Holocaust education is no small matter in places like, Israel, Britain and the United States. As a Swedish teacher and educational scientist, you cannot help being surprised and impressed by the huge collection of guidelines and curricula on Holocaust education assembled by the US Holocaust Memorial Museums (USHMM). The collection in the museum basement is open to all teachers and educationalists. A number of librarians are on hand to help you track down a particular guideline, even if you cannot specify exactly what you are looking for and can only describe your mission in vague terms.
This approach is probably indicative of an educational system dictated by the curricula for each individual subject. In Sweden, as you know, we are more accustomed to management by objectives than management by rule. Several of my teaching and research colleagues in Britain, at the Spirou Institute in London, for instance, and in Beth Shalom outside Nottingham, have observed that the number of teachers seeking further training about the Holocaust has increased drastically following the introduction of a compulsory curriculum for Holocaust education in the early 1990s. The question then arises: what is this dramatic increase in teacher training going to lead to, and why do teachers suddenly feel the need for extra training in this field? These questions are highly relevant in Sweden, too, not because a new compulsory subject has been introduced but because for the past three years we have been actively spotlighting the historic event known as the Holocaust in almost every conceivable kind of learning situation – schools, the home, study circles, and so forth. My purpose in presenting this article is to describe and discuss various educational perspectives in relation to the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is an historical fact that ought to make us reflect on the educational opportunities involved
A famous article by the German philosopher T W Adorno, Erziung nach Auschwitz, begins thus: ‘The first demand that should be made on all education is that it should never allow another Auschwitz. This demand overshadows all else, so I consider it self-evident that I do not have to go into the reasons why. (1)
After this opening, he presents his arguments for why schools must deal with the mechanisms that led to Auschwitz. He does not argue specifically in favour of teaching schoolchildren about Auschwitz, which is not to say he is against it. Adorno’s point is that the mechanisms that were of decisive importance for the Holocaust are a part of society and therefore a contemporary problem.
It is precisely this connection with our own day and age that makes history such a complex subject, and we must constantly ask ourselves whether we should approach it on the basis of problems deriving from our own contemporary view of the world or whether we should use it as a point of departure in describing why we are where we are today.
A meeting of minds, a collision or an exchange of views?
The explicit endeavour of the Living History project is to raise consciousness among pupils and other groups about the historiography of the Holocaust as a means of combating racism, Nazism and xenophobia. Consequently, the declared aim is to use history to influence the modern age, which is always both a complex and a controversial course to take. The Holocaust thus becomes more than an academic subject – it takes on additional perspectives and, as I have noted, my aim here is to describe the various educational approaches. It is abundantly clear that there is a difference between the Holocaust as a subject of academic research and the Holocaust as an educational subject. Whereas academic freedom is considerable as regards how the Holocaust may be researched in historical terms, Holocaust education always takes place in an explicit framework. In our objective-oriented Swedish schools there are of course no plans describing in detail how Holocaust education is to proceed, but such teaching must meet the requirements of the national curriculum, or rather it is supposed to represent a stage in the fulfilment of one or more of the curriculum objectives.
While academic research on the Holocaust can freely discuss things like whether the Holocaust was unique or not, the Holocaust as an educational subject must be curriculum-related. This does not imply a contradiction between academic research and classroom tuition – on the contrary, classroom work is based on genuine historical facts that have been assembled through research. But I reject the idea of the teacher simply functioning as a sort of transformer, who reduces the degree of difficulty so that academic knowledge becomes easier to manage for the various age levels and groups. Teachers should not only dictate the forms, they must also be educational leaders who invest their tuition with meaning. It is part of a teacher’s task to deal with all the points of view concerning a given subject and to turn them into useful school work. In the case of the Holocaust, opinions differ as to how the train of events ought to be interpreted in part or as a whole, and we have long abandoned the idea that this is simply a case of intentionalists versus functionalists. You then have the question of how education is to be viewed in general – is the point of it to provide factual knowledge or should it also have a fostering role? But as though this were not enough, there is the further question of what teaching is and how it should be provided – should it be thematised, interdisciplinary or problemoriented? Somewhere in the middle of all this stands the individual teacher, wondering which perspective to choose.
Didactical matters
In order to give all these perspectives a structure, teachers can proceed from the three universal didactical questions:
• Why should I teach? – the Legitimacy Question
• What should I teach? – the Selection Question
• How should I teach it? – the Communication Question.
These three questions separate the perspectives described earlier. They do not necessarily need to be addressed in that order. You can if you like start with the Communication Question. But in the case of a subject area such as the present one, where it is not absolutely clear what can be achieved and what ought to be achieved, it is a good idea to contextualise the teaching situation. As a teacher, I must have some idea about the context in which the education is provided before I choose the form.
