Berlin – In a routine workday in 1986, a German woman in her 40s was waiting at the bus station next to her home in Wannsee, the famous lake in southwestern Berlin. As the bus was slightly late, the woman – who was on her way to work as a teacher in a school for disabled children – had some time to peek at the graffiti which filled the station.
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One of the graffiti included a small writing reading, ‘Freedom to Rudolf Höss’ – Hitler’s deputy who was serving a life sentence at the Spandau prison, not far away, waiting for his death which would come a year later.
The bus arrived at the station eventually, but the sticker – posted by Neo-Nazis – kept haunting Irmela Mensah-Schramm.
When she returned towards the house 10 hours later and saw that the writing was still there, she decided to remove it.
“All day I kept asking myself: Why didn’t you do anything about it? I thought about all the people passing by those writing and moving on, and I knew I couldn’t be like them.”
It may sound strange to many, but at that same moment, 64-year-old Mensah-Schramm decided to devote her life to that very cause.
In the past 24 years, while improving her equipment and abilities, this energetic and gray-haired woman – who is not Jewish – has become the nightmare of skinheads in Berlin. She sprays, uproots, cleans and documents the Neo-Nazi graffiti across the city on a daily basis. And who better to testify just how widespread racism and anti-Semitism is in Germany today than her?
“Our politicians keep talking about an end to racism, tolerance and ‘multi-culti’ (German slang for multiculturalism, but I see what happens in practice and on the ground on a daily basis.
“When I inform the police about swastikas I spotted during a tour, I sometimes have to wait a week, two weeks, six weeks – and the authorities here do nothing. In the end I clean it up myself.”
For the Germans the Nazi symbols are more than just indicia of antisemitism they are a symbol of a controlling, totalitarian military state and of a political ideology that brought the country to literal ruin. That said, good for her, if only more people around the world, and in NYC in particular would clean up the offensive graffiti. I am sure I am not the only one in Manhattan who has seen the scrawlings, “9/11 Ha, Ha, Ha! :)” In fact, I am going down right now to the newbox on the corner where it is scrawled and paint it over…I think I have yellow paint in the closet. Thank you Mrs. Schramm for the inspiration.
You are a special person , Irmela.
She’s gotta have her hands full 24/7 to do that over there…