Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings

Andy Pearce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351008624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings brings together a group of international experts to investigate the relationship between Holocaust remembrance and different types of educational activity through consideration of how education has become charged with preserving and perpetuating Holocaust memory and an examination of the challenges and opportunities this presents.

The book is divided into two key parts. The first part considers the issues of and approaches to the remembrance of the Holocaust within an educational setting, with essays covering topics such as historical culture, genocide education, familial narratives, the survivor generation, and memory spaces in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. In the second part, contributors explore a wide range of case studies within which education and Holocaust remembrance interact, including young people's understanding of the Holocaust in Germany, Polish identity narratives, Shoah remembrance and education in Israel, the Holocaust and Genocide Centre of Education and Memory in South Africa, and teaching at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.

An international and interdisciplinary exploration of how and why the Holocaust is remembered through educational activity, Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings is the ideal book for all students, scholars, and researchers of the history and memory of the Holocaust as well as those studying and working within Holocaust education.

Part I

Issues, approaches, spaces

1

Lessons at the limits

On learning Holocaust history in historical culture

Klas-Göran Karlsson

Introduction

Can history provide lessons for posterity? If so, what, how, when, and why can we learn from the past? What are the basic historical perspectives available for history learning, and how do they relate to each other? Does the Holocaust as a unique or unprecedented history offer exceptional historical lessons, can and should it be ‘normalised’ as an object of history learning, or rather is the Holocaust what Omer Bartov (1996: 89) has called an idiot’s tale – a meaningless narrative bereft of any historical lessons? Are there different stages of Holocaust historical learning, answering to different societal prerequisites, learning ideas, and degrees of qualification? Is Holocaust learning merely an educational activity, connected to curricula, resources and other learning structures, or is this learning also to be understood from and carried out in larger cultural and societal contexts?

These are questions that will be reflected on, if yet not fully answered, in this chapter. It does not primarily aim to discuss specific Holocaust lessons; rather, it seeks to analytically reflect upon the position and function of Holocaust learning in a larger framework of historical learning, historical thinking, and historical culture in which Holocaust history today plays a prominent role. Such an analysis is not only intellectually challenging, but has strong emotive and moral dimensions. One of the most provocative and prevailing issues, suggesting quite another orientation than that put forward in this volume, is indicated by Geoffrey Hartman. If, in Hartman’s words (1996: 1), the Holocaust ‘blocks thought and leads to a black hole that swallows the haunted interpreter’, then the question arises whether there is a need for closure – a time when Holocaust history is left without the enormous attention that it gets today. It is an idea that echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1986: 67) famous dictum that human beings must develop their ability not only to remember but also to forget or to remain unhistorical, since ‘an excess of history is harmful to the living man’.

Two opposite answers

The process of learning history, which here includes the teaching of history as well, is a qualified mental operation of translation or transformation, wherein different temporalities and horizons are forced to merge and communicate, preferably in a productive way. The learner of history acquaints themselves with and reflects upon historical interpretations to orientate in life and to prospect good directions for the future. The results of the learning process, the lessons, are not any one knowledge of past events. Rather, the concept of historical lessons emphasises that history supplies students with information, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and notions that are supposed to be useful in their lives. These amalgamations of history and posterior lives, essential to all historical learning, are certainly not always easy to bring about. In the case of Holocaust education, the difficulty lies largely in the abyss that separates the personal histories of those who endured it (where the threat of death was present all the time) from the detached and distant perspective that we can apply from our latter-day point of view.

Learning history is not about finding simple historical cases that are considered identical with or equal to the conditions and situations of the learners. Differences are also the subjects of history learning. Ideas of unicity and unprecedentedness, often linked to Holocaust history, are, as such, no obstacle to learning. However, the general idea of historical learning is based on the premise that it is fruitful to let different temporal dimensions interact by means of insightful and balanced comparisons, analogies, metaphors, and other temporal or structural connections.

This somewhat rudimentary definition of the process of historical learning is far from unobjectionable. The question whether history can provide us with lessons has been asked since time immemorial. This is hardly surprising, since its basis is an almost ageless curiosity about whether human beings, by mastering the past in experiences, memories, or a more systematic production of historical knowledge, can handle their lives in a good way, or rather in a better way than if they had not known history at all. However, the timelessness of the question does not mean that the answers have been the same from one time and place to another. In our modern era, with a second World War following a first and then exceeding it in destructive force, and with the continued recurrence of genocide and man-made atrocity, our often-heard refrain of ‘Never again!’ invariably rings hollow.

