Tackling anti-Semitism amid a pandemic: Deborah Hartmann takes the helm at the House of the Wannsee Conference, where top Nazis planned the "Final Solution."
The new director of the House of the Wannsee Conference: Deborah HartmannImage: Yoram Aschheim
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Deborah Hartmann begins her role on December 1 as the new director of the House of the Wannsee Conference, a Berlin Holocaust memorial museum.
The luxury villa in Wannsee, a south-western suburb of Berlin, was where high-ranking Nazi and SS officials met in 1942 to plan the devastating "Final Solution" for Jews that saw some six million systematically murdered during World War II.
Hartmann was previously head of the German Desk of the International School for Holocaust Studies of Yad Vashem — Israel's official memorial and organization dedicated to preserving the memory of victims of the Holocaust.
She took on the directorship from historian and lawyer Hans-Christian Jasch, who returned to the Federal Interior Ministry in August, and interim director Elke Gryglewski.
The Wannsee house, which binds National Socialist crimes with the Jewish experience of the Shoah, represented a "particular challenge," Hartmann commented in a statement on her appointment.
She was "looking forward" to working with colleagues to develop further concepts and points of access for research and mediation within both global and local contexts.
In 1942, Nazi officials met in this lakeside villa to discuss their so-called Final Solution to the Jewish QuestionImage: DW/E. Grenier
Who is Deborah Hartmann?
The Vienna-native has a thorough academic background in politics and history. She was awarded an MA in Political Science from her home university and the Free University of Berlin in 2011, writing her thesis on "Europe and the memory of the Shoah."
Hartmann has applied her knowledge of Jewish history, National Socialism, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in professional settings: Following her work as a guide at the Jewish Museum Vienna, she moved on to positions with the American Jewish Committee in Berlin and with the project "Witnesses of the Shoah" at the Free University.
Between 2011 and 2014, Hartmann was the pedagogical representative of Yad Vashem to German-speaking countries, based in Berlin, before heading to Israel in 2015 to take up her most recent position.
Jewish memorials in Berlin
The Holocaust may have been eight decades ago, but it is never to be forgotten. Large and small memorials all over the German capital commemorate the victims of the Nazis.
Image: DW/M. Gwozdz
The Holocaust Memorial
A huge field of stelae in the center of the German capital was designed by New York architect Peter Eisenmann. The almost 3,000 stone blocks commemorate the six million Jewish people from all over Europe who were murdered by the Nazis.
Image: picture-alliance/Schoening
The "Stumbling Stones"
Designed by German artist Gunther Demnig, these brass plates are very small — only 10 by 10 centimeters (3.9 x 3.9 inches). They mark the homes and offices from which people were deported by the Nazis. Around 10,000 of them have been placed across Berlin.
Image: DW/T.Walker
House of the Wannsee Conference
Several high-ranking Nazi officials met in this villa on the Wannsee Lake in January 1942 to discuss the systematic murder of European Jews, which they termed the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Today the house is a memorial that informs visitors about the unimaginable dimension of the genocide that was decided here.
Image: Paul Zinken/dpa/picture alliance
Track 17 Memorial
White roses on track 17 at Grunewald station remember the more than 50,000 Berlin Jews who were sent to their deaths from here. 186 steel plates show the date, destination and number of deportees. The first train went to the Litzmannstadt ghetto (Lodz, Poland) on October 18, 1941; the last train to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on January 5, 1945.
Image: imago/IPON
Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind
Today, the Hackesche Höfe in Berlin Mitte are mentioned in every travel guide. They are a backyard labyrinth in which many Jewish people lived and worked — for example in the brush factory of the German entrepreneur Otto Weidt. During the Nazi era he employed many blind and deaf Jews and saved them from deportation and death. The workshop of the blind is now a museum.
Image: picture-alliance/Arco Images
Fashion Center Hausvogteiplatz
The heart of Berlin's fashion metropolis once beat here. A memorial sign made of high mirrors recalls the Jewish fashion designers and stylists who made clothes for the whole of Europe at Hausvogteiplatz. The National Socialists expropriated the Jewish owners. Berlin's fashion center was irretrievably destroyed during the Second World War.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Kalaene
Memorial at Koppenplatz
Before the Holocaust, 173,000 Jews lived in Berlin; in 1945 there were only 9,000. The monument "Der verlassene Raum" (The Deserted Room) is located in the middle of the Koppenplatz residential area in Berlin's Mitte district. It is a reminder of the Jewish citizens who were taken from their homes without warning and never returned.
Image: Jörg Carstensen/dpa/picture alliance
The Jewish Museum
Architect Daniel Libeskind chose a dramatic design: viewed from above, the building looks like a broken Star of David. The Jewish Museum is one of the most visited museums in Berlin, offering an overview of the turbulent centuries of German Jewish history.
Image: Miguel Villagran/AP Photo/picture alliance
Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
There are still eight remaining Jewish cemeteries in Berlin, the largest of them in the Weissensee district. With over 115,000 graves, it is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. Many persecuted Jews hid in the complex premises during the Nazi era. On May 11, 1945, only three days after the end of the Second World War, the first postwar Jewish funeral service was held here.
When the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse was first consecrated in 1866 it was considered the largest and most magnificent synagogue in Germany. One of Berlin's 13 synagogues to survive the Kristallnacht pogroms, it later burned down due to Allied bombs. It was reconstructed and opened again in 1995. Since then, the 50-meter-high golden dome once again dominates Berlin's cityscape.
Image: Stephan Schulz/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa/picture alliance
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Berlin's cultural community welcomes Hartmann
Klaus Lederer, the senator for Culture and Europe in Berlin, welcomed Hartmann's experience with teaching the Holocaust — vital at a memorial site that provides an extensive educational function. For example, the house offers workshops aimed at professionals, such as police officers or hospital staff, who face current ethical questions such as abuse of power or euthanasia.
"Mrs. Hartmann impressed with her promising, innovative ideas," said Lederer in a statement commenting on her appointment, announced in August. "The house wins a theoretically versed, competent leadership with international ties who carries the task of further developing of the center's educational work close to her heart," he added.
Elke Gryglewski, the acting director of the memorial and educational center, commented that Hartmann was known as "a colleague with extraordinary expertise in remembrance pedagogy."
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Combating anti-Semitism amid a pandemic
Despite her experience in engaging people today with the past events, Hartmann's appointment comes at the end of a year that has presented tough challenges to Germany's remembrance culture: measures introduced to combat the COVID-19 pandemic meant memorials and museums were forced to physically close and digitalize their programs.
Symbols of the horrors of the Holocaust, such as the 'Jewish star,' have been misused in protests against coronavirus restrictionsImage: picture-alliance/dpa/B. Roessler
Still, the rise of anti-Semitism and the far right in Germany means that the role of memorials showing the consequences of these ideologies — such as the House of the Wannsee Conference — are more important now than ever.
Hartmann outlined in an appeal published in the German-language Jewish newspaper, the Jüdische Allgemeine, in November that these challenges should be used "as a chance to reflect and contemplate our well-rehearsed cultural remembrance practice."
"Dealing with the past cannot only be done from a supposedly safe distance," she wrote, adding: "Yet, that does not by implication mean that physical participation in ever-repeating rituals automatically ensures one enters into a relationship with past events."
