By: Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah Lipstadt — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 10:49:53 +0000

I have posted a link to your blog http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2008/03/holocaust-education-german-reflects.html

By: Jakob

Jakob — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 10:22:47 +0000

Sadly, it’s not a North/South thing. I grew up in Lower Saxony, and I learned even less about the Holocaust. I do remember the famous picture of the child in the Warsaw ghetto, presented with little context. I also remember a picture of a extermination camp, which, I believe, was Bergen-Belsen. I certainly did learn that the Nazis killed a lot of jews (even though I do remember being quite insecure about the actual number …).
Please keep in mind that I visited a Gymnasium (something like High School) and that I continually got A and B grades in History (I even wrote my final exams on the Weimar Republic). Nevertheless, I didn’t actually have an idea about the anti-Semitic ideology of the Nazis. As far as I was concerned, National Socialism was a dictature by a man (Hitler) who, for some reason, happpened to dislike Jews (whoever they were). Since i did not know any Jews, I considered them some kind of “foreigners” who, these days, were not present anymore in Germany. I don’t think that I ever learned the least bit about the history of German Jewry at school (something that might have proven helpful not for “understanding” the holocaust, but for realizing what the murder of most of them truly meant). So the whole thing seemed somhow external to Germany in my eyes: There was this dictator, and there were these Jews. It was a bad time. People chose a bad leader because they had no jobs. Then there was war, which was also bad – that pretty much sums up my concept of what happened in Germany between 33 and 45.
My ignorance went even so far that I didn’t have the slightest idea what the term anti-Semitism meant (which was not a problem in my history classes, because it tended not to crop up there). Considering myself anti-racist, I was quite confused by the use of “anti”. I finally concluded that “semite” was a word that was somehow connected to words like the English “similar”, and that an anti-Semitist was basically a racist, meaning someone who didn’t believe in the “similarity” of people of different ethnicity – an “anti-similarist” (clearly, I didn’t know about the different usages of English words like “similar” and “equal” back then). I remember that I finally got rid of this misconception when reading Moishe Postone in a reading group I started with some friends in my last year of school.
So, while I did learn about NS and the Holocaust at school, I didn’t learn about the anti-Semitic ideology behind it. And I think this is the main reason, why, in school, I remained so deeply ignorant about the Holocaust. One might consider it problematic to teach schoolchildren about anti-Semitic ideology, even if it is to denounce this ideology. However, I don’t think there’s an alternative.

Comments on: Where Have I been While My Peers Have Been Harrassed with the Holocaust?

By: Deborah Lipstadt

By: Jakob