Although it is probably true that extreme events teach us simple lessons, historical lessons are often so general and diluted that their learning capacity can be questioned. If the Holocaust informs about, say, humanity’s predilection for self-destruction, the fragility of the human condition, or various ideologies’ legitimation of deadly deeds, why do we need to look at the Holocaust for this, and not another incident from history? Additionally, ‘lessons’ of history have often been connected to problematic themes such as biology and race, nationalist and communist ideology, religion and war, which doubtlessly has contributed to casting suspicion on the entire project of historical learning. Similar suspicions have been aimed at reductionist and instrumental pedagogical and political uses of history, where the problems that haunt today’s society and are considered important to counteract, from bullying in the schoolyard to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, are placed on an equal footing with the Holocaust.

No doubt, the refutation of learning from history has been reinforced by modern historical scholarship, with its basic idea that history never repeats itself and therefore offers no lessons for posterity. Consequently, there are no other history lessons but the proverbial Hegelian one, stating that a unique, ever-changing history provides us with but one lesson: the lesson that there are no lessons. David Lowenthal, a geographer but also the author of The Past Is a Foreign Country, is one of those who hoist a flag of warning against ‘presentism’: the idea of viewing the past through the lens of the present in which the learner is situated. In his opinion, this leads to the deplorable tendency to pass judgement on the people of the past, invariably characterising them as worse than ourselves, and in turn inversely learn that our own epoch has a singularly positive value. Lowenthal’s (2000) recommendation is as clear as crystal: ‘students need to realise that every present seems especially salient to self-centred denizens, who skew history to prove their point’ (66–67).

There is indeed much to say about Lowenthal’s argument, and ‘presentist’ acts should no doubt be counteracted. However, the inverse idea that a historical period can stand out as so extraordinarily unique that nothing can be meaningfully related to it, so much so we only can do justice to it through ‘pure’ historical lenses, is just as harmful. In both cases, the historical narrative becomes enclosed within itself, with no reciprocity and no possibilities for the present observer to understand history based on her questions and desires to learn. The unfortunate result is a lack of interest for tasks related to historical learning, which is often described as a mechanical and benign response to the ‘real’ scholarly endeavour to produce new knowledge.

In a volume published in a series with the series title ‘Lessons and Legacies’, Michael Marrus (1998) concludes: ‘Holocaust history is a remarkably complex, advanced field of historical inquiry and needs no other reason than that to command the close attention of scholars and students’ (23). In yet another book in the same series, Marrus (1991) laments any presentation of the Holocaust that is ‘deliberately undertaken to make us “feel better” – to confirm our political judgments, to enhance understanding of the Jewish predicament, or even to improve “human understanding”’ (119). In his eyes, such ideas correspond to a misuse of Holocaust history.

The idea behind this chapter is different. When learning history, we need to confront and make use of two temporal sets of phenomena and perspectives, making careful and reflected cross-references in dialogue between them. Our own position can never be left out of the learning process. It must certainly be mastered, but it must also be made as explicit as possible. As Bodo von Borries (1994) has reminded us, ‘the lack of understanding of the other includes inadequate definitions of ourselves’ (347). This, in turn, tends to restrict our possibilities to retrospectively pose productive questions from our present horizon.

There are certainly ideas that challenge the traditional historians’ convictions. Cicero’s well-known motto about history as the master of life, historia magistra vitae, is an optimistic expression of the belief that history as a collection of instructive ‘cases’ contains a kind of practical life wisdom. No doubt his notion is still alive, especially among political and economic decision-makers and power-holders, but also in social science, among economists and political scientists. Behind this notion rests the idea that by grounding leadership and strategic considerations in relevant historical knowledge, one can avoid such errors and mistakes that previously led to war, economic crisis or other man-made catastrophes. As an idea that might bridge over the two notions, it can be suggested that even if history does not repeat itself, human beings and their actions and motivations do, which opens for connections over time.

Historical learning, historical culture, and borderline events

Historical learning is engineered within the boundaries of historical culture, the arena in which a society evaluates what history is worth teaching and learning, researching, debating, or in other ways communicating. Naturally, the results and products of these activities belong to the arena of historical culture as well.

