Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Klaus-Dieter Ehmke

Berlin

Klaus-Dieter Ehmke is an unconventional man. The residents of Niederhof, in Western Pomerania in the former East Germany, discovered this when he started to search for gravestones taken from a forgotten Jewish cemetery nearby. “I will disassemble your staircase, but I will build a new one for you,” he remembers telling people when he thought a stone had been misused as construction material. “I examined them staircase by staircase, and when I found one, I returned with a wheelbarrow to pick it up.”

The youthful 45-year-old medical doctor, a Berlin resident since finishing his studies in the 1980s, did more than find 15 stones and fragments this way. Due to his initiative and continuing work, the Gute Ort cemetery has been put in order and saved from oblivion. He also made German-Jewish history part of his and others’ daily life—organizing projects at his place of work and in his church community, as well as providing Russian-Jewish artists from Israel with opportunities to exhibit their work.

A student of history and religion as well as medicine, Ehmke was raised in the small northern German village of Dennin and schooled in nearby Anklam. He had been fascinated by German-Jewish history in his youth and was interested in stories of resistance and persecution during Nazi times. His attention to Germany’s Jewish past intensified when he discovered, during a bicycle tour in 1979, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Western Pomerania, which had been in disrepair since 1857. “It was completely overgrown, and the inscriptions were illegible,” he remembers. He started to read about the Gute Ort and its stones and took photographs with precious film imported from West Germany.

Soon he discovered that gravestones had been used in construction or as stepping stones, and he began searching for them. The people of Niederhof watched him suspiciously, taking him for a peculiar guy from Berlin. Recognizing this, Ehmke wouldn’t ask for a stone directly, even when he knew exactly where he could find it; he preferred to make conversation over the garden fence, drinking schnapps and talking about growing potatoes just to turn the conversation to what an interesting history certain stones had. “I never wanted to scare people. Instead, I tried to encourage them to discover history for themselves and recognize the cultural value,” Ehmke explains. Klaus Marsiske, an architect and friend who later took part in the search, knows the benefit of Ehmke’s tactic: “One of his many talents is to turn situations of daily life into something really charming,” he says. “Ultimately, the people thought they had themselves decided to give back the stone.”

Before Ehmke recovered the first gravestones in 1999, he brought visitors and villagers on guided tours of the cemetery and arranged for the grounds and the remaining gravestones to be cleaned. When the old inscriptions became visible, he made rubbings and exhibited them in Berlin and northern Germany. A class from a local school helped with his work, and eventually the pupils published a short book about it. “I wanted to involve the youth,” Ehmke explains. “What young people experience for themselves stays in their souls.”

Word of his work at the Gute Ort has spread. He has been invited to the Czech Republic next year to make rubbings of gravestones with a group of young people; another group, this one from Anklam, will help him research the town’s German-Jewish history and present it in an exhibition. “His commitment is contagious— that’s why he always finds like-minded people who join him in his work,” says Frederike Gänsslen, a journalist and friend.

Eventually the villagers in Niederhof came around, as well. Today Ehmke doesn’t have to haggle as if he’s at a bazaar or visit families several times to convince them to give up a gravestone—people tell him on their own if they’ve found something. “For me, that’s the real miracle,” he says. “The people have started to regard the cemetery as something important, as part of the village’s history.”