Keywords

Introduction

The reunification of Germany not only marked a new political way forward, but also created a space to reassess Germany’s past. The process of reunification and subsequent re-examination of identity and memory has also meant confronting the reality of multiculturalism in contemporary Germany. As the schools attempt to navigate these multicultural realities, engagement with the Holocaust may well present unexpected challenges. In this chapter I focus on one German state, and investigate the conflicts and compromises presented by the demands to have both robust Holocaust education and multicultural education.

In the decade that followed political reunification, particularly once the Social Democrats ascended to the chancellorship in 1998, the longstanding emphasis on a blood-based (jus sanguinis), ethnocultural (Brubaker 1992) German identity was abandoned in favor of recasting Germany as a multicultural country (Joppke 2000; Thraenhardt 2000). This effort to recast Germany as a multicultural society, represented formally by national legislation aimed at changing citizenship requirements and developing immigration policies, is a continuation of Germany’s reconciliation with National Socialism. In part these laws, and the discussions which accompanied them, highlighted the fact that recognising Germany as a multicultural nation means coming to terms with how “others” were, and are, incorporated into the German state. German Jews, Roma, and German-speaking Slavs all lived in and contributed to German society, but were constructed as non-Germans prior to World War II (Brubaker 1992; Klopp 2002; Thraenhardt 2000). Even after the Holocaust, other groups were not included as Germans insofar as citizenship laws precluded them from attaining citizenship and immigration, according to the letter of the law, did not exist (Joppke 2000). In particular, the guestworker (Gastarbeiter) population recruited from Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Turkey became disenfranchised from the democratic process (Ortloff 2007, 2009): even into their third generation of living in Germany they had no right to citizenship. Indeed, as Brubaker (1992) has argued, the late political unification of Germany (under Bismarck) specifically required an ethnocultural notion of Germanness to be promoted and reified. In short, the lack of political unity, what Brubaker terms “pre-political Germany”, meant that some foundation for identity from outside of the political realm was necessary; the process of othering on the basis of ethnicity, race, and religion made an ethnocultural “Germanness” possible (Gosewinkel 1998; Joppke 2000). After World War II, the Cold War, and in particular the existence of ethnocultural Germans in the Soviet bloc, allowed for this ethnocultural sense of German identity to be further propagated—despite its obvious overlap with Nazi ideology (Joppke 2000; Rathel 1995). Thus, reunification has created a space where the diversity of the present German state must be reconciled with long-held notions of what it means to be German.

Ultimately this re-examination of national identity has educational implications. If future citizens are to be prepared for citizenship in a multicultural German state, then it follows that a citizenship education process must be developed, one which both recognises the implications of the past and embraces a multicultural future. In this chapter, I probe into the question of how, in the conservative German state of Bavaria, official citizenship education policy (in the form of state-approved textbooks in social studies) and teachers’ reflections on their implementation of this policy, can be used to reconcile Germany’s past with a new multicultural education.

In particular, I examine anti-violence education, a required part of social studies education in the Hauptschule, as a means of understanding how education policy and teachers are specifically addressing xenophobia and othering. The Hauptschule is a form of secondary school ending at the 9th grade, in which students are prepared for blue-collar apprenticeships to be completed after graduation.

This subject is critical for explicating how German schools are confronting questions of identity because, as explained above, othering has been an integral part of German identity. Further, anti-violence education has become a primary means of addressing the Holocaust in the social studies curriculum. Although education about the Holocaust and World War II occurs primarily through history classes, the anti-violence education unit, as my study reveals, allows teachers to connect to the Holocaust in ways that are relevant to examining contemporary society. Thus, understanding Holocaust education in Germany requires not just a study of Holocaust education itself, but also an examination of how future German citizens are being prepared to embrace an inclusive German identity.

Methodology

This chapter evolved out of a larger exploration of changes in multicultural education policy and practice in Bavaria (Ortloff 2007, 2009; Ortloff and McCarty 2009), based on a qualitative analysis of Hauptschule and Realschule social studies textbooks and interviews with 58 teachers at these two school levels. The Realschule is a school form ending in 10th grade, in which students prepare for a technical education and technical-oriented apprenticeships; in this chapter I use only data from the Hauptschule. The data provided a window into the twin processes of grappling with the legacy of National Socialism while conceptualising a future or present multicultural German state. This coupling, of multicultural and Holocaust education, was present in the textbooks, but emerged most strikingly as the teachers discussed their teaching practice and how they implemented the prescribed curriculum.

