Holocaust Education – Historisches Lernen –

Menschenrechtsbildung

Anja Ballis · Markus Gloe Hrsg.

Holocaust
Education Revisited
Wahrnehmung und Vermittlung ·
Fiktion und Fakten ·
Medialität und Digitalität
Holocaust Education – Historisches
Lernen – Menschenrechtsbildung

Reihe herausgegeben von

Anja Ballis, Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München, München, Deutschland
Michele Barricelli, Historisches Seminar, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München, München, Deutschland
Markus Gloe, Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Deutschland
Die Reihe „Holocaust Education und Menschenrechtsbildung“ verbindet inter-
und transdisziplinär die beiden Ansätze von Holocaust Education und Menschen-
rechtsbildung, die sowohl im Bereich der Gesellschaftswissenschaften, der
Sprachwissenschaften als auch im erziehungswissenschaftlichen Gesamtkontext
der Vermittlung von demokratischen Werten in bildungspolitischen Zusammen-
hängen adressieren. Ausgewiesene Expertinnen und Experten aus verschiedenen
Disziplinen, aber auch der wissenschaftliche Nachwuchs präsentieren in dieser
Reihe neueste Forschungsergebnisse, theoretische Grundlagen und dokumentie-
ren die aktuelle inter- und transdisziplinäre Diskussion. Die Reihe „Holocaust
Education und Menschenrechtsbildung“ wendet sich an Wissenschaftlerinnen und
Wissenschaftler, die sich mit Fragen der Vermittlung des Holocausts und Fragen
der Menschenrechtsbildung beschäftigen, sowie historisch-politische Bildnerin-
nen und Bildner in Schule und außerschulischen Kontexten.

Weitere Bände in der Reihe http://www.springer.com/series/16330

Anja Ballis · Markus Gloe
(Hrsg.)

Holocaust Education
Revisited
Wahrnehmung und Vermittlung •
Fiktion und Fakten • Medialität
und Digitalität
Hrsg.
Anja Ballis Markus Gloe
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München München
München, Deutschland München, Deutschland

ISSN 2662-1878 ISSN 2662-1886 (electronic)

Holocaust Education – Historisches Lernen – Menschenrechtsbildung
ISBN 978-3-658-24204-6 ISBN 978-3-658-24205-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-24205-3

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbiblio-

grafie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

Zur Einführung
Von der „-Losigkeit“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Anja Ballis und Markus Gloe
A Quarter Century of Globalization, Differentiation, Proliferation,
and Dissolution? Comments on Changes in Holocaust Education
Since the End of the Cold War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Oliver Plessow

Wahrnehmung und Vermittlung

Holocaust Survivor Testimony in the Age of Trump. An American
Perspective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Sandra Alfers
The Holocaust as Metaphor: Holocaust and Anti-Bullying
Education in the United States. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
George Dalbo
Gedenkstättenbesuche als emotionales Erlebnis. Welche Rolle
weisen Geschichtslehrkräfte den Emotionen ihrer Schülerinnen
und Schüler zu?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Daniel Münch
The Continuing Knowledge Gap in Holocaust Aftermath
Education in the Netherlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Angela Boone

V
VI Inhaltsverzeichnis

„…und es war wirklich stecknadelruhig.“

Zwischen Faktenwissen und Betroffenheit. Was meinen
Lehrkräfte, wenn sie von gelingendem Unterricht zu
Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust sprechen? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Holger Knothe und Mirko Broll
Guides an KZ-Gedenkstätten und Holocaust Museen ‒
Professionalisierung in Zeiten eines Wandels der
Erinnerungskultur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Anja Ballis
Inklusiver Unterricht zum Holokaust für Nutzerinnen und
Nutzer der Gebärdensprache. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Mark Zaurov
Die zwiespältige Stimme meines Vaters. Paul Hoffmann als
Zeuge des Holocaust im Nachkriegsdeutschland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Daniel Hoffmann
The Past is Indeed a Different Country: Perception of
Holocaust in India. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Baijayanti Roy

