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Introduction

In the seventy-five years following the end of World War II, the way in which German schools have taught the Holocaust has evolved. In the immediate years after the war, the Holocaust was almost entirely ignored; denial, repression, and antisemitism persisted for decades. Furthermore, many of those responsible for educating Germany’s youth had been supporters or even members of the Nazi Party. Even as recently as the 1990s, Holocaust education in Germany was fairly rote and lacked depth.1 Thus, the question of how to teach the Holocaust in Germany has been a dynamic discussion in the years since World War II. 

This effort to reckon with the country’s violent and shameful history has been named Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “working through the past.” Several theories exist to explain how and why the Holocaust should be taught in primary and secondary schools. Furthermore, a significant number of scholars and educators agree that when students learn about the Holocaust from an early age, they will be better equipped to tackle human rights issues today. By closely looking at and confronting a genocide, young people are given the opportunity to develop a greater sense of social and global responsibility.

Tracing the evolution of Holocaust education reveals the difficulty of teaching about genocide, especially within the countries that perpetrated crimes against their own citizens. Immediately following the end of World War II, an educational vacuum existed in Germany. There was no formal education program addressing the country’s recent history, which can be attributed to Germans’ attempt to bury their complicity. Germans educated from 1950-1980 cannot recall any significant education on the Holocaust. In the 1950s, essentially, all discussion of the Holocaust was censored in classrooms and not yet mandated by the German government. It was not until 1978 that state legislators began to focus on the complexities of Germany’s past. With the rise of the far right in the 1970s, the socialists in power at the time realized the importance of mandating education on genocide, antisemitism, and racial discrimination.2 However, the recent rise of the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which questions the veracity of the Holocaust and supports an anti-immigration platform, has made Holocaust curriculum even harder to implement. This has become especially dangerous as the last survivors pass away and accessibility to eyewitness accounts dwindles.

Though Germany has made great strides in grappling with its recent history and make Holocaust education relevant to their students, their work has not sufficiently inspired similar Holocaust education infrastructures elsewhere, including the United States. Recently, Echoes & Reflections, a global Holocaust education organization, released a study confirming that high school Holocaust education is correlated with helping students become more “empathetic, tolerant and socially responsible.”3 And, yet, a different study conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany reported the alarming fact that “66 percent of millennials say they don’t know about the Auschwitz death camp where more than a million Jews and others, including Poles, Roma people and gays were executed.” Moreover, 22 percent of millennials say they haven’t even heard of the Holocaust.4 As the last of Holocaust survivors disappear, Holocaust education has come to a critical juncture: either a majority of the world’s population will carry on its memory and messages, or, like so many other atrocities before it, the Holocaust will fade into the past.

While being the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor comes with a certain sense of inherited tragedy, sharing my family’s history also feels likes a kind of obligation. It serves as a charge to ensure that the stories of my ancestors—and all of those who died—are not only honored, but become catalysts for shaping a more responsible, tolerant society. Likewise, it is imperative that societies reflect on the ways in which they talk, think, and teach about their national trauma. In the United States, for instance, the ongoing debate about how we talk and teach about slavery has raged since 1865. Some white Americans resist confronting the realities of systemic racism and the role slavery played in cementing it into our society. At the same time, Black Americans continue to fight simply to be heard and seen. Germany, then, offers a useful example for considering how and why this kind of careful, detailed education and remembrance should be done. While far from perfect, the country’s methodologies reflect a nation wrestling with how it can take responsibility for its historical sins and work toward dismantling bigotry and ignorance. 

The research question structuring this project asks how societies that have perpetuated genocides can educate students about their pasts in order to foster unity and avoid creating a larger divide between members of the victimized group and society at large. This project tackles issues of national responsibility, inherited trauma, and collective forgetting. Education is a vital part of achieving transitional justice, an extrajudicial response inside a country that is emerging from a prolonged period of conflict and human rights abuses. In the absence of education and a shared consensus on the facts of the past, the same mistakes can and will be repeated, further sustaining division. Without addressing the history of a genocide in an objective, fact-driven way, it is easy for persecution and bigotry to persist and, often, for conflict to thrive.