By coupling, as I will explain in more depth below, I mean that the curriculum, and in particular the teachers, connect the teaching of both anti-violence education and multicultural education to teaching about the Holocaust. In short, teaching about the Holocaust, an event in the past, functions as a distancing mechanism, fulfilling the prescribed discussions of present-day xenophobic violence and other challenges to multicultural living from a comfortable and familiar vantage point. At the same time, paradoxically, teachers’ discussion of the Holocaust effectively excludes non-ethnic Germans. Non-ethnic Germans are therefore excluded from a multicultural education in multiple ways because of their ethnicity.

In this chapter I re-examine data from the larger study on multiculturalism in German education with the explicit intent of probing the relationship between teaching about Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust and teaching about a multicultural notion of German identity. This is significant, not only because it contributes to our broader understanding about the status of Holocaust education in Europe, but also because it contextualises the role Holocaust education plays in pushing German identity towards a more inclusive posture. Thus this chapter unites two strands of educational research, Holocaust education (cf. Becher 2008a, 2008b; Deckert-Peaceman 2002; Deckert-Peaceman and Kloesser 2002; Pingel 2000, 2002) and multicultural education (cf. Aurenheimer 2006; Himmelmann 2004, 2006; Klopp 2002; Luchtenberg and Nieke 1994). Previous studies on the German case in both of these fields either frame Holocaust education as something separate from multicultural education or have recognised, abstractly, that multicultural classrooms and rising xenophobia may require a different approach. They have failed to examine, empirically, how teachers connect these distinct curricular goals in their examination of Holocaust education. Brinkmann et al. (2000) stress the need to consider contemporary exhibitions of xenophobia and to include a moral dimension to Holocaust education. By doing so they, and others, are actually connecting multicultural education to Holocaust education. Indeed, they show that, at least in the interpretation of teachers, multicultural education and Holocaust education have strong connections.

Case Selection

In this study I specifically consider Bavaria, which is located in southern Germany, sharing a border with the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Austria. With its consistently conservative government and anti-multicultural rhetoric and its particularly diverse population, Bavaria is useful as a case study of multicultural education, particularly when situated as a potentially more extreme case, a tool suggested as one means of purposive sampling. Educationally speaking, Bavaria also has a highly centralised compulsory schooling system in which all curricular decisions are made by the state education ministry and all materials, particularly textbooks, must come from a ministry-approved list. The ministry of education officials, whom I interviewed for this project, explained that the procedure for approval of textbooks is followed very strictly and very fastidiously because it is viewed as a means of ensuring that the teachers are not straying from state-mandated curricular guidelines. In an interview in August, 2006, one such official explained this approach:

The textbooks provide the content that is outlined in the curricula. It is the best way we have to make sure that the content is spot-on with the curricula. This way we can make sure that the teachers are teaching what they are supposed to do. We invest time and money in approving the textbooks and making sure the teachers know them and use them. We do professional development with teachers and observe them using the textbooks. They are just as important as the curriculum because they are an extension of it.

Thus, textbooks and curricula work in tandem to create the Bavarian state practice regarding citizenship education policy. Social studies offers the most direct connection to the overall goal of examining the wide variety of outcomes associated with citizenship education, including anti-violence education and multicultural education, since citizenship education is not a subject by itself.

Data Collection

Textbooks

I used textbooks, archived through the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI), and included any general textbook for the Hauptschule generally available in the period from 1988 to 2006 and approved for use in Bavaria. I list the textbook series I examined in the appendix. I compared the textbooks collected to lists of approved textbooks for the time periods sought, compiled both by the GEI archivists and the Bavarian education ministry. Although in the larger study I coded the textbooks based on seven relevant state curricular guidelines, in this chapter I use only data from the textbook sections that aimed to fulfill the required anti-violence education; in Ortloff (2009) I discuss these data further. Since this theme is identified in the Hauptschule curricula as an overall learning outcome, it is methodologically appropriate for guiding the initial selection of material for the content analysis. This selection process follows the suggestions of both Krippendorf (2004) and Neuendorf (2001) for ensuring consistency in developing a unit of analysis.