Fiktion und Fakten

Holocaust und Identität: Biografische Menschenrechtsbildung
am Beispiel von „Lauf Junge lauf“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Andreas Sommer
Fake News or the Power of Fiction? The Case for Using the Amazon
Series The Man in the High Castle in Holocaust Education . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Cornelius Partsch
Narrative zwischen Gewalt und Leiden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Christian Wevelsiep
Ist eine Annäherung an den Holocaust im Medium komischer
Fiktionen möglich und sinnvoll?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Lutz Ellrich
Die Darstellung von Widerstand gegen das NS-Regime im
zeitgenössischen Amateurtheater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Lisa Schwendemann
Inhaltsverzeichnis VII

Welche Geschichten erzählen wir an Gedenkstätten? Zur

Bedeutung literarischer Archetypen in der Geschichtsvermittlung. . . . . . 325
Christian Angerer

Medialität und Digitalität

Geschichten von ‚Nähe und Distanz‘: Wie Radiojournalismus
heute den Holocaust vermittelt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Susanne Wegner
Teaching Unseen Students: The Online Challenges for an
American Holocaust Course . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
Jeffrey Kleiman
Social Media und Holocaust Education. Chancen und Grenzen
historisch-politischer Bildung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
Hannes Burkhardt
Holocaust Education in Multicultural Classrooms. Some Insights
into an Empirical Study on the Use of Digital Survivor
Testimonies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
Christina Isabel Brüning
Interaktive digitale 3-D-Zeugnisse und Holocaust Education –
Entwicklung, Präsentation und Erforschung. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
Anja Ballis, Michele Barricelli und Markus Gloe
Holocaust Education in Multicultural
Classrooms. Some Insights into an
Empirical Study on the Use of Digital
Survivor Testimonies

Christina Isabel Brüning

Abstract
The text tries to provide an overview about a larger empirical study on the
use of digital testimony of survivors of the Shoah and other genocides during
National Socialism in classrooms. The author conducted quantitative and qua-
litative research with students of grade 9 and 10 in order to find out which
challenges and opportunities this new source might provide. The data were
gathered in very diverse classrooms in Germany as the heterogeneity of stu-
dents is not only a fact in teaching nowadays but is also still growing. The
study provides evidence on different theoretical hypothesis which declare
online platforms with videographed interviews with survivors of the Shoah to
be very approachable for students, to be easier to grasp (as compared e.g. to
written sources and or textbooks), to get students involved by effects such as
immersion into the interview and the feeling of a virtual encounter with the
interviewee. The aspects of immersion and encounter are the ones that are
focused upon in this article.

C. I. Brüning (*)
Tübingen, Germany
E-Mail: christina.bruening@uni-tuebingen.de

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 391
A. Ballis und M. Gloe (Hrsg.), Holocaust Education Revisited,
Holocaust Education – Historisches Lernen – Menschenrechtsbildung,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-24205-3_21
392 C. I. Brüning

Zusammenfassung
Der Text versucht einen knappen Überblick über eine umfangreichere empiri-
sche Studie zur Verwendung digitaler Überlebendeninterviews im Unterricht
zu geben. Die Studie beleuchtet die didaktischen Herausforderungen, die mit
dieser neuen Quelle einhergehen. Die Daten wurden in sehr divers zusammen-
gesetzten Lerngruppen in Deutschland gesammelt, da die Heterogenität von
Schülerinnen und Schülern heutzutage nicht nur bereits eine Tatsache ist,
sondern immer noch zunehmen wird. Die Studie überprüfte die theoretischen
Hypothesen, wonach Online-Plattformen mit videografierten Interviews mit
Überlebenden der Shoah für Lernende sehr zugänglich sind (da bspw. durch
die gesprochene Sprache leichter zu verstehen als Schulbücher) und die Ler-
nenden durch Effekte wie Eintauchen („Immersion“) in das Interview und das
Gefühl einer virtuellen Begegnung mit dem bzw. der Interviewten besondere
Lerngelegenheiten bekommen. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz konzentrieren sich die
Darstellungen vor allem auf die beiden zuletzt genannten Aspekte.