A Note on the Interviews

The primary source evidence I used for this project are three interviews which I conducted with different individuals who were educated in Germany. Micheal Sturm, who grew up in Germany in the 1950s, highlights the complete absence of even the word “Holocaust” during his childhood and education.5 Daniel Kashi, who attended middle and high school in the 1990s, explains how basic his Holocaust curriculum was, as it lacked both emotion and detail.6 Finally, Hannah Moser, who attended middle and high school in the 2000s and lived in a very conservative town, explains that, despite the in-depth Holocaust education curriculum she encountered, many students were resistant to engaging in discussion, refusing to believe their country’s history.7 

Micheal Sturm, a retired Dalton math teacher, was born in 1943 in Frankfurt Germany. He came of age in the decade immediately following the end of the Holocaust, and affirmed that the subject was swept under the rug, ignored in both the classroom and in his personal life. Born into a religious Christian family that was not politically active, he attended a boarding school in the 1950s. Sturm says he never interacted with any Jewish people while he was growing up in Germany, and there was not a single Jewish student at his boarding school. He explains that the “older generation, my parents age, did not want to talk about the Holocaust.”8 While some of the “younger ones my age [would] discuss among themselves,” there were no formal conversations taking place. Sturm remarks simply that “it was not discussed openly.” When I ask him whether he had any recollection whatsoever of discussions of that period, he explains that he “sensed guilt” but that “the word [Holocaust]” was never uttered.9 

The repression that Sturm discusses is reinforced by the secondary literature about Germany in the decades following the end of the war. According to Bodo von Borries, a culture of repression was pervasive in Germany in the 1950s. Outlining the evolution in German Holocaust textbooks throughout the 20th century, von Borries returns to the textbook that he learned from in the 50s. He describes “the total inability to learn, the complete suppression of guilt and, at the same time, the feeling of being insulted and the expression of national disappointment. Both overtly and obliquely, only one thing was mourned: the defeat of Germany.”10 In other words, textbooks were presenting a narrative about Germany losing the war, but they were not discussing the Holocaust. In fact, “even in the late 1970s, Jews were not mentioned as a group of people especially threatened after the Nazi invasion of the USSR; rather, “anti-Jewish measures and anti- semitic persecutions were omitted in favor of detailed information about anti-socialist and anti-humanitarian acts.”11 The story of the Jewish genocide simply did not appear in textbooks even as late as the 1970s. 

Despite the silence around the Holocaust that characterized Sturm’s youth, he does have one essential memory about his grandmother telling him how she hid Jewish families in her basement during the war. Sturm recounts, “this was the only vivid thing I remember.” Other than this conversation, though, “people were totally embarrassed” by the events of the Holocaust and not willing to revisit the recent and painful past.12 Later in the interview, I ask Sturm how he dealt with the shortcomings of his Holocaust education, and he explains that even to this day, whenever this part of German history is referenced, he feels very empty. He explains that he never felt complicit or accountable, but he did feel upset that these things were not “emphasized in any curriculum.” Indeed, “In West Germany during the first postwar decades…history books were written by Nazi-era teachers, and the urge to repress the past was widespread.”13 If the same people who committed the atrocious crimes of the Holocaust were also teaching about it in the decades following the War, how could Holocaust curriculum begin the work of reconciliation? Of course, it did not. Since Nazis wrote the majority of the post-war curriculum particularly in West Germany, they had a “general neglect of the Holocaust and a tendency to absolve the German people as a whole of responsibility.”14 Thus a number of factors, including a generation of adults and educators who, for various reasons, were not prepared to take responsibility for the crimes of their nation, led to an educational and cultural vacuum that lasted through the 1950s and beyond. 

In Sturm’s eyes, the value of contemporary Holocaust education is that it helps people become tolerant, giving them greater “understanding and aware[ness] of Jewish contributions to society.” Sturm, a fan of classical music, shares that 95% of the famous German composers he listens to are Jewish. In fact, he believes that “Jews have contributed … an immeasurable amount … to German culture.” He states that it’s vital to celebrate their legacy, adding that “it would be insane to not cherish” Jewish artists’ achievements.15 

Sturm believes that Holocaust education must be reformed and made into a primary part of students’ history curriculum. At the same time, he believes that the national mandate to study the Holocaust in Germany can be off-putting because of its compulsory nature. He would like to see the country find a new way to make Holocaust education accessible and engaging. Lastly, he asserts that the United Nations needs a greater proportion of individuals who understand the importance of Holocaust education to advocate for it.16 