Teacher Reflections

I interviewed Bavarian teachers from about 18 Hauptschule. The schools were in both urban and rural areas of the state and had student populations in which the proportions of non-native speakers of German ranged from 5 to 90%. I used this category as a designator because many of the students who are non-native German speakers have German citizenship because they are so-called repatriates (Ethnic German returnees from areas of the former Soviet Union). However, in the interviews, the participants universally refer to these students as foreigners regardless of their citizenship status. In recruiting teachers, it was important to interview a range of teachers in terms of their years of teaching experience and experience with teaching in diverse settings. In its urban areas, particularly Munich and Nuremburg, Bavaria has had a diverse population since the guest workers were first recruited to work in Germany in the 1960s. The teachers I interviewed in these areas had worked with diverse student populations for most of their careers, although in the last ten years each Hauptschule teacher in these urban areas explained that their classrooms had become nearly universally non-native German speaking.

In the more rural areas of the state, in particular Franken, a region in Northern Bavaria where I conducted the majority of the interviews, in a few smaller communities with factories, the majority of the non-German residents, of Turkish and Greek origin, have been residents since the 1960s. However, most of the areas have seen a dramatic rise in the number of non-native German speakers since 1990 mainly through the repatriation of ethnic Germans and their families from areas of the former Soviet Union. By seeking teachers with a wide variety of experiences, I constructed what Tagg (1985) calls a maximum variation sample, which seeks to include the widest degree of experiences within the interview participants.

Data Analysis

After identifying the section of each textbook pertaining to anti-violence education (the Bavarian curricular guideline used as the unit of analysis) I used close reading (Carspecken 1996) to initially organise the material into content sections, in this case at the paragraph level. After reading each identified section three times, I highlighted topic sentences, taken directly from the texts, and grouped them according to topic; this process is similar to conducting in-vivo coding (coding using the words of the participants) and keeps the level of inference as low as possible before proceeding to analysis. I followed a similar process for the participant interviews, identifying sections of the interviews that specifically dealt with anti-violence education, multicultural education, and Holocaust education through close reading. I further validated my choices by using the search function in NVIVO, a qualitative research software package. I then conducted in-vivo level coding, to organise the teachers’ responses based on topics they named in their own words.

From this initial coding, in both data sets, I used a two-step analysis process based on Carspecken’s (1996): approach: meaning field analysis and reconstructive horizon analysis on each paragraph (textbooks) or speech act (interviews) organised under the topic sentences. As an analytic tool, the meaning field reveals how meaning is bounded. The statement “Germans are punctual” cannot mean “Pillows are soft” or even “Germans like to drive fast”. In brief, by using meaning field analysis, I was able to understand the full range of possible, and less possible, meanings for a statement. After the meaning field analysis, I conducted reconstructive horizon analysis on the data. This form of analysis is an extension of the meaning field analysis because it enables the researcher to view the “horizon” of possible meanings in any given statement. Gadamer developed the concept of “horizon” as part of the hermeneutic process to refer to the world affiliations of researchers. He deemed the researcher’s hermeneutic acts of interpretation, specifically with regard to analysis of tests, as a “fusion of horizons” (Habermas 1984, p. 134). Carspecken (1996) draws on this concept of horizons and pairs it with Habermas’ (1987) idea of validity claims, in order to develop his reconstructive horizon analysis (p. 103). Carspecken conceives of the horizon as having both vertical and horizontal axes. An example of a reconstructive horizon analysis from this study is reproduced in Table 1. The teacher said “Because we are Germans, and we will always have it [Holocaust] in our baggage”. To add this item to the analysis, I chose statements that fit what Carspecken calls foregrounded (very explicit), intermediary (somewhat explicit, but requiring some inference), and backgrounded (requiring inference to understand tacit implications).

Table 1 Example of reconstructive horizon analysis
Full size table

Both of these techniques are aimed at moving qualitative analysis beyond coding and categorising at the explicit level by focusing on tacit meaning. In a study such as this one, where I was probing in two data sets, looking for volatile and conceptually complex ideas such as identity, responsibility for the Holocaust, and multiculturalism, it is critical to have analysis tools aimed at implicit meaning. Likewise, these techniques allowed me to examine the implicit meaning both within and across the data sets, that is within the textbooks or within the interview transcripts, and to compare official policy from the textbooks to teacher reflections on these policies.

