Holocaust Education: Issues and Approaches (review)

Holocaust Education: Issues and Approaches, Samuel Totten (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002), xi + 195 pp., $24.99.

Teaching and writing about the Holocaust has changed fundamentally in the last ten to fifteen years. Rather than continuing the simplification that the Holocaust represents a direct outgrowth of traditional antisemitism and was, in effect, the largest pogrom in history, Holocaust scholars began to explore the workings of the administrative apparatus of the Nazi state, the "near ubiquitous complicity," as Hannah Arendt put it, of the civilian population, and the basic transformations of ideology and action in the history of anti-Jewish violence. The focus of Holocaust studies therefore shifted from chronicling the suffering of the victims and the pathological hatred shared by the leaders of the Third Reich to scrutinizing perpetrators such as railroad bureaucrats and workers, doctors, lawyers, architects, industrialists, bankers, and accountants.

Those economic, administrative, and bureaucratic agendas, examined in textbooks such as Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews (1961, 1985) or through documents, epitomize routine operations—railroad bills of lading, bills of sale, exchanges between administrative offices, memoranda full of euphemisms, and descriptions of normal office procedures. Together, they embody the Holocaust, are the stuff that drove it. How do teachers take such boring materials and convert them into engaging, vital information about the consequences of routinized indifference and business as usual?

According to the late Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, in 1992 virtually all of the pedagogical materials were poorly conceived, painfully inadequate, unhistorical, and unsophisticated.¹ Forbidding to both teachers and students, most curricula offered moralistic or shocking, sentimental or uninformed courses of study. They seemed to have either artificially freed themselves of the ghosts or been possessed by them. Some assumed missionary roles, and almost all seemed to presume prior knowledge on the part of the teachers. In short, where the subject was taught, it was taught badly; more to the point, because of the poverty of resources, it was not being taught at all. American or European history textbooks also proved inadequate, averaging one paragraph, approximately seventy words, on the Holocaust. Several Holocaust programs emphasize a split between heinous Nazis, who personify evil, and helpless Jewish victims, who personify innocent good. Both groups thus become dehumanized and unreal. References to "the Jews" or "the Germans" abound and do not raise questions about which Jews and which Germans, implying that whole peoples think and act monolithically.

Few scholars have done more to attempt to correct this lamentable situation than Samuel Totten, professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He has authored or coauthored more than fifteen books and articles on Holocaust education. Now he has produced a "reference" work to assist teachers at the secondary and college levels who want to brave teaching about the Holocaust.

What does it mean to omit the Holocaust from a historical curriculum? Borrowing from Elliot Eisner's Educational Imagination (1979), Totten asserts that such an omission "distorts the history of humanity and...the history of the twentieth century" (p. 3). In contrast, Totten's goal "is to devise a study of the Holocaust in which all students are left with something to ponder for the rest of their lives. Then and only then, it seems, will such a study be worth the time, effort, and agony of confronting such horrific events and issues" (p. 36). The book presents pragmatic, thoughtful, organized, and historically informed suggestions on how to achieve that goal and how to avoid the most common missteps.

From start to finish, "rationales" to "conclusions," Totten focuses on the critical need to "complicate," to reverse the trends of simplification that writers like Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Raul Hilberg, and others have deplored. Totten insists on provoking students to engage in "critical thought and personal growth." In part, this means positing "gnawing" questions whose answers remain inconclusive and disquieting. Dealing with both content and pedagogy, the book abounds with issues to be extensively addressed: a "partial list of essential topics...