Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

164   SPEECHES | POLITICS AND SOCIETY Politics and Society ©Bavarian State Parliament Photo Archive / M. Balk Dear Contemporary Witnesses, Dear Dr Knobloch, Dear Dr Schuster, Honourable Minister-President, Honourable President of the Bavarian State Parliament, Dear Guests, It is an honour to speak to you today, as Lord Mayor of Dachau, at this act of remembrance for the victims of National   Socialism. I am also grateful that we are gathering here in Dachau Palace, at the very heart of our town. As you may have seen on the invitation card, and as we have heard today, a commemorative event for the victims of the concentration camp was held at this very place as early as 1945, the year of liberation. In the years that followed, survivors   continued to meet in these very rooms. From 1945 to 1951, Dachau was even home to a Jewish community – with its cultural centre located in the middle of the old town. After the war, many survivors and displaced persons stayed in Dachau – the very town whose name was so closely tied to the place of their suffering. When Dachau survivor Nico Rost returned to the town in 1955, the situation was far removed from what he had experienced immediately after the war. In his account Ich war wieder in Dachau, he suspected that the Bavarian State Government and local authorities wanted to make the traces of the concentra- tion camp disappear in order to erase the memory of the years 1933 to 1945. Nico Rost’s wake-up call marked a turning point. In the years that followed, he and other survivors were instru- mental in running a long campaign that would culminate in the establishment of the Dachau Memorial. For decades after the war – and until well into the 1990s – the town of Dachau did indeed struggle to find an appropriate way of dealing with its past. It was not until the mid-1990s – when historian Sybille Steinbacher published her study Die Stadt Florian Hartmann Lord Mayor of Dachau Act of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism at Dachau Palace  23 January 2025 und das Konzentrationslager (The City and the Concentration   Camp) – that the close entanglement between Dachau’s society, the SS and the concentration camp began to enter the broader public consciousness. Initiated by committed mem- bers of civil society, political attitudes towards contemporary history also began to shift. A historian once described this dif- ficult process as a journey “from burden to a place of learning”. It was above all the survivors who accompanied the town on this journey. Survivors who, despite their traumatic experienc- es in the concentration camps, had stayed in Dachau or the surrounding region after 1945; people like Nikolaus Lehner or our honorary citizen Dr Max Mannheimer. Survivors who had built a new life in Israel but maintained lifelong ties with Dachau through countless visits and lectures; people like   Uri Chanoch or the indomitable Abba Naor, who continues to speak to Bavarian school groups here in Dachau year after year. And later, Jewish citizens expelled from Dachau who had survived the war and returned in search of their family roots; people like Ruth Locke or FrankWallace from England. Today, the Dachau Memorial is a place of learning where the survivors’ association, local churches, history organisations, the Max Mannheimer Study Centre and the local council have formed a strong and trusting partnership. Together, we organ- ise educational programmes and commemorative events – such as an annual commemoration for the victims of National Socialism on 27 January. This coming Monday, we are honoured to welcome Igor Levit for a conversation as part of this year’s event – and I warmly invite all of you to attend. We are also working closely with the Bavarian Memorial Foundation and the Free State of Bavaria. For example, we are currently finalising the transfer of the so-called “herb garden” to the Free State and the Foundation. This is an important step that will allow Dachau to grow as a memorial site in the coming years.