1 Introduction

At the beginning of the 21st century, we are at a crucial turning point that is highly
relevant for Holocaust Education: the last survivors who can bear witness to the
National Socialist mass murders are about to pass away and ways of teaching and
remembering without their presence have to be found. At this point, online archi-
ves with digital interviews such as The Shoah Foundation’s Institute for Visual
History and Education at the University of Southern California (VHA) with a total
of 52,000 interviews hold an interesting but also challenging potential for future
teaching. The Shoah Foundation’s digital interviews are a special source. They are
video-recorded, audiovisual, biographical interviews with survivors of the Shoah
and of other genocides, which were later digitized, edited and uploaded to the
internet. This source and especially its presentation in an online archive usually
already motivates the students because it seems very different from the textbook
instructions they are used to in the history classroom. At least this was the case
during most project days I taught or supervised at CeDiS FU Berlin and also in
my PhD project. Of course, students can lose this motivation easily when they
encounter difficulties such as the challenges on language level, length of the inter-
views or other obstacles (Brüning 2018, pp. 353, 357). Moreover, these survivors’
Holocaust Education in Multicultural Classrooms … 393

stories are fascinating due to their biographical, seemingly personal relationship

that some viewers establish while watching. The interview can therefore offer
some moments of identification as well as reduce the feeling of temporal distance
to historical events. The didactical-methodological opportunities and limits of
videotaped interviews for historical and political learning will be discussed in this
article.
One hypothesis of the study “Holocaust Education in the Heterogeneous
Society. A study on the use of videographed testimonies” (Brüning 2018) was
that online archives offer learners a chance to create relationships that can reduce
temporal, ‘cultural’ and emotional distance to the subject. For this article, I chose
to stay with just the aspect of a ‘relationship’ between the interviewee and the
viewers but of course, there are many more when teaching with testimonies. To
what extent the “old man on screen” (Bothe and Brüning 2015) can actually reduce
the distance between the students and the learning object is the main question to
be raised and clarified in this article. This question will be discussed in a shorte-
ned and focused way as compared to the book, mainly concentrating on heteroge-
neous, especially multicultural, learning groups in lower secondary education as
this aspect is a main challenge we have to face in Holocaust Education nowadays.

2 Theoretical Frameworks about Teaching

in Multicultural Classrooms

For years, empirical studies such as the works of Meik Zülsdorf-Kersting (2007),
Carlos Kölbl (2008, 2009) and Elke Gryglewski (2006, 2009, 2013) have shown
a growing distance between students and the topic of National Socialism and the
Holocaust. First and foremost, the change from the so-called communicative to
the cultural memory (Assmann 2011) has to be considered. The temporal distance
to the topic is already so large that today’s learning groups can hardly resort to
intergenerational familial communication with their grandparents as witnesses in
the field of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The topic is as remote for them
as the First World War or the German Kaiserzeit were for previous generations of
learners.
Furthermore, it should be taken into account that for many young people, apart
from the growing temporal distance, a considerable ‘cultural’ distance has deve-
loped which makes the learning object less accessible. This of course, as usual, is
not the students’ fault. The teaching of the subject matter Holocaust and National
Socialism at German schools usually takes place in a way that does not address
current heterogeneous learning group compositions. Due to migration and
394 C. I. Brüning

