Teaching About National Socialism and the Holocaust: Narrative Approaches to Holocaust Education STEPHAN MARKS University of Education, Freiburg, Germany ABSTRACT: The article outlines a deficit in Holocaust education: The motives of the perpetrators and bystanders are often not dealt with. In order to explore these motives, interviews with former Nazis were conducted and evaluated in the Geschichte und Erinnerung (History and Memory) research project; two of the findings are presented here. Subsequently the question of how these findings can be applied in school teaching about National Socialism and the Holocaust is discussed. The author recommends teachers not to expose students to whole narrations of former Nazis, but to use brief excerpts from those narrations in order to develop an analysis of the Nazis’ motives. Ultimately, teaching about the topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust should be integrated with students’ own narrations, with their knowledge of the topic based on family stories, family secrets, and other sources. KEYWORDS: National socialism, holocaust education, Germany, shame, narrative education, counter transference, Hitler, perpetrator, bystander, fascination.
Introduction In this article, I explore the crisis in teaching about National Socialism and the Holocaust in German schools. As I will outline in the first section, entitled “The Crisis in Holocaust Education,” students are confronted with the facts and data, as well as the suffering of the victims, while the motives of the Nazi perpetrators and onlookers are, in general, left out. I will argue that Holocaust education needs to deal with this issue too, otherwise a dangerous vacuum is being created. In other words, the motives of the perpetrators and bystanders also need exploring. Such an exploration is being carried out through the Geschichte und Erinnerung (History and Memory) research project, which is based on interviews with former Nazis. I will describe this project in the second section of the paper, and present two of its findings, the pedagogical Interchange, Vol. 38/3, 263–284, 2007. DOI 10.1007/s10780-007-9029-9
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consequences of which I will go on to discuss in the sections that follow. Each of these sections will present a different approach on how to use the narrations of former Nazis in school teaching. Section Three will consider how, because of the toxic quality of these narrations, it is counterproductive to expose students to Nazi supporters live, while Section Four will argue that it can be helpful, however, to use quotes or clippings from former Nazis themselves when the issue of their motives is being addressed. Section Five will consider how, ultimately, Holocaust education should not skate over the teachers’ and students’ own narrations, that is, the knowledge of National Socialism and the Holocaust which they bring with them from their families, peers, media, and other sources. On a meta level, the sixth and final section will reflect on the lateness of narrative education in Germany. In it, I will ponder whether the cardinal trust that is inherent to narrative approaches conflicts with notions of education that are based on control, which may be a legacy of Nazi education.
The Crisis in Holocaust Education Teaching on the topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust (or Holocaust education, as it is, rather mistakenly, often termed in English) has a high priority in the German school system. It is taught in a considerable number of lessons, at different age levels, and in several subjects, that is, history, social studies, German literature, religious studies, and ethics. Public expectations of this programme are high: Holocaust education is supposed ‘to ensure that it won’t happen again,’ as it is frequently phrased. Students are supposed to gain knowledge of the facts and data about the topic, learn about the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust, as well as become moral, responsible, tolerant democrats. Altogether, the educational objectives comprise cognitive objectives (knowledge of facts and data; this might be called ‘learning about history’) as well as moral development and social skills (‘learning from history’). However, different studies have shown that the pedagogical success of Holocaust education in Germany is rather modest, both in terms of learning about as well as from history (Borries, 1995; Wagensommer, 2001, 2003). Ultimately, the alarming number of neo-nazi and racist sentiments, activities, and crimes in Germany since the 1990s indicate
