He worked, instead, for the Technical Emergency Assistance Service ("Technische Nothilfe"), which involved reinstating gas, electricity and water supplies after air-raids on the city.
[1] After October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic and political differences between the two new Germanys became progressively harder to ignore.
Monika's father resigned abruptly from his work in East Berlin after deciding he no longer wished to be placed under sustained pressure to join the recently created Socialist Unity Party (SED) which by this time was well on the way to becoming the ruling party in a new kind of one-party dictatorship, under Soviet sponsorship and subject to Soviet political and social constraints.
Inwardly Richarz was not keen on this plan, and it was probably as a result of what today would be termed "passive resistance" that she successfully avoided being accepted as a trainee teacher.
"Das war für mein (weiteres) Leben sehr wichtig, weil ich von dieser Zeit an ein „normales“ Verhältnis zur Juden hatte….
Vor allen Dingen hatten wir dort Studenten, die aus Emigrantenfamilien kamen, aus England, aus den USA und aus Israel, die von ihren Eltern die double Message bekommen hatten: Deutschland ist das Land der Mörder und Deutschland ist das Land einer überlegenen Kultur… Und dann haben sie zu ihrer Eltern gesagt, wir gehen jetzt mal nach Deutschland und gucken mal selbst, was da los ist.
Then when I came back I checked out the lecture list, and discovered that there was a professor teaching Jewish history, and so I came to the seminars of Prof. Adolf Leschnitzer, otherwise known as Dolfi."
"Ich habe sozusagen alles gesehen, was in der Bundesrepublik immer unter den Teppich gekehrt wurde.
1958, das war die Zeit, als der wirtschaftliche Wiederaufbau sehr dynamisch zu werden begann.
"[1] The Free University, where she studied till successfully completing her degree in 1962, had an unusual, albeit brief, history, reflecting Berlin's wider political postwar tensions.
After several more months of largely low level confrontation between the students and the Soviet-backed authorities, a number of Berlin academics and politicians, eventually with the necessary backing of the US governor, General Clay, created of an alternative free university in the US administered sector.
The recent date of the university's foundation meant that, unusually in Germany, it was institutionally unencumbered by the shadows of a Nazi past.
That month the sudden appearance of the "Anti-fascist protection wall" had an immediate personal impact on fellow students from East Berlin who found their route to the Free University being blocked.
Spontaneously the members of Prof. Leschnitzer's seminar group became people smugglers, organising false identity papers and smuggling friends, hidden under cars, into West Berlin.
I sometimes felt that I was reliving the Weimar years, right there in the Leo Baeck Institute, starting with the way they used the language, and extending to the historical perspectives and evaluations."
Die öffneten sich mir freundlich und waren sehr interessiert, weil sie mich als Vertreterin der jüngeren deutschen Generation betrachteten.
[10]) Collecting the many testimonies sometimes involved unconventional research methods, as she sought out written records inherited by their writers' heirs.
The collection also highlights the extent to which many of the people whose writings it features lived in rural Germany which, as Richarz was quick to point out, comprehensively refuted the stereotyping of German Jews as inhabitants only of the large cities.
In 1993, working jointly with Reinhard Rürup [de], and again under the auspices of the Leo Baeck Institute, she produced a compilation entitled "Jewish life in the countryside: studies on German Jewish history" ("Jüdisches Leben auf dem Lande: Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte").
She arrived at a difficult time, shortly after Prof. Hermann Greive had been shot dead by a firearms-obsessed former student called Sabine Gehlhaar, while delivering a seminar in the library.
Richarz nevertheless acquired a new zest for teaching, taking on roles as a guest lecturer at the Academy for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg and at Zürich university.
[7][1] On 1 December 1993 she took up an appointment as director of the "Institute for the History of German Jews" ("Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden"), in Hamburg, and was able, with the support of younger colleagues, notably Stefan Rohrbacher, Andreas Brämer, Ina Lorenz [de] and Beate Meyer, both to improve its hitherto precarious finances and to raise significantly the level of activity.