The opening of the exhibition “Traces in Stone — Jewish Cemeteries in the Lower Rhine” will take place on Tuesday, May 7, 2024 at 7 p.m. in the museum Center for Persecuted Arts instead of.

Armin Alfermann, born on December 2, 1924 in Düsseldorf, was a well-known gallerist and photojournalist. Many appreciated him as a speaker who gave slide lectures about Alsace, the Lower Rhine, Belgium, Prague and other cities and regions of Europe at numerous adult education centers. But Armin Alfermann's significance extended beyond his death in 1998.

His life was not like that of many in his generation. As a student, he received a poetry album, but he did not use it for poetry because too much injustice was happening around him. He wondered why a Jewish classmate disappeared and why the synagogue was burning. He saw how Jews from Düsseldorf were sent to their deaths in large numbers and wrote down his observations. What was intended as a poetry album became a diary in which an adolescent distanced himself from the fascist period (un) spirit. Moral authority was his grandfather; a Christian excluded from the “national community.”

National Socialist Germany, designed for 1000 years, came to an end after 12 years. Armin Alfermann shaped these years. He became aware that humanity could not continue to live as before after the Holocaust if the incomprehensible was not repeated.

During the last two decades of his life, Armin Alfermann increasingly sought contact with the younger generation. In schools and youth recreation facilities, he read from his diary, reported on experiences and discussed. He is the spiritual father of the idea of creating a school with the sponsorship of Jewish cemetery in Solingen to entrust. Gerd Kaimer was mayor not long before Armin Alfermann presented his idea to him in Solingen City Hall. Kaimer took up the suggestion. He helped make it happen by finding a school that was ready to become a sponsor. In autumn 1987, the Jewish Cemetery Association began work at the Solingen Comprehensive School (now Alexander-Coppel-Gesamschule). The students' interest in this gave Armin Alfermann hope that it would not be entirely possible to wean people off their own thinking.

Photographs by journalist and gallerist Armin Alfermann have been included in international exhibitions, where he has often received prizes and awards. It was not uncommon for entire photo series to impress, such as “The Prague of Kafka”, “The Dying City” and “Violence”, pictures taken in 1972, taken in the midst of the unrest and violent riots in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The series “Traces in Stone — Jewish Cemeteries in the Lower Rhine” from 1986, which was sponsored by the then Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia Johannes Rau, received international attention and was even shown in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, located almost twelve thousand kilometers from Solingen.

Dorothee Alfermann, the widow of Armin Alfermann, had donated the photo series to the Jewish Museum in Berlin after his death. Together with Dr. Jürgen Kaumkötter, Director of Center for Persecuted Arts, as well as director Andreas Schäfer, on the occasion of Armin Alfermann's 100th birthday, author Olaf Link has made an effort to bring a larger selection of photographs back to Solingen and to display them here.

The exhibition is supported by the Gerd Kaimer Citizens' Foundation and the SPD sub-district of Solingen.