Learning from the Holocaust? Social Initiatives and State Education Policy in Both German States

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörg Ganzenmüller
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540067469

The project explores the history of educational policies and pedagogical engagement with the Holocaust in a broad sense by taking a comparative look at West and East Germany as two post-perpetrator societies. In doing so, the project will ask how different individuals and groups defined what and why was to be learned from the Holocaust at different times, and how this was to be achieved. These questions are addressed by looking at three interconnected complexes: first, the state's educational approaches to the topic; second, socio-political initiatives; and third, mutual perceptions and the role of transnationally operating initiators. The project aims at assessing how knowledge was produced, disseminated, and received, and, thus, will contribute to a history of knowledge of the Holocaust after 1945. The focus will be on the conditions of knowledge production(s), which were shaped by political interventions and social needs. Parallel to this, the actors in knowledge production and dissemination will be examined, and they will be shown in their roles as discursive initiators or counter-discursive acting and arguing outsiders. The project takes up various impulses and desiderata for dealing with the National Socialist past in both German states and beyond. The Cold War serves both as a frame of reference and as an object of investigation, for the project will also investigate which initiatives were rejected for political reasons, for example because they were too left-wing, too 'bourgeois', or not anti-fascist in a partisan sense and thus contradicted or at least undermined respective self-positionings and political claims. Accordingly, the project will ask which initiatives were supported or resisted at which points in time and how this was justified in each case.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants