Like several organizations recently, the Jewish religious community in Erlangen advocates the preservation of the remaining parts of the historic sanatorium and nursing home (HuPfla) in the university town in Central Franconia. “Above all, we are depressed by the planned demolition of the eastern patient wing of the former mental hospital,” it said in a statement. In the open letter to Mayor Florian Janik (SPD), Chairwoman Ester Limburg-Klaus explains that there were also people of the Jewish faith “who were tortured in these rooms, whose complaints have eaten into the DNA of the surrounding walls, so to speak”. That is the reason “to ask you not to let this place of criminal misdeeds be wiped out”.
“Respect for those who were tortured in an unspeakably cruel way” dictated that nothing should be left unturned, the memory of the victims “preserved to the extent that the place of their agony remains as recognizable as possible for us today”. The community has also thought about a “way out” from the Erlangen malaise. The dispute over the extensive demolition of the historic sanatorium – which is to make way for a Max Planck Center – has been smoldering for years. A “compromise” three years ago provided for the preservation of a central avant-corps including narrow appendixes (i.e. structural fragments) in the east and west wings. As recent studies confirm, sick people were starved to death in their basements. Since the medical ethicist Andreas Frewer urgently pointed this out again four weeks agothe debate has not only flared up again in the university town – and more vehemently than before.
The Jewish community is considering a variant without having to change previous “ideas too much”. Accordingly, the remaining basement of a former hunger station should be preserved and provided with a green flat roof. According to the proposal, the planned new building could be built over the remaining hull of the old building, “with a distance between the individual structures”. According to the religious community, this would result in “a small loss” of new space, but the desired “disruptive factor” would arise.
Mayor Janik confirmed receipt of the letter through a spokesman. In February, the Mayor replied to an open letter from “Doctors for Peace”, who also called for a demolition freeze, that the expansion of medical research was “of exceptional importance” for Erlangen as a science location and medical city. The cooperation of individual research areas requires “closest spatial and functional proximity to each other”. The builders had proven that the “desired scientific effects could not be achieved at an alternative location, or could not be achieved in the same way”.
In the middle of the week, the Auschwitz Committee in the Federal Republic of Germany e. V the “widest possible preservation” of the HuPfla required. This place of victims “under no circumstances should be demolished,” said a statement by the organization, which is committed to raising awareness of Nazi crimes in memory of those murdered in Auschwitz.