2010: Exhibition in Washington commemorates Helene Mayer
Offenbach's most famous daughter is often described as the foil world champion Helene Mayer, whose 100th birthday was commemorated in 2010. In the city's collective memory, however, her image seems to be gradually fading 55 years after her death. From "outside", however, there are repeated reminders of her.
The Holocaust Museum in the US capital Washington is currently showing an exhibition about the Jewish involvement in the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. Visitors report that the exhibition focuses on Helene Mayer from Offenbach. At the same time, a documentary film about the life of Helene Mayer has been completed in the USA and is due to be broadcast next January on one of the major American television networks.
Its producer, Semjon Pinkhasov, has a sporting connection to fencing. However, it was a Mayer biography published as a book in 2002 that inspired him to make the film. It was published by a Californian publishing house. The author Milly Mogulov gave her book the title "Foiled". "Foil" is the English word for foil, the weapon with which Helene Mayer fought her way to the top of the world.
The book tells the story of the eventful life of the Offenbach native, who returned home from the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928 at the age of eighteen with a gold medal, amassed European and world championship titles, was celebrated as a national heroine in Germany and loved in Offenbach - until the Nazis took power over Germany. Although she was already severely restricted in her civil rights as a so-called "Jewish half-breed", the Nazi leadership pressured her to compete for Germany at the Berlin Games in 1936.
She achieved silver. At the award ceremony, she was joined on the podium by two other non-German fencers with a Jewish background. When the national anthem was played, Helene Mayer was the only one to raise her right arm in the Hitler salute - as all Germans were required to do when listening to this melody.
Since then, Helene Mayer, who subsequently ran a fencing school in California, has not only been remembered as an outstanding sportswoman. Her fate also illustrates living conditions under the swastika, which were far more complicated than many simplistic depictions suggest. This is the subject of yet another book published by a British publishing house.
Its author, Richard Cohen, wrote a work on "The Sword" among gladiators, musketeers, samurai and Olympians. One chapter is dedicated to the Offenbach woman Helene Mayer. Cohen gave it the questionable title "The woman who saluted Hitler".
Suffering from homesickness for Germany, Helene Mayer survived the high points of the persecution of the Jews in the safety of California, where she remains unforgotten to this day. She returned to Germany in 1952 to get married in Munich. She died the following year, aged 43.
Offenbach named a street after her, a side street between Bahndamm and Isenburgring. Helene Mayer's club, the Offenbach Fencing Club, was based there for a long time. The film shows in several shots how passers-by on Helene-Mayer-Straße were asked about the person who gave the street its name. The result is devastating.
Members of the Offenbach Fencing Club recently had the opportunity to watch the film. They came across documents that make it clear why the German leadership campaigned for Helene's participation in the Berlin Games: if German "non-Aryans" had been excluded, American sports associations would have boycotted Berlin. A wealth of newspaper clippings in the film prove that the Offenbach woman was the subject of lively discussion in America before the Berlin Games. That is why the Nazis used her and then immediately dropped her again. When she became world champion in Paris in 1937, the German press was not allowed to publish a word about it.
The moving story of a "life in difficult times", as chairman Waldemar Krug put it, was unrolled in front of the club members. The film gives an idea of how this young woman may have suffered under the pressure that came at her from different directions. Helene Mayer's sister-in-law, who lived in Frankfurt, also has her say. She made it clear why Helene Mayer refused to criticize the Nazi regime even under the protection of her US citizenship, which she obtained in 1940: her mother was living in Germany as a hostage.
By Lothar R. Braun
from the Offenbach Post (opens in a new tab)