Speech OB 16.05.2007

The spoken word counts!

Dear Mr Rotstein, dear Mrs Rotstein, dear members of the German Bundestag, the Saxon State Parliament and the Chemnitz City Council

State Parliament and the Chemnitz City Council,

Dear Mr District President

Mayors of the City of Chemnitz,

Mr Aris, representing the Board of Directors of the Central Council of Jews in Germany,

Dear State Rabbi Dr Almekias-Siegl,

Dear Dr Röcher

Honourable members of the Jewish communities of Chemnitz, Dresden and Leipzig,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The awarding of our city's highest honour, honorary citizenship, is a very special celebration. Thank you for accepting my invitation to this ceremony.
Today is not only a particularly joyful day, it is also an extremely memorable one. I am sure that it will go down in the history of our city.

But not only that. It will also mark a very special day in the almost 125-year history of our city's Jewish community. And as Lord Mayor, I am proud that the Chemnitz City Council unanimously supports the award of this honorary citizenship.

Like many civil rights, honorary citizenship is based on the ideas of the French Revolution.
The first German cities to award a similar honorary title were Saarbrücken, Frankfurt (Main) and Bremen around 1790. This title was first awarded in Leipzig in 1832. Just eleven years later, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a Jew, became an honorary citizen of Leipzig. This happened at a time when Jews in the Kingdom of Saxony were not yet permitted to settle in Chemnitz.

The history of the honorary citizenships of Chemnitz has not yet been written. However, it is noticeable that the honorary citizens of our city have included entrepreneurs, scientists and cultural figures from the very beginning. I would just like to mention the names of the factory owners Johann von Zimmermann (1885) and Hermann Vogel (1911).

Until 1933, Saxon state ministers and local politicians completed the list of honorary citizens. Let us remember today, for example, that Dr André played a not inconsiderable part in ensuring that the "movement to establish a [Jewish] community" in Chemnitz was crowned with success after a tough struggle in 1885. Dr Beck, his successor as Lord Mayor, received a delegation from the Jewish community at the end of 1907 when he was appointed Saxon Minister of Culture.

Only a few decades had passed since Jews were allowed to resettle in Chemnitz, and their representatives were welcome and respected members of the citizenry. They were granted civil rights. Within a short time, they had become part of the city's society.

On the one hand, the Jews of Chemnitz benefited from the powerful economic upswing in the city. On the other hand, they themselves played a key role in this. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, they acted as cultural and social patrons.

The foundation lists for the opening of our opera house in 1909 and the inauguration of the New Town Hall in 1911 therefore also include the names of numerous Jewish citizens. In doing so, they emphasised their attachment to their home town and their active participation in the development of Chemnitz as a major city.

At the beginning of the First World War, more than 1,200 Jews from Leipzig and Dresden with Russian citizenship were allowed to live temporarily in Chemnitz thanks to the commitment of the city council and the state authorities. On this occasion, a large number of so-called Eastern Jews also stayed in Chemnitz. Others felt encouraged to try their luck in our city in the following years. Among them, Mr Rotstein, was your father, who was born in Warsaw.

It is possible that Kommerzienrat Louis Ladewig, one of your predecessors in office, would have deserved to be the first Jew to become an honorary citizen of our city, due to his dedicated determination at the time. However, a tragic road accident in 1921 ended the life of this man, who was then almost forgotten.

Another 80 years were to pass before a man of Jewish origin was awarded honorary citizenship of our city for the first time.
Many of you, ladies and gentlemen, no doubt remember, as I do, the memorable ceremony on 2 October 2001: Stefan Heym was the focus of the tribute in the same place.

Dear Mr Rotstein,
We have come together here today to honour you. Your life and your life's work are exemplary and yet very individual for around eight decades of Jewish life in Chemnitz.

Matthias Siegmund Rotstein was born into a large Jewish family in Chemnitz on 30 November 1925. He is a true son of our city, born into the hopeful and contradictory times of the Weimar Republic. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had just become the new President of the Reich and Germany had joined the League of Nations. An increasing radicalisation from the right and left was taking place in people's minds. The Jewish religious community in Chemnitz had reached the peak of its development at that time.