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that Holocaust education has often failed to create preventative learning effects. What are the reasons for this? Looking at the various curricula of Holocaust education in Germany, one interesting observation can be made. Although students are confronted with facts and data about the Third Reich, as well as learning about the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust, there is little or no analysis of the motives of those millions of men and women who agreed to, and actively supported, Hitler and National Socialism (bystanders and perpetrators, as they are termed in research1) and who are the parents, grandparents, or ancestors of present day teachers and students. This deficit in Holocaust education causes a dangerous vacuum, as the following remark of one student illustrates: For hours and hours our history teacher told us about the Jews, the Communists, the gypsies, the Russians – all those victims, nothing but victims. I never really believed him. Who knows whether it was all that bad? One of my classmates once asked him: ‘What was so great about that time? Why did so many people cry Hurrah and Heil Hitler? Why were they all so excited? There must be a reason?’ At that point, the teacher looked quite foolish and started to call him a neo-nazi. But we would not let it go. Finally, somebody had raised the all-important question of what had really happened. After all, in the movies he had shown us you could see children laughing, and the women’s eyes all lit up. Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets were rejoicing. Where did all this excitement come from? (as cited in Sichrovsky, 1987, p. 41f)2 Avoiding dealing with the question of the Nazis’ motives may be counter-productive, as pedagogue Doerr (1986) writes, “You can’t fight the dangerousness of National Socialism by blanketing everything that made it attractive to young people” (p. 49). This deficit in Holocaust education reflects a deficit in the way German society has dealt with its Nazi past: The facts and data about National Socialism and the Holocaust have been surfaced through historical research and are accepted by society at large. Often, in public events for example, the need to remember is emphasised, the need “to learn from history” in order “to prevent its repetition.” However, it often remains unclear what is meant by remembrance. In most cases it is connected to remembrance of the victims and survivors: the need to commemorate and thereby honour them. As necessary as this is, however, it cannot substitute for the issue of the Nazis’ motives. Too often, they have not been
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remembered and dealt with. On the contrary, the question of their motives has been excluded from narrations within families and from discourses in German society at large. The same deficit can be found in scientific research. “National Socialism is the most explored field of modern history and yet also the least understood” (Welzer, 1997, p. 9). Historian Goldhagen (1996) commented, “A striking aspect of the literature on the Holocaust is that, with some exceptions, these central questions about the mentality of the actors are not addressed directly, systematically, and thoroughly” (p. 478). There are numerous publications, based on all sorts of scientific methods (or speculations), ultimately blaming all kinds of human traits, desires or behaviours with causing National Socialism. But there have been very few efforts to analyse the motives of former Nazis based on these people’s narratives, even though as far back as 1966, Theodor Adorno (1997) called for a thorough exploration of Nazi motives because “the roots of the Holocaust are to be found in the perpetrators and not in the victims” (p. 12).
The Geschichte und Erinnerung (History and Memory) Research Project These reflections were the starting point for the Geschichte und Erinnerung (History and Memory) research project at the University of Education in Freiburg, Germany. In the first phase of the project (1998 to 2004), interviews were conducted with former Nazis, for example, former members of NSDAP, SA, SS, or other Nazi organisations. Using psychoanalytic-hermeneutical methods (Koenig, 1993, 2003; Marks, 2001; Marks & Moennich-Marks, 2002a, 2003), the interviews were analysed with regards to the following questions: 1. What motivated the interviewees to agree to and actively support Hitler and National Socialism? 2. In what ways is the experience of those years still present to them, cognitively and emotionally? 3. What happens when former Nazis communicate about the Third Reich with younger people, that is, members of following “generation”3? This approach proved to be productive and surfaced a complex of motives that help explain how National Socialism and the Holocaust
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could happen (Marks, 2003a, 2003b; Marks & Moennich-Marks, 2002b). At this point I briefly want to mention just two of the research findings.
Shame Many Germans experienced their defeat in World War I, the Versailles Treaty, poverty, economic crisis, unemployment, and the inner strife of the Weimar Republic as shameful, as a “loss of honour.” Shame is a very painful, primitive emotion (Schore, 1998); it is “about being in the world as an undesirable self” (Gilbert, 1998, p. 30); and it is “one of the major destructive forces in all human life” (Bradshaw, 1988, p. vii). National Socialism managed to utilise this wide-spread emotion (Lethen, 1994) by offering and legitimising opportunities to fend off shameful feelings (Wurmser, 1981). It did this through its cynical ideology of toughness and scornful disdain for weakness and humanistic values; through its humiliation of others, especially Jewish fellow citizens, by ridiculing and dehumanising them, discriminating against them and turning them into outsiders; through its promises to restore Germany’s honour; through its grandiose claims to eventual world domination; and through idealizing Hitler and Germans as “the master race” (Marks & MoennichMarks, 2002b).
