Content area
Abstract
This dissertation explores how the postfascist countries of East Germany, West Germany, and Italy taught about the Second World War and the Holocaust in their educational systems and specifically explores the representations of these events in textbooks. Postwar textbooks were initially reluctant to discuss mass murder, but a discourse eventually developed in all three countries’ textbooks that was largely influenced by the needs of rebuilding postwar nations. While West German textbooks and their treatments of the Holocaust have been highly studied, the East German and Italian cases have thus far suffered from a paucity of scholarship. Using process-, product-, and reception-oriented methods, this three-country comparative project deals not only with the actual textbook products, but also with the processes by which these textbooks were developed, the educational structures that supported their production, as well as their reception among student and the public. The East-West German comparison permits us to evaluate how governmental ideology affected educational reform, while the comparison between both German states and Italy allows one to consider how the ambiguities of perpetrator status helped determine educational policies.
This dissertation dates the first instances of increased attention to Holocaust education to the late 1950s. This finding challenges scholarly narratives that argue that the 1961 Eichmann Trial and/or the 1968 student movements were central to focusing public attention on Holocaust memory and Holocaust education. This is an important distinction because it suggests that this new attention to education about Nazi crimes in secondary schools in the late 1950s could have had a causative influence on the increased attention that the Nazi/fascist past received during the student revolts in the West. Overall, this project examines larger questions of how textbooks both contributed to and reflected the processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past] and building postwar national identities. It investigates how these countries approached the process of nation-rebuilding, both incorporating and sometimes selectively ignoring the painful legacies of the fascist attempts at racial empire-building. Most broadly, it illuminates how post-dictatorial states democratize and rebuild.
