Facing the Holocaust: A Part of German Identity
By Jade Martinez-Pogue
BERLIN — The summer sun is shining down on a group of about 20 students on a field trip two hours outside of their hometown of Wismar, eastern Germany. Birds chirp overhead but there is a cool, breeze in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, in the midst of Europe’s hottest recorded June.
The group of 15-year-olds are chatting and laughing as their tour guide walks them through a gate reading “Arbeit Macht Frei,”– work makes you free. They are touring a place in which 100,000 people died from Nazi brutality: Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
The ninth graders, from the Integrated Comprehensive School, IGS Wismar, visited this camp, with its extensive museum, as the culminating trip to end a year learning about the Third Reich. Mandatory field trips such as this are part of the German curriculum in most states and have been the subject of controversy over how to find an appropriate and adequate method to confront the country’s Nazi-era past. With the end of World War II now nearly 75 years in the past, Germany’s legacy as the perpetuator of the largest planned genocide of modern times continues to shape Germany identity today.
Students were silent as they walked through an old, preserved bunker, and several expressed shock and disbelief at being in one of the physical locations where atrocities took place.
“We were just sitting in a place where you could wake up in the morning and you could see two corpses lying on the floor beside you,” said Tony, a student visiting the camp for the first time after only formally learning about this part of German history in his ninth grade class this year.
Individual states in Germany all teach this subject differently as education is a state-affair with no federal jurisdiction. Concentration camp field trips aim to teach students empathy for minorities while depicting what life was like for victims of Nazi extermination and detention camps, says Ron Beilke, teacher of the visiting ninth grade class.
Some students still do not participate in all the programs offered on this subject. Even with the mandatory field trip, a handful of students called in sick for that day specifically. “Nine students called in sick. Maybe four of them really were,” Beilke said.
Germans still debate how students should have to study the atrocities the Nazis perpetrated and when the appropriate time to start this part of their education is. State Secretary for Federal Affairs in Germany, Sawsan Chebli, recently proposed making concentration camp visits a mandatory part of education nation-wide. “This is about who we are as a country. We need to make our history relevant for everyone,” Chebli said in an interview with the British newspaper The Independent.
Wismar teacher Beilke agrees it’s important to teach about Nazi crimes to young adults, but also acknowledges the difficulties in doing so. “It’s a good age to teach this subject, but it’s also the age of adolescence when they are only interested in girlfriends and boyfriends,” he said. “It’s hard to make it relevant to the students.”
Michael Schmitz, an elementary school teacher in Munich, says there is some mention of the Holocaust in children’s books and that some teachers in his school even have their students read excerpts from Holocaust books at the elementary age. He does not necessarily agree that it should be taught in primary school. “From age 10 to 12 they can’t understand the whole story,” he said.
Teachers have a certain amount of freedom when choosing how to teach the subject, Schmitz says. While there is a state-wide curriculum, teachers can include more interactive methods, such as visits to concentration camps or museums he explains. “The Holocaust is taught in Germany in an open way. It’s not taboo at all,” he said. “It’s important that Germany deals with it.”
Teaching about Hitler’s National Socialism is so present in high school that many students do not want to continue learning about it at the college level, says Freie Universitat history professor Isabel Richter.
“I experienced young students who have just finished high school and my general impression is that they learned a lot about National Socialism. So much so that they come to my classes and they don’t want to take them because they have already heard so much of it,” she said.
But Richter notes that once students have been in her class for a few weeks they begin to see differences in the teaching of this era in their secondary schooling and at the university level. “1945 was interpreted in Germany in many ways,” she said. “They have to cope with new topics that aren’t very present in schoolbooks.”
For some students, once they realize that there is more than one interpretation to history, a fire ignites inside them that created a yearning to know more. That was the case for economist Ulf Heinsohn, who took it upon himself as a youth to study Jewish history, learn Hebrew and become active in the German-Jewish dialogue activities.
When Heinsohn, was growing up in Saxony, Germany about 40 years ago he was taught about the Holocaust from a perspective in which guilt and responsibility was put entirely on the perpetrators of the crimes. Then he noticed that other teachers had different ways of talking about the subject.
“What was not part of my education, in relation to relatives and friends of mine, was that we were not brought up with the idea that the Holocaust is something that holds us personally responsible,” he said.
Heinsohn criticizes teachers who try to emotionalize the subject too much for the students. Trying to tug at the heartstrings of Germans by placing blame makes people who weren’t involved in the genocide feel guilty, he says. This guilt causes them to begin to shy away from learning more. He believes there has to be a balance between presenting the repercussions to the country as a whole, and the tragic consequences the victims of the Nazi regime experienced.
“In the beginning, what was much discussed was what [the Holocaust] did to Germany when they kicked people out, but not what it did to the people that got kicked out,” he said. “It didn’t look enough at those who were victimized. But I think it caught the attention of the general public because it is actually something that happened to all of us.”
Grappling with the past is not confined to schools. German artists have created hundreds of museums and memorials throughout the country to address National Socialism and the Holocaust.
