Rajaa Nadler has lived in Germany for 40 years, in the Forchheim district for 37 years. Anyone who asks people in the area about the Ermreuth synagogue, a well-attended meeting place, will hear that it is not least a “child of Rajaa Nadler”. The orientalist, who has a doctorate, laughs when confronted with it, but she wouldn’t contradict it; For 32 years she has made sure that the house shines again. She says that Ermreuth was well on the way to a completely different public perception. In the 1970s, Ermreuth was known almost exclusively as the historic center of the “Hoffmann military sports group”, which was banned in 1980 – Ermreuth, with its almost 900 inhabitants, is now considered a Franconian spot with an international cultural program in a synagogue. You were almost on your way to the showcase village.
Until New Year’s Eve. Nadler looked at the images captured by a new infrared camera at the synagogue. She delivers recordings as if it were day, she reports. With the help of the pictures, a young man from the neighboring village was arrested last week. Because the investigators are assuming an “anti-Semitic crime with a right-wing extremist background,” the case has passed from the local public prosecutor’s office to the Munich public prosecutor’s office, the agency responsible for extremist-motivated crimes. The public prosecutor’s office accuses the 21-year-old of having broken a synagogue window and throwing a firecracker through the shattered glass into the synagogue. Luckily it didn’t ignite. Among other things, because of attempted serious arson, the man is in custody.
“The whole place is shocked,” says Rajaa Nadler, “we thought we had the stories behind us.” The place has been branded since in the 1970s a paramilitary group wreaked havoc from Ermreuth, which was later banned as anti-constitutional and was closely linked to a resident of Ermreuth by name: the “Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann”. Named after Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, who lived in Ermreuth.
Of course, the whole place noticed how traces led to Ermreuth again and again in the media. When it came to the Munich Oktoberfest attack, reports often included Ermreuth. When it came to the anti-Semitic double murder of which the rabbi and publisher Shlomo Lewin and his partner Frida Poeschke fell victim in 1980, the trauma of attainment, then likewise. No “military sports group” had a worse sound, and of course Rajaa Nadler also followed all this, had to follow it over the years. If you ask her about this formerly unfortunate call from Ermreuth, she takes a deep breath and says: “We thought the spook was over.”
Antje Yael Deusel (2nd from left-r), Rabbi, Claudia Roth (Greens), Minister of State for Culture, and Lisa Badum (Greens), Member of the German Bundestag, listen to a lecture on the synagogue by Rajaa Nadler (l), former curator of the Jewish Museums, on.
(Photo: Daniel Vogl/dpa)
At the weekend, Claudia Roth, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture, visited the synagogue in Upper Franconia, and she also has an eye on the history of Ermreuth. The place is now associated with its past again, she said. And you automatically ask yourself: “Hey, does this start here again?”
The public prosecutor’s office has so far revealed little about the young man who is said to have committed the crime in Ermreuth. But she says one thing: According to the current investigation, there is no connection between the 21-year-old and the man who lives at Ermreuth Castle, Karl-Heinz Hoffmann.
Nevertheless, many eyes are now turning to Ermreuth, its history and the man who played a key role in it. On the one hand, it has become quiet around Hoffmann. On the other hand, the 85-year-old continues to struggle for attention. At the turn of the year he only spoke up on the Internet with videos from a clinic where he was being treated for illness. Hoffmann states that those he considered his “most reliable and best friends” were now waging a “campaign of annihilation” against him. And that he had fallen into “poverty in old age”. But you can order his books to support him.
campaign of annihilation? It is apparently about the property, Ermreuth Castle, in which Hoffmann lives not far from the synagogue – and about which, according to him, there is a civil dispute in court. Hoffmann does not want to reveal more details when asked. On the other hand, he becomes clear when he is asked to comment on the allegedly anti-Semitic attack on the synagogue in Ermreuth: In his opinion, “anti-Semitism” is “only nonsense based on religion”.
Dominik Sauerer from the Bavarian state coordination office against right-wing extremism has been observing Hoffmann for a long time, he knows such sentences. In a recent video, for example, Hoffmann urges young people to stop “being diehards.” Sauerer also observed Hoffmann caring for Syrian refugees in 2015. But he is also aware of the “right-wing society” with which Hoffmann occasionally surrounds himself. Sauerer believes that the fact that many are now looking back to Ermreuth is “tragic” – but “inevitable” in view of the town’s past.
The synagogue in Ermreuth in Upper Franconia has been used as a meeting place and culture center since 1994.
(Photo: Alexander Nadler)
Anyone who speaks to Martin Walz, the mayor of Neunkirchen am Brand, can hardly fail to see how much it all weighs on him. They actually believed that they had overcome the evil spirits of history. Walz reports that there was “great solidarity” in the district of Ermreuth, especially when it came to the synagogue project. The fact that an allegedly anti-Semitic attack and Ermreuth can now be mentioned in the same breath “of course shocks me,” he says. But I hope that the investigation will lead to a clear result. So that nobody in Ermreuth has to worry that this will happen again.
Fear? “I don’t have any,” says Rajaa Nadler, who is a pleasure to listen to because, even in this tricky situation for Ermreuth, she still finds enough arguments to make everything appear a little friendlier. The young man in the pictures on New Year’s Eve? “Swayed noticeably,” she says. The fact that it is someone who may no longer have been in control of his senses after drinking alcohol should not be completely ruled out. Although it is obvious that the smashed pane now threatens to rip everything open again, the “old” that the locals believed had already been overcome. But she also wants to remind her that the man who stands for the old for many in Ermreuth – Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, himself a restorer – pointed out a material defect during earlier renovation work on the synagogue that should be avoided at all costs could. One hears that she has no fundamental reason to doubt the potential power of good. Not even now.