Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Lothar Bembenek and Dorothee Lottmann-Kaeseler

Wiesbaden, Hesse

When Lothar Bembenek began teaching in 1975, he was dissatisfied with the curricular materials. “It didn’t make what had happened clear,” remembers the 57-year-old from Wiesbaden in Hesse. But he found his own ways to bring it to life. He knew a communist, for example, who had twice been in concentration camps and interviewed him, recording it for his class. “My students were really fascinated,” he says. “After that, I thought I should do more and started to conduct research.”

More than a quarter of a century later, 200 co-workers have joined his efforts. His initiative led to the creation of the Aktives Museum Spiegelgasse für Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte in Wiesbaden (the Active Museum Spiegelgasse for German-Jewish History in Wiesbaden), which for the past 13 years has been under the vigorous leader-ship of Dorothee Lottmann-Kaeseler.

Bembenek feels comfortable doing research and work in the background; Lottmann-Kaeseler is exceptionally talented at communicating, organizing and networking. She cultivated contacts that Bembenek had established with survivors and emigrants and made them a vital part of the institution’s activities. Under her leadership—for the first years as a volunteer and since 1998 as part-time director—the Aktives Museum has preserved the oldest Jewish building in the city and provided a means for commemorating and disseminating information, often involving young people. She also answers genealogical inquiries, strengthens the museum’s relationship with other institutions and implements new projects. “Dorothee is a very energetic person with a sense of humor. She has a lot of ideas about how to bring the residents closer to the history of the Jews in their German community,” says Ruth Pewzner, who has roots in Wiesbaden.

Bembenek himself had acquired a long record of accomplishments before he founded the Aktives Museum. Since the 1970s, he has researched Wiesbaden’s local history. He collected more material about resistance and persecution during Nazi times than any other archive in town: an extensive collection of photos, documents and interviews on video and audio tapes forms the basis of the museum’s archive. “I found Lothar to be a very modest man, very kind and understanding, but always questioning to learn as much as possible,” says Eric Kahn, a former Jewish resident of Wiesbaden who was interviewed for the museum’s archive.

In 1985, Bembenek provoked a public outcry in his hometown when he interrupted a commemoration ceremony on Germany’s Memorial Day, a martial event organized by SS veterans. The ceremony was changed. As a teacher, he visited jailhouses because some files were archived there, and he started to write to former Jewish residents. For four years, on nearly every school holiday, he went to Israel with an audio recorder and a camera. “I was confronted with personal histories, and each conversation showed me that I had to continue,” he explains.

The goal of founding the Aktives Museum became more concrete when Bembenek learned that the third-oldest building in Wiesbaden had once been a mikvah (a Jewish ritual bathing house). “The idea was not only to preserve this remnant of Jewish past, but also to commemorate the victims and start research on a broad basis,” he says. Lottmann-Kaeseler, who was raised in Essen and moved to Wiesbaden in 1978, met him in 1987. She began working on the project during her spare time while raising her children and gradually became more committed to it. “I realized quickly that I actually knew little about the Holocaust here,” the 60-year-old says. “I knew quite a bit about Auschwitz but nothing about Wiesbaden.”

The pair and their supporters intended it to be more than a typical museum where the past is simply preserved. One of the first projects, documenting the deportations from Wiesbaden in 1942, was a mobile exhibit displayed at several locations around town. “For us, it is important to give victims back their names and faces, to make clear their role in society and their cultural contributions,” explains Bembenek. About 3,000 citizens, each with information about the life, work and death of a deported Jew, joined a “commemoration march” in 1992. “People realized that [the past] touched their schools, their houses and their offices,” Lottmann-Kaeseler
remembers.

The museum also reaches out to younger residents. Wiesbaden students produced a virtual reconstruction of a synagogue in Alsace and came up with new ideas to save the building. Additionally, as many as 20 computer and design students worked from 1998 to 2000 to virtually reconstruct Wiesbaden’s Michelsberg Synagogue, which had been destroyed during Kristallnacht, exclusively from photographs, creating a three-dimensional, interactive program that makes the now-nonexistent Moorish-style synagogue seem real again. The resulting exhibit and video has been installed in City Hall. “Most young people just know Jews from television,” Lottmann-Kaeseler says, “and we want to teach them to interact unbiasedly, so they don’t acquire prejudices out of ignorance or insecurity.”