On|Outlooks 06/2023

June was a really special month for us: we attended the Grimme Online Awards 2023 ceremony in Cologne. We also published the book Disappeared and Murdered together with the Elisabeth Käsemann Foundation (Stuttgart) this month. As part of our „Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights“ event series, we welcomed Seda Başay-Yıldız with a lecture on state racism and the NSU 2.0. Our Managing Director Irmtrud Wojak was a guest of the SPD board in Bochum – and we also moved house.

As already reported in recent months, our digital exhibition „Fritz Bauer. In the fight for human rights“ was nominated for the Grimme Online Award 2023. On 15 June, the time had finally come and we were invited to take part in the award ceremony at the „Flora“ in Cologne. Alongside many other projects, we were eagerly waiting to see whether we could succeed in winning this award for our debut work. Unfortunately, we were not able to convince the jury with our work. Nevertheless, just being nominated out of 800 submissions was a great honour for us, which we were very pleased about and had not expected at first.

Even without an award, we had a great evening and were able to talk to some exciting personalities.

In collaboration with the Elisabeth Käsemann Foundation, this month we published the book Disappeared and Murdered about European victims of the secret detention and torture camp El Vesubio in Argentina as the fifth volume in our Fritz Bauer Library book series. In this work, seven authors document the life stories of ten men and women who, during the Argentinian military dictatorship, campaigned in various ways to break up the structures of injustice. Their commitment to a better life cost them all their lives. Despite various solidarity initiatives in Germany, France and Austria, they could not be saved. However, their commitment to human rights should not and must not be forgotten.

With the support of the BUXUS FOUNDATION, BUXUS EDITION has published a Spanish translation of the book, which the Managing Director and founder of the Elisabeth Käsemann Foundation, Dr Dorothee Weitbrecht, presented at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires to great acclaim. Dorothee Weitbrecht is a contemporary historian and a niece of Elisabeth Käsemann, who was murdered as a young woman in Argentina and whose story can also be read in the extensively illustrated book.

The German-language book edition and the Spanish-language eBook can be purchased HERE in our online shop.

The Munich Higher Regional Court dealt with the NSU complex for 438 trial days. Lawyer Seda Başay-Yıldız accompanied the trial as the legal representative of the family of one of the victims of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which murdered people for years. As part of the event on 13 June at the Bochum Art Museum, Seda Başay-Yıldız spoke about the crimes, the police investigations and the tough court hearings, not least the disregard for the victims‘ concerns experienced by the joint plaintiffs. Their alarming conclusion: the state and police repeatedly failed in this context. For example, the investigating police officers notoriously linked the victims to organised crime and drug trafficking, which was not at all apparent from their life stories, and then pursued them with increased investigative zeal. According to Seda Başay-Yıldız, the police officers did not mention that the offences were committed with a racist motive.

This misjudgement by the authorities persisted until the NSU unmasked itself and could have been avoided if the investigating police officers had listened more to the bereaved families of those murdered. The most frightening, albeit historically and politically unsurprising, finding is and remains that people with a history of migration who become victims of racist offences were and are declared to be perpetrators (perpetrator-victim reversal), which serves to underpin the talk of alleged individual cases. However, as Seda Başay-Yıldız can show, racism in the police is not only evident in the actions of individual police officers, but prejudiced assumptions and reckless thoughtlessness are a structural danger that is reflected in the work processes during investigations and is always at the expense of the victims.

After it became clear in May that we would be able to rent part of the former Havkenscheid café as office space, we took the plunge this month. You can now find us at Feldmark 102, directly opposite the future Fritz Bauer Forum and next to „our“ new bus stop, whose signs were erected just in time for the timetable change in June. We hope that in future (and also at weekends) a bus will stop here more often and are very pleased to be closer to the site, which has already become much livelier. We can now keep interested parties better informed about the construction progress, including the many cyclists who stop by.

For our voluntary contributors, we can now welcome you to the Fritz Bauer Forum to discuss the current significance of the Forum and our joint tasks and to tackle projects. We look forward to seeing every familiar and unfamiliar face and all committed contributors. In future, there will be a separate date for our meetings, the first of which will take place on 1 August 2023 from 10.00 a.m. at our new location.

We were also able to interview Felix Lipski once again in June. He was born in Minsk on 11 May 1938 and survived the Minsk ghetto as a child. In 1943, he and his mother were able to escape and joined a Jewish partisan unit; they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. Today he lives in Bochum and is very active in remembrance work. He has shown us many documents and photographs, his mother’s notes from the resistance, and we are grateful that he has shared his story and his commitment with us. His granddaughter helped us with the translation and categorisation, many thanks to her too! We are now editing the interview and will publish it in the coming months. You can find more exciting interviews HERE .

6 July 2023, 6 p.m.: Lecture and discussion with Rolf Gössner at the Kunstmuseum Bochum, more HERE

11 August 2023, 15:00 – 21:00: Make a note now of our open day to visit our completed Fritz Bauer Library, just in time for Fritz Bauer’s 120th birthday. With a summer party for all interested parties! There will be lots to see, art, talks and live music with Grupo Manzanar from 6.00 pm!