RESOURCES

We are delighted to introduce to you Herr Dr. Dirk Erkelenz, a teacher whose ingenuity, dedication, and far-reaching contributions deserve recognition.

Overwhelm is a natural physiological response to unspeakable events. While animals in the wild instinctually shake off the after-effects of life-threatening encounters, many humans do not. Relatively recent research in the field of epigenetics has shown that the legacy of undigested trauma is passed down through generations, meaning that descendants of those alive during tragic times — whether our ancestors were perpetrators, bystanders, victims, survivors, or refugees — live with the consequences of things we ourselves did not live through.

Paradoxically, trauma can be both intensely isolating individually and a deeply collective experience. Despite being on opposite sides of the “war to end all wars,” many descendants of Holocaust perpetrators and survivors share one thing: silence in our families about what specifically happened. How can we bridge this void, both within and between ourselves?

Reckoning with history, knowing that terrible things happened, and committing to “never again” are necessary but insufficient, and the paths to reconciliation are not clearly marked. This makes the unexpected arrival of a humble individual undertaking a heroic journey that much more meaningful, profound, and enlivening.

Herr Erkelenz, a teacher of history and Latin at Königin-Luise-Schule in Köln, envisioned more than a decade ago how to transform the usual abstraction of history into direct engagement. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, his initiative has rippled out to touch and connect colleagues, students, multiple generations of descendants, community, and even distant shores around the world.

He shares, “It all began for me with my first visit to Auschwitz in 2011. I already knew a great deal, and on site realized in a shocking way the difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding.’ The shocked reactions and questions of my students showed me that I had to teach history differently than before: more concrete, more personalized, not 6 million dead, but a concrete person with a face, not history in Berlin or in the clouds, but in my street, my school. The Königin-Luise-Schule, founded in 1871, is the oldest municipal girls’ school in Cologne. In a commemorative publication for the 100th anniversary, however, the description of the Nazi dictatorship was limited to one sentence. Because it took a long time in Germany before people were willing to face up to the past, I wanted to focus there.

“When Projektkurs Geschichte were set up as a special form of normal teaching, I proposed to develop a voluntary course to teach scientific historical research around the K-L-S community most affected by the Nazis. Since 2015, about 150 students have participated. Hundreds of additional students have benefited from the results in normal lessons or been involved through Stolpersteine sponsorships.

“Some schools still have archives with all the records, where one knows how many and which Jewish children attended the school and their names. At K-L-S, though, everything was destroyed during the war. The biggest problem here was, and is, finding names. We have found 80 names, 32 biographies are in the memorial book on the homepage about 10 are in progress; 22 Stolpersteine were laid by us in front of the school (3 more are already financed), 12 more in the city area (another 15 are already ordered and paid for).”

The official nominators of Herr Erkelenz for the 2024 Obermayer Award are all descendants of family members directly affected by the Nazis’ overarching goal of eliminating Jews from the face of the earth. The eight who wrote Impact References and I, who wrote an Expert Reference, shared remarkable intergenerational, intercultural, and interfaith interactions with students — from a school many of us hadn’t even heard of before — determined to learn everything possible about the lives and fates of our mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. Whatever we knew, or thought we knew, the learning exchange was revelatory on both sides. The students, seven of whom contributed Impact References, brought curiosity, kindness, rigor, and excitement to their assignments, which they uniformly seemed to regard as a privilege to undertake.

Since the students were our first and primary contacts, many of us met Herr Erkelenz, the self-effacing wizard behind the curtain, only around the Stolpersteineverlegung for our family members in the school courtyard and/or in front of our family’s former homes. To a person, all of us felt his deep dedication this work, his unflagging determination that his students learn to question, investigate, and become exemplary global citizens, and his yearning to facilitate healing for descendants. His mission of remembrance and reconciliation extends beyond the Holocaust to other genocides over time and space, also addressing the rising incidence of antisemitism, racism, and hatred in present-day Germany and the world.

Herr Erkelenz’s general excellence as a teacher — not including this work — was acknowledged with a prestigious Deutscher Lehrkräftepreis in May 2023. In June 2023, Metropol published “Jüdisches Schülerinnen und Schüler an Kölner Gymnasien” a book he co-edited, that includes seven essays written by his students.

Unsurprisingly, Herr Erkelenz invests far more in this initiative than is reasonable for even a hard-working teacher. “Regarding the voluntary workload,” he wrote, “when I made an estimate for the principal of my effort beyond my normal workload — although it hardly seems possible — it came to about 5000 hours.”

The great American poet, Mary Oliver (1935-2019), concludes her poem, Wild Geese, with these relevant, heart-rending lines:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

Through his unique alchemical blend of empathy for human vulnerability, passion for teaching, respect for students, dedication to scientific historical research, and profound grief and humility in the face of the Shoah, Dirk Erkelenz wholeheartedly welcomes everyone his dedication touches, back into their fully human, rightful place in the family of things.

We are deeply honored to support his nomination for a 2024 Obermayer Award.

~ Written by Terry Mandel, and submitted on 13 July 2023 on behalf of the following nominators, comprising descendants, students, experts, personal references, and community members:

Stephen Mendel
Daniela Rubens
Anna Schlechter
Rita von Schwarzenberg
Sarah Stauber
Mia Louisa Weckmüller

My boat struck something deep.
Nothing happened.
Sounds, waves, silence.

Nothing happened?

Or perhaps everything happened
And I’m sitting in the middle of my new life.

~ Juan Ramón Jiménez

”It all started with Anna.”

With these words I often begin telling the astonishing story of how I, in July 2021, received an unexpected email from a 16-yo across the world seeking information about a student who’d attended Königin Luise Schule in Köln — Anna’s high school — until 1938. Anna wrote:

“I am writing regarding Ingelore Silberbach, a former student of our school. Due to a special history class, students research former Jewish girls [who] attended our school until and during the second world war and were victims of antisemitism. Our goal is to reconstruct their life and fates to tell their stories and keep their memory alive. While searching for information about Ingelore Silberbach and her family, I found the family tree you created but decided not to publish. Maybe you could share [this] information with me. I am also interested in learning [your] connection to Ingelore Silberbach and why you created [this] on ancestry.com!”

My email address was attached to that family tree because Ingelore Silberbach was my mother. Thus began an intense, cooperative, and beautiful project that has changed my life!

This anthology shows what’s possible when you allow history to come alive in the present. The articles reflect the students’ profound engagement with difficult material that — before this elective class — may have been mostly a horrific abstraction. The hands-on research Herr Erkelenz’s students conducted in 2021-22 will not only shape their lives forever, but deeply touch all who encounter it. 

Anna’s time-bound quest to learn about my mother’s life mirrored my long-frustrated quest to do the same. Within hours of sharing Anna’s remarkable email with my sister Pam and our cousin Stephen, they assembled memorabilia. Over the next 6 weeks, I created an online album spanning my mother’s birth in 1925 Köln to her death in 1995 California. I learned much I’d never known — my mother almost never spoke about her early life — not just from stories I heard for the first time from my family, but from Anna!

“That graduation photo of your mother’s was not from our school,” Anna wrote. 

“What do you mean?” I replied. “She wrote ‘My Last Form 1938’ above it.” 

Anna revealed, “There were only girls at our school in those days, and there are boys in that photo. It had to be from the Jawne, the Jewish school.”

Terry & Anna at the Dom, Köln, October 2022