For what purpose should the Holocaust historiography be used?
One extreme is to view the Holocaust as a unique occurrence that can and should be studied disinterestedly and in a true positivist. The other extreme is to seek the relevance of the Holocaust for contemporary life. By placing it in a contextual relationship to something modern, you link factual knowledge to human interests. It happens to be my conviction that knowledge and human interests always interlock even when people claim disinterested study. The question is simply what sort of knowledge you link to what kind of interest. This can be discussed on two levels: on the one hand on a metalevel that questions the political relevance of the subject matter for modern life, as for instance Klas-Göran Karlsson has done with the Swedish Government project Living History. (2) But the question can also be discussed from a didactic viewpoint. Even if both levels are worth discussing, I will confine myself to the latter. Using Habermas’s definition of ‘knowledge interests’ (3) as a starting point, it is possible to describe different approaches to the didactic choice of material.
• Technical knowledge interest – A controlling knowledge interest where the pupil is expected to master a certain field in order to produce results (e g more effective medicines).
• Hermeneutic or practical knowledge interest – Concerned with interpreting phenomena in various connections. Understanding is the primary goal.
• Emancipatory knowledge interest – A liberating knowledge interest that is verified by changing the factors constraining liberation.
Habermas never argued that one form of knowledge interest was more important than another. On the contrary, all were necessary. The problem according to Habermas is that we have been operating from the wrong interest in some sectors. It is apparent, for instance, that the system sphere tends to try and colonise the life sphere.
Applied in this context, the technical knowledge interest may be viewed as a desire to establish pupils’ levels of attainment by means of various tests for the purpose of arriving at an assessment or grade. The hermeneutic interest can be viewed as an endeavour to develop the pupil’s ability to interpret and understand the historical event in question. The emancipatory interest, finally, proceeds from the notion that knowledge of the past can be used to question the present.
To return to Adorno, the task then is to identify the mechanisms that were crucial to the development of the Holocaust and place them in relation to modern society. Are they still with us? In that case, how do they operate? What is my role as a pupil, a teacher or a citizen in relation to these mechanisms?
Once again, there is no conflict between these interests. If the third and last is to work, the requisite knowledge, i e the hard facts, in the first must have been properly established. If you choose to take Adorno’s approach to the Holocaust as an educational issue, the subject will be made up of a framework where the structure is firmly rooted in historical fact while the content is more controversial. In the present case, the content is society’s common ‘code’ of fundamental democratic values.
This code, of course, is neither self-evident nor unambivalent. You might easily think that it comprises a basic set of established values – ‘the equal worth of all’, ‘equality’ and so forth – but it would be more accurate to view it as a basis for values that can develop and become comprehensible through dialogue. To reduce democratic values to the policy documents that variously seek to define some kind of code of ethics would be to alienate pupils from the real world they occupy. The form and substance of these values and their meaning can only be explained in relation to the reality in which we live our lives, where history is a very important part. Historical fact (the framework) provides efforts on behalf of fundamental democratic values with an authenticity within which we can tackle the concepts of ‘autonomy’ and ‘responsibility’. An assertion that needs further clarification.
What do I as a teacher want to say by holding up the Holocaust as an example?
The history of the Holocaust does not describe a clear-cut, linear course. Sometimes the paths it takes seem both winding and labyrinthine.
When the chief prosecutor in Munich, Carl Wintersberg, was confronted with the situation in KZ Dachau in 1933, he was shocked. Probably at what was actually taking place there, but principally because it was unlawful. On paper, Germany in March 1933 was still to a great extent a law-based state, even if emergency clauses were being invoked to allow the government to enact laws without parliamentary approval. But as yet, not many laws had been amended and Wintersberg described KZ Dachau as unlawful. Consequently, he took legal action against the camp command, citing deprivation of liberty, assault and murder. The classic question is: what happened to the prosecutor? The answer you usually hear is that he got to see Dachau from the inside. Almost 70 years on, people are still astounded to learn that nothing happened to him personally, even if the case he brought was constantly delayed until such time as it could be dropped and 18 months later he was moved to a less prominent position in northern Bayern.
