Event schedule

Registration at Holiday Inn Express Hotel. Participants will receive a welcome bag with necessary materials.

Check in to the hotel will be possible from 15:00. 

Participants will walk to the Cervantes Institute, our conference site (13 minutes walk, directions will be provided). 

Welcome remarks by Centropa Team. Introduction of the German Jewish Source Book and the five elective groups during this year’s CSA:

1.  Teaching the Holocaust in the 21st century
2. Interwar Europe
3. Cold War
4. Civil Society
5. Video-making

Elective groups meet for the first time.

Introduction to the Centropa website and the resources we offer. Time to discuss the scavenger hunt pre-trip assignment.

At the Anhalter Bahnhof, a former train station and site of one of the first Kindertransports in 1938, which were established after the infamous Reichspogromnacht in November 1938, we will read aloud from the personal memories of Centropa interviewees. Be sure to bring your German Jewish Sourcebook.

Between 1933 and 1945, the central institutions of Nazi persecution and terror – the Secret State Police Office with its own “house prison,” the leadership of the SS and, during the Second World War, the Reich Security Main Office –  were located on the present-day grounds of the “Topography of Terror” that are next to the Martin Gropius Building and close to Potsdamer Platz.

Museum website: http://www.topographie.de/en/

Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial is dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide of World War II. Participants have 15 minutes to explore the monument on their own.

The underground Ort der Information (Information Centre) complements the abstraction of the memorial with personal documentation about individuals and families. This includes biographical details, recordings and information about memorial sites throughout Germany and Europe. Documenting the universal issue of genocide, the centre represents a central focus on the diverse memorial sites across Germany which stress the living memory aspect of remembrance.

Participants explore the exhibition on their own.

Participants take part in the tour based on their preferences indicated in the registration form. Centropa staff will provide directions and day passes for public transport.

The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum Berlin opened in 2001 and is the largest Jewish museum in Europe. It consists of three buildings, two of which are new additions specifically built for the museum by architect Daniel Libeskind. German-Jewish history is documented in the collections, the library and the archive, and is reflected in the museum’s program of events. Please note that the permanent exhibition of the museum is currently under construction, so that the two upper levels of the Libeskind Building will not be accessible for us to visit.
More information: https://www.jmberlin.de/en

Schöneberg´s “Street sign memorials”
In 1993, Berlin-based artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock inaugurated their “Places of Remembrance” memorial. Today you can see the 80 signs that are hung on lamp posts throughout the Bavarian Quarter, each one spelling out one of the hundreds of Nazi laws and rules that dehumanized Berlin’s Jewish population. Here, you can see Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt’s houses alongside all the signage commemorating the laws that limited Jewish daily life.
Check out this 2013 interview by the New York Review of Books with the artists!

7xjung – Your Training Ground for Solidarity and Respect
7xjung offers intense workshops for dealing with the past times of National Socialism, as well as with the present-day issues of identity, exclusion and civil courage. They advocate that everyone can be an agent of change by expressing and discussing new perspectives on history, the present, the individual and personal possibilities of shaping society in a wholly democratic way.
More information: http://www.7xjung.de/en/?lang=en

Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof
This cemetery is where some of the greatest names in Weimar culture are buried: Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann and Hanns Eisler. Next door to the entrance of the cemetery at 125 Chaussee Straße is where Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel spent their final years after returning to Berlin from America. Only Eisler was Jewish, but all three fled Nazi Germany for Los Angeles. Hounded for being Communists, Eisler and Brecht left America (Eisler was deported, Brecht left on his own accord) for the newly created GDR. Also within the cemetery are several monuments including a tall cross dedicated to the resistance fighters who perished under the Nazi regime with the names of the men involved in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler as they were executed in a nearby park. Next to the cross there is a marker indicating a mass grave of 64, mainly unknown, persons who were killed in the cemetery days before the end of the war. Finally, there are a number of ehrengrab, or graves of honor, including Johannes Rau, the eighth president of West Germany and first German head of state to address the Knesset in Israel. Note that the cemetery is adjacent to the French cemetery, sometimes referred to as the cemetery of the Huguenots.
Chausseestraße 126, 10115 Berlin

You will meet in small groups, with one or two people from each of the morning’s field trips, describe what you did and what you saw and what you will bring back to your students from this morning’s experience. Explain what you saw, but we’re also hoping you take a big picture approach to discuss how what you saw might be used in the classroom – this might be the information you learned, or it might be a similar type of field trip.

Veteran teachers from Europe, US and Israel will present different projects they did with their students based on Centropa materials. 15 minutes per presentation. Participants get to choose which project their want to learn more about.

Ed Serotta will introduce Centropa´s newest film, the story of Menachem Mayer who grew up in the South German village of Hoffenheim in Baden Württemberg, and who now lives in Israel. The film is narrated by Ilay Elmkies, an Israeli teenager who plays for the TSG Hoffenheim youth soccer team.

Speakers: Anna Sauerbrey (Tagesspiegel), Luisa Beck (The Washington Post); Guy Chazan (Financial Times)
Moderator: Edward Serotta (Centropa).

Speakers:

• Marzanna Pogorzelska from the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes, University of Opole, Poland
• Cilly Kugelmann (Former Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum Berlin)
• Patricia Williams Lessane, Executive Director, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston

Moderator: Professor Joachim Schloer