Heritage Lecture Series
Anna Rosmus
"The Nasty Girl"
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
SSU Warren Auditorium at 4:00 p.m.
Admission is Free
Anna Rosmus, from Passau, Germany, who as a teenager discovered her hometown's hidden Nazi past, is the real-life heroine of the film The Nasty Girl. At the age of twenty-four, she won Germany's prestigious Geschwister-Scholl Award for Resistance and Persecution in Passau From 1993 to 1939, which outlines the town's history during the Nazi era. Though celebrated on many fronts for her civil courage, Rosmus faced a storm of opposition and threats against her life in Passau and was subsequently shunned. For 22 years she has dedicated her life to uncovering anti-Semitism and the Nazi past of her hometown in Bavaria and to combating the neo-Nazis and extreme right in Germany. Anna Rosmus has located and published the stories and the artwork of Jews who once lived in the Passau area and were exiled from their hometown.
Anna Rosmus was awarded the highest honor of the German Jewish Community, the 1995 Galinski Prize. Her recent work is the subject of a documentary film which was shown throughout Germany, Passau-Washington: The Nasty Girl in America, available in English. Twice, Anna Rosmus was featured in a 60 Minutes profile by Morley Safer. Anna Rosmus sponsored 50th anniversary commemorations in Germany, bringing survivors and liberators together to preserve this memory and to restore the defaced names to the monument in Pocking featured in 60 Minutes. She succeeded.
As a free lance writer, Anna Rosmus has contributed numerous essays to various magazines and newspapers, such as La Pensée etles Hommes, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The New York Times, The European and Aufbau.
Professor Robert E. Herzstein writes in The Journal of The Historical Society II: "Senior German historians wrote dense prose devoted to leaders and institutions, to structures, and to cumulative radicalization. It was all appropriate - and impersonal. In the constructs and the textbooks, there was little room for inquires into local crimes and perpetrators, even when the unnamed bodies were buried near one's home and the killers lived a few blocks away. In this fog of oversight, Anna Rosmus's remarkable studies of the Passau region in Bavaria stand out as the rare exception. Despite the opposition of her teachers and of the people who ran Bavaria's education al establishment in the late 1970s, Rosmus decided to examine the history of the town of Passau during the years of the Third Reich. She has never stopped, and in the process has found the bodies and identified living culprits."
Her book, Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders, documents the atrocities in Passau at the end of the war, the murder of 2,000 Soviet prisoners, the forced abortions performed on slave laborers in the area, as well as and the murder of infants of slave laborers in the area. It shows how memorials to the victims were changed to erase the past. Her other books include Pocking: End and Renewal, Exodus: In the Shadow of Mercy, Resistance and Persecution: Passau 1933-1939, Robert Klein, a German Jew Looks Back. A biography of Anna Rosmus was published in 1994 by Hans Dieter Schutt, Anna Rosmus - The Witch of Passau. In 1995, Anna was honored to publish What I Think. In March 1999, her book Out of Passau was released. In 2002, the University of South Carolina release the English translation of her book Against The Stream: Growing up Where Hitler Used to Live, followed by Out of Passau: A City Hitler Called Home in 2004.
Anna Rosmus represents the legacy of the Holocaust in memory, education and action in the continuing struggle against bigotry and anti-Semitism. Winner of numerous awards for her efforts, she was chosen by the American Society of Journalists and Authors for their Conscience-in-Media Award, presented in a special program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; she received the Sarnat Prize from the Anti-Defamation League for those who fight anti-Jewish bigotry, the coveted Tucholsky death mask and the Holocaust Survivors & Friends' Holocaust Memorial Award. The D.C. Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Law Foundation honored her with the Immigrant Achievement Award as a "distinguished immigrant who through her extraordinary endeavors has made a substantial contribution to the United States of America and is a proud reflection of the values of this nation." Anna Rosmus is listed in "Who's Who in the World". "In honor of an Outstanding Contribution to Education", IBC Cambridge lists her in "Outstanding People of the 20th Century".
Co-sponsored by the Heritage Lecture Series, Holocaust Lecture Series, Instructionally Related Activities, Center for Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Associate Students Productions and the Sonoma Student Union Corporation.
