Lilli Zapf
Anna Mathilde "Lilli" Zapf (born January 5, 1896 in Nördlingen , † December 12, 1982 in Tübingen ) was a German secretary and local researcher . She dealt with the history of the Tübingen Jews, about which she published a book in 1974.
Life
Anna Mathilde Zapf, who herself always used the name Lilli , was the daughter of the King. Württemberg State Railway Inspector Michael Zapf and his wife Anna, née Lindenmeier. She grew up in Nördlingen, but lived in Berlin in the 1930s , where she opened a typing office in 1932 . She also had many Jewish customers there with whom she was on friendly terms - this led to her being denounced as a “Jew friend” in 1935 and her apartment being searched. She fled to the Netherlands , where she worked as the secretary of the lawyer Hendrik George van Dam (who was to become the first general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany after the Second World War ). After he fled to England in 1940 , she went underground with his mother.
After the liberation, she initially stayed in the Netherlands and returned to Germany in 1949. She lived briefly with her brother in the Upper Palatinate and came to Tübingen in 1950, where she worked as a secretary at the Tropical Institute until her retirement.
In 1982 she died in Tübingen. She was buried in Nördlingen, and in 2005 her urn was transferred to the Tübingen city cemetery .
plant
From the mid-1960s, Lilli Zapf made it her business to investigate the fate of the Tübingen Jews. Supported by no official agency, but rather hindered in some cases, it collected a large amount of information from archives, from offices, from Tübingen Jews who had survived in emigration, and from Tübingen citizens. She did this out of Christian conviction and with the aim of wresting as much information as possible from oblivion. She was thus a pioneer in coming to terms with the past at a time when this topic was not yet on the agenda.
Her book Die Tübinger Juden was published for the first time in 1974 (further editions in 1978, 1981 and 2008) and is today considered a prime example of the exemplary processing of the situation in a specific city: “I don't know of any account of the persecution of the Jews from 1933 to 1938 that is thorough , but can also be measured by the author's human empathy. A maximum of educational work has been done here for the manageable urban area. ”( Paul Sauer , former director of the Stuttgart City Archives).
Honors
Lilli Zapf was only recognized towards the end of her life. In 1981 she was still satisfied that the city of Tübingen followed her long-standing suggestion to invite former Jewish fellow citizens. In April 1982, a few months before her death, she received the Tübingen Citizen Medal.
In 1996 a street in the Loretto district in the southern part of Tübingen was named after her. In 2001, the "Association for the Awarding of the Lilli-Zapf Youth Prize eV", which was specially founded for this purpose, founded the "Lilli Zapf Youth Prize", which is awarded annually by young people to committed young people on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Web links
- Literature by and about Lilli Zapf in the catalog of the German National Library
- Official website of the Lilli-Zapf Youth Prize Tübingen
- Stumbling blocks in downtown Tübingen with many descriptions of the lives of Tübingen Jews according to Lilli Zapf
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. City chronicle 1996 on the city of Tübingen's website
- ↑ cf. City chronicle 2002 on the city of Tübingen's website
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Zapf, Lilli |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Zapf, Anna Mathilde |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German secretary and local history researcher, researcher into the fate of the Tübingen Jews |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 5, 1896 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nordlingen |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 12, 1982 |
| Place of death | Tübingen |