Findings

Textbook Analysis

German textbooks have consistent coverage of the Holocaust and World War II (Pingel 2000; Steffens 1991). In fact, some aspect of World War II is included in the curriculum of every grade in the Hauptschule. This fact mirrors the national discussions about Holocaust education, and recognises that one of the defining notions regarding Germanness is guilt over the Holocaust (von Thadden 1998). Contemporary rises in neo-Nazism have once again focused attention on the need for Holocaust education, including a required unit on anti-violence education in the Hauptschule. This section is the main focus for this analysis.

In the textbooks, within the anti-violence section, frank and open depictions of right-wing radicalism tend to focus on antisemitism and the Nazi past. This focus becomes clear when one examines older textbooks and is also confirmed in Pingel’s (2000) analysis of Holocaust education. However, particularly after the anti-foreigner attacks and the arson of two asylum homes in the former East Germany in 1993 and 1998, the textbooks began to address violence in general. According to the curricula, xenophobia, with a particular emphasis on anti-foreigner sentiments as developed themes, should be included in separate chapters in the 8th grade texts. Also, anti-violence education should be a thematic development in the 7th and 9th grade texts, when possible. The 9th grade texts, in particular those published after 1998, include an emphasis on Islam and the curriculum requires a sub-chapter on “Foreigners in Germany”, usually a profile of a Turkish resident’s experiences, including experiences with xenophobia. One woman describes how she and her husband could not find an apartment because they would be rejected as soon as the owner heard the word “foreigner” (Begegnungen 9, 2003, p. 208).

Violence against others tends to be described in fictionalised accounts, which primarily include only ethnic Germans. Take, for example, the story of “Jürgen” from Trio 8 (1999, p. 101). Using staged photos, the textbook presents Jürgen’s encounter with school bullies who beat him up for his soda. The violence itself is not portrayed; rather we see a photo of Jürgen, a white, blond-haired adolescent, buying his soda and then in the next frame a picture of Jürgen on the ground in pain. The caption reads in German Jürgen wurde niedergeschlagen (Jürgen was struck down). The passive voice construction, with no perpetrator mentioned, emphasises the anonymous nature of violence as portrayed in the textbooks. This fictional violence is typical of the books’ portrayal of violence. For example, in this chapter the only mention of xenophobia is in the title picture (Trio 8, 1999, p. 100) which shows anti-foreigner graffiti. The picture is not discussed, nor is any mention made of the concept of xenophobia represented by the graffiti that reads Ausländer raus (Foreigners out). The phrase Auslaender raus certainly evokes the memory of Juden raus (Jews out), a slogan used by the Nazis, and consequently takes on both a literal and a more historical sense of xenophobia. Both connotations present opportunities for education that are not taken up in the textbook. Instead the violence is thematised through Jürgen’s story.

In contrast, chapters that deal directly with violence against foreigners approach it from the perspective of the perpetrator. Neo-Nazism is approached in each 8th grade textbook. The reasons neo-Nazis give for joining their movement are presented and criticised, and the consequences of illegal actions are explained. In one example, a neo-Nazi is arrested and writes a letter to his girlfriend; her letter to him, condemning his actions, is also printed. Much like the attention paid to the Holocaust, neo-Nazism is problematised and presented in an open fashion. Of course this perspective is important for critically approaching the topic of violence and motivation for violent acts. However, I find it curious that, as in the example above, the conversation remains between two members of the majority; even here, the minority voice, the victim’s voice, is silent.

In the 8th grade texts, only one series, Begegnungen (Interactions), specifically addresses violence against minorities in the school setting. Yet, here again the perspective of a majority student is highlighted. Accompanying a picture of a darker-skinned student sitting alone and a group of white boys in a group, Sandra, a 12-year old student, explains how her classmates called a new student ein Schoko (a chocolate). She expresses shame at the boys’ behavior. As with the other examples of violence, it is important that it is being directly addressed and characterised negatively, but the lack of minority perspective is noticeable.

