It is largely thanks to Elisabeth Abendroth that Frankfurt has been dealing with its National Socialist past much more than before since the 1990s.

For example, with commemorative plaques that commemorate crime scenes and victims, for example the Adler works, at that time a branch of a concentration camp, and the Frankfurt treasurer and former mayor of Höchst, Bruno Asch, who was expelled by the National Socialists.

Abendroth also made sure that the Main metropolis honored those citizens who resisted the terror after 1933.

In the 1990s, 171 men and women received the Johanna Kirchner Medal for their courage, which in turn bears the name of a woman from Frankfurt who paid for her resistance with her life in 1944.

Manfred Koehler

Head of department of the Rhein-Main editorial team of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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Abendroth never pushed his way into the front row.

Nevertheless, she was on the stage at the beginning of May, that of the Paulskirche, at the funeral service for the honorary citizen Trude Simonsohn, who died in January and survived the Holocaust.

Abendroth reports on the late friendship between the two women, who had been on the phone every evening for years.

The two worked together for eight years on a book with Simonsohn's memoirs, which was published in 2013 under the title "Noch ein Glück".

She found the task of her life in occupying Börneplatz

National Socialism was not a topic that Elisabeth Abendroth had to read about.

Her father, the political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, had been a courier in the resistance when he was young.

Elisabeth Abendroth says about her own youth: "I grew up under the Nazis," and by that she doesn't mean her own family, but the environment, "enemy country," as she puts it.

She was born in Potsdam in 1947, studied in Marburg and Gießen, and came to Frankfurt to do her legal clerkship in Hanau in 1976. However, she did not go into teaching, but to Medico International.

Latin America was close to her heart, and Abendroth had written the dissertation about Chile on the road to socialism.

But she found the task of her life when the Börneplatz was occupied in 1987: to contribute

The occupation was about how Frankfurt should deal with its Jewish heritage;

The “historian coordination” emerged from those involved there, a working group in which the first ideas emerged, for example for today’s Anne Frank educational center, for the Fritz Bauer Institute, for the memorial to commemorate the persecution of homosexuals.

From 1990 onwards, Abendroth took care of it full-time in the Office for Science and Art.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the state of Hesse, she moved to the State Chancellery in 1996, after the end of Hans Eichel's government in 1999 she went to Ruth Wagner (FDP), the new Minister for Science and Art, where she was also employed at the time by Wagner's successor Udo Corts ( CDU) stayed and took care of the "literature state of Hesse".

"I was good at net knitting," says Abendroth.

She lives with her husband in Eschersheim and still writes for Marxist magazines;

"Marx gave us a way of thinking," she says, "he left us no tenets except to doubt everything." She also cares for refugees from Ukraine;

At the moment, however, she is primarily worried about a family in the house next door that comes from Iran and is to be deported.

"Human rights are worth something all over the world," she says indignantly.

But Elisabeth Abendroth never stopped at outrage.

She always finds ways to get things done, smart and thoughtful, caring for people and with a zest that is still admirable.