Education After Auschwitz in a United Germany

Abstract

This article explores the teaching of the history of National Socialism in East and West Germany. Against the backdrop of the dual politics of memory that existed before reunification, the article examines how the divergent value systems of the two German nations came together to produce a single national conception of "Education after Auschwitz" in the post-1989 period. Not until German reunification and the revision of East Germany's antifascist view of history was a universalist perspective on the Holocaust able to establish itself as a legitimate component of German memory culture. While from the 1960s to the late 1980s the teaching of the Nazi past was primarily focused on making young people aware of the special German responsibility to remember, today the national character of an "Education after Auschwitz" has become infused with universal values such as tolerance and human rights (Meseth, 2005). German reunification made it possible to compare National Socialism with Stalinism, thereby reframing the Holocaust from a specific problem unique to German history to an example of totalitarianism from which important lessons could be drawn about human rights.