Collateral Damage of History Education: National Socialism and the Holocaust in German Family Memory

Harald Welzer Collateral Damage of History Education: National Socialism and the Holocaust in German Family Memory HISTORY IS NOT ONLY ON THE CURRICULUM, A N D IT IS NOT ONLY THE subject of books, journals, radio and television programs, or public debates that explicitly deal w ith the past and w ith the question of how to rem em ber it in an adequate way.* History is also conveyed en passant. It is inscribed in the fabric of everyday life, in people’s habits and routines, in things they live w ith and places they go to. Be it in the course of day-to-day conversations, be it in the context of events in the life of a community, historical experiences are passed on from one generation to the next. Rather than, first and foremost, thinking about the past, people here are doing history. In w hat follows, I shall deal w ith the question of how experi­ ences and m emories are handed down in family contexts. It is, to be m ore precise, German family contexts and the ways recollections of the national-socialist past are handed down from one generation to the next. The analyses will include personal memories of people who spent part of their life in the Third Reich as well as the recollections of their children and grandchildren. These analyses are part of an extensive study (Welzer et al., 2002) on the form ation of historical consciousness in the course of which social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2 008 287 m em bers of 40 East and W est G erm an families w ere interview ed (n=182). Each person was interviewed individually and independently from the others. The m em bers of the older generation, the so-called contem poraiy witnesses, were asked to give an account of their life in the Third Reich; the mem bers of the younger generations, their chil­ dren and grandchildren, were questioned about what they know of the life of their ancestors in this historical period. Furthermore, individual family members were brought together for a family session to talk about personal histories as well as about the histoiy of the Third Reich. The interviewers were instructed to follow as m uch as possible the rules of ordinary conversation. A list of them es that should be touched on in the interview actually served as a kind of im plicit guideline for the interview, but apart from that the interviewers were free to spon­ taneously react to their interlocutors as well as to the situation they found themselves in. As we were interested in the dynamics of presentday intergenerational discourse on the Third Reich we conceived of the interviews as actually reflecting these dynamics and not so m uch as a window on the somehow hidden social world of our interviewees. HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE THIRD REICH In Germany, Holocaust education, teaching through m emorials, and school lessons about National Socialism and the Holocaust are quite successful. Survey data show that young Germans are generally quite well inform ed about the historical events and can associate correctly w ith keywords such as “Auschwitz” and “SS.” Thus, education on the history of the Third Reich m ight be considered a successfully completed project—but only if one does not ask w hat use the young recipients of these educational offerings actually make of the product. Knowledge and the use of knowledge are two different things. The transm ission o f history is accom panied by a range of subtexts—fascinating, daunting, anesthetizing—and historical infor­ m ation is interpreted w ithin a frame of reference that exists outside of school (Wineburg, 2001, 2002; Seixas 2001; Welzer et al., 2007). As recent studies show, young people in Germany acquire knowledge of 288 social research history in general, and of Nazism and the Holocaust in particular, in a way very different from w hat their educators have intended. Formal lessons aim to pass on knowledge, but they cannot com pete w ith the em otional wallop of images from the past offered by m ost other sources. But research on the effects of Holocaust educational efforts has...