Transgenerational Transmission Psychological research has observed that the unresolved traumatic experiences of one generation are passed on to the following generations at an unconscious level. For example, children of Holocaust survivors exhibit symptoms similar to those who experienced the Holocaust themselves. They have horrifying memories which recall the traumatic experiences of their parents. They dream of Nazi persecution, barbed wire, gas chambers, executions, torture, mutilation, and the fear of annihilation. The Holocaust has influenced their lives more than any other event, even though it happened before they were born (Barocas, 1979; Epstein, 1987; Faimberg, 1987). Transgenerational transmissions were also observed in descendants of Nazi perpetrators and bystanders, although with different contents (Gruenberg, 2000; Gruenberg & Straub, 2001). Despite being born after the end of World War II, many of them experience guilt or shame about what their parents or grandparents did during the Third Reich, but
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never talked about it or worked it through (Bohleber, 1998; Eckstaedt, 1992). Based on their narrations, we came to conclude that former Nazis too had been strongly influenced by the previous generation, most of all by their traumatized fathers and teachers, who had been veterans of WWI and, having lost the war, felt dishonoured by the Communist Revolution of 1918 and the Versailles Treaty. Returning to a poor, indebted, economically and politically weak country, German veterans experienced overwhelming shame, which was passed on to the following generation. The children were implanted with the desire to restore their fathers’ honour. This transmission motivated many of the interviewees to join Hitler and the Nazi movement. One interviewee, for example, described the “course of his life” to have been “predestined” by his parents’ narrations about the humiliating consequences of WWI. Consequently, he yearned to join the SS and be engaged in the war and, ultimately, found his “fulfilment at the front.” Such examples illustrate the toxic effect of parents’ narrations on their children. In the second phase of the project, that is, since 2004, we have been applying our research findings to education in general and to Holocaust education in particular. We are primarily concerned with establishing what are the implications of findings about the inheritance of shame and the transgenerational transmission of traumatic experiences, and in what ways can the narrations of former Nazis be made productive for Holocaust education. In the following sections, three different approaches will be presented and discussed.
Failed Attempts: When Narrations Are Toxic In the main study of Geschichte und Erinnerung, all the team members belonged to the first post-Nazi generation, that is, the generation of the interviewees’ children, born approximately within about10 years after the end of WWII. In addition, during the pilot study, we experimented with using interviewers at different ages. We were interested to see what would happen if former Nazis narrated their stories to younger interviewers, such as college students. The outcome was so alarming that we broke off this comparative experiment. Students of a college seminar in Religious Education (undergraduate level) were asked to conduct interviews with former Nazis – not mass murderers, just average Nazis. The11 interviewers
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were introduced to interview techniques and prepared for the interviews that were scheduled for a specific week near the middle of the semester. One evening during that week, one of the seminar instructors received a telephone call from one of the students. She had just conducted her interview, was very upset, and cried profusely during the half hour conversation on the phone. The following seminar session started with another student breaking out in tears as she talked about her interview, sobbing “I need support.” For the following weeks, she was given guidance by one of the instructors. As the students started to share their interview experiences, it became obvious that one of them was in a state of fascination. With a gleam in his eyes, he recounted his encounter with a 90-year-old interviewee using terms such as “fascinating.” For two hours they both had been sitting face to face, looking at each other intensely. He left the interview feeling elated and the following day he “had to” visit her for an additional interview. In the seminar session, he refused to listen to the evaluation of his interview tape: “I don’t want to hear that … I want to keep it [the interview] in my memory the way it is, innocently, without any judgements or whatever … I don’t want it to be torn apart.” Interestingly, many interviewees narrated their encounter with Hitler using the term “fascinating” as well, and many of them were enthused about the eye contact with him. As one interviewee puts it, Hitler appeared on the balcony of the hotel and there was something fascinating about him, something which cannot be described. … This fascination, I don’t know whether there was something demonic about it … I’ve decided … not to analyse it anymore, because I don’t understand it. Presumably, the fascination of the interviewee with Hitler more than 60 years previously was somehow repeated in the interview interaction, leaving the student in a state of fascination, just as had happened to the interviewee in the past. Also, both refused to analyse (“tear apart”) their “fascinating” experience. Notice that the student skipped into the present tense when he described his encounter with the interviewee several days previously (“I want to keep it in my memory the way it is”). Obviously, the experience is still very present to him – as it was for the interviewee (Marks, 2003a). From experiences like these, plus many others, we came to the conclusion that interviews with former Nazis may have a toxic quality. In other words, they carry a high risk of “psychological contamination”
