewish residents and descendant families. “Participants will long remember this event,” says Mayor Wingenfeld.

But the time since the October 7, 2023 terror attack has been particularly difficult for Listmann. “I didn't have words to describe how I felt, my thoughts and my heart,” she says. “So many friends were hurt.”

When she learned that there was not yet any plan in Fulda to remember the victims on the first anniversary of the attack, Listmann decided: “OK, then I will do it.”

She organized a vigil and was joined by Mayor Wingenfeld, local clergy, and 26-year-old Israeli student Eden Shahar. “At least we could do something,” she says. “It doesn't change the world. It doesn't help the hostages, [but] we were in the main square in Fulda, and everyone who passed by listened to the names” of the victims read aloud, one by one.

For all the doors that were closed in her face back in 1994, many more have opened. She turns each obstacle into something positive, she says. “People say never again, never again, and then October 7 happens,” and people were afraid to come to the annual Kristallnacht ceremony. “So it became more lonely.”

At the anniversary vigil, she says, ”There were wonderful moments when young pupils, maybe eight or nine years old, came and said, ‘Can I ask what you are doing?’

“And they went home with candles.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2025