50 Stories for 50 Years: Dr. Margot Kaessmann ‘75

To celebrate our 50th anniversary year during 2018/19, we collected stories and profiles of people and institutions that have helped us build our organization, which first began as one person's dream in 1968. We will feature one story per week on our blog. Please enjoy these “50 for 50” profiles featuring ASSIST's dedicated board members, dynamic staff, welcoming host families and enthusiastic ASSIST Scholars.

Dr. Margot Kaessmann '12
Germany, The Hotchkiss School

My year with ASSIST has influenced my entire life. I was 16 and from a blue-collar family in Germany. Among the students with a stipend, I was the only one that was not Afro-American. For the first time, I experienced racism. I started to read the contributions of Martin Luther King and wrote my history paper about his fight to overcome racism. I was impressed by his pacifism. From my upbringing, I was grounded in the Christian faith, but that this faith could bring one to a political position was a new concept for me. Being Christian and being politically engaged has been a major theme of my life since then.

A second influence was the end of the Vietnam War. My parents had experienced the devastation by the second World War when they were young. The guilt of Hitler's Germany weighed heavily on them. So I was engaged in conversations and debate, and I could hardly believe that for some Americans the end of the war was seen as a defeat.

The third major influence for me was meeting people of Jewish faith for the first time in my life. The Holocaust, the Shoah, became topics that have never left me since.

Finally, my father died. One day one of my uncles called me from Canada to explain that my father was very ill. I did not know what to do. When my Latin teacher asked me what was wrong, I told him. He took me to the director of Hotchkiss and they decided to pay for a trip to Germany and back for me to spend one week at home. The teacher took me to JFK, and I spent one week at home visiting my father. The doctors said it could be seven days or months or years; there was no reliable prognosis. So, my parents said, I should take my chances and go back to the U.S. I did. One week later, my mother called; father had passed away. I did not tell anybody at school. My mother said a flight was too expensive—and my attendance at the funeral would be of no help to my father at that point.

All in all, it was a life-changing experience. When I came back to Germany, I had decided to study theology.


About Margot :
Margot spent her ASSIST year at Hotchkiss School in Lakefield, CT. She studied theology at the universities of Tuebingen, Edinburgh, Goettingen, and Marburg; she was ordained as a minister in 1985 and finished her doctoral studies in 1989 at Ruhr-University in Bochum. Margot's dissertation was published in German under the title “The Eucharistic Vision: Poverty and Wealth as a Challenge to the Unity of the Church.” She taught at the faculties of Leipzig (in 1989) and Marburg (in 1990).

After her work as a pastor and, later, as secretary general of the German Protestant Church Congress, Margot was elected Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover from 1999 until 2010. In 2002, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hanover. In 2009/2010, she served as Chairperson of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Between August and December of 2010, she accepted an appointment as a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In Since then, she has continued teaching, researching, and speaking publicly about the church's role in modern society. She officially retired in 2018 but remains an active, outspoken speaker and writer.