According to the 1925 census, around 2,800 citizens of our city professed to be Jewish. However, the community was not spared from internal disputes. The long-established Jews from the German provinces and the often very religious Jews from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe were at odds with each other. Two different worlds collided.

Nevertheless, Rabbi Dr Hugo Fuchs, who was respected by both sides, was full of confidence when he summarised the overall history of Chemnitz's Jews with the following words:
"Thus the Jewry of Chemnitz may look to the future with confidence. May hardship and enmity not become unbearable! Then it will probably continue to be a lively member of the Jewish community."

As we know today, the rabbi's wish was not fulfilled. Hardship and enmity became unbearable. However, this was by no means caused by his own problems.
Siegmund Rotstein soon had to experience this. His childhood and youth were overshadowed by hostility and humiliation. They were to be followed by disenfranchisement, persecution, expulsion and finally the loss of his father in the extermination machinery of the National Socialist system.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Rotstein,
Please allow me to take this opportunity to say a few words in memory of your father.

Yankel Rotstein was recruited by the Tsarist army at the beginning of the First World War as a Russian citizen. He became a German prisoner of war in the autumn of 1914. He was used as an interpreter by the military authorities. After the end of the war, the 30-year-old did not decide to return to Warsaw. Yankel Rotstein initially continued his work as a translator, which subsequently also took him to Chemnitz. He finally settled here in December 1920. He was deprived of his Russian citizenship and did not want to opt for Polish citizenship. He therefore became stateless. He quickly became successful in the haberdashery trade.

His professional fortune was soon joined by his personal fortune: in February 1924, he married the war widow Liddy Kittel. The couple moved into the house at Alexanderstraße 1, now Ludwig-Kirsch-Straße. The life of the family, which grew to seven members, took place in this apartment block.

At the end of the 1920s, social tensions increased in Sonnenberg, a traditional working-class neighbourhood. The struggle between the KPD and NSDAP for political supremacy intensified with the global economic crisis.

After the National Socialists seized power, brutal political purges took place here in particular. In the spring of 1933, SA storms raged here and killed numerous opponents of the regime. The young Siegmund Rotstein experienced first-hand how the well-known publisher and social democrat Georg Landgraf was shot dead in the immediate neighbourhood.

He saw, felt and sensed how the situation of Chemnitz's Jews increasingly deteriorated. On his 8th birthday, Jewish business owners were forbidden to use Christian symbols in their Christmas sales. From Easter 1932, Siegmund Rotstein attended the Lessing School on the Sonnenberg. However, the guidelines for school lessons had changed fundamentally. Hereditary studies, racial studies and population policy soon took centre stage.

The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had serious consequences for the coexistence of Jews and non-Jews. Siegmund Rotstein and his siblings suddenly became so-called Jewish half-breeds. The final so-called "racial segregation of Jewish and Aryan pupils" was now on the agenda. From June 1938, he was therefore forced to attend the special Jewish classes set up in Chemnitz at the Brühlschule. A few months later, he witnessed 343 Jewish men, women and children with Polish citizenship being arrested and deported to Poland. Suddenly over 90 of his classmates were missing! It is hard to imagine what effect all this had on an adolescent, how development is possible in such mental and moral hardship and confinement.

The sword of Damocles of expulsion hovered over the Rotstein family. On 1 August 1939, the police chief informed the family that, as stateless persons, they had to leave the "Reich territory" within two months. A period of uncertainty began. Existential fears spread through the small flat in Alexanderstraße. The first things were given away, especially the children's beloved toys! The following month, the Second World War broke out and the decision was initially suspended. The father, Jankel Rotstein, was nevertheless arrested as a Jew with former Polish citizenship who had remained in the country. Internment and deportation followed. And the happiness that Jankel Rotstein had once found in Germany, in Chemnitz, was completely extinguished. The inhumane conditions in the Warsaw ghetto, the harsh winters and the separation from his beloved family wore him down.

Months later, Liddy Rotstein received the news that her husband had died in Warsaw on 13 September 1942. In the end, it was probably malnutrition that prevented him from continuing to live. Dear Mr Rotstein,
As chance would have it, a Stumbling Stone will be laid in front of the house on Sonnenberg in a few weeks' time in memory of your father. An impulse not to forget what must not be forgotten! An impetus not to stop asking questions!
In 1961, the trial of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem.

