You can hear the anticipation of Judith Mathä. Mathä has been headmistress of the middle school in Garching for a year and a half. These days, after two years with various restrictions caused by the pandemic, the school can finally organize project days with its students again. “It’s the first school year in which you can organize school life properly again,” says the principal. The school has chosen a difficult and sensitive topic as the content for its projects: The classes from the fifth to the tenth grade deal intensively with the life and work of Max Mannheimer for four days.
The middle school in Garching has a close connection to the famous eyewitness. It has been named after him since 2018. The Holocaust survivor, who lived in Haar for many years until his death in 2016, was one of the most active admonishers and upholders of the memory of the terrible crimes of the National Socialists in Germany. “We deliberately gave ourselves this name and it still affects me a lot,” says Mathä. Hence the motivation to make the namesake the subject of the project days. “On the one hand, our concern was to show the students who this man was,” says Mathä. The younger classes in particular will deal primarily with Mannheimer’s biography. But the projects should go even further. “We also want to work out: What does this name mean to us today? What role do issues such as tolerance, exclusion and racism play for us?” says Mathä. “We are a school with a high proportion of immigrants. These issues affect our students.”
How the individual project groups approach the topic is very different. A class designs and performs a scenic play about Mannheimer’s life; another develops an art project in which the students paint in the style of Mannheimer, who also recorded his thoughts and memories artistically. Yet another group wants to deal with racist tendencies in today’s hip-hop. There should also be plenty of space for the ideas of the students. Dealing with such topics also reflects what is important to young people today, says Mathä. “A lot will develop there. I myself am curious to see what will come out of the individual project groups.”
The students summarize the results of their examination of Max Mannheimer, his life and work in an exhibition that will be presented at school on Wednesday.