It seems as though the ‘Goldhagen Debate’ (4) is having a hard time making itself heard in Sweden – just why, one can only surmise. To speculate, however, this may possibly be due to a conviction that the Holocaust was carried out within the framework of a strict issuing of orders that could only be disobeyed on pain of death. The very idea that people exercised free, individual choice in participating in, say, the mass killings committed by the Einsatzkommando seems as terrifying as it is improbable. Yet both Goldhagen and Browning show that there was plenty of scope for free choice in Reserve Police Battalion 101, and proceed to project this onto the Holocaust machinery as a whole. The debate concerns not whether free choice existed but what that this choice looked like and how the soldiers made use of it. In this respect, if their positions may be defined so briefly, Goldhagen contended that the soldiers used their free choice to shoot Jews as they were anti-Semites, while Browning argued that they dared not exercise their freedom of choice. This was not from fear of formal punishment but because it was easier to go with the others into the woods to the place of execution – which involved a passive decision – than to stay behind in the town or village, which involved an active decision.
A passive decision does not have to be explained or legitimised to your colleagues, while an active decision does. Back to the question of what one wants to say by referring to the Holocaust. There may be other things you want to explain, such as what the ultimate consequence of racism may be, or what blind obedience can lead to, etc. Whatever it is you want to say, you have to establish a clear link between it and the historical reality in point, otherwise you risk simplifying and diluting the matter. There are a number of infamous examples, in Britain and other places, of the Holocaust being cited to counteract bullying in school.
The starting point for the present article is the interaction between the individual and the system. What often appears to be both an explicit and a tacit a priori is that it was the National Socialist state that created the spectators through violence, the threat of violence and indoctrination. This is indeed a part of the truth, but hardly the whole truth – the spectators helped create the system by an unparalleled display of personal adjustment and integration. The individual’s interaction vis-à-vis the system can be described in terms of people’s desire and capacity to adjust. Such adjustment can then be placed in relation to our own society. In order to investigate this kind of adjustment, you have to separate the system from the life sphere in your historical presentation and put the following questions:
• What was the system’s intent? (i e the National Socialist state)
• What was the function of the system?
• What was the individual’s (life sphere’s) intent?
• What was the individual’s function?
These questions bring to mind the classic debate between intentionalists and functionalists, but it is clear that neither of them can explain the genesis of the Holocaust or its implementation on their own. In general, you could say that intentionalists have no difficulty explaining how the Holocaust developed but then find it hard to explain the actions of the individual participants at various stages along the way and to explain how Germany (i e West Germany) could return to being a humanistic society. If, as Goldhagen claimed, there was an explicit desire among the Germans to exterminate all Jews, it is difficult to understand what happened to this desire after 1945.
The functionalists find it difficult to apply, say, Milgram’s theory, which describes our inclination to obey authority, in seeking to explain the origins of the Holocaust (i e why the Jews in particular), but have no difficulty making clear the unbroken chain of German administration before, during and after the Holocaust, when very few individuals were substituted from one stage to the next. This is why in a teaching situation it is important to problematise the complex relationship between system and individual and to split up the Holocaust into its different phases and different levels. A progression can be seen from, say, the housewives who earned money on the side by helping to amend the civic registry following the introduction of the Nuremberg laws, to the train drivers who drove the trains, to the administrators who ran the various camps and made sure they were properly paid for the slave labour they hired out to companies, to those on the Eastern front who actively shot people or who were responsible for the industrial extermination process, to those who planned the various phases, to those who legitimised these actions (whether beforehand or afterwards).
Individual responsibility in the National Socialist state
In charting the origins of the Holocaust, we must focus on the moral responsibility of the individual. This is to be found in the interaction between the life sphere and the system. Was Frau Müller the housewife forced to help revise the civic registry, where her task was to record which members of the population were Jews? No, she was not. It was a job you applied for. Why did he apply for it? Because she was an anti-Semite or because she needed the money? There is no answer to this question – here is where independent reflection and analysis begin on the basis of the historical facts at our disposal.
On the one hand we can argue that she would not have performed this task were it not for the presence of anti- Semitism, but we are then referring to the anti-Semitism of the system, for it was the system that sought to distinguish between Jews and Aryans. So without this anti-Semitism there would have been no work on the side for Frau Müller. Was the nature of the work important to her personally? Yes, if she was an anti- Semite it probably was. But if she was not, would it then have been impossible for her to do this work? Probably not – the extra money may well have been enough to persuade her to take on this fairly simple task. Regardless of whether or not she was an anti-Semite, could Frau Müller in 1935 have known about the fate of the Jews? Of course she could not have been aware of the ‘final solution’, but she could have known that the Jews did not stand to benefit from being deprived of their citizenship or from being forbidden to take part in a number of both private and public areas of community life, and that her role was to make it easier to distinguish Jews from the rest of the population.
