Michael Zimmermann (1951–2007)

With the death of Michael Zimmermann on 20 January 2007, the international history-workshop movement has lost a pioneer and the Ruhr district a champion. Those who worked with him on his many projects or who sought his advice have lost a good friend, a stimulating companion and an interlocutor whose responses were always generous and often funny, as well as critically acute. Michael was born in Mülheim into a strict Catholic family; his parents owned a car-rental business and a petrol station. He resigned from the Church before embarking on his university career, but there was much about the way he combined ethical commitment and intellectual rigour that suggests the lingering traces of a particular kind of religious upbringing. In the early 1970s he joined the Spartakus-Bund and the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (the West German 'branch' of the East German state party). He eventually broke with the party, but before his death he had begun to reflect again on his time in the communist movement, in the light of the many 'turns' that have marked German politics and historiography since the 1990s, and on the need for a coherent world-view to underpin politics and scholarship.

Most of his work as a historian reflected a critical engagement with the central problems of modern German history, including the history of the working class and the origins and consequences of National Socialism. As a postgraduate, Michael was one of the group around the Essen-based project investigating 'life histories and social culture in the Ruhr between 1930 and 1960' (LUSIR). This group can claim not only to have pioneered regional history in Germany as history from below, but also to have established oral history as a self-conscious discipline there. Michael's part in this project led to his first book, a 1981 study of the mining community of Hochlarmark, and in 1986 to his dissertation on the same subject. His collaborators on the project were impressed and sometimes intimidated by the ease with which he interacted with the 'subjects' of his study, challenging by example his fellow academics' inhibitions about engaging with the real-world problems of working-class life in communities that were dying or being transformed. Anyone meeting Michael on his home ground in the early eighties could expect a tour of abandoned pits and the evening in a Turkish restaurant – and those were the days when that actually meant going among immigrants on the wrong side of town.

During those years, Michael researched and wrote historical and biographical texts for the miners' union, and this was characteristic of his continued commitment to giving history back to the people. From 1986 to 1994 he was historian at the Old Synagogue in Essen, leading the work that transformed it into one of Germany's first permanent exhibitions on the local manifestations and consequences of the Nazi dictatorship. He was an activist in the German history-workshop movement and co-editor of its key journal GeschichtsWerkstatt (since 1992 WerkstattGeschichte). While it was not by his own choice that he never held a permanent, full-time university position, his contributions to public history were substantial and infused with energy, enthusiasm and political savvy of the kind that probably finds its truest rewards outside of the academy. He sat on a number of commissions relating to memorial and museum projects, including the consultative group for the redesign of the concentration-camp memorial exhibitions in Brandenburg (notably Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen). Getting inside knowledge about all sorts of key culture-political events thus became one of the many satisfactions of a conversation with Michael (he was an inveterate gossip). The Brandenburg sites had been developed by the East German authorities, and remaking them was high on the cultural agenda of the newly united Germany after 1990. The commission report is a model of a balanced approach to the mission of public history, both in its analysis of what was there before 1990 and in its proposals for the future. When I mentioned to Michael that I was using the commission report as...