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(Jung, 1969), or counter-transference reactions (Gysling, 1995; Koenig, 1998). Ultimately, such reactions may be turned into a source of information for the researcher, just as ethnopsychoanalyst Georges Devereux (1967) established in his work From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. Consequently, in order to grasp, work through, and understand counter-transference reactions comprehensively, an elaborate program of supervision (peer, individual, and team supervision through external supervisors) was incorporated into the Geschichte und Erinnerung research project (Marks & Moennich-Marks, 2002a, 2003). This required a lot of time, attention, and ultimately, money – more than school settings can provide. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that interviews with former Nazis should not be conducted by students because of the intensity and toxic quality of counter-transference reactions. This decision was confirmed by another experiment that we heard about later. Students from a middle school class in a small German town went out to interview senior citizens, so-called witnesses of National Socialism. In one of the episodes of the video film about the project (Dienst-Demuth & Stickel, 2001), an interviewee called “Aunt Mathilda” tells the students, The worst things I’ve ever heard about were from a schoolmate of mine. He worked in the concentration camp in Dachau. He had been forced by his father to join the SS. During his vacation he told me, ‘I can’t bear the camp, I can’t sleep because we have to do such terrible things.’ He told me … ‘Polish men had to run in a circle and every seventh of them was shot, no matter what he had done – he was shot arbitrarily. One day a nun was brought in the circle, and it was winter; it was very cold, and they undressed her and poured water over her until she froze to death’ … Then he told me, ‘I reported to the front because I can’t bear to think what I have participated in.’ (Dienst-Demuth & Stickel, 2001) In another section of the film, students summarize what they learned from the interviews. These are some of their quotes: In the 1930s, the nazis seized power, here as well as all over Germany. … As a girl aged ten I had to join the BDM, an organisation of the Third Reich; that was mandatory for everybody. The boys had to join the Hitler Youth. Our mother had to work in the armaments factory. … The war spread throughout many countries in the east and the west. Almost every week there news came about soldiers being imprisoned or going missing. My father
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was reported missing in Russia in 1944. (Dienst-Demuth & Stickel, 2001)
Students were obviously reproducing quotes of the interviewees here. However there is no distancing, such as “The interviewee Mrs. X told us that…”, which would allow for critical reflection on the narrations. Instead, the recollections of the students and the interviewees seem to have become one. Students seemed to have become caught up in the interviewee’s world view. The Nazis are portrayed as a small group of mysterious aliens who came from somewhere else to “seize power.” The Germans – supposedly all victims – were forced to join Nazi organisations (just like Aunt Mathilda’s schoolmate apparently had been forced to join the SS) and to work for “them.” Similarly, the war supposedly “spread” like some mysterious entity, victimizing German soldiers only. What is missing in this world-view? The instigators of “the war” are not named, nor are “the Nazis” – that is, the millions of men and women, young and old, from within German society. Moreover, not all of those millions were forced to join Nazi organisations. Many of them volunteered to join and were indeed enthusiastic members of the Nazi movement. There is no mention of the real victims of National Socialism, the 6 million murdered Jews, nor the further 42 million nonGerman people who were killed. There is no empathy for the murdered Polish men, nor the tortured nun. Rather, in this world-view, empathy is being created for former Nazis. This is far from what Holocaust education wants to achieve. The narrations of so-called “witnesses” such as Aunt Mathilda provided no facts or data about National Socialism and the Holocaust. On the contrary, National Socialism and the war are made mysterious. The student’s question, quoted above, remains unanswered: “The children laughing, and the women’s eyes all lit up. Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets were rejoicing. Where did all this excitement come from?” Students learned little about the suffering of the victims. Instead, they learned about the suffering of the bystanders and one specific perpetrator. How could these narrations possibly contribute to students’ moral growth and tolerance? The descriptions of Nazi cruelties may even be having secondary traumatizing effects on children. Thus, summarizing the narratives of former Nazi bystanders or perpetrators4 seems to be rather counter-productive for Holocaust education. If such narrations are useful at all, it is only within a safety-
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net of supervision and the context of scientific research as in the Geschichte und Erinnerung project. The findings from this project have been published in several articles (Marks, 2003a, 2003b; Marks & Moennich-Marks, 2002b, 2003), as well as being available in lectures and papers which present and discuss the research process. Such findings are best illustrated with brief clippings from the interviews.
