When the weather is nice, there is a lot going on in the small square diagonally opposite the southern tip of the Grünwald Park in Neuhausen. No wonder, the place is charming: lined with trees and equipped with benches, a bookcase and a listed tram house that is used as a kiosk, it invites you to chat with friends and neighbors. The only thing is that dating is sometimes difficult. Because the square between Ruffini-, Waisenhaus- and Nymphenburger Strasse has no name.
The Neuhausen-Nymphenburg district committee now wants to change that. On the initiative of Lili Schlumberger-Dogu (Left), local politicians have submitted a proposal to name the square after Walter Joelsen – a Holocaust survivor who was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 2009 for his involvement as a contemporary witness at the Dachau concentration camp memorial. Joelsen died last year at the age of 96. “He would certainly have been very happy that this place should bear his name,” says his daughter Gisela Joelsen. “And for four of us children it would be a great honor.” Especially since Walter Joelsen, according to the 59-year-old, was “Neuhausener through and through.”
Born in the Red Cross Hospital in 1926, Walter Joelsen grew up in Borstei as the son of Protestant baptized parents and initially attended the Alfonsschule. For a long time, the boy did not know that his father was of Jewish descent and had changed his name from Joel’s son to Joelsen. He was twelve when he found out. “A local group leader of the Borstei visited the parents of his friends and instructed them to stop their children from playing with the Jew,” says Gisela Joelsen. Young Walter loses all of his friends that day.
It was only the first of many more painful experiences of exclusion. In 1943 – when the young man was just 17 – he was excluded from the Wittelsbach high school because of his family’s Jewish roots. The Evangelical Christ Community on Dom-Pedro-Platz welcomes him and employs him as an assistant youth worker. The church becomes his home. But just a year later, Walter Joelsen was drafted into forced labor and had to expand an underground armaments factory in a mine in Bad Salzungen in Thuringia. The Munich resident was deported two more times, to Abteroda, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and to Dankmarshausen, a few kilometers further west. He survived the torture, but suffered so much from the consequences of imprisonment that he was plagued by suicidal thoughts long after the camp was liberated by the Americans at Easter 1945.
After all, it is the positive memories of the Christ Church that help him to live on. Walter Joelsen studies theology, becomes a Protestant pastor, religious teacher and editor at the Protestant television company Eikon, which has its headquarters on Lachnerstrasse – not far from the square that could bear his name in the future.
The Holocaust survivor Walter Joelsen was a Protestant pastor, religious teacher and editor at the Eikon television company.
(Photo: Christian Topp)
But he can’t talk about his experiences for a long time; the past haunts him. “We children also knew little,” says Gisela Joelsen. That only changed when the Holocaust series came on television at the end of the 1970s. From then on, Walter Joelsen went to schools and to the Dachau concentration camp, talking about his experiences in classes and in the memorial’s Church of Reconciliation.
“He was so open and respectful towards the young people,” remembers Schlumberger-Dogu. The politician herself accompanied visitors through the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial for 20 years and was able to experience Walter Joelsen as a contemporary witness on several occasions. “He made a huge impression on me,” she says. “He was a true Christian and a great humanist, a very fine, profound person.” Walter Joelsen, adds the pastor of the Christ Church, Dean Christoph Jahnel, was also a warning “who repeatedly explained that democracy cannot be taken for granted.” And a reconciler. “One who made young people understand that every person is different and special – and everyone has their own dignity.”
Jahner and the church council of the Christ Church therefore support the initiative from Neuhausen – as does the pastor of the Church of Reconciliation at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial, church councilor Björn Mensing. The decision now rests with the city council.