Terry Swartzberg

Terry Swartzberg

Terry Swartzberg (born July 22, 1953 in Norwalk, Connecticut ) is an American ethical campaigner and former business journalist . The Munich resident wrote for around 25 years as a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and was best known for his Stolpersteine campaign and his self-experiment on wearing his kippah in public.

Life

Swartzberg first grew up in New York and then went with his parents to northern India as a child, where his father did a long research stay as a cultural anthropologist . After attending a Catholic boarding school in India, he first studied at Brandeis University and, after spending a semester abroad in Paris in 1973, switched to the University of Wisconsin – Madison , where he graduated in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in urban planning . However, he then became a business journalist and came to Berlin in 1980 as a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and finally to Munich in 1985, where he has lived since then.

Since 1999, he has been managing partner of the advertising agency Swartzberg GmbH, which, in addition to public relations work for companies and authorities, provides editorial services to the creation of magazines, also oversees foreign authorities in Germany. His customers include the state capital Munich and the Bavarian state government . Since the middle of this decade he has shifted his work focus to ethical campaigning. In the Charlotte Böhringer murder case, for example, he took over the press work for the family of the convicted perpetrator Benedikt Toth.

Volunteering he was active on the board of Munich Liberal Jewish congregation Beth Shalom , where he was project manager for the planned construction of a synagogue , designed by Daniel Libeskind responsible. In 2011 he became the chairman of the local Stumbling Block Initiative . In this role, he fights to ensure that these memorial stones for victims of Nazi tyranny can be relocated by their relatives. Munich is one of the few cities in Germany that prohibits this.

His play Tzaddhik takes up the Talmudic idea of ​​the 36 righteous in connection with peace and war and was performed in 2012 in Augsburg, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Munich and Hamburg. In the same year he published the satirical guide How to enjoy bad relationships with Jim Booras . With chutzpah and kippah followed in 2016 .

In 2012 he began his experiment of wearing the kippah in public spaces outside of the home or the Jewish community. On the one hand, he wanted to set an example against anti-Semitism, on the other hand, he also wanted to test the reactions of the majority society. Contrary to fears, he never experienced hostility, but consistently positive reactions. His kippah was then even included in the collection of the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn.

Web links

• Internet presence of Swartzberg GmbH
• Internet presence of the Stolpersteine ​​für München eV initiative

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anja Kühne: Munich takes it to the extreme , Der Tagesspiegel from January 14, 2004
2. ↑ Werner Weidenfeld (editor): Atlantischer Kulturbruch? , CAP postscript, bulletin of the Center for Applied Political Research , January 1996, page 6
3. ↑ Hartmut Kistenfeger and Ulrike Plewnia: Transatlantic Relations Unrequited Love , Focus of November 13, 1995
4. ↑ Class Notes 70s On Wisconsin, alumni magazine of the University of Wisconsin-Madison , Volume 113, page 54
5. ↑ ^{a b} Claudia Keller: Stolperstein prohibition divides Munich , Der Tagesspiegel of October 28, 2014
6. ↑ Trade tab and list of shareholders HRB 123818 Munich District Court
7. ↑ State capital Munich, Department for Labor and Economics Munich. Because , Munich 2011
8. ↑ Foreign agency of the Bavarian State Ministry for Economic Affairs Business Bavaria ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Edition 1/2 2011 
9. ^ Matthias Frese and Marcus Weidner (editors) Negotiated memories: Dealing with honors, monuments and memorial sites after 1945 (Research on regional history 82) , Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2017, p. 384
10. ↑ Katharina Mutz: On Corso Leopold: Concert for a convicted murderer , tz from August 31, 2016
11. ↑ Caroline Wörmann: Beth Shalom raises allegations against the city , Münchner Merkur of December 7, 2009
12. ^ Judith Leister: Memorial plaques for Holocaust victims , Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 7, 2015
13. ↑ Michael Grill: People still laugh in the mourning hall , evening newspaper of April 27, 2012
14. ↑ Michael Risel The Kippa Experiment Deutschlandradio Kultur from March 29, 2015
15. ↑ Good experiences with the kippah , Jüdische Allgemeine, May 28, 2015
16. ↑ Jamie Campbell: German Jews should stop 'making themselves recognizable' in Muslim neighborhoods, says Jewish council leader , The Independent of March 14, 2015