processes of globalization as well as urbanization, classrooms nowadays are cha-

racterized by a high (socio-)‘cultural’ diversity. Curriculum designers, didactici-
ans and educational scientists as well as authors of text books and teachers have
for years created a canonic education of Auschwitz, which was designed for a
‘bio-German’ community of perpetrator descendants. Migrants, their children and
grandchildren have not been considered in these lesson plans for a very long time.
That means, that Holocaust Education in 21st century Germany is often not well
connected to the diverse living conditions and realities of young people’s lives.
Not only Bärbel Völkel has repeatedly pointed out that traditional, predominantly
genetically-chronologically oriented history education fosters racist narratives of
a supposedly ethnically homogeneous ‘nation’ and thus needs to be conceptually
rethought (Völkel 2016). History lessons, especially education after Auschwitz as
an “entry ticket” (von Borries 2001) into the German majority society should not
form the core of a school event that aims to promote historical or historical-politi-
cal learning. Very often, however, these teaching practices installed by the domi-
nance society are seldom addressed in studies (an exception is the study by Fava
2015), but the focus of empirical research is on the finding and discussion that
adolescents with a so-called ‘migrational background’ are rather skeptical about
the Nazi-time and or the Holocaust. Thus, the studies try to show if and how their
memories and learning outputs differ from the majority society (Georgi 2003).
This way, they contribute to a racist process of ‘othering’ that rather deepens the
divides instead of creating common forms of remembrance.
Today, more than ever, historical-political learning must seek to open up the
view for perspectives that were neglected so far and to include those in the core
narrative that is still very stable and often inflexible. Certain groups simply do
not have interpretative sovereignty as they were and still are marginalized. One
example is the Roma population which was murdered by the Nazis as so-called
‘Zigeuner’. They still have a difficult status in all European societies today. Unfor-
tunately, most of the approaches including anti-racism or critical whiteness stu-
dies into historical learning in the area of the Holocaust still stem from the field of
politic didactics or general education. Only some history didacticians addressed
racism as a crucial part of historical learning so far (Brüning et al. 2016).
It is necessary to address the different (socio-)‘cultural’ backgrounds and the
linguistic diversity of the students, who are often involved themselves—especi-
ally in lower secondary schools—in diverse, partly also marginalized, remem-
brance contexts. Additionally, the empirical study I conducted for my PhD
showed that for heterogeneous learning groups an anti-racist approach to the
topic of Shoah is very useful. Here, the Shoah Foundation’s large collection pro-
vides an opportunity to work with testimonies dealing with topics that have for a
Holocaust Education in Multicultural Classrooms … 395

very long time not been part of the dominant culture of remembrance. There are
survivors telling their experiences in genocides such as the Porajmos (the murder
of the Roma population), the so-called ‘Euthanasia’ T4 and 14f13, and other raci-
ally motivated persecutions. In addition, the forced sterilization of the so-called
‘Rhineland Bastards’ or the so-called ‘asocials’ provides a starting point to reflect
about the large variety of persecution stories. Working with the surviving witnes-
ses’ persecution, migration and escape stories can help to reveal present-day chal-
lenges of society and make students reflect upon their own situations now and in
the future using this historical knowledge (Brüning 2018, p. 344).

3 Theoretical Assumptions about the VHA

and Goals when Using it in Teaching

The relevant goal when working with the VHA is the intense reception that Bothe
has differentiated on a theoretical level with the help of the terms ‘immersion’,
‘interactivity’, ‘instantness’ (Bothe 2012). In the context of historical-political
learning the technical conditions, that enable a smooth and instantaneous recep-
tion of the videos, play a role as basic prerequisites so that learners can sense
the immediacy (instantitude) of the narrative. This however has dramatically lost
importance since I started my research almost ten years ago as the quality of data
transfer has enormously increased. The internet connections to the server with the
videos have improved and high-speed internet is—at least in bigger cities—avai-
lable all over Germany. What is therefore more exciting on an educational level
is the concept of ‘immersion’, that means immersion or diving into the video and
the assumption of interactivity in a communication situation with the survivor on
the screen. This idea, which was developed by theoretically working researchers
only, assumes the feeling of a quasi-dialogical situation between the recipient and
the survivor. Alina Bothe calls this a “secondary dialogue” (Bothe 2012) whereas
Assmann and Brauer call it “encounter” or “virtual encounter” (Assmann and
Brauer 2011, p. 97). In the case of historical learning with videographed testimo-
nies, the core issue is a training to feel a ‘communication’ with or connection to
the narrator, to change one’s own perspective or to take over the survivor’s per-
spective in order to gain experiences of otherness or—as it is called in history
education—experiences of alterity. The feeling of alterity is even more challen-
ging in history lessons than for example in language or literature classes where
students are also supposed to take on the protagonist’s view to understand a cha-
racter. In history this strangeness or otherness comes two folded: Firstly, the per-
spectives of the survivor are different to the students’ perspectives as he/she is
396 C. I. Brüning

