Obituary for Margot Friedländer

Margot Friedländer was living proof of the assertion that you can make a fresh start at any age. Her personal new beginning began at the age of 88 and had a short history.

She lived with her husband Adolf Friedländer in New York after the war. Her husband, born in Berlin like her, never wanted to return to Germany after the war, despite annual trips to Europe, and especially not to Berlin, the pain was too great. For years, invitations from the Berlin Senate to visit her old home went unanswered.

Adolf Friedländer, managing director of the Jewish educational institution Y in 92 Street in Manhattan, died in 1997. Margot, then aged 76, tried to maintain social contacts and took a course in her husband’s old workplace entitled “Write your memories”. It was there that she met Thomas Halaczinsky, a young German filmmaker living in America. He is fascinated by her and her charm, like so many others later, and persuades her to accept an invitation from the Berlin Senate to visit her old home.

They traveled to Berlin together in 2003 and made the great film “Don’t Call It Homesick”, which later opened the Jewish Film Festival in Berlin City Hall in the presence of Iris Berben. On this first visit to Berlin in almost 60 years, the author welcomes the group of Jewish visitors on behalf of the Senate. He, too, falls for the 81-year-old’s wide eyes and charisma, a friendship that lasts for years develops, followed by Sunday phone calls with the announcement “this is home speaking”.

Her autobiography “Try to make your life”, titled after her mother’s last lines before she and her son Ralf were murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 2008. Margot Friedländer was now coming to Berlin and Germany more and more often. She read from her book in schools and migrant institutions and was enthusiastic about her old home town. A not entirely serious suggestion from the author “why don’t you move back?” was put into action by Margot Friedländer in 2010, after a digital apartment search from New York at the remarkable age of 88. First for 6 months on a trial basis, then permanently.

In the same year, Berlin’s Interior Senator Erhart Körting restored her German citizenship, which had been revoked by the Nazis. To the astonishment of the audience, she does not thank him, but speaks the wise words “I only got back what was mine”. In all her public speeches, interviews and discussions, her use of the German language was astonishing, despite almost 60 years in the USA and the lack of school and university education caused by the National Socialists.

She had a magnetic personality and possessed strong communication skills. There was no reception or party to which the author initially took Margot Friedländer where she didn’t end up bringing home a handful of business cards. She maintained these new contacts, and the initially small circle of acquaintances and friends around her grew and grew. Later, after the author left politics, it was Margot who began taking him to the receptions and parties she was invited to.

One can make a fresh start in life at any age. Margot Friedländer proved to us that this is truly possible. In the 15 years since her move, she reinvented herself, and today it almost seems like a miracle: the Holocaust survivor, seamstress, and travel agent from New York started her life all over again or one might say, she truly came into her own. She made use of her opportunities and abilities, her enduring feminine, almost youthful charm, her smile, and her curiosity, especially about young people. What kind of career might this woman have had if the catastrophe of National Socialism had not occurred?

From the Federal Cross of Merit first class, the Berlin State Order, the honorary citizenship of the city, to the Bambi and the special prize of the Peace of Westphalia this year, with laudator Frank-Walter Steinmeier, she has cleared all the prizes that our country has to award. The former seamstress, who would have loved to become a designer and always dressed elegantly, something she always made a point of, appeared on the cover of the July/August issue of German Vogue 2024, which sold out immediately.

She always followed her self-imposed mission to bear witness to what is almost unimaginable for those of us born later and still enjoyed the last 15 years of her life to the full – according to her own statement, the best years of her life. Anyone who experienced her in her readings and lectures, especially with young people, was fascinated by the effect she had on the grandchildren and great-grandchildren generation. Such events did not become too much for her almost to the end, “this work has given me a second life”. And she called out to the audience “I do it for you”.

Her constantly repeated phrase “you should be the witnesses we can no longer be, it is in your hands that what happened will never happen again” is her legacy to us. I very much hope we can live up to it.

The Schwarzkopf Foundation will continue to fight with all its strength against anti-Semitism and right-wing enemies of democracy. Margot Friedländer will always be a great role model for us.

André Schmitz

Honorary Chairman of the Board