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