Rather than standing as a singular or unique narrative, Sturm’s account of his education characterizes the experiences of most members of his generation in Germany. The pervasive repression and silence that he describes was present throughout the nation, which was, at the time, more concerned with mourning its own loss in the war than acknowledging the millions of murders that took place under the Nazi regime. Therefore, historian Stephen Pagaard asserts, “it is difficult indeed to find individuals educated in the 1950s, 1960s, or early 1970s who can recall these subjects being taught at all, let alone with care.”17 Overall, Sturm’s account reflects the research that shows that, in the years immediately following the Holocaust, there was no national dialogue and no formalized curriculum. As a result, shame and silence prevailed.18  

My full interview with Micheal Sturm can be found here: https://youtu.be/lNu_D8nrMAU

Daniel Kashi, a language teacher working in Germany, was born in Stuttgart in 1980. Kashi embodies the unique experience of being a Jewish person coming of age in a conservative German town. Surrounded by non-Jewish friends and culture, Kashi characterizes his experience of learning about the Holocaust in school in the 1990s as fact-based, but superficial. Overall, he observed, it lacked depth and reflected “collective guilt.”¹⁹

In an article published in the New York Times, historian Alan Cowell examines how secondary classrooms in Germany have grappled with the Holocaust alongside the rise of neo-Nazi groups since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. While students interviewed in the article express ambivalence about some of the aspects of their curriculum, most agree that the curriculum is important. Cowell explains: 

“In the effort to escape the Nazis’ centralization of power, the authorities of the various federal states took responsibility for postwar education, so there is no single standardized curriculum for teaching modern German history. But in 1991, the federal Government’s educational-monitoring agency urged that the Nazis be subject to an ‘intensive and thorough treatment’ in schools and that ‘the memory of the holocaust is kept alive.”²⁰

In other words, the system is decentralized; individual German states decide for themselves how to mandate and implement history curriculum. In turn, individual experience is likely very dependent on regional policy. 

Kashi’s family is unique. His father migrated from Israel and has a background that also draws from Turkey and Iran. Although his mother is Christian by birth, she converted to Judaism. His was a religious family, and Kashi had a bar mitzvah and lived in a kosher home. Both of his parents were deeply devoted Zionists. Daniel and his siblings were in “lefty circles in a conservative town” and frequently tried to “disrupt right wing” events. Kashi related how the Holocaust was not often brought up as a topic of conversation. When people learned that he was Jewish, however, it would sometimes come up. He explains, “typical reactions were confusion.” In this sense, being Jewish meant that there was a “constant reminder of history.” Prior to ninth grade, Daniel attended a school where he was bullied for being Jewish. He recounts that “swastikas were drawn on my desk table.” In response he asked his “punk friends…to come to school,” to help him respond to the incident, but he ended up getting in trouble. “The teacher organized a class discussion where I had to argue against everyone else. I was on trial!”²¹ 

In ninth grade, Kashi attended a new school where his class learned about the Holocaust in-depth. At that time, the Yugoslav Wars were raging, and when his history teacher announced that the class would start to learn about the Holocaust, a couple of classmates from Croatia got angry that the class would focus on one genocide but not the mass deaths occurring in Yugoslavia. “Why do we always need to talk about the Jews?” they asked. Kashi remembers that the school handled the incident quite well, turning it into a learning experience for the class, discussing the issue for a couple days. This experience is reflected in the research of Bodo von Borries, who explains that Germany’s demographic makeup is increasingly diverse. He writes, “The school students of today, born shortly before 1989 as the fourth generation after the war, are no longer the sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters, but already the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the Germans who lived under Hitler.” He goes on to note that “about 20-25 per cent are descendants of immigrants from other nations.”²² Thus, the charge of facing one’s own family history or even one’s national history has taken on a changed meaning. Kashi’s experience with the students from Croatia illustrates the challenges of teaching to an increasingly diverse student population.²³ 

In contrast, however, Kashi describes his school’s Holocaust curriculum as “quite historical.” Rather than offering an engaging set of lessons, the learning was “abstract, cold, and factual,” focused mainly on dates and events. However, there was no discussion of guilt or responsibility. “Just showing a documentary or going to a concentration camp and saying people were killed there is not a good way of teaching the Holocaust” he explains. “It makes people go to their defense mechanisms.” By failing to delve into the psychological aspects of the Holocaust and by leaving out the stories of real people, the curriculum was not relatable to students. “For most students it was another boring history lesson,” Kashi says.²⁴ When asked about the value of Holocaust Education, Kashi quickly responds that it’s meant “to prevent fascism or Nazism” and to make sure an event like the Holocaust “never happens again.”²⁵ Kashi believes that Holocaust education cannot be taught from textbooks and that the curriculum needs to be more interactive by using firsthand accounts. Lastly, Kashi thinks that the German educational system should be more open to comparisons. With Germany becoming increasingly diverse, Kashi believes that it would be very helpful to create links between different historical events. While the Holocaust is distinct in many ways, he argues that learning about the Holocaust in context of other global genocides will draw more people in.²⁶

