Obermayer Award

“I saw that there is a need to act, that we…must pass on the baton.”

Margit Sachse engages students throughout Europe in remembrance work.

by Toby Axelrod

Margit Sachse is in a race against time, a race against forgetting.

An educator and activist for Holocaust remembrance, she has taken the baton given to her by eye-witnesses and is passing it to her students. “I am a transmitter,” she says.

Margit Sachse was born in 1969 in the Porz district of Cologne. She moved to Darmstadt in 2000, and today is a senior teacher at the Lichtenbergschule Darmstadt, a high school with the status of Europaschule, emphasizing international exchange. During her 18-plus years there, she has taught German and history, museum education, and more. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she has been a guest teacher at the Cité Scolaire International (City School International) in Lyon, France.

Her work over the years has empowered a generation of pupils to find out about history on their own, through direct encounters with witnesses, survivors, scholars, and historical documents — not only in Darmstadt but also internationally. Her goal is to help transmit democratic values and to continue the fight against all forms of discrimination.

From 2018 to 2021 she worked to develop a pedagogical app for the Europaschul network, called Europäisches Kulturerbe. Aktives Erinnern (European Cultural Heritage. Active Remembering).

The idea behind the app is to share remembrance projects across Europe, she says: “What good projects are there in France and Germany and in Greece? What can we learn from each other?”

On her home turf, Sachse has trained countless students as guides in museums and archives, and built strong connections between her school and outside educational institutions, include the Hessian State Museum Darmstadt, the Cité Scolaire International, and the University of Cologne.  

Among the astounding projects her students have realized is Telescope into the Past. A permanently installed telescope in Darmstadt provides a glimpse at a virtual reconstruction of the city’s Bleichstrasse synagogue, destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. A QR code leads to the Footprints for Freedom app, which the Lichtenberg students set up together with members of the Technical University of Darmstadt. The app provides information about Jews from Darmstadt who were deported and murdered in the Holocaust, and about remembrance work by cooperating schools, memorials, artists, and media-makers throughout Germany.

Sachse’s international work has taken her to the Holocaust memorial in Paris, where she trained students as guides to the memorial at the Gurs concentration camp in southwestern France. She has also taken part in Obermayer Award winner Hilde Schramm’s Berlin-based initiative Respect for Greece, organizing an exchange with teachers in Athens and Germany. Further programs are planned involving Greece, Croatia, and Poland, focusing on the rescue of Jewish children —most of whom had come to France as refugees from other parts of Europe — by French villagers. According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel, about 7,000 Jewish children were rescued in France.

All of her various activities have a strong common focus: “I saw that there is a need to act, that we, the older generation, must pass on the baton,” she says.

A New Way of Learning 

In her own family, the older generation didn’t talk much. Only on her father’s deathbed did he reveal some of what he knew about his own father’s role, working with the German railway in Cologne during World War II.

Ironically, it was from her father that she learned the importance of confronting the past. Born in 1937, he was a child during the Nazi era. As a young man, he traveled for work throughout Europe. “He always raved to us about how warmly he was received everywhere, even though he didn't know many languages,” says Sachse. “It made him very reflective.” 

In Germany, attitudes toward so-called guest workers from foreign countries were certainly not warm. “So he always said there was something missing, that we have to deal with what the German Wehrmacht did in those places. He didn't know any of this from his own family; he found out about it on his own,” she says. 

“He conveyed that to me very strongly. I came to understand that there were lots of things we weren’t [even] supposed to think about and that we had to work on those things little by little. On the one hand, my father said, ‘It's good, what you're doing,’ and on the other hand, he never shared certain documents, or he hid them or put them away or threw them out.”

She came to see that almost every non-Jewish family in Germany had what she calls “dark spots or secrets.” The question was, how best to uncover and learn from the past.

In the mid-1980s, a high school teacher opened the door to a new way of learning. It was a formative experience for Sachse. Pastor Werner Ohrmann encouraged his students to go out into a nearby community and tutor children of Turkish background. Every week, Sachse would ride her bike to visit the children and help with homework. Sachse saw firsthand that “peer education can have a huge impact,” both for the recipients and the givers. 

All of these children went on to finish high school, and some went to college. It showed her that “we can achieve a lot together… sometimes you just have to set the right course.”

Another lesson came from her history teacher, Bernd Moritz, who used role-playing to encourage his pupils to recognize their own empathy. How do you react if one of your buddies expresses right-wing radical views? What options do you have? he would ask. Or How would we behave if suddenly someone was being hunted by the Gestapo and was looking for a place to hide? How do we behave as observers?

“It made us realize how difficult it is to find the right words,“ says Sachse.

At university, she was deeply influenced by historian Wolfgang Schieder, who always urged his students to try to see history from different perspectives. The lesson was that “you can’t just stick to German history; you always have to make comparisons,” she says. Sachse was drawn to the Europa school project because of her own experience studying in France, thanks to exchange programs.

Like her own teachers, Sachse has introduced her students to contemporary witnesses to history. In 2005, she started working with them on research projects about cultural history and Holocaust remembrance, with an emphasis on peer education. That approach bore fruit in 2011, with an Anne Frank Day event in which students guided visitors through an exhibit about the young diarist who was murdered in the Holocaust. 

Sachse also coedited a publication of student essays on the question “Anne Frank: A Relevant Topic Today?”   

The student guides were prepared by professional guides and discussed many exhibits in advance, says former student Ada Seelinger. For the opening event, “We [read] parts of Anne Frank’s diary which had touched us most,” says Seelinger, who was born in Amsterdam, where Frank’s family went into hiding. Sachse had suggested that Seelinger talk about her visit to the Anne Frank House. That was typical of the way Sachse would incorporate students’ personal experiences into her teaching, says Seelinger.

Some locals did not appreciate the deep dive into history, Sachse recalls. “A lot of people thought it was somehow over now, that we don't have to deal with it anymore. I thought, that can't be the case. As long as there are people who want to talk about it, it's an issue for us.”

At that time, she received support from the association Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie (Against Forgetting – For Democracy), which was formed in 1993 in response to racist and xenophobic rioting in post-unification Germany. Sachse and her students started their own group, Schüler Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie, which they called in English “Pupils Against Oblivion and for Democracy.”

Encounters with Holocaust survivors had a profound impact on students like Seelinger. She met the late Leslie Schwartz, who visited Darmstadt from the United States. Students moderated the discussion and asked questions, and created a video recording for posterity. “In my opinion,” says Seelinger, “the encounter with contemporary witnesses is extremely important, especially for young people, and it definitely was for me.’’ The meeting made what had been abstract, the injustice of the Nazis, more tangible, she says.

Understanding that injustice, says Sachse, leads naturally to activism for justice. To her, it has always been important “to position ourselves against enemies of democracy all over the world and win over these young people to speak up. And that includes standing up against antisemitism, against racism, but also for a liberal democracy.”

Darmstadt resident Max Mühlhäuser, whose daughter was in Sachse’s class, says he was moved by the impact of her work.

Every couple of weeks there was a new activity, he says: “a speech at a historic place, a presentation in memory of a memorable date and event, an interview with a Holocaust witness, a delegation’s visit and speech at the local synagogue, a project to mount little columns in the city that explain the Jewish and Holocaust history throughout our town, a ‘march’ along landmarks of touching events during the Holocaust time — the list would be endless.”

Sachse’s approach has successfully caused her students “to reflect on their innermost convictions, to see the world with enlightened eyes, and often to change their mindset and credo forever,” he says.

— Obermayer Award recipient 2024