The 9th grade books usually include a small section on xenophobia in the “Foreigners in Germany” subsection of the migration chapter. Right-wing radicalism is again addressed, but as with the 8th grade textbooks, the victims’ voices are not included. Finally it bears mention that the discussion of violence, xenophobic or otherwise, never includes a non-German in the role of the perpetrator even though, in fact, Turkish and Russian youth gangs are a growing problem (Dietz 1999). One can imagine that the textbook developers chose not to address this issue from a fear of stereotyping; still, if non-ethnic Germans are to be integrated into citizenship education, that process must be true and honest. Considering this within Banks’s (2001) framework, it is necessary to include the contributions of Turkish, Russian, and other non-ethnic Germans to criminality and violence, to achieve what Banks terms “structural reform”. This level of transformation indicates that all previously segregated histories, such as those of guestworkers, are a part of the mainstream perspective. Leaving them out of the presentation of anti-violence education, both as victims and perpetrators, marginalises their inclusion in the larger German society.

Here we see an implicit supposition that Sandra’s expression of shame and the refusal to cast a non-German in the role of a perpetrator are elements of the shared history on which Holocaust education rests. In other words, Holocaust education in Germany relies on building from the continued shame and shared responsibility of Germans, but as with anti-violence education, this fails to allow a more complex and inclusive idea of Germanness to emerge. In short, the textbooks, serving as a statement of the state’s idea of who is German, are at least implicitly excluding non-ethnic Germans even in their direct discussions of xenophobia. My interviews with teachers, as I describe in the next section, show how teachers respond to this implicit claim.

Teachers’ Reflections

Throughout my interviews with teachers, I probed how they enact the curricular guidelines and textbook materials discussed above. When I re-examined my results as they relate to Holocaust education and post-unification identity, the connection between Germanness and shame over the Holocaust became clear. What also became clear, however, is that the pairing of shame and Germanness creates a constraint on practising an actual multicultural education. As the data show, teachers view the Holocaust and shame as things uniquely German and do not include the many non-ethnic Germans, especially in the Hauptschule classroom, in discussions of the Holocaust. These constraints are further tightened by teachers’ use of anti-violence and Holocaust education to “handle” or “deal” with the diversity question. Consequently, despite a new rhetoric about multiculturalism, my data show that reflections about the Holocaust and the implementation of current curricula are not achieving real change.

The teachers consistently offered the notion of shame as a reason why no one, except a German, could understand how it feels to be German. Here I noticed a tendency for the older teachers, those who had been teaching for over 15 years, to reflect on this in relation to the way they taught citizenship and diversity. However, shame was not a theme exclusive to older teachers’ reflections; several younger teachers also mentioned it. In some cases these reflections were a way of explaining why there is something unique about being German. One teacher explained:

We Germans, we are very susceptible, more susceptible than others [to nationalism and xenophobia], and we don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know, maybe the younger people can handle it. I would wish it for them, that we, like other countries, have finally learned.

Teachers also explained how this fear and shame affects how they teach and what they teach. One teacher said:

One must also give them both sides. One must say: you are not guilty, you were born much later, you have not done anything. But you will forever, as long as there are Germans, have to help carry this package. We must stand by it, because otherwise the world will not recognise us. We are lucky that the people of the world even acknowledge us now, because for many years it did not look like they would and we must be careful not to destroy this accomplishment. There are two sides that belong together. When the media say that we should draw a line under this history, I say we can never do this. Because we are Germans, and we will always have it in our baggage. And the students understand this well.

In her eyes it was one of her most important jobs, in both the social studies and religion classes she taught, to convey to her students this special burden of being German.

In saying that no one except a German can feel the guilt of being German, the teachers touch upon Germanness as a notion not bound to place but to emotion, in this case the sense of shared guilt. In essence this statement is enacting the temporal nature of Germanness which is a hallmark of ethnoculturalism. Temporality, as conceived by Cornwall and Stoddard (2001), is not merely the lack of a spatial relationship, but refers to the notion of Germanness transcending place through time; Germanness is passed from generation to generation regardless of physical location. The teachers touched upon this temporality frequently as they discussed how one teaches “being German”.