For my full interview with Daniel Kashi click here: https://youtu.be/bJexkM8lpg8

Hannah Moser, grew up in the very conservative town of Dresden, in eastern Germany. She went to an upper class Christian high school in the early 2010s where she “did not know any Jew[s] in [her] town.”²⁷ In fact, she can remember meeting a Jewish man only once in her childhood. She describes herself as a liberal, explaining that her dad is an architect and her mom is an educator. Her grandparents, however, were part of the Nazi Army in Poland. She says her family never really spoke of it.²⁸ 

The Holocaust was never a topic among Hannah’s friends, either. Instead, they only talked about “teenager stuff.” That said, she explained that the Holocaust was covered extensively in her school. They read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, visited concentration camps, and learned about the history of Nazi Germany. There was a class in every grade that somehow connected to the Holocaust. According to Moser, the education was sufficient, although the reception from the students was variable. In other words, “we had the discourse around the topic.” “The problem was not the school,” she says, but that most “people were not reached by the school education.” Students in Moser’s classes generally failed to connect with the curriculum, no matter how extensive. As a result, she observes that “not everyone fully understood the impact the [Holocaust] had on society.” Her fellow students believed that the Holocaust was “something from the past,” especially as their parents taught them the Holocaust never happened. She recalls a time when her class was assigned a research paper on the Holocaust and a majority of her classmates refused to write the paper, believing that the Holocaust was a conspiracy theory.²⁹ 

Moser’s recollections suggest that the issue in contemporary German Holocaust education is the countereducation some students are receiving at home. The rising tide of antisemitism throughout the country is reversing the course of any progress made over the past couple of decades. Journalist Emily Schultheis addressed the issue of Holocaust denial in a 2019 article for The Atlantic. Schultheis explains how the rise of the far right has contributed to a mounting attitude of dissent among Germans. She writes about an incident at the former concentration camp Sachsenhausen, in which a group of people representing the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) questioned the tour guide about the veracity of the claims that mass murder was committed on the site. As Schultheis explains, “although Sachsenhausen and other such sites seek to stay above the fray politically, in recent years they have been confronted with politics.” As such, “the rise of right-wing populist parties across Europe, coupled with growing anti-Semitism, puts places such as Sachsenhausen in a new and difficult position.” In a disturbing irony, she points out that a group of students on a tour at Sachsenhausen at the same time expressed the importance of the experience they were having. Finally, Schultheis also mentions another difficulty of creating impactful experiences for students, namely that “precious few survivors remain” to tell their own stories.³⁰ 

Picking up on these themes, Moser reflects that the ongoing conversation about the Holocaust was both ubiquitous and inadequate. “Wherever you go people will ask you about the Holocaust,” she says, “everyone has family members that participated.” And, yet, at the same time, a sense of incredulousness pervaded these conversations: “no one wanted to believe it, but it is a part of our culture.”³¹ Moser says that within the relatively homogenous white, German culture of her youth, people never truly learned the importance of tolerance and acceptance, not just racial and cultural, but also sexual. To this end, an interview with German political scientist Lars Rensmann of the University of Munich explores how poorly many children are processing the required Holocaust education. First, Rensmann mentions that, since two-thirds of students stop school after 10th grade, there is much less time to dive deep into the history of Nazi Germany. Furthermore, he writes that a dangerous idea floats around in many communities that the Holocaust is, in fact, taught too much. Together, these two issues serve as primary obstacles in teaching young German children about the history of their country.³²