Clippings Short, typical interview sections are used in another approach that was carried out in several seminars with high school students as well as college students, taught by members of the Geschichte und Erinnerung research team. Unlike the attempts described before, students were not exposed to former Nazi interviews live for hours. In this way, powerful counter-transference reactions such as crying, or fascination and identification with the subject matter, as described in the previous section, could be avoided. Instead, students were exposed to narrators’ voices only for a few seconds or minutes. Findings of the research project were therefore passed on to the students in a controlled setting, through a presentation supported with selected clippings from narrations to illustrate the teacher’s thesis. Concretely, students were taught about the role of shame in National Socialism and the Holocaust. Judging from the students’ feedback, this approach was quite successful. Students learned about the Nazi method of establishing power as well as about the way Jews were humiliated, dehumanised, and ridiculed. Students were also able to connect the issues raised with their own experience and become aware of and sensitive to the painful emotion of shame and its manipulative potential. Accordingly, learning from history turned into something quite relevant for the students’ present. However, this style of teaching is “top down.” At the outset, the teacher knows what students are supposed to learn. The students’ narratives matter only inasmuch as they contribute to the teachers agenda; the teacher remains in control.
What About the Students’ Narrations? What about the stories that the students themselves are able to tell about National Socialism and the Holocaust? What do they know about the topic even before they enter their first school lesson? What did they learn from family stories (and family secrets), TV, films, video games,
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peers, and other sources? What emotions, sounds, images, metaphors, values, questions, and so on, are they connecting with the topic? What curriculum is “embodied” (Furlong, 2004) in the students themselves? As narrative educator Dolores Furlong stated during a recent workshop, Genetic codes are transmitted not only biologically but biographically, autobiographically, and culturally as well, passed on from generation to generation through a legacy of stories [one could add, both told and untold]. As ‘educators’ in the broadest sense, are we aware of the legacy of stories that is encoded in ourselves, influencing both our lives and the lives of those around us? While educational processes primarily focus on teaching and learning the content of a subject or a discipline, little attention is paid to the curriculum that is embodied in the teachers and students themselves, and through which the content must invariably be processed. What happens then when this content encounters the curriculum of life that the teacher or learner brings with them?” Accordingly, Furlong invites teachers to reflect on their “stories of teaching-learning experiences that have shaped the implicit curriculum of their own lives” (2004). Reflecting on one’s teaching-learning experiences is therefore of major importance for all education, and in all subject matters. It is, in my opinion, crucial for Holocaust education in Germany. The topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust is – unavoidably and more than any other topic – connected with an intense legacy of stories, told and untold, for teachers as well as students. It is burdened with unconscious content and emotions such as guilt and shame, which were transgenerationally transmitted from one’s ancestors. The majority of today’s teachers and students are descendants of those millions of men and women who were bystanders or perpetrators – standing by, agreeing to, or actively participating in National Socialism. So, most teachers as well as students may, in one way or another, embody “the sins of their fathers,” mothers, grandparents, or ancestors even further back. This legacy – unless worked through and made conscious – causes overreactions, contradictory messages, blockades in thinking, and misunderstandings whenever the topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust comes up, as Borries (2004), Wagensommer (2003), Schwendemann & Marks (2002), and others have observed. This makes it such a highly sensitive, irritating, and emotionally-charged topic to teach, and one’s efforts are destined to not always be successful.
