Monika Richarz

Monika Richarz (born 8 June 1937) is a German historian. The focus of her work is on the social history of the Jewish minority in Germany, and the relationships between the Germans and the Jews. In talking about her area of expertise, she likes to explain that there is a whole lot more to "Jewish history" than Auschwitz.

Between 1993 and her retirement in 2001 she was the director of the Hamburg based "Institute for the History of German Jews" ("Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden"). In 2022 Camden House published an English translation of her dissertation Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe under the title German Jews and the University, 1678–1848.

Life

Childhood in wartime Monika Richarz was born in Berlin, and spent the first part of her childhood in the relatively quiet Zehlendorf quarter. Her father (like his father before him) was a mechanical engineer. When World War II came, slightly more than two years after Monika's birth, he avoided conscription because of his health. He worked, instead, for the Technical Emergency Assistance Service ("Technische Nothilfe"), which involved reinstating gas, electricity and water supplies after air-raids on the city. He never joined the Nazi Party, although his daughter later described her parents as Nazi "fellow travellers", not actively involved in Nazi crimes, but not actively distancing themselves from the government either. Monika's mother was a teacher of domestic sciences, and was also involved in teacher training. Between 1957 and 1972 Leschnitzer was Honorary Professor for Jewish History and Culture. One of his students was Monika Richarz. Indeed, she would continue to attend his seminars till 1972, one of just two women in his (never large) seminar group. Accurately summarizing Leschnitzer's career progression, she later described him as "a mixture of German secondary school teacher and American professor", while going on to add that for her, and for post war fellow students of Jewish provenance, he had unlocked the door to a completely new way of understanding Jewish culture.

Academic and scholar In 1964 she managed to negotiate a part time post at the Berlin Historical Commission ("Historische Kommission zu Berlin"),

Monika Richarz submitted her doctoral dissertation in 1969. She had visited no fewer than 26 archives. She was not always well received. Many archivists suspected that anyone researching German Jewish history was simply bent on gathering evidence of anti-semitism.

"At The institute I lived mostly among the older emigrants. They were friendly and opened up to me, interested because for them I represented the younger generation of Germans. In turn I was fascinated by them, because they really did represent Weimar Germany. I sometimes felt that I was reliving the Weimar years, right there in the Leo Baeck Institute, starting with the way they used the language, and extending to the historical perspectives and evaluations." She quickly found she had integrated herself into three contrasting worlds: she lived in the city's Lower East Side, "more or less a Puerto Rican slum" (Richarz) with empty houses, collapsed buildings, high crime and a developing fashion in the neighbourhood for Voodoo cult practices; she was also soon participating in a long string of animated discussions with members of the New York feminist movement, and each day she commuted to the Upper East Side for her work at Leo Baeck Institute, then located at East 73rd Street in Manhattan. (The institute holds additional memoirs that she collected which never made it into print. ) Collecting the many testimonies sometimes involved unconventional research methods, as she sought out written records inherited by their writers' heirs. She cultivated excellent relations with the book keeper of a firm of undertakers that numbered, among its clients, the families of a large number of German Jewish emigrants. Each of the three volumes in which the work eventually appeared included a lengthy introduction by Richarz, setting out her methods with clarity and providing readable insightful summaries which covered each of the three epochs of German Jewish history into which the volumes were arranged. The collection also highlights the extent to which many of the people whose writings it features lived in rural Germany which, as Richarz was quick to point out, comprehensively refuted the stereotyping of German Jews as inhabitants only of the large cities.

In 1983 Richarz took over as director of the Germania Judaica in Cologne, a library concerned with the history of German Jews. She arrived at a difficult time, shortly after Prof. Hermann Greive had been shot dead by a firearms-obsessed former student called Sabine Gehlhaar, while delivering a seminar in the library. This had a traumatising impact on the institution. Richarz nevertheless acquired a new zest for teaching, taking on roles as a guest lecturer at the Academy for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg and at Zürich university.