E a large-scale one Survey commissioned by the Jewish Claims Conference discovered last year that knowledge about the Holocaust is declining, especially among younger people. On the occasion of the memorial hour in the Bundestag on Wednesday and a very extensive memory infrastructure in the country, the question must be asked why this is the case – and how the development can be stopped given the fact that the last survivors are now very old.
One thesis: The effect of direct emotional confrontation on young people is unclear and possibly even counterproductive. A tenth grade class goes to a concentration camp memorial, tears flow. Or jokes are made to cover up one’s own insecurity or excessive demands. What is more sustainable and better – and this is already being done in many places – is to delve into local history: Which Jewish students were suddenly no longer there at your own school in 1938, what happened to them? Continued injustice after 1945 is also a research topic: Why didn’t the descendants of the murdered Jewish shopkeeper get their business back after the war?
There is too little talk about the specific entanglements of ordinary Germans. There are still many boxes and boxes in the families’ attics waiting to be opened: What exactly can you see in the photos that the great-grandfather and Wehrmacht soldier brought back from the Eastern Front? Why is there a barn burning in the background? Are there people in there? Such disturbing images exist. Often it is only later generations who look at contemporary documents without a blind spot. Digitized archive holdings and digital location recognition offer research opportunities that did not exist 10 years ago. The involvement of the Wehrmacht – simply because it occupied areas into which the SS murder troops could move in – has been well documented since the 1990s.
Or the connections on the “home front”: Why did the bombed-out grandparents in Berlin or Frankfurt am Main actually get a new apartment so quickly? It is not unlikely that she was assigned the apartment of a deported Jewish family. And the beautiful dresser, which Grandma bought cheaply at a “Jewish auction”. and which is now with the granddaughter, would also be a family research topic.
Gaza and the Holocaust
A major topic in history education is how to teach young people with an immigrant background about the Holocaust; The direct connection is missing here. Quite a few teachers have probably heard the sentence “What the Germans did to the Jews, the Israelis are also doing to the Palestinians.” Here it is appropriate not to accuse 16-year-olds of anti-Semitism, as this will destroy such a conversation with a wooden hammer. But rather to clearly state the clear differences between the Holocaust and the Gaza War – the Nazis were concerned with the industrial, planned destruction of an entire people over years – but to give Gaza enough space elsewhere.
The memory of the German crime against humanity, the Holocaust, has no expiration date. But because we know more about the mechanisms of the extermination of the Jews and those who profited from them than we did 30 years ago, the work of remembrance must not become rigid in rituals.