When Sandra Gruber herself was still a student, Max Mannheimer took her class from the Freising grammar school once through the memorial in the former Dachau concentration camp. Gruber was deeply impressed by how vividly and at the same time the Holocaust survivor Mannheimer told the young people about the cruel deeds of the National Socialists and his own experience of the Nazi era. When she took over the provisional management of the Max-Mannheimer-Mittelschule in Garching at the beginning of this school year, it was therefore particularly important to her to maintain the legacy of this great namesake. The school has now started an ambitious project for this.
She wants to set up her own room, which is entirely dedicated to the life and work of Max Mannheimer, who died in 2016. However, the room should not be a museum, but rather a space for experiencing, for personally dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust survivor. “It is important to us that we are not just called the Max Mannheimer School, but that we live and pass on the thoughts and topics for which Max Mannheimer stands,” says Gruber. “We want to sensitize our students and everyone else to right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism.”
Max Mannheimer was born in 1920 as the first of five children to a Jewish merchant family in Moravian Neutitschein in what was then Czechoslovakia. When the Nazi dictatorship grew in Germany and the Sudetenland was annexed to the German Reich in 1938, Mannheimer experienced the concentrated anti-Semitic violence. He was persecuted with his family and deported to the concentration camp, where he was forced to do labor; After stops in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Warsaw, Mannheimer was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1944. With his younger brother Edgar he was the only one in the family who survived this period and was liberated by the Americans in 1945. The traumatic experiences tormented him for a long time. Mannheimer discovered art as a way of relieving pain; since the 1950s he painted under the stage name “Ben Jakov”, Jacob’s son.
In the mid-1980s, Max Mannheimer made it his life’s work to publicly fight against right-wing radicalism and anti-Semitism and became a central authority in the discourse on remembrance. He worked tirelessly as a contemporary witness for the memory of the victims of National Socialism. He saw himself as a contemporary witness in the truest sense of the word, never as a prosecutor or judge. “You are not responsible for what happened. But that it does not happen again, yes,” Mannheimer told the younger generations in his countless appearances at schools.
In 2018 the Garching Middle School took on its name as the first middle school in Germany. The school family has dealt intensively with Mannheimer’s life and work and, especially as a school with pupils from many different countries of origin and cultural backgrounds, made a conscious decision in favor of Mannheimers. This discussion should be even more tangible in the new room. With the help of high-performance projectors, the room is to become a kind of interactive platform, into which content that the students themselves develop is continually incorporated. Headmistress Gruber is also thinking of role-playing games that make the effects of propaganda and dictatorship tangible. “Pupils learn better with their heads, hearts and hands than just from a book,” she says.
The room should also be open to all Garching residents and interested parties. Perplex GmbH, which has already developed the corporate design for the Max Mannheimer School, is responsible for the technical implementation. The school is now looking for financial supporters so that the adventure space becomes the desired “lighthouse project”. According to managing director Stefan Marshall, they want to approach Garching companies, but also, for example, the Central Council of Jews.