The philosopher and social scientist Hannah Arendt observed this trial for the American magazine "The New Yorker" and published her much-discussed and controversial book "A Report on the Banality of Evil" in Germany in 1964.
Hannah Arendt describes:

- 'The deeds of the criminals of war and humanity are repulsive, monstrous, incomprehensible.
- And yet the perpetrators are ordinary and average.

And so we are faced with frightening questions:
- How thin is the varnish of civilisation?
- How strong is the humanity in each of us?
- Where is the barrier that prevents the individual from letting evil take its sinister course?

Ladies and gentlemen,
Let us return once again to the year 1938. The fatal events of the so-called Reichskristallnacht had immediate consequences for Siegmund Rotstein, who was still a minor: When he was due to become a bar mitzvah, a person bound by law or commandment, at the end of November 1938, the celebration could not take place because the synagogue on Stephanplatz had been blown up and demolished a few days earlier. This meant that he could not participate in public religious life as he had hoped. The step into adulthood was delayed!

The situation of the German Jews continued to deteriorate! Their emigration was also becoming increasingly difficult. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, Siegmund Rotstein, now 14 ½ years old, embarked on hachshara (training) in Havelberg (Mark) in April 1940. There he prepared for his imminent emigration as an agricultural and horticultural trainee in a camp run by the Jewish Youth Welfare Organisation. But emigration became more and more a fiction.

From September 1941, he too had to wear the yellow Jewish star. After the Landwerk was dissolved, he lived in Berlin for six months, where he was allowed to do unskilled labour at the Jewish cemetery in Weißensee and in a nursery on Wannsee. Siegmund Rotstein had no idea that in January 1942, fifteen leading representatives of the Nazi regime had decided on the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish question in the Villa Am Grossen Wannsee, very close to his home.

After the deportations of Berlin Jews to the East became increasingly frequent, he returned to Chemnitz.

In April 1942, he set foot on Saxon soil again. After two years, he was to see his mother, brother Roland, sister Bella and sister Zilli again. Sister Marianne was still in a Jewish labour camp.

But the threat of deportation soon caught up with him. From May 1942, the deportation of Jews also began in Chemnitz.

He had barely arrived in his native city when he was forced to work at the E. F. Barthel lighting fixture and metal goods factory.

As a stateless Jew, he was also forced to report to the police headquarters on Hartmannstraße every evening. After 1943, he was one of the Jewish men who were forced to work directly for the armaments industry in the specially created defence department. Here he had to spray shells for anti-tank guns with nitro paint. This was extremely unhealthy work.

On 14 February 1945, Siegmund Rotstein was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto with 56 fellow sufferers from the district, including his brother Roland, who was only 12 years old. Sister Marianne had already been deported there on 9 January 1945. Frieda Eckstein from Lengenfeld in the Erzgebirge, who was also part of this transport, reported on her arrival in Theresienstadt after her return home: "On 7 February 1945, I was informed by the local police that I had to report to the Gestapo in Plauen on the early morning train at 6 a.m. on 13 February for work in Theresienstadt. [...] Everyone had to pay their own fare (11.80 RM). Once the transport had been assembled, they travelled at [high] speed to the station under command and guard. People stopped and looked at us with pity, because many of them wore the Jewish star and they knew immediately who we were. From Plauen to Chemnitz we were left in the passenger car to some extent. [...] That night [in Chemnitz] we were housed in the former academy, the ground served as our camp and [we] slowly got a taste of what was to come. The heavy terrorist attack on Dresden on 13/14 [February] gave us hope that we would have to go back, but we were taught otherwise. On 14 February, at 6 o'clock in the morning, we were loaded into cattle trucks like cattle for slaughter.

The journey took three days, with no seats and no food or drink. If there was a train, our wagons were attached to it, otherwise we stood on dead track for hours and [were] exposed to all the bomb attacks in wagons firmly locked with iron bars. Nevertheless, they still took us to Terezin, and when the gates closed behind us, we also knew that we were doomed unless help came from some quarter. The reception was so shameless, especially for us women. All our money was taken from us, as well as our jewellery, and some of us even lost our wedding rings. Everyone was afraid of the SS and their big dogs. Some women were even beaten. We also saw [...] the political prisoners who were guarded by very young louts with machine guns and beaten by them."

