»Auschwitz was my real university«. In commemoration of Joseph Wulf
Joseph Wulf (1912-1974) was a Jewish resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor. After the war he lived in Poland and Paris before settling in Berlin in 1952. He published the first in-depth investigations in Germany into Nazi rule and the destruction of Jews.
In 1965 Wulf called for an “international documentation centre for research into Nazism and its consequences” to be set up in the villa where the so-called Wannsee Conference had taken place on 20 January 1942. Although his proposal found prominent supporters worldwide, the West Berlin Senate was not prepared to relocate the school recreation camp that the building then housed.
In November 1967 the World Jewish Congress offered to finance the construction of a new school recreation camp if the West Berlin Senate made the building available for the documentation centre. But the government was vehemently against the idea. After years of fruitless negotiations, the project was abandoned in March 1973.
In the 1980s Joseph Wulf’s idea to open an education and memorial site on the premises was revived and finally realized in January 1992 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. Joseph Wulf, who took his own life in 1974, did not live to see the site’s inauguration.
Duration:
12 December 2012 – 30 September 2014 in the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site (Opening the evening before, 11 December 2012, at Topography of Terror Memorial Center in the context of a memorial service for Joseph Wulf)
subsequently on the occasion of the 40. death anniversary of Joseph Wulf from 21 October – 18 December 2014 at the Jewish Community Hall at Fasanenstr. in Charlottenburg, since 2015 as permanent exhibition (in German and English) in the garden shed of House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site
