One of the professional blessings of this year has been my deepening collaboration with historian Irmtrud Wojak, Frieda L. Miller Fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2014-15) and managing director of the nonprofit BUXUS STIFTUNG GmbH.
Together with US-based German historian Susanne Berger, we have developed the following mission statement for two archival projects named in honor of jurist and Human Rights advocate Fritz M. Bauer.
“The FMB Database’s central mission is to research, document and share humanity’s extraordinary stories of resistance in order to preserve human dignity and to create a more just and humane world.
We do this because people everywhere and at all times, often under extreme conditions, struggle for their personal dignity. It is our task to remember this fight and, at the same time, to strengthen the respect of civil liberties and human rights. We accomplish this by recounting the extraordinary global history of resistance and the pursuit of human rights, inscribing the memories deeply. In doing so, we reject impunity for human rights violators and champion the ethic of accountability.
We call on human rights activists and organizations to publish their stories on our interactive website. We invite people to share their experiences and to conduct research in creative workshops, and we take the resistance stories to schools. Some of these collected stories we plan to publish as books or monographs.
In this way, we are creating a living archive of shared humanity.”
We hope to launch the FMB Database in 2017 and to augment its reach in 2018 with the FMB Library of print volumes.
To learn more about the FMB Library follow the link below:
Click to access FMB_LIBRARY_OF_REMEMBRANCE_AND_HUMAN_RIGHTS.pdf
Ben Miller, author 