Holocaust Education in Germany: Ensuring relevance and meaning in an increasingly diverse community

Abstract

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's 'open-door' policy towards the recent wave of migrants and refugees to Europe shows promise for expanding the workforce and increasing diversity, yet opens up some significant cultural and religious differences. Although the government has created programs to aid in their transition, little attention has been paid to how school curriculum, 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. This study focuses on how classroom material presents the rise of National Socialism and the Holocaust through a document analysis of curriculum materials from a Gymnasium in Hamburg, Germany. Results show that even at the highest level of the education system, students are not being presented with the material in a way that draws relevance to the present day nor fosters meaning for recent immigrants. For the Holocaust, which is both a significant historical event and a critical lesson in the importance of universal human rights, effective education is imperative in order to combat present global trends of radicalism and intolerance.

Struggles for Horizontal Identification: Muslims, Jews, and the Civil Sphere in Germany

“…These efforts are meant to imbue new generations with knowledge of the Holocaust, and also a sense of collective guilt/responsibility (Carrington and Short, 1997; Özyürek, 2018). However, such educational endeavors have largely failed to consider the complex and intersecting ways in which new ethnoreligious minority groups—Muslims, in particular—grapple with their own relationality to mainstream society when facing this past (Özyürek, 2018; Vitale and Clothey, 2019). As Esra Özyürek (2018) illuminates in her work on school visits to concentration camp sites, young German Muslims do not feel responsibility, but rather a keen sense of empathy—the ability to imagine themselves in another ‘Other’s’ shoes—when confronting this past.…”