Siegmund Rotstein survived.
He was a coal carrier in the Theresienstadt ghetto and later worked in the demolition and civil engineering detachment. He also survived the typhus epidemic that broke out there.

After liberation by the Red Army, the ghetto was temporarily quarantined. During this complicated time, he volunteered to transport sick people and corpses. As a twenty-year-old, he suffers, experiences and survives this and finally the actual liberation is near!
On 9 June 1945, the three siblings arrived in their bombed-out hometown on a bus sent to Theresienstadt by the Chemnitz city administration.
All these experiences had a lasting effect on his consciousness and his humanistic world view!

Siegmund Rotstein was one of the few survivors of the old Jewish religious community who had returned to Chemnitz.

In September 1945, he was one of only 18 Jews in Chemnitz who dared to make a new start. They founded the Chemnitz Jewish Community. We know from the literature that these communities were often actually established as liquidation communities.

Ignaz Bubis, the long-standing chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, recalled in his farewell to the second millennium that the majority of community members were sitting on packed suitcases. And often for a period of 20 years!

How and why continue to live in this country? After all that has happened.

Siegmund Rotstein also seriously considered whether he should follow his sister Marianne to the USA. But he decided otherwise. He stayed in Chemnitz. After the end of the war, Siegmund Rotstein initially learnt the trade of a men's tailor from a tailor in Chemnitz. In April 1948, he proudly passed his journeyman's examination.

And he soon found the woman of his life. In September 1950, he married his Marianne. The two have now been together for over half a century. And anyone who knows them a little better has the impression that they know how happy they are to be together.

After gaining several further qualifications, Siegmund Rotstein took on tasks in the wholesale trade, first in the co-operative and later in the state. After 1965, he took on management positions at the local CENTRUM department stores. As a Jew, he was responsible for the former Jewish department stores Tietz and Schocken. There he was head of the men's clothing department and finally deputy trade director for sales. He took his well-deserved retirement in 1986, but only professionally.

Festive assembly!
Today we honour Siegmund Rotstein, a man who dedicated himself with passion and commitment to Jewish community life in our city.

From 1966 to 2006, he was chairman of the local Jewish community, which became the home for the Jews of the former Karl-Marx-Stadt district after the dissolution of the Jewish community in Plauen. He thus stood in impressive continuity with his predecessors in this honorary post. Hans Kleinberg, Max Abel, Albert Epstein and Siegbert Fechenbach, to name just the post-war chairmen.

A brief look back over this long period of four decades illustrates the impressive achievements of the man being honoured today.
Siegmund Rotstein, who had no political affiliation, had been a member of the board of the Jewish community in Karl-Marx-Stadt since 1959. Two years later, he was elected to the advisory board of the Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR.

After the unexpected death of Hans Kleinberg, the previous chairman of the Jewish community in Karl-Marx-Stadt, the board appointed him as his successor in January 1966. Not an easy task! Although his many years of experience on the board stood him in good stead, the position required skill, patience, consistency and, ultimately, perseverance and tolerance. At the time, he was able to take over a well-functioning community that his predecessor had saved from ruin.

When Siegmund Rotstein began to steer the fortunes of the Jewish community, he was responsible for the interests of just 22 members. As chairman, he was also elected one of the two vice presidents of the Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR in 1969.
Representing the Jewish community was one of the natural duties of a chairman.

The fact that he repeatedly succeeded in bringing the Jewish community with its painful history back into the consciousness of the citizens of this city - even into the recent present - was much more than just routine work.

Siegmund Rotstein's voluntary work as chairman was supported by the Karl-Marx-Stadt city council. In particular, the mayor at the time, Eberhard Langer, was very open to the development of the Jewish community.

As head of the community, Siegmund Rotstein was a man of public life from the very beginning. He immediately took on a "public role", as this prominent position in society was aptly described by sociologist Richard Sennett in the 1970s.

As a survivor of the Shoah, he was also a widely respected contemporary witness, and still is today. He appeared in schools and parishes, in front of writers and doctors and spoke about the disenfranchisement, persecution and murder of the Jews.

