Interpreting Legacies of the Past, Shaping Lessons for the Future: Holocaust Educational Media and Collective Memory Formation

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

A number of recent articles and opinion pieces in both English-language media such as The New York Times and The Atlantic and German outlets like Deutsche Welle have highlighted the growing challenges faced in Holocaust education in Germany and around the world. Education about the Holocaust has become both particularly pertinent and increasingly challenging as the survivor generation passes away and in the context of an upswing of right-wing ethnonationalism. This raises questions about the best practices of Holocaust education, as well as Holocaust education’s relationship to testimony and to broader streams of collective memory/memories.
This panel presents a scholarly approach to these issues in both the United States and Germany. It considers two questions: 1) how effective Holocaust educational media is and has been in achieving its pedagogical goals and 2) how various forms of educational media, in both historical and contemporary contexts, have contributed to or challenged collective memory of the Holocaust. Educational media—including textbooks, museums, and memorials—is often dismissed as ineffective and/or is perceived to lag behind or simply mirror trends in broader Holocaust memory culture. This interdisciplinary panel, however, complicates this assumption through empirical studies of the successes and failures of educational media. It also explores how the narratives and representations put forth by Holocaust educational media interact with family memories and/or broader societal collective memory. The panel seeks to determine when educational media challenges already present societal narratives of the Holocaust, when it simply reflects broader cultural values, when it serves as a change agent to push memory culture forward, as well as when it lags behind the consciousness in the public sphere. The panel will thus promote to a richer understanding of how education has contributed and continues to contribute to the development of critical Holocaust memory.

Sub Unit

• Holocaust Studies

Chair

• Gabriel Natan Finder, University of Virginia

Individual Presentations

• Holocaust Museums: Generating Knowledge through Aesthetic Spaces - Natasha Goldman, Bowdoin College

• Making Holocaust Lessons: American Educators, the Cold War, and Civil Rights, 1945-1963 - Ryan Abt, Texas A&M University

• “The people were helpless against a system, which became even ever more devilish:” The WEGE DER VÖLKER Textbook and Early Educational VERGANGENHEITSBEWÄLTIGUNG in West Germany - Daniela R.P. Weiner, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Respondent

• Daniel H. Magilow, University of Tennessee - Knoxville