We can see that Frau Müller’s adjustment occurs in several different ways and that it is definitely not a question of adjustment by coercion. She is adjusting to an anti-Semitic system that in practice does not insist on her being an anti- Semite herself, even if we are unable to determine whether she in fact was one or not. Her adjustment may be of a financial nature. Is it possible to adjust to work you do not believe in for financial gain? A banal question, of course, with a simple answer – it goes on all the time. But getting a pupil to ask himself or herself that question is not banal. This is because it embodies a part (far from the whole) of the Holocaust’s origin, implementation and conclusion while at the same time describing problems in our own day and age.
Separating morality and action
The question of whether Frau Müller was aware of the consequences of her actions or not causes us to examine the relationship between morality and action. In his book ‘Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason in the Search for Truth in the Sciences’ (5) René Descartes described the three rules in his own personal code of morals. The first was to “…obey the laws and customs of my country…”, but noting that it was not always easy to be sure of people’s true intentions, he added: “…in order to ascertain that these were their real opinions, I should observe what they did rather than what they said, not only because in the corrupt state of our manners there are few people who desire to say all that they believe, but also because many are themselves ignorant of their beliefs.” This first rule and its explanatory note incorporate one of the most important mechanisms behind the Holocaust. It might be described as the separation of avowed morality (moral consciousness and intent) from consummated morality (i e the action performed as a function of stimuli-response rather than an action performed individually and based on autonomous principles) in the public sphere.
When the mass extermination of Jews began in 1941, this was in accordance with the “…laws and customs of my country…” and it took place in the public sphere, which means that public customs bore responsibility for such actions. Unlike in the case of pogroms, the participants did not require personal hatred to motivate them nor did they need to take responsibility for the work content to any great degree. This is because the predominant values in the public sphere differ from those in the private. In the public sphere, the predominant values are instrumental ones such as duty, while the private sphere is dominated by terminal values, i e values you aspire to that give meaning to your life. As everyone knows, we have to use instrumental values as a way of realising terminal values – in modern society, we find it very hard to imagine life without both a public sphere and a private. This in itself is clearly not peculiar to German society in 1933-45 but is a feature of all modern societies. Thus two different patterns of action emerge, one in the public sphere and one in the private. Public action might be termed strategic as it primarily seeks to bring benefit to the private sphere – perhaps something as banal as working for an ourly wage – in order to realise terminal values there.
Thus taking responsibility for the form of your work is more important than taking responsibility for the content as it is the system that decides the content, and in the present case we are talking about the anti-Semitism of the system. If you object to the content, you may well find it harder to exploit the instrumental values. In the private sphere, however, we have what Habermas terms communicative action (6), i e we take personal responsibility for both the form and the content of our actions. Or put more simply, we are obliged to do what we say and say what we do if people in our immediate circle are to understand and respect us.
Thus we can see that the assumption of moral responsibility differs strikingly between the public sphere and the private. In the private sphere you assume full responsibility for both motive and deed while in the public sphere your only responsibility is to perform the tasks you have been entrusted with, i e to take technical responsibility rather than moral responsibility. Thus your personal motives are totally irrelevant as long as you do what is expected of you. The question we teachers have to ask ourselves is how we are dealing with this mechanism today. Is there not a danger that the school system is reproducing this separation of morality and action? Isn’t this precisely what is meant when young teachers and trainees are warned that the pupils are good at decoding their tuition, i e working out how to go about things in order to please the teacher?
Isn’t it our duty as teachers to get the pupils to work out how they are to go about things in order to please themselves rather than us?
This is nothing new, perhaps, nor is it controversial. But by basing our actions on this insight, and using the Holocaust as an historical framework, we may be able to deepen people’s understanding through Holocaust education and help them realise that we all have something to learn from the Holocaust.
(1) Originally a radio talk on Hessischer Rundfunk frpm 18 April 1966.
(2) Karlsson K-G. Varför sekelslutets Förintelseintresse? (Why this turn-of-the-century interest in the Holocaust?)
Paper published at the 7th Nordic Conference on History and Didactics in Trondheim, Noway, 9 September 1999.
(3) Originally published as an appendix to his book, Erkenntnis und Interesse, published in 1968.
(4) The Goldhagen Debate derived from two books by historians Browning and Goldhagen on Reserve Police Battalion 101 which served at one time in Poland. The books are based on the same source material, consisting of police interrogation of members of the battalion some 20 yeas after the war, when a preliminary investigation was launched into its wartime activities.
(5) Descartes, R. Om metoden (Discourse on Method) pp 36-37 Björck & Börjesson, Stockholm 1918
(6) Habermas J. Kommunikativt handlande (Communicative Action) Daidalos, Göteborg 1995
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