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\u2019s 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<\/a> Thus, the question of how to teach the Holocaust in Germany has been a dynamic discussion in the years since World War II. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n This effort to reckon with the country\u2019s violent and shameful history has been named <\/span>Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/span><\/i>, or \u201cworking through the past.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s recent history, which can be attributed to Germans\u2019 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\u2019s 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<\/a> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cempathetic, tolerant and socially responsible.\u201d3 <\/a>And, yet, a different study conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany reported the alarming fact that \u201c66 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.\u201d Moreover, 22 percent of millennials say they haven’t even heard of the Holocaust.4<\/a> As the last of Holocaust survivors disappear, Holocaust education has come to a critical juncture: either a majority of the world\u2019s population will carry on its memory and messages, or, like so many other atrocities before it, the Holocaust will fade into the past.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n While being the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor comes with a certain sense of inherited tragedy, sharing my family\u2019s history also feels likes a kind of obligation. It serves as a charge to ensure that the stories of my ancestors\u2014and all of those who died\u2014are 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\u2019s methodologies reflect a nation wrestling with how it can take responsibility for its historical sins and work toward dismantling bigotry and ignorance. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A Note on the Interviews<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cHolocaust\u201d during his childhood and education.5<\/a> 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<\/a> 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\u2019s history.7<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the seventy-five years following the end of World War II, the way in which German schools have taught the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3275,"featured_media":57,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3275"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dalton.org\/capstone-germany-holocaust-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}