Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Silvester Lechner

Elchingen, Bavaria

Silvester Lechner took his first job in the mid 1970s teaching political history in Ulm, a city of 120,000, at the Volkhochschule community college—an institution with a very special past. It had been founded after WWII by Inge Scholl, the older sister of Sophie Scholl, who was tried and executed for distributing anti-Nazi literature with the White Rose resistance movement in 1943. Inge and her husband, the famous designer Otl Aicher, created the school “to democratize the new Germany” and reteach the principles of a free society which were lost during the Nazi years.

“These people,” says Lechner, “were my educators, [and] in context with them I found my lifelong engagement in Jewish history. My task was to inform: to teach people in politics and history and to get people to think about why the majority of Germans joined this antidemocratic, racist, world-destroying Nazi movement.”

Lechner was elected to run the school’s political program, and thanks to another formative relationship—this one with Alfred Moos, who had immigrated to Palestine and returned to his native Ulm in 1953—Lechner’s focus turned to the history of Ulm’s Jews. Moos “became like an intellectual political father to me,” says Lechner, “helping start all my further studies and books I wrote about Jews and Jewish Ulm.”

In the years that followed, Lechner created exhibitions and led workshops; published five books on Jewish history; produced a 100-page guided walking tour through Jewish Ulm; helped save the Ulm Synagogue which reopened in 2012; and forged lasting connections between the Swabian city and its Jewish descendants around the world.

Along with Moos, Lechner also worked in the 1980s to preserve and restore an early Nazi concentration camp located in a 19th century fortress on Kuhberg, or Cow Mountain, located outside Ulm. Lechner, who served as its first director, recalls that the majority of Germans and also the Ulm residents “wanted to be silent about the past” and initially resisted efforts to establish a memorial at the camp. But today, the Kuhberg Documentation Center and camp memorial is “an accepted institution in Ulm, where we’re teaching thousands of students and visitors what the National Socialist government and the Holocaust meant.”

In the words of Alfred Moos’ son, Michael Moos, who lives in Freiburg: “Dr. Silvester Lechner has strengthened awareness of Jewish life in the Ulm region and the contacts between Jews and non-Jews at different levels for more than three decades, [helping] to break down barriers and the long silence between the descendants of the perpetrators and victims.”

Born in 1944 in southern Bavaria, close to the Austrian border, Lechner grew up largely unexposed to anti-Semitism. On the contrary, his mother would recount fond memories of attending school in Austria, where half the students were Jewish and where she knew the Rabbi, helping to foster his early interest in Jewish culture and history.

Lechner participated in the student rebellion of the 1960s, when young Germans “put the first questions to their parents” about what happened in the war, and vocally opposed the positions granted in the post-war years to former Nazis in education, law, government and other fields. “That critical discussion was the beginning of my near scientific and pedagogic involvement in Jewish history,” says Lechner, who earned his doctoral degree in history in 1974 prior to becoming the preeminent scholar and educator about Ulm Jewry dating back to the Middle Ages. Lechner jokes, “I had in that time a kind of monopoly on that knowledge.”

“This is a man who knows from deep inside himself the necessity to remember the past and to educate the young about it. He has made this his life’s work,” says Richard Serkey of Plymouth, Massachusetts, whose parents and grandparents emigrated from Ulm in the late 1930s and were among the first survivor “guests” invited to return to the city in the 1980s.

Among Lechner’s books is the heralded account of Resi Weglein, the only Ulm Jew deported to Theresienstadt who returned to Ulm in 1945 and wrote about her experience—a document which Lechner published along with 150 pages of his own research, marking “the first publication in Ulm about a certain person and family and all the social, religious and political implications for Jews of Ulm,” he says.

Beyond remembering Ulm’s Jewish victims and the legacy of its survivors, Lechner also dedicated himself to writing and speaking about anti-semitism, the Nazi perpetrators and the “silent majority. To understand the perpetrators and their deeds was essential—as a kind of lesson for the present,” he says.

Since the 1980s, Lechner is engaging with Ulm’s current Jewish population of some 400 people, mostly from the former Soviet Union, whom he has strived to help integrate culturally into the community. Now in retirement, he is also working to educate caregivers for the elderly about the long-term effects of traumatic emotional experiences during the Nazi period. Living in nearby Elchingen with his wife—with whom he has two daughters, aged 24 and 29—Lechner says he still receives several calls per day from former students seeking information about the Nazi years and Ulm’s Jewish past.

He realizes his work will never really be over. As someone who always understood himself as an educator, Lechner says, “my narrative is to confront the residents of Ulm with the facts about how our society in a short time became a fascistic society,” in order to prevent it ever becoming one again.