Charlotte Knobloch likes to be uncomfortable. For decades she has campaigned energetically and tirelessly for the interests of Jews as well as for peace and democracy. At 90 she looks back on a life between dark times and great joy.
Charlotte Knobloch was born in Munich on October 29, 1932 – her father, the lawyer Fritz Neuland, was Jewish. Her mother Margarethe had converted to Judaism to please him, but divorced her in 1936 because of the pressure exerted by the Nazis. Charlotte, who was four at the time, never saw her mother again.
During the November pogroms of 1938, Knobloch and her father fled to friends in Gauting, where they found temporary shelter. In 1942, the name of the then ten-year-old appeared on a Gestapo deportation list – Fritz Neuland brought his daughter to Kreszentina Hummel, a former maid of his brother’s. She passed Charlotte Knobloch as her own illegitimate child and lived with her on her parents’ farm in Middle Franconia until the end of the war. In 2017, Hummel was posthumously honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” for rescuing Knobloch. After the war, Charlotte Knobloch returned to Munich with her father, who survived as a forced laborer. Fritz Neuland was elected president of the Jewish community.
Back in Munich, Knobloch graduated from business school and worked in her father’s law firm. In 1951 she married Samuel Knobloch, a survivor of the Kraków ghetto and the Buchenwald concentration camp. At the age of 16, she had fallen in love with the merchant against her father’s will. Samuel and Charlotte Knobloch had three children – for their sake they abandoned their plans to emigrate to the USA.
In addition to her role as a mother, Knobloch gradually became politically active – she was involved as a lay judge in the orthodox Jewish community in Munich, became treasurer of the Jewish Women’s Association in Germany and founded the German section of the “Women’s International Zionist Organization”. Since 1984 she was the chairwoman of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria. In this picture she can be seen in 1989 with the German-Jewish journalist and religious scholar Schalom Ben Chorin and the CSU local politician Winfried Zehetmeier.
In November 2006, Knobloch was elected the first female chairwoman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, having previously been vice president for several years. By 2010, it represented almost 110,000 of the 260,000 Jews living in Germany. In this capacity, too, she was involved in numerous commemorative events, such as here with Chancellor Angela Merkel in the synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin at the central commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass.
She saw the old main synagogue on Herzog-Max-Strasse burn, and was instrumental in the construction of the new main synagogue in Munich: in 2003, Charlotte Knobloch sank a copper container with documents in the foundation stone of the Ohel-Jakob synagogue. In the next three years, St.-Jakobs-Platz became that Jewish center built. Visitors will find there the main synagogue, a Jewish kindergarten and elementary school, and the Jewish Museum.
Charlotte Knobloch described it as a miracle: On November 9, 2006, Munich’s new main synagogue Ohel Jakob was officially opened. “I unpacked my suitcase,” she said at the time, referring to the sentence from the 1950s that the Jews in Germany were “sitting on packed suitcases.”
In the presence of Federal President Horst Köhler and the Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber, Mayor Christian Ude handed over the key to Knobloch. Without Charlotte Knobloch, the synagogue might never have existed: as early as 1987, she approached the authorities and expressed her desire to rebuild the former main synagogue. The old main synagogue on Herzog-Max-Strasse was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 – five months before the pogrom night.
With the opening of the main synagogue on St.-Jakobs-Platz, the Jewish community has returned to the city center. Before that, people met in Reichenbachstraße – in the 1930s, a meeting place developed there in a backyard. It was important to Knobloch that Jewish life became better known, because “not knowing creates prejudices”.
Knobloch is known for her involvement in political debates: she vehemently called for a ban on the NPD, is a clear opponent of the stumbling blocks in Munich’s public space and speaks out against the scientifically commented edition of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.
The fight against anti-Semitism is a particular concern of hers – she can be seen in the picture at a rally in 2014. She demands that politicians ensure the protection of minorities and take action against xenophobia and anti-Semitism. It is not surprising to those who know her that Knobloch is still energetically committed to her goals at 90 and also tells young people as a contemporary witness. She talks about how other children didn’t play with her, or about the friends of her father Fritz Neuland, who slowly turned their backs on him and his daughter.
Energie Knobloch pays tribute to Munich’s Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD). “Charlotte Knobloch is an inspiration for me and she shows you how important it is to do everything in your power to combat anti-Semitism and to do everything possible to ensure that Jews in Germany can feel safe,” Reiter told the German Press Agency .
In 2014, the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing awarded Knobloch the Tutzinger Löwen for her commitment to “a Jewish present and future in Germany”. Knobloch received a number of awards over the course of her life: in 2010, former Federal President Christian Wulff presented the honorary citizen of Munich with the Great Cross of Merit with a star, and in 2008 she had already received the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
On January 23, 2019, a speech by Knobloch at a commemoration event for the victims of National Socialism caused a scandal in the Bavarian state parliament. Knobloch attacked the AfD directly, criticized it as anti-constitutional and called on society and all democratic parties to protect democracy. As a result, a large part of the parliamentary group left the plenum.
Knobloch also gave a speech on January 27, 2021 at the commemoration hour in the German Bundestag on the day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism.
Many celebrities honor Knobloch’s life’s work on their birthday. But on her 90th on Saturday, Knobloch first wants to celebrate with her family, with all the children and as many grandchildren and great-grandchildren as possible. Charlotte Knobloch does not know any precise plans. “They want to surprise me to celebrate,” she says, and in the face of war, conflict and tension, she also has a wish: “I really hope that we can put these difficult times behind us and return to a life free of fear .”