a different person with different mental maps. But there is also the historical or
temporal alterity which includes the whole setting, in this case the difference bet-
ween the students’ world today and the totalitarian society during National Socia-
lism. This temporal and ‘cultural’ distance are often a major challenge as not all
students are able to imagine these very different worlds.
In these cases it is helpful, if the survivors know how to create narrations (and
of course a well prepared teaching beforehand, that provides the students with the
necessary historical knowledge). When working with the VHA videos, the aspect
of personalization plays an important role: even lesser-linguistically skilled pupils
can have access to complex topics through the intimate stories of the witnesses.
The videos thus also provide a methodological enrichment of the text-heavy sub-
ject history in order to explicitly create learning settings for pupils with less pro-
nounced reading and writing skills.
Especially in heterogeneous groups on a lower education level, where often
very different levels of reading skills are present and the linguistic alterity of his-
torical sources is (still) a great challenge, the testimonies are a way to promote
an equally relevant form of source. Working with the testimonies, students can
practice source criticism, which then—if practiced regularly and in a structured
way—could result in a ‘digital source competence’ that is crucial for (histori-
cal) learning nowadays (Bothe and Brüning 2015). Here, however, it is explicitly
necessary to ask where the limits of the medium are, particularly in view of cog-
nitively weaker pupils in lower secondary schools.
As a final point, especially in the context of working with heterogeneous
groups, it is worth mentioning that the multi-perspectivity of the life stories
represented in the archive, and especially in the sample that I chose for my study,
already fulfills a fundamental prerequisite for the use of sources in history les-
sons. In addition, it is possible to take into account the students’ own narratives,
that they come up with when working with the interviews and thus allow and
show the plurality of interpretations. These two levels of past and present mul-
ti-perspectivity are inextricably linked. They are indispensable for the develop-
ment of a reflexive and critical historical consciousness.

4 Methodological Arrangement of the Study

In order to give an insight into how students worked with the VHA videos in my
study, the following paragraphs will provide a very short overview about the pro-
ject days that were carried out in different types of schools, each in grade 9 or
10. The types of schools included the entire range of educational programs in
Holocaust Education in Multicultural Classrooms … 397

­ ermany: from lower level secondary education and so-called integrated secon-
G
dary schools and comprehensive schools to Gymnasium (highschools providing
A-level classes preparing for university). The project days themselves were held at
university because a reliable internet connection was not state of the art at schools
back then. Of all the schools and classes who participated, in the end the data of
122 students could be used for the analysis.
The approach of choosing survivors’ stories which enable to talk about racism
is reflected in the sample of interviews, which covers the entire scale of racist
persecution during National Socialism. It follows the premise that no victim hie-
rarchies should be opened up and no further racist distinctions should be made,
but rather opportunities can be offered to examine the differences and similarities
in individual persecution stories. Therefore, I used interviews with Jewish people,
homosexuals, so-called ‘asocials’, so-called ‘foreigners’ (‘Fremdvölkische’) and
so-called ‘Rhineland bastards’ as well as Sinti and Roma survivors. In my choice,
I followed the racial-state theory of Burleigh and Wippermann (1991). This is
based on the thesis that racism represents the main ideology that influences all
areas of the Nazi regime. That means that the entire policy of the National Socia-
list state was subordinated to the goal of a ‘racially perfect’ national community.
The question of the so far under-represented or ‘forgotten’ mass murders in
the classroom is useful to escape the annoyance of many students and to avoid
their alleged oversaturation with the Shoah, since typical expectations will not
be met, and stereotypical images can be overcome. At each project day I carried
out during my investigations, the pupils worked with the interviews of Reinhard
Florian, Gad Beck, Albrecht Becker, Hans Hauck, Paul Eggert, Rolf Joseph and
Ilse Arndt. Reinhard Florian was a Sinto, Gad Beck a Jewish and homosexual
man from Berlin, Albrecht Becker was homosexual, Hans Hauck was a so cal-
led ‘Rheinlandbastard’ which during Weimar Republic and later was the term for
the children of French soldiers with North-African origin and German mothers,
Paul Eggert was a survivor of the Euthanasia program, Rolf Joseph was Jewish
and was raised in a very religious and traditional family as compared to Ilse
Arndt’s family who were non-observant and assimilated (for a longer biographi-
cal description of each witness refer to Brüning 2018, pp. 153–211). During the
two days in which students worked with the interviews, they were asked to pre-
pare a presentation of the biography (of 15 min maximum) and to choose a quota-
tion from the interview that they find meaningful for the person and their talk. Of
course, there were different scaffolding materials such as while-viewing works-
heets as well as phases where they discussed their preliminary results with me
and exchanged them with other groups. Otherwise it would have been impossible
398 C. I. Brüning

to make students watch the testimonies which are around three hours or someti-
mes even longer.
Finally, the students presented their witnesses’ biographies. This part was
rounded up by a follow-up discussion in which the continuities and discontinui-
ties of racism and eugenic thinking up until today were discussed. This enabled
them to examine the unique characteristics of the ‘Third Reich’, but also the
beginnings of racism on a smaller scale in everyday life even before 1933.

