Concept
Monika Richarz (born 8 June 1937) is a German historian. The focus of her work is on the social history of the Jewish minority in Germany, and the relationships between the Germans and the Jews. In talking about her area of expertise, she likes to explain that there is a whole lot more to "Jewish history" than Auschwitz ("...jüdische Geschichte weit mehr umfasst als Auschwitz."). Between 1993 and her retirement in 2001 she was the director of the Hamburg based "Institute for the History of German Jews" ("Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden"). In 2022 Camden House published an English translation of her dissertation Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe under the title German Jews and the University, 1678–1848. Monika Richarz was born in Berlin, and spent the first part of her childhood in the relatively quite Zehlendorf quarter. Her father (like his father before him) was a mechanical engineer. When war came, slightly more than two years after Monika's birth, he avoided conscription because of his health. He worked, instead, for the Technical Emergency Assistance Service ("Technische Nothilfe"), which involved reinstating gas, electricity and water supplies after air-raids on the city. He never joined the Nazi Party, although his daughter later described her parents as Nazi "fellow travellers", not actively involved in Nazi crimes, but not actively distancing themselves from the government either. Monika's mother was a teacher of domestic sciences, and was also involved in teacher training. In 1943 she and her mother were evacuated to Neuruppin, a small town a short distance to the north of Berlin. Later they moved again, going to live with her grandmother at Meiningen in Thuringia. It was therefore not in bombed out Berlin, but in small town Germany that at the age of 7 the child first experienced the horror of air-raids, first saw dead bodies being pulled out of rubble, and was first terrified by dive bombers on the walk to school. When war ended in 1945 Monika was summoned back to Berlin by her father.