German artist Gunter Deming began a memorial project across Europe in 1992 that commemorates individuals who lost their freedom or their lives to Nazi terror. It has since spread to 24 countries in Europe which lay little brass plaques into sidewalks and pavement outside the victims’ last place of residence before deportation by Hitler’s regime. These individual memorials are called Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, and include the victims’ names and birth dates, as well as the fate they suffered during the Holocaust.
Deming began this project because he believed that “a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.” He wants to acknowledge Germany’s past while paying respect to all of the innocent people who lost their lives just because they were different.
While this project was fueled by respect for the memory of victims, it also has become controversial in parts of Germany. The city of Munich banned the installation of Stolpersteine in there in 2004 because the city believed it was disrespectful to have these stones on the ground where people could walk all over them. Instead, they installed Holocaust memorial plaques that people could look up at.
Another key landmark in Germany’s confrontation with its past is the Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened in 2001. This museum’s famous avant-garde architecture by Daniel Libeskind helps to teach the Holocaust through a physical experience. When in the museum, one does not merely walk around reading explanations, but rather experiencing architectural disruptions and exhibits that provoke a sense of disorientation, harshness, and tragedy. Museum guides even take time to mention how visitors often faint in certain exhibits because the feeling of disorientation is so strong in the building.
The museum seeks to not merely tell Jewish history but mimic emotions and experiences that the Jewish people faced during this time. An exhibit in one of several ‘memory voids’ in the museum is Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman’s ‘Fallen Leaves,’ which includes 10,000 metal faces scattered across the floor, representing the innocent victims of war and violence. Visitors can walk across these horrified faces, hearing the loud clanking of the metal discs with every step.
Another monument, in the heart of Berlin, is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Located right across from the Tiergarten, a giant wooded park in the center of town, the memorial consists of a grid of different sized concrete blocks that seems to represent the coffins of murdered Jews during the Nazi years. Its location provides a juxtaposition between the natural beauty of the Tiergarten and the crimes against humanity that led to the loss of six million Jewish lives.
The maze of blocks provokes an eerie feeling among visitors, who quickly sense that it is easy to get lost. The installation makes visitors feel small when standing between the tall blocks in the center of the memorial, a feeling that immediately brought tears to my eyes.
Still, in each generation, critics question whether Germany is doing enough.
An exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin, “A is for Jewish,” gives statistics that indicate attempts to increase tolerance through Holocaust education are not necessarily effective. In the first six months of 2018 alone, the police reported 401 anti-Semitic crimes. When subjects were asked ‘Would you be willing to accept a Jew as a member of your family?’ 19 percent of people said ‘no’.
These statistics are perhaps not surprising when one considers the behavior of visiting German school groups at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Students can be observed sitting, standing, running, and taking selfies on the concrete blocks — concrete blocks that represent coffins. When questioned about their actions around the memorial, several students declined to comment, as if they understood what they were doing was wrong, but did not want to take responsibility for it.
Germany’s has recently witnessed the of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has the largest representation in parliament seen by a far right party since the Nazi era. The AfD is known for its anti-immigration stance and a strong since of German nationalism — which includes continuously downplaying event related to the Holocaust and the experiences of Holocaust victims. Björn Höcke, an AfD politician in Turingia, has been accused of anti-Semitism and speaks of Germany as ‘the Fatherland,’ using terminology similar to that used in the Nazi era.
A survey published earlier this month by German weekly Bild am Sonntag shows that the party’s support level is currently at about 12 per cent. That change in in public mood, combined with apparent student desensitization to Holocaust education, plays into the debate about whether more mandatory Holocaust education will be implemented— or less.
Meanwhile, an American student, Carly Kay of UC Santa Barbara, reacted to the monument in in direct contrast to how these German student visitors responded. Tears rolled down her cheeks as Kay walked through the maze of blocks and she thought about the 17 Holocaust victims in her own family. Kay’s face showed disappointment and disgust as she watched how young Germans chose to behave at a place that holds so much meaning to her.
“I didn’t expect to feel such an immediate reaction. I keep seeing people take selfies and I think it’s just glorifying what happened,” Kay said, observing a scene that could be compared to children playing on graves at a cemetery. “I don’t think that people truly understand what this meant.”
For teacher Beilke and his class from IGS Wismar, the field trip to Sachsenhausen proved an effective way to handle Holocaust education. While it is difficult to find Holocaust survivors to relate their own experiences to today’s students, providing a glimpse into those experiences can increase empathy, he said.
Tom, another student in the visiting ninth grade class, said his visit to Sachsenhausen made him think that people need to show more tolerance today toward those different from themselves. Tom said the visit made him more critical of those Germans who express anti-foreigner sentiment at a time when the country is absorbing more than a million refugees . “It’s hard to see what people can do to other people,” he said. “Everyone should have to see what happened here.”
Jade Martinez-Pogue is a fourth-year communication major at UC Santa Barbara. She is a staff writer at the school’s weekly newspaper, The Bottom Line.