The interconnection between historical learning and historical culture is analytically interesting. One consequence of this close relationship is that a historical learning not carried out within the frames of a historical culture risks being dysfunctional. It is true any historical fact can be superficially learned, but there is a lot to be said in favour of the idea a historical learning that will yield intended and profound results must be interwoven with the general interpretive patterns of historical culture. Furthermore, historical learning must be understood and undertaken from a dual perspective, partly underlining that human beings make history, and partly stressing that we already are history or have a history beforehand. Consequently, on the one hand, historical learning is a functional activity carried out by active, purposive subjects who use history to reach various learning objectives, thereby satisfying certain needs and interests. Power is a keyword when historical learning is analysed from this perspective. On the other hand, learners are already ‘written into’ or culturally disposed towards certain interpretive patterns and lessons that are much older than our own individual interpretations and learnings. This perspective calls for a cultural, hermeneutical approach to understanding how history is learned, and, on a strictly educational level, it encourages us not to treat learners simply as empty vessels ready to be filled up with historical knowledge.

In sum – and using some of the most cherished words of today’s cultural studies – learners are involved in complex projects and practices of negotiation, contestation, and reception between cultural traditions that pre-figure all representations of the past and organise learning into certain patterns of historical culture, on the one hand, and operations in which these traditions are selectively adopted, consumed, manipulated, questioned, or even ignored in accordance with the learners’ interests and positions, on the other.

Another important question of historical culture concerns the histories we turn to, time and again, when we learn history. We should ask ourselves: are all historical events and processes equally ‘learnable’? What imperative histories are hard to overcome and which parts of the past will neither be dethroned nor laid to rest? Being geared to the processes, structures, and functions of historical culture, it stands clear that the learner’s engagement in history should not be regarded as arbitrary. Learners favourably turn to constitutive or ‘foundational’ phenomena of the past; the latter described as ‘an event that represents an age because it embodies a historical novum that serves as a moral and historical yardstick, as a measure of things human’ (Confino 2012: 5–6). In recent scholarly discourse, much attention has been devoted to these borderline events or events at the limits, which are considered as historical crossroads, turning points, historical origins, fractures, and catastrophes that challenge our traditional concepts and categories and shatter their credibility. These events seem to trigger us to ask ‘learning’ questions about not only what happened in the past, where it started, why it happened, and who was guilty.

At least as important are questions of how we, as those who come after, consider ourselves related to, involved in, and responsible for these events. This involvement in histories at the limits also includes problems of the limits of interpretation, representation, and learning of these histories (Friedlander 1992). We can conclude that great wars, genocides, and revolutions – events that in their own time were radical instruments of change and in posterity are instruments of recurrent historical debates – are imbued by temporality as few other historical phenomena are. In this respect, they are suitable topics of historical learning, but certainly of a careful and respectful kind. Jörn Rüsen (2001) has described the Holocaust as a ‘black hole of sense and meaning’ that ‘consumes every concept of historical interpretation and crushes all meaningful narrative relationship between the time before and the time after’ (252). His words might help to explain both the difficulty and the need to learn lessons from the most painful and emotionally charged histories in general, and the history of the Holocaust in particular.

To many people in the twenty-first century, the Second World War and the Holocaust constitute what Henry Rousso (2016: 9–12) has called ‘the latest catastrophe’ that laid the mental and intellectual groundwork and became the historical point of reference for our own time. As such, this catastrophe commands a special place in European and Western historical culture and learning. Twenty-first-century historical scholarship on the Nazi genocide is extremely rich and variegated, and simultaneously so paradigmatic that many of its basic concepts and interpretations are used to analyse other modern genocides as well. Holocaust education is a field with many present-day practitioners, most of whom echo Theodor Adorno’s famous statement from 1966 that the first requirement of all education is that Auschwitz does not happen again. Since the 1990s, Holocaust history has had a position in cultural, intellectual, and societal life that no other historical event has ever had, as a powerful existential, moral, ideological, and political yardstick reaching far beyond the strictly historical sphere, as a ‘ruling symbol in our culture’ (Bauer 1994: 306). Today, we live in an increasingly digital and universal historical culture in which the Holocaust has conquered a central position. If the combination of words had not been so provocative, it could be – and has been (Fogu et al. 2016) – called a Holocaust culture.

This aspect will be further developed in a subsequent section. An interesting question here, then, is whether these scholarly, educational, and societal activities inform and benefit each other. Do they have anything in common, except for the obvious fact that they all depart from an interest in Holocaust hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors’ foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Education, remembrance, and the Holocaust: Towards pedagogic memory-work
• Part I Issues, approaches, spaces
• Part II National perspectives, contexts, and case studies
• Index