Review on the Symposium on (forced) migration and flight and pupil excursion

"I felt like a real expert!"

This is how pupils from the Käthe Kollwitz School summed up the excursion day on 10.11.2023, which took pupils from the Georg Büchner Gymnasium (Düsseldorf) and the Käthe Kollwitz School (Leverkusen) to the Alter Schlachthof memorial site (Düsseldorf) in the morning and to DOMiD (Cologne) in the afternoon.

"I could do this every day!"

At the Alter Schlachthof memorial site, the pupils, divided into four expert groups, presented the memorial site and its exhibition, which is dedicated to the approximately 6,000 people who were persecuted as Jewish and who had to gather in the cattle market hall of the municipal slaughterhouse for a total of seven transports during the National Socialist era and were deported from here to the ghettos and murder and concentration camps in occupied Eastern Europe. Pupils showed the digital archive of the memorial site in detail, presented unique sources and biographies and listened to detailed testimonies from contemporary witnesses who gave vivid accounts of persecution, disenfranchisement, attempted, successful and unsuccessful escapes.

After a lunch break, the pupils traveled together to the DOMiD. Here, pupils from the Käthe Kollwitz School presented the history of DOMiD in four expert groups, told stories of migration in the corridor exhibition, gave informative and critical tours of the depot and collection and presented unique objects from the DOMiD archive.

Creating a shared learning space -
A cooperation project

How can polyphonic stories of migration and flight be made visible, told and remembered in the society of the many? How do we incorporate the experiences and realities of participants into our educational work on (forced) migration and flight?

Questions like these were the focus of the symposium "(Forced) migration and flight - stories from then and now", which took place on December 8, 2023 at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences (HSD). It was conceived and organized by the Alter Schlachthof memorial site (project management Eva Krane) in cooperation with DOMiD (Documentation Center and Museum on Migration in Germany, Andrea Nepomuck) and funded by the North Rhine-Westphalia State Center for Political Education.

Six high school students from Käthe-Kollwitz-Schule (Leverkusen) and Georg-Büchner-Gymnasium (Düsseldorf) also took part: in conversation with Andrea Nepomuck (DOMiD), Saeed Abd Alghany, Nashmil Al Youssef, Abdalla Elmahmudi, Sofia Tirelis, Julia Daszkiewicz and Leonie Eckert told the interested participants about their very personal experiences from the previous cooperation project: About which objects and stories particularly touched and moved them at DOMiD and at the Alter Schlachthof memorial site and what it was like for them to "appropriate" these and present them to the pupils* from the other school.

After this personal introduction, there were keynote speeches (see flyer), which could be deepened in the afternoon in the form of workshops. These offered exciting insights into practical and theoretical remembrance work.

At the end of the symposium, the content, questions and discussions from the workshops were brought back to the plenary session. In addition, display walls with various questions encouraged participants to reflect on their own positioning as an educator, on remembrance work on (forced) migration and flight and on working with historical source material.

In the end, the conclusion remains: there is still so much more to discuss and do! Although the symposium officially marked the end of the cooperation project, the intensive exchange and networking of different actors in the field of historical-political educational work that it enabled should hopefully be seen as the beginning of further discussion of these important issues and a pluralistic and multi-perspective approach - so that corresponding concepts for educational work can be further developed.