He supported related exhibitions and publications. It was therefore only a matter of time before the former concentration camp inmate was awarded the Terezin Memorial Medal of Honour in May 1988.

Siegmund Rotstein's commitment to the preparation of projects in our town to mark the 50th anniversary of the commemoration of the pogrom night of 9 November 1938 will remain a lasting memory.

On his initiative, a memorial stele for the Old Synagogue was erected on Stephanplatz and a memorial stone for the deported Jews of Chemnitz was erected in the inner courtyard of the Technical University.

Siegmund Rotstein was elected president of the Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR at a conference on 13 March 1988. A new and difficult task, which was soon to be completed by another historical caesura. On 10 November 1988, Siegmund Rotstein was appointed President of the International Board of Trustees of the "New Synagogue Berlin - Centrum Judaicum".

In this capacity, he initially oversaw the lengthy process of rebuilding the New Synagogue, which was not finally completed until May 1995.

The political turnaround in 1989/90 meant that the regional association of Jewish communities in the GDR was accepted into the Central Council of Jews in Germany. As a result, the now 65-year-old Siegmund Rotstein was elected chairman of the newly formed Saxony-Thuringia state association in August 1990. In this capacity, he was delegated to the Board of Directors of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. At the time, he received particular support from the chairmen Heinz Galinski and Ignaz Bubis.

Siegmund Rotstein did not stand for re-election as Chairman of the Board in January 2002 for health reasons, but continued to be represented on the Executive Committee. Until this year, he was also a founding member of the MDR Broadcasting Council.

German reunification also meant that the Jewish Community of Chemnitz escaped the impending fate of dissolution or self-dissolution. After 1990, an initially unexpected influx of Jewish families began to immigrate to Germany from the successor states of the former Soviet Union. From the very beginning, Siegmund Rotstein put all his energy into overcoming the challenges associated with integrating the immigrants into community life and their social integration. No easy task, considering that the Jewish community of Karl-Marx-Stadt had twelve members in 1989, the year of reunification. But perhaps he was also thinking of his father.

Together with the city of Chemnitz, Siegmund Rotstein also persistently endeavoured to build a new synagogue. In the fulfilment of this dream, he was supported unreservedly and passionately by Dr Peter Seifert, my predecessor in office! The Chemnitz City Council was also committed to this endeavour.

In May 2002, the time had come. The New Synagogue was consecrated. After almost 65 years, the Jewish community in Chemnitz once again had a synagogue. And an impressive community centre! At the beginning of the new millennium, Jewish life was finally possible again in our city, in our region. Siegmund Rotstein himself regarded this as the crowning achievement of his life's work and later said several times in interviews: "A piece of justice has been restored!" The Jewish community with its now 600 members enriches life in our city. Jews are being born in Chemnitz again, what a joy to be able to say that here today!

Six months after the consecration of the synagogue, the book "Jews in Chemnitz" was published. An important book for our city. Jewish stories and history in Chemnitz. In this respect, too, Siegmund Rotstein deserves credit for supporting this unique project for a Jewish community in the new federal states from the very beginning. He himself contributed an essay on the "rocky road to a new beginning after 1945".

In August 2003, Mr Roststein was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In addition to this high honour, however, the Peace Prize of the City of Chemnitz, which Siegmund Rotstein received in March 2006 for his outstanding life's work, should not go unmentioned. This still very young prize is awarded for ideas, initiatives and projects that promote and support non-violent coexistence, stand up for basic values such as tolerance, democracy and peacefulness and take a stand against xenophobia and racism. All of these attributes can be used to describe Siegmund Rotstein's life's work.
Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz and Nobel Peace Prize winner, once said:

"Never fight against memory. Man is capable of knowing what happened in the past and what he is capable of; he is capable of responsibility."

Ladies and gentlemen,
At its meeting on 14 March 2007, the City Council unanimously decided to award Siegmund Rotstein honorary citizenship in recognition of his great services to the preservation of Jewish life in Karl-Marx-Stadt / Chemnitz and his many years of commendable commitment to our city!

Dear Mr Siegmund Rotstein
On behalf of the citizens of the city of Chemnitz, I confer on you, the important contemporary witness and long-standing chairman of the Jewish community, the honorary citizenship of our city.