5 Observations and Findings

One very important thing that occurred among all researched groups but was even
more obvious among classes at lower secondary educational level: Many stu-
dents tend to adopt the survivor’s narrative of the past presented to them as the
‘real history’. They tend to think that this is the past “as it really was” because
of the apparent immediacy, authenticity and auratic effect of the survivor on the
screen. The narrations and individual episodes, which in the survivors’ testimo-
nies are sometimes presented in a very well-narrated and professional way and
with constructed tensions like in detective stories or fairytales, are adopted by the
learners (Brüning 2018, p. 335). It was especially striking that they sometimes
even re-narrate episodes almost word by word. This makes the critical questio-
ning and deconstruction of the source, which is necessary in historical learning,
more difficult than when working with the printed sources in textbooks. Histori-
cal learning understood in the sense of Rüsen means that history helps us to find
an orientation in the present and for the future and that one can present or utter
one’s individually created sense or connection between past, present and future
in a (historical) narrative (Rüsen 2008). But the basic historical competences are,
as Schreiber et al. (2006) emphasize, not just about construction, but also about
deconstruction. That deconstruction competence includes a critical evaluation of
any given narrative, thus, also of testimonies. This, however, is possible only in
very well-informed, knowledgeable groups and within teacher-centered teaching
settings with the specific source genre of videographed testimonies as it needs
the constant feedback and questioning by the teacher to make students distance
themselves from the heard life stories in order to treat them as sources they need
to analyze and interpret. This was especially striking in very heterogeneous clas-
ses of lower secondary education. One example for a deep personal interest and
involvement in a specific topic that made the stories of World War II and the
Holocaust almost irrelevant came up multiple times while working with the stu-
dents: Especially male students with Turkish and Arabic roots and who i­dentified
Holocaust Education in Multicultural Classrooms … 399

themselves as Muslims where interested in the life story and fate of Albrecht
Becker, a man who was perpetrated due to paragraph 175. A majority of young,
male, Muslim students picked this survivor’s testimony to work with. In their pre-
sentations of his biography that they later gave in class, they described in detail
episodes of his love life, his hobbies and other personal things but almost blanked
out all stories of his time in prison and his conviction. These presentations were
led by real curiosity but often ended in giggling and a strange way of performing
their own masculinities by making fun of the homosexual affections of the inter-
viewee (Brüning 2018, p. 283). So even if a topic which might be tabooed in the
students’ everyday communications is brought up by working with the testimony
and it might be a good starting point to get adolescents talking about it, we should
ask ourselves as educators if this is still appropriate given the suffering that many
survivors share with us by giving testimony. If we take our responsibility seri-
ously and try to handle digital testimony with a similar awe and respect as we
would show during a meeting with a survivor in real life, there are many situati-
ons where we had to stop group work and ask students to rethink their behavior
and attitudes.
This shows us one major clash of interests and points out how thin the ice
we are skating on when working with testimonies really is: The critical questio-
ning of a source and its thorough analysis and interpretation, as is traditionally
practiced in history classes, runs counter to the previously described aspects of
immersion, encounter, interaction and empathy that are key to receive survivor
testimonies.
Coming back to our question of a virtual encounter or a secondary dialogue
that we raised in the beginning, it is interesting to see that in this area, students
tend to be much more critical and aware of what a real encounter as compared
to a head on a screen should feel like. In the questionnaire after the project, the
students were asked: “Did you have the feeling to build a relationship with your
contemporary witness? If so, why do you feel that connection?” Only 17% ticked
yes, 17% were undecided, 54% answered no. If one counts the proportion of
those who have given the question no attention (either crossed it out by a single
line or left it completely empty) also as no, then the number rises to 66% from
all the 122 students. From this data, it is safe to say that for the most part, pupils
reject the idea of an encounter.
Even in the group interview after the project, the comments of all learners in
all classes concerning a possible encounter are very cautious. Despite all normal-
ity in dealing with digital and social media, students still reserve terms such as
encounter and relationship for real life interactions with actual people. In my opi-
nion, this may be read as a negative finding because it disproves the hypotheses of
400 C. I. Brüning