Lastly, when discussing her ideas for how Holocaust education could be improved, Moser suggested more experiential opportunities in the curriculum. In fact, there has been a shift in pedagogical approaches in recent years. Bodo von Borries explains that “history textbooks have changed their methodology too… there are substantial additional chapters with selected primary sources (partly texts and partly photos). In these cases, the students are asked to interpret and to decide for themselves and thus to construct their own narrative”³³ In other words, a more project-based approach encourages students to make connections to their own lives and also to understand the Holocaust in the context of other historical atrocities, thereby mitigating some of the national shame that might encourage resistance among some students. Moser agrees that “it would be good to focus more on the present” and proposed that students “meet actual Jewish people” or “go to places that show you why it matters to learn about [the Holocaust in the present.”³⁴ She added that too many people simply think, “Oh, it’s from the past we don’t need to learn about.” Ultimately, though, the goal is to create a “more inclusive society where no one has to hide.” Moser’s experiences, the most recent of the interviewees, help to demonstrate the progression of the Holocaust education curriculum in Germany since the 1950s, but also highlights other factors that have hindered its ability to reach resistant audiences.³⁵

For my full interview with Hannah Moser click here: https://youtu.be/Sr-z4A8oJRM

Both the research and interviews point to the fact that even over 75 years after the Holocaust and a national mandate on its education, the current curriculum still struggles to engage resistant learners. As a whole, the curriculum is very extensive and has vastly improved over the last seven decades. While it is still imperfect, students in Germany today listen to survivors, visit concentration camps, learn about the history of Germany, and take trips to Holocasut memorials. 

In spite of the increased comprehensiveness of the country’s Holocaust education, many students are failing to get the message. Based on my research, there are two main issues contributing to this failure. First, the resurgence of antisemitism and far-right populism. Second, the influx of immigration into Germany, legal and illegal, has radically changed the population and radicalized xenophobes who do want to see “their” nation change demographically. At the same time, educators and curriculum developers have not been able to adequately adapt to the new political and social challenges facing Germany.

The rise of antisemitism in Germany, seen as symbolic of a greater global resurgence of antisemitism, has been a major focal point over the past two decades. One of the greatest causes for concern is the growing numbers of elected officials in the Parliament who are members of the AfD party, whose founder, Alexander Gauland, called the Holocaust a “speck of bird poop” and Björn Höcke, another leader, called the Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame.”36 Even if the Holocaust education curriculum were perfect, when students come home and are told the Holocaust never happened from parents, friends, and some government officials, teachers face a significant barrier in terms of reaching their students. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas recently observed that “in recent years, [Germany has] seen antisemitism and racism eating into [its] society.”37 Maas expressed a connection between these beliefs and demonstrations against COVID measures and social media that encourages conspiracy theories. 

One of the major aggravating factors for the rise of AfD is the sentiment among party supporters that immigration has led Germany to become less German. The demographic composition of Germany has changed dramatically in the past twenty years, as the generation of those who witnessed the Holocaust firsthand has dwindled, and a new wave of immigration has resulted in an increasingly diverse population. Authors Monica Vitale and Rebecca Clothey in 2019, examine how German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open-door” policy toward the surge in immigrants negatively affected Germany’s Holocaust education. The authors use materials gathered from an advanced school in Hamburg, Germany to prove their point. Even though Germany has funded organizations to help immigrants, no effort has gone into making sure school curricula, “particularly education on the Holocaust, is presented to students for whom the event lacks personal, religious, or social relevance or who may have been taught that it is a fabrication.”38 I believe that that Germany must do better as the Holocaust was not only a singularly horrific event in Germany’s history, but it is also valuable for teaching young students how to be global citizens and to push against the recent rise of the radical right. 

Kashi brings up an important point when he argues that placing various genocides in dialogue with one another would be useful in terms of allowing students to draw connections and identify common patterns. Furthermore, it is important to note when Kashi talks about how the two girls in his history class were frustrated that the Holocaust was being talked about but the Yugoslavian War was neglected. It is especially difficult to teach Holocaust education in classrooms where few people were or are affected by the event. I think one way to engage more people in Germany today about Holocaust education would be to have a class about global genocide and national trauma. In this class, students would learn about all different kinds of national trauma—slavery in United States, the Rwandan Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Armenian Genocide, the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, the Syrian War and so many others—in order to involve the greatest number of students. Young people from all over the world would develop different connections to each of these events which would allow them to engage in deeper discourse.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Germany’s effort to work through its difficult history, has taken on new meaning in the twenty-first century. The task at hand is no longer simply an issue of reckoning with the past, which, though imperfect, Germany has done thoroughly. But Germany is now called on again to face a new challenge of facing the past within a rapidly evolving present. In this sense, the study of history cannot simply exist in a vacuum, but must engage with human experience as it unfolds historical events recede further into the past.