Likewise, the teachers explicitly named the ideas of temporality and shame as items that must be taught in order to teach about the Holocaust. They described doing so as their duty. But they see this duty differently; here I noticed another break mainly along generational lines. Although they quite often used the concept of duty itself to explain the moral obligation extending from Holocaust education and teaching about being German, older teachers linked this idea to passing on the idea of shame, whereas younger teachers connected it to coping with history and moving forward from it.

The teachers often gave this idea of shame for being German as one of the key aspects of raising good German citizens, but they also explained that non-Germans cannot understand this guilt, nor should they be expected to. One younger teacher, who was in his second year of teaching social studies and English, told me that since my last name is German perhaps I would understand it better than the Turkish students.

They cannot get it, they think it is funny to call us Nazis, there is no way they can be German because they cannot feel what we feel. I don’t know how else to explain that, so I just stick to the content in the book about voting in Germany.

He continued:

In a lot of ways teaching about the Holocaust is much easier; there are clear items to teach the students about. They know most of it before they get to me though, because we teach about the Holocaust in every grade. But I can approach it as history. It is connecting it to being German, I don’t know how to do that for someone who is not German.

This same teacher then reflected on what he can teach and discussed the Holocaust and anti-violence education:

It is easier to say we will learn about the Holocaust so as not to repeat it. It is easier to say don’t be a neo-Nazi, don’t be in a gang because this is repeating it. That is all easier than getting to teaching about being German, I really don’t know how one would do that, especially [in my diverse classroom].

This last exchange, typical of the way many of the younger teachers reflected thoughtfully on their practice, is particularly important because it represents a certain inability to conceive of a multicultural education, in part because of they way they interpret German history. Here we see Holocaust education becoming something easier to achieve than multicultural education. Implicitly, in a trend evident in many of the interviews, the teacher here links Holocaust education and multicultural education. But the link is incomplete: these teachers view Holocaust and multicultural education as achieving similar things without really interrogating the relationship or asking why both might need to be achieved.

Conclusions

In his now famous essay Education after Auschwitz, Theodore Adorno (1971) argues that all political education must be aimed towards preventing another Auschwitz. In Germany’s case, some have argued that this has gone too far. Education about the Holocaust permeates every level of education. Researchers such as Becher (2007), Heyl (2001), Pingel (2000, 2002), Rathenow (2000), and Fechler (2000) report that students feel overloaded by the sheer repetition of the subject matter, which starts in elementary school and continues through each grade level and in each type of school. Still, there is a moral imperative, not just in Germany, but especially in Germany, to educate pupils about the Holocaust. Indeed, the rise of neo-Nazism and the complex reality of a multicultural Germany place new pressures on education policy and practice to educate young people with Adorno’s purpose firmly in mind.

My analysis reveals, however, that in terms of both state policy, as represented by state-approved textbooks, and teacher reflections on their practice, Holocaust education and multicultural education are often intertwined to the point that a truly multicultural education is truncated. This happens in two distinct ways. First, the idea of the Holocaust and shame is put forward, especially by the teachers, but also in more subtle ways in the textbooks, as something uniquely German. Non-ethnic Germans cannot be included in this education because their ethnicity bars them from engaging in the shame discussion. Violence in the textbooks was depicted as perpetrated by Germans, but the victims’ voices were, for the most part absent. Non-ethnic Germans were also absent as perpetrators. Shame and guilt over xenophobia and violence were held as uniquely the purview of ethnic Germans.

In addition to this complex means of exclusion, a second way of intertwining Holocaust education and multicultural education also brought about a de facto segregation of non-ethnic Germans. Teachers viewed the Holocaust—an historical event—as an easier way to approach the difficult topics of diversity, multiculturalism, and tolerance. In and of itself, this would not necessarily be problematic, but when coupled with the teachers’ belief that non-ethnic Germans cannot really be included in Holocaust education, we have a—perhaps unintended—marginalisation.

While the case of Holocaust education and multicultural education in Germany involves particular elements that do not immediately apply to other settings, this study does offer some important and global lessons. If, as Adorno argues, education must set as its goal the prevention of another Holocaust, then it is imperative that Holocaust education be able to include a wide variety of conversations and interrogations on the question of what it means to live together in a diverse society. Holocaust education cannot continue to be just a separate educational goal, but must be an educational goal that contributes to preparing citizens to live in a multicultural society.