researchers in the field who have commented on the videos on a theoretical basis
and had great hopes. Equally well, however, it seems natural to argue that this is
a positive finding, since the young people obviously have some form of media
literacy and level of reflection that allows them to differentiate between real
encounters with people and watching videos. The students’ ability to different-
iate between an actual meeting with a survivor and the process of working with a
digital source from an online platform came as kind of a surprise for many resear-
chers who from the beginning of the usage of videographed testimony argued that
some kind of immersion and “virtual encounter” (Assmann and Brauer 2011)
would take place. That might be the case for researchers with a lot of knowledge
and pre-concepts of the time, it is however not true for the diverse learners in gra-
des 9 and 10.

6 Conclusion

Teaching and learning with digital survivor testimonies is, as we have seen, a
complex undertaking, both in planning and implementation, as well as in analysis
and evaluation. In addition to influencing factors such as motivation, pupils’ inter-
ests, prior knowledge, attitudes, sympathy and antipathy, learning atmosphere and
so on, various influencing factors on the technical level as well as the ‘interaction’
with the survivors, linguistic and receptive abilities are added on the part of the
learners and moreover, ethical-moral issues have to be considered.
The obvious fact is that digital sources are highly motivating for most stu-
dents, as they initially provide a change from traditional sources and schoolbook
history lessons. Of course, there is the danger that people-mediated history, which
is livelier and more motivating, is assumed to have stronger authenticity and grea-
ter validity. This danger exists especially for learning groups with a rather low
previous content knowledge about the topic of National Socialism and the Shoah,
as they then use the interviews to extract historical information. With more time
or after teacher interventions, it is possible to reflect this alleged factuality and
the emotional impact of the witness’s presence. General understanding and cri-
ticism of oral history as just one method of historians must therefore be part of
any teaching unit that includes testimony. The emotions and the felt and establis-
hed ‘closeness’ that this source genre brings with it must therefore be reflected. A
media-critical attitude in general could help here.
The presented learning setting of the project days in my study has made clear
how important it is, especially for pupils from different backgrounds who are
learning together in very heterogeneous groups, to bring the subject of National
Holocaust Education in Multicultural Classrooms … 401

Socialism into the personal horizon and to arouse a need for orientation which
they often are not provided with at home. More insights into how the students in
my experiments worked with the testimonies especially of the non-Jewish survi-
vors and how they connected narratives of discrimination and racism with their
own experiences can be found in detail in the book (Brüning 2018). For now, we
have to conclude with the statement that raising questions that seem relevant to
the students in their everyday lives is even more difficult when it comes to the
Shoah, as one may have to deal with anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist pre-concepts
concerning the situation in the Middle East that have to be met with a lot of
knowledge on the side of the teachers.
As I have tried to show, approaches that focus on racism and discrimination
in general and include Anti-Semitism as one of its many faces, can offer a way
to make students willing to learn about the murder of the European Jews. In this
racism-aware approach, the consideration of the present is equally essential. The
Shoah should not be a topic that only comes up in history lessons on the years
1933 to 1945. This can be done, for example, by demonstrating continuities and
discontinuities or similarities and differences between National Socialist exclusion
and annihilation mechanisms and today’s concepts of the Alt-Right-movement or
the Neonazis such as ethnopluralism or racism against refugees and foreigners.
Having said that, we must keep in mind that racism-critical approaches in Holo-
caust Education must always defend themselves against the claim that they are
using or abusing history. Of course, the Holocaust should in no sense be diminis-
hed into a learning piece that requires little historical learning and rather serves
purely political learning. The life stories and testimonies of the survivors have to
be more than only a foil to draw attention to contemporary human rights’ issues.
Therefore, in each setting, we again and again have to face the demanding chal-
lenge of combining the aims of working with testimony, the goals of historical
learning and the connection to the present in a reasonable manner.

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