Horst Selbiger

Horst Selbiger (born January 10, 1928 in Berlin ) is a German-Jewish journalist , persecuted by the Nazi regime and contemporary witness of the Shoa .

Life

His parents were the Jewish dentist Erich Selbiger and his non-Jewish wife Erna nee Wegner. He had a brother Gerhard. His Jewish grandfather ran a glass factory . Horst started school in 1934. He was the only Jew in his class at the Sonnenallee elementary school . Even as a small boy, his classmates insulted him as a " Jewish pig ", contempt, beatings and marginalization. Fortunately, he was accepted into the Jewish sports club " Makkabi ", where he learned boxing and thus gained self-confidence. In 1938 he had to leave the general school and went to the Jewish school. Even much later, he spoke happily and relievedly about the friendly atmosphere and the good lessons with teachers, whom the children trusted and respected. His favorite subjects were history and German . His German teacher taught him a love of language and literature.

The adolescents were deeply impressed by the pogroms of November 9, 1938 . When he was about to go to school the next morning, he witnessed the SA vandalist acts that destroyed apartments, threw beds out of windows and smashed the windows of Jewish shops. The teachers stood in front of the school house and immediately sent the students home in view of the impending danger. When he got home, his father's practice sign and the door to his apartment were smeared with red paint: "Careful, Jews!" only visited the synagogue on major holidays . But he was proud to have campaigned for the emperor and empire as a nationally conscious army soldier in World War I - after all, he wore the Iron Cross . But he was wrong: the award did not protect him from the fact that the dentist's practice was also withdrawn and that he and his two sons were used for forced labor . Horst was forced to work in a hat factory, where he had to manufacture tropical helmets for the German Africa troops . Another place of work was an armaments factory , where he had to degrease aircraft parts in a hot and caustic solution.

Another decisive event for him was February 27, 1943, when he too was arrested in the so-called “ factory action ” and transported to the former Jewish community center - a collection point for the intended deportation . Under inhumane catastrophic conditions he had to spend there crammed with many other arrested people. In the meantime, numerous non-Jewish women and mothers had gathered on the streets in front of the collection points who protested against the deportation of their husbands and sons (see also Rosenstrasse protest ). The protest of this crowd, which had grown to several thousand women, also forced the SS to give in, so that they abandoned their plan.

After the liberation from National Socialism , Selbiger was unsure whether he should stay in Germany or rather go to the USA . He managed to move to the GDR in 1949 , joined the FDJ and became a member of the SED . He took on the ABF , the university and studied journalism . He then became press officer at the National Council of the National Front . Because he had chosen Heinz Brandt as his mentor , after the uprising of June 17, 1953, his party leadership assigned him to the Herrnstadt / Zaisser faction , was prosecuted and was banned from working . After the political climatic changes of the XX. At the party congress of the KPDSU Selbiger was rehabilitated and appointed head of the cultural department of the Humboldt University . He became a freelance journalist and member of the GDR writers' association . But then in 1964 he went to the West out of disappointment that his comrades had treated his mentor Heinz Brandt so disgracefully. He opened a travel agency in the Federal Republic of Germany , but it did not bring him the economic success he had hoped for. What bothered him the most was his decades-long struggle for recognition as a racially and politically persecuted person . In 1970 he finally received this recognition, while his fight for compensation for damage to his health remained unsuccessful even after 15 years.

Even today Horst Selbiger is constantly on the move to pass on his experiences with fascism and racism to schoolchildren and adolescents . He is co-founder of the association “Child Survivors Germany eV - Surviving Children of the Shoah”. He was the first chairman of the association for many years and is now its honorary chairman.

He was married to Ingeborg Wulf. She brought her son Reinhard (born 1948) into the marriage.

Publications

Literary works

• “The day will come” , Verlag Rütten & Loening, 1st edition 1956, historical story;
• “75 Years of Berlin Power Supply” , co-author Lieselotte Stranz-Gassner, publisher: Berliner Kraft und Licht (BEWAG) -Aktiengesellschaft, Berlin 1959;
• "Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben - yesterday, today, tomorrow" , (unpublished)
• "Ostracized - pursued - betrayed" , Baunach: Spurbuchverlag, March 2018, 1st edition, ISBN 978-3-88778-458-4

Plays

• "Der Zitronenfalter" , co-author Ursula Geißler, world premiere 1951,
• "Michael Kohlhaas", a paste adaptation for the natural stage , world premiere in 1960;
• “Jawa-Club 63” , revue, first performance 1963, tour through cities of the GDR;

Radio plays

(all staged by Berliner Rundfunk , Nalepastraße)

• “Before Madrid on Barricades” 1956;
• "Franktireurs" 1956;
• "Courage" 1956;
• “Heinis prevented start”, part 1 and 2, 1957;
• "Aurora - Dawn of a New Age" Part 1 and 2, 1957;
• "Spring 1848" 1958;
• "Gustav Adolf Schlöffel" 1958;
• "Murder in Police Headquarters" 1959;
• "Michael Kohlhaas" 1960;
• "The life path of Dr. Honest “1960;
• "Love, Lie, Passion" 1961;
• "Arms for Denmark" 1961,
• "Grid square 4 B 63" 1962;
• "Thomas Münzer" 1963;
• "That was Lützow's wild, daring hunt" 1963;
• "A scrap of paper" 1964;

German television broadcasting

(Berlin-Adlershof)

• Report series “The expansion of the Rostock high sea port” - from the transport of the collected boulders in 1957 to the inauguration of the Rostock overseas port on April 30, 1960. Weekly reports for “The current camera”.

• "All of this happened in broad daylight", Schwerin: Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania State Parliament, Public Relations Department, January 2015

• The day will come, Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1956

Honors

• 1951 Honorary Award of the Central Council of the FDJ

literature

• Inge Lammel : Jewish life pictures from Pankow - family stories, résumés , short portraits , ed. From the Bund der Antifaschisten Berlin-Pankow eV, 1996
• Inge Lammel and Rudolf Dörrier : Jewish ways of life - a cultural-historical foray through Pankow and Niederschönhausen , ed. From the Friends of the Former Jewish Orphanage Pankow eV, 2007
• Inge Lammel: Jewish life in Pankow, a contemporary historical documentation , published by the Bund der Antifaschisten Berlin-Pankow e. V. 1993 Edition Hentrich
• Alexandra Föderl-Schmid: Incredible miracles - conversations with Holocaust survivors in Germany, Austria and Israel , (text) Konrad Rufus Müller (photos) Böhlau-Verlag, 2019 Vienna Cologne Weimar
• Bettina Leder, Christoph Schneider, Katharina Stengel: Plundered and administered - History of legalized robbery of Jews in Hesse , Verlag Hentrich and Hentrich 2018

Web links

• www.horstselbiger.de Website from Horst Selbiger
• Ask us, we're the last! Memories of those persecuted by National Socialism and people from the anti-fascist resistance. An interview brochure . Ed. VVN-BdA Berlin, T. 1 - 6 (Seliger: Part 5)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.child-survivors-deutschland.de
2. ↑ https://www.mdr.de/zeitreise/ddr-seefahrt-schiff-ahoi-zur-see102.html