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So far, little is known about these hidden aspects of teaching the topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust. For example, in a study by Koenig (1997), it turned out that a teacher who consciously intended to make her pupils aware of and critical towards Nazism, unconsciously conveyed messages that motivated them to provoke her with Nazi slogans. There is a risk that children are made objects of continued transgenerational transmissions, with Holocaust education itself being a means of transmission – just as many of the Nazi followers themselves had been objects of the unresolved shame of their fathers and teachers (veterans of WWI) that was transmitted through their narrations and teachings. I hypothesise that some teachers today may, unconsciously, be conveying the message to students to be ashamed of and dishonour their parents and their parents’ generation. In this way, students of Holocaust education classes become objects of the teacher’s unresolved conflict with his or her parents. As a matter of fact, a great number of young Germans experience shame about the German past (Brendler, 1997) after having been taught lessons on National Socialism and the Holocaust in their classes on history, social studies, German literature, religious studies, or ethics. This finding is quite alarming since shame is such a painful emotion, yet so easily instrumentalised, as it was by National Socialism in the past and as it is by neo-Nazi organisations today. In my opinion, it is crucial to understand the hidden aspects of Holocaust education. What are the curricula for this topic that are embodied in the teachers themselves and through which the pedagogical content is unavoidably processed? What happens when the content of National Socialism and Holocaust education encounter the curriculum of life that the teachers bring with them? What happens when the content is processed by both the teachers and the students respectively? Presently, we are in the process of creating a research project in order to explore these questions and pilot-studies have already been carried out (Schwendemann & Marks, 2002; Wagensommer, 2003). The research is based on interviews with teachers and students. In return, we offer teachers support (supervision, counselling, continuing education) in their processes of reflecting on and integrating their (family) stories and transgenerationally transmitted legacies. With this narrative research approach, we intend to provide a role model for teachers to interact with their students in a narrative
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educational paradigm as well. Rather than merely impose facts and data on the students, which can have the effect of overwhelming them, teachers would listen to the students’ narrations about National Socialism and the Holocaust. They would listen to what they know already about the topic; to what they learned from family stories and secrets, media, peers, and other sources; to the emotions, metaphors, values, and so forth, that they associate with the topic; and they would support students in integrating their personal stories with their knowledge about German history in consistent and meaningful ways.
Narrative Education: Letting Go of Control Here is an example of the sort of approach to Holocaust education which my colleagues and I are anxious to help avoid. Tenth grade students were shown a film about a neo-Nazi. The teacher expressly invited the students to openly and spontaneously share their impressions, emotions, and thoughts about the film. However, in the way she paneled the discussion, she tried to ensure that students talked about National Socialism and neo-Nazism in highly moral, politically correct ways only. Horrified by Nazism (her father had been a Nazi perpetrator), she was determined to make her students anti-Nazi. In this way, the teacher actually prevented the students from dealing with their emotions, that is, their fascination with the neo-Nazis shown in the film. Indeed, her conscious interventions unconsciously actually provided an incentive for the students to provoke her with Nazi slogans (Koenig, 1997). Narrative approaches to Holocaust education ultimately face the issue of control. What if a student, for example, expresses sympathy for Hitler or neo-Nazi organisations? Can teachers allow such thoughts to be expressed? Can students be allowed to make their own mistakes in this matter? Can their process of learning and growing be trusted? Or do they have to be controlled and taught “top down”? These questions reflect two different paradigms of education that pervade many a pedagogical debate. These paradigms may be sketched out in terms of control versus trust, or mechanical versus organic. Some educationists, for instance, describe the learning process using metaphors of technology (Brezinka, 1971), such as the production of a car (Dehn, 2000). By contrast, an organic perspective would compare education with the growing of a plant. This need not be elaborated here; instead I will make a few observations and speculations.
