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The year 2023 got off to a very exciting start for the Fritz Bauer Forum. We have a lot planned and are receiving a lot of support from very different sides for the project of a human rights centre in the middle of the Ruhr region. To keep you up to date on how things are progressing at the Fritz Bauer Forum, we want to tell you every month what has been happening.
As I said, the year got off to an exciting start for us, as we were able to present our digital Fritz Bauer exhibition „When I leave my office, I enter a hostile foreign country“, which we developed in 2022 with funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and Demokratie leben. We were able to present our exhibition and the Fritz Bauer Forum itself to around 100 representatives from the judiciary and politics, including Dr Christiane Kroll (Vice President of Bochum Regional Court), Member of the Bundestag Michelle Müntefering and her husband Franz Müntefering, Member of the Bundestag Max Lucks, Dr Benjamin Limbach (NRW Minister of Justice) and the Lord Mayor of Bochum, Thomas Eiskirch. We were joined by representatives from the world of research such as Christoph Köster (Head of the Documentation and Research Centre „Justice and National Socialism“ NRW) and people from Bochum’s committed civil society, for example from the „Bochum Alliance against the Right“ and the „Grannies against the Right“.
For us, the presentation at the Justice Centre was a complete success, not only because we were able to introduce ourselves and our ideas to a wide audience, but also because the overall response to the exhibition „When I leave my office, I enter a hostile foreign country“ was positive. So positive, in fact, that the Bochum Justice Centre suggested making our exhibition permanently accessible via a screen in the foyer. We are of course very pleased about this!
But what happens after the presentation? – We now want to make the digital exhibition accessible for educational purposes and, together with the Interactive Fritz Bauer Library (IFBB), bring more stories of survival and their significance onto the educational curriculum.
From left to right: Bochum’s Mayor Thomas Eiskirch next to Franz Müntefering, Serdar Yüksel (MdL), Max Lucks (MdB) and Michelle Müntefering (MdB) ©Fritz Bauer Forum | BUXUS STIFTUNG, Photographer: Mike Fischer
On 26 January 2023, lawyer Achim Doerfer presented his latest book Someone had to punish the perpetrators. The Revenge of the Jews, the Failure of German Justice after 1945 and the Fairy Tale of German-Jewish Reconciliation .
According to Doerfer, the topics of Jewish revenge and Jewish resistance are a repressed chapter in the culture of remembrance in Germany. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, he set out in search of a feeling that remained strangely pale after the end of National Socialism and its terrible crimes, and not only in his family: the desire for retribution, for revenge.
View of the event in Q1 on 26 January 2023 ©Fritz Bauer Forum | BUXUS STIFTUNG
Finally, some more good news. Not only did the SPD’s culture working group visit us in large numbers on the Fritz Bauer Forum building site. District Mayor Dirk Meyer was also there and the discussion about possibilities for co-operation was encouraging. The suggestion made last year by the NRW Foundation to rename the „Havkenscheider Str.“ bus stop, which is located directly at the main entrance to the future site, „Fritz Bauer Forum“, met with a positive response and we are naturally just as enthusiastic about this idea.
16.02.2023: RA Dr Florian Fischer in Q1
23.02.2023: Guided tour of the Fritz Bauer Forum construction site, Feldmark 107