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.