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In different fields of German post-Nazi research, narrative approaches have developed rather belatedly and reluctantly; for example, in the disciplines of history, including “oral history” (Niethammer, 1983; Niethammer & Plato, 1985), medicine, and education (Kubli, 2001). To my knowledge, the first time that the term narrative Paedagogik (narrative pedagogy) was used was in 1979 in a book edited by Dieter Baacke and Theodor Schulze (Aus Geschichten Lernen, Learning From Stories), and then rather tentatively, in the foreword only. As the editors write, they “resisted the temptation” to title the book Narrative Pedagogy because it seemed to be “too early” to constitute a “new, different pedagogy” (Baacke & Schulze, 1979, p. 7). Still in 1998, narrative education appeared to be a rather new idea, and the educationist Neubert (1998) was formulating its “theoretical foundation.” Meanwhile, narrative approaches to education are developing slowly, with support from constructionists such as Reich (1998), Werning (1998), and Siebert (2002), and from “subject-oriented” didactics (Hoppe, 1996). As Baacke and Schulze (1979) write in the foreword of their book, there is an attempt to open up “new methodical approaches and conquer new terrain” (p. 7). I will return to the term “new” in a moment. In the meantime, this terminology is rather interesting, as it equates education with warfare. This equation has a long and influential tradition, especially in Germany. During National Socialism, education was indeed regarded as a battle, beginning with birth as the first “battlefield.” These are the words of Nazi educationist Johanna Haarer (1934), author of the book Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind (The German Mother and Her First Child) from 1934, which decades later was still very influential. Haarer wrote about the “war of births” (“Geburtenkrieg”) being the “mothers’ front” (“Front der Muetter”). As she puts it, the child’s basic needs were to be combated: If the comforter fails, dear mother, stay hard! Don’t take the child out of the bed, don’t hold it, don’t dandle it, don’t put it on your lap, don’t nurse it. If possible, shut the child in a quiet place where it is alone and don’t take it out before the next meal. Often it takes just a few trials of strength between mother and child and the problem is solved. (Haarer, 1934, p. 148) In 1922, another Nazi pedagogue, Ernst Krieck, called for the “liberation” of men from their “subjectivity” which was to be “suppressed mercilessly” (as cited in Giesecke, 1993, p. 37).
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One could ask whether that “battle” is really pacified today; whether the issue of control is resolved in German education; whether its reluctance towards narrative education, which is rooted in trust, may in part be a long-term effect of German5 history with its educational paradigm of control, a paradigm that fits well with the presently dominating notion of educational technology. Let me return to the 1979 foreword from Baacke and Schulze, describing narrative pedagogy as a “new, different pedagogy” and talking about the conquest of “new terrain” (p. 7). As a matter of fact, narrative education is not really that “new” if we look at the pedagogy of, for example, Janusz Korczak (1995). As Thomas Klein (1996) comments, Kosczak regarded each human being and its learning process as unique. Each child needs to give birth to his or her own thoughts. Korczak’s education is based on a fundamental trust in the child, which is regarded as an “organism.” Errors must be made and children are capable of correcting them. Likewise “negative” emotions such as anger, indignation, sadness, or hatred need not be smothered and gotten rid of as quickly as possible, but accepted. The teacher is not working against but with the children. Truth can be found only by watching and listening to children. Teaching, learning, and thinking are not monological actions, but dialogical ones (Klein, 1996; Korczak, 1995). What a difference to concepts of Nazi education as expressed, for example, by Johanna Haarer and Ernst Krieck! As Gérard Kahn argues, Korczak’s narrative education is rooted in Judaism and the tradition of Jewish enlightenment. While in Christianity, redemption happens “top down,” in Judaism reconciliation is primarily a matter of the heart, and is open to each individual at any time (Kahn, 1993). As Kahn comments, Jewish education has a humanistic core, insofar as it regards humans as precious, sacred, unique, and capable of surprises. Turning back, reconciliation, forgiveness, and newness are possible. Judaism views each human as “uniquely endowed” (Soloveitchick, as cited in Kahn, 1993, p. 84). Each child is regarded “an unfolding and developing person” (Goldman, as cited in Kahn, 1993, p. 85) who is to be respected. Each human is to find his or her own path. The connections with Korczak’s pedagogy are obvious; the fundamental importance of dialogue in Korczak’s work clearly refers to the work of Martin Buber (1970, 1996). Korczak negates the educational paradigm of modernity, whereby educational progress can be achieved by plan and control. He insists
