Pre-death legacy Jürgen Pieplow

Jürgen Pieplow was born in Rostock in 1935. After his Abitur, he started working for the regional press as a drawer, graphic designer, and journalist. Since he was denied to study in the GDR, he moved to West Berlin in 1956 and studied there at the Academy for Visual Arts. Starting in 1962, he worked as a publishing and advertising graphic designer in Hamburg. He worked for several companies including Springer and the Jahreszeiten-Verlag. From 1971 to 1977, he worked as a designer and a public relations consultant for Aktion Sühnezeichen and other Christian peace services. In the late 1970s, he started his own business and focused on book design, illustration, and historical documentation. Jürgen Pieplow's works are characterized by the interaction of graphics, typography, cartography, and photography. As a result of his occupation but also privately, Pieplow cultivated close contacts with the Polish Holocaust memorials and with many survivors of the Holocaust including Tadeusz Szymanski. He contributed to various exhibitions and publications regarding Nazi violent crimes. In 1976, Pieplow was awarded the Medal of the Association of Polish Resistance Fighters for his dedication to the reappraisal of Nazi crimes in Poland. In 2000, he also earned the Fritz-Reuter-Medal of the Kulturkreis Mecklenburg. Today, Jürgen Pieplow lives in Wedel near Hamburg. The pre-death legacy Jürgen Pieplow covers after description, demetallization, and filing 19 archival units with a total extent of 0.5 running meters. Since the record group did not have an inner structure upon the acquisition the processor Inga Steinhauser completely reorganized the holding during indexing in January and February 2023. It follows the "rules for the description of personal papers and autographs" (RNA, Regeln zur Erschließung von Nachlässen und Autographen). The holding is now structured in four sections: "opus" ("Werk"), "correspondence" ("Korrespondenzen"), "personal documents" ("Lebensdokumente"), and "collections" ("Sammlungen"). The section "opus" ("Werk") contains various photographic, cartographic, and graphical works by Jürgen Pieplow. They mostly are related to exhibitions and publications in the context of Pieplow's work for Aktion Sühnezeichen. The section "correspondence" ("Korrespondenzen") contains correspondence with the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau but mostly consists of letters from the survivor Tadeusz Szymanski. The section "personal documents" ("Lebensdokumente") comprises further photographs and design drafts as well as various documents, records, correspondence, and newspaper clippings regarding Pieplow's work. The section "collections" ("Sammlungen") contains a few drawings by the artist Mieczyslaw Koscielniak.