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that children may develop differently from the teacher’s objectives for them (Schreier, 1998). As Oelkers points out, this is the reason why Korczak’s pedagogy is ignored in most anthologies about the history of education. His view of education is still a scandal for the dominating paradigm of education in modernity, claiming progress with an educational system which is regarded as a “tool” (Oelkers, 1982) and based on control. Korczak was murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Treblinka in 1942, together with the children of the orphanage of which he was the director. Schools of other pedagogues with narrative educational concepts (“Reformpaedagogen”), such as Maria Montessori, were closed by the Nazis or absorbed by their school system, their teachers forced into emigration or political conformity (“Gleichschaltung”). In conclusion, I ponder about the long-term effects of the National Socialism on post-war education in Germany. How is it that narrative approaches in education have developed only reluctantly, often ignoring the work of narrative educationists such as Janusz Korczak? Might this be the aftermath of Nazi education with its paradigm of control? The Nazis murdered 6 million Jewish fellow citizens and also annihilated a pedagogical tradition which – unlike Nazi education – was characterised by trust, respect, uniqueness, dialogue, in short, narrative education. In German history, and ultimately during National Socialism, dialogue was destroyed (Thuermer-Rohr, 2002), and narratives became toxic. To (re-)discover the creative potentials of narration6 and to (re-)establish a tradition of narrative education, we have to begin by telling the story of its destruction. We may have to learn dialogue from scratch. Dialogue is more than a mere addition of talking plus listening, which is still practiced dominantly both in schools and in teachers’ formation (Uhle, 1989). Dialogue requires “I” and “Thou,” and a realm of “Between” (Buber, 1970) in which trust and disclosure is possible; a “Between” that is beyond control and shaming (Marks, 2003b). To learn dialogue we need attentiveness, respect, letting go of control, appreciation for people (“Thou”), and genuine interest in their stories. This will be the ground on which learning both about history and from history can prosper.
Summary The facts about National Socialism and the Holocaust are, indeed, overwhelming: the sheer number of victims, the extent of their
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suffering, the Nazis’ brutality, their ingenious methods of murdering. The moral implications are obvious: Never Again! However, confronting students with these facts does not in itself suffice to ensure their moral growth. Moral growth can never be ensured. Education, unlike the production of a car, is open and uncontrollable by nature. Teaching about National Socialism and the Holocaust may even induce counterproductive reactions when teachers or students are unwittingly influenced by the unresolved Nazi past of their ancestors, which has been passed on to them in unconscious ways, that is, as “family secrets.” Therefore, it is crucial to understand the hidden aspects of this specific topic. What happens when the pedagogical content of the topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust encounters the “inner curriculum” embodied in the teacher or the student? These questions need to be thoroughly explored.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am grateful to William Randall, Dolores Furlong, Deb Pushor, and Nichola Hayton.
NOTES 1. While the terms perpetrators and bystanders refer to people’s actions, it is, in my opinion, necessary to explore and deal with their motives. 2. Quotes and book titles were translated from German into English by S. Marks. 3. The term generation is written in italics because it is imprecise, even dubious, yet it expresses the transgenerational quality of the unresolved Nazi past. 4. This differs from narrations of Holocaust survivors or members of the anti-Nazi resistance, which are not addressed in this paper. 5. Ultimately, the issue of control is also rooted in the dominant Christian tradition of “original sin” (Fox, 1983). 6. The potentials of “self-actualization and self-creation” (Randall, 1995, p. 33).
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