"Erziehung nach Auschwitz" (Adorno) / Education after Auschwitz
Summary in 21 Points

1. Why focus on the Holocaust? Three reasons

2. (1) To get to know yourself and humanity
(2) To warn about comparable things that are still happening (3) To distance yourself from anyone who denies the Holocaust ever happened 3. "The very first demand on education is that there not be another Auschwitz" (Adorno)

4. "Erziehung nach Auschwitz" (Adorno) / Education after Auschwitz
(1) Teaching about the Holocaust / Shoah / Endl?sung
(2) Bringing up children in general

5. Education after Auschwitz
-1- Promoting empathy and warmth-2- Promoting autonomy: enhancing the capacity for- reflection- self-determination - not automatically following what other people do (non-conformity)

6. Education after Auschwitz-3- Promoting empathy with the horrors of Auschwitz, which are the horrors of our world

7. Education after Auschwitz-4- Promoting empathy with the perpetrators, the victims, and the bystanders in the Holocaust and other forms of cruelty and aggression. All human beings have experienced all three of these roles at one time or another -5- Gaining insight into the mechanisms and circumstances that turn people into aggressors and murderers, insight into the structure of annihilation

8.The teaching principles of this five-point programme are warmth, empathy and autonomy

9. The programme devotes attention to all the actors: perpetrators, victims and bystanders (the perpetrators, everyone who helped them, everyone who collaborated with the people in power, passive observers, the opposition, the active resistance, everyone who helped the victims, the victims)

10. How did they live before the Holocaust and what was the situation of the Holocaust survivors?

11. Attention for positive issues such as solidarity, resistance, and the preservation of human dignity in situations of extreme danger and hardship

12. Broad context is necessary

(1) Discussing or demonstrating (solely) human cruelty sometimes activates human
cruelty, and at any rate does not teach youngsters how to prevent it
(2) Focusing a relatively excessive amount of attention on extreme cruelty makes cruelty on a smaller scale not seem that bad.
(3) Comparing the Holocaust with other forms of prejudice, discrimination and racism
(4) Not limiting the focus to the horrors of the Holocaust- it does not generate sympathy for the victims- the horrors are not specific to the Holocaust

13. Using life stories- before, during and after the Holocaust - demonstrate that everyone plays various roles in the course of a lifetime (sometimes perpetrator, sometimes victim, usually bystander)- sometimes more than one role at the same time (Oskar Schindler in the Holocaust)- youngsters are often interested in authentic life stories- they enable youngsters to identify (empathy)

14. "Education after Auschwitz has to start in early childhood" (Adorno)

15. Education after Auschwitz for children in the 3 – 10 age group
This is "Education after Auschwitz without Auschwitz", bringing up children and educating them without examples of extreme cruelty

16. Three-point programme

-1- Promoting empathy and warmth-2- Promoting autonomy: Enhancing the capacity for- reflection- self-determination- not automatically following what other people do (non-conformity)-3- Promoting empathy (the ability to identify with someone else and feel what they are feeling) with perpetrators, victims and bystanders. Children experience all three of these roles at one time or another17. The three-point programme and the five-point programme are both based upon the same teaching principles: warmth, empathy and autonomy

18. My criticism of books for children’s and young people about the Holocaust and educational Holocaust activities on the part of museums and commemoration centres about World War Two in particular, of programmes about Education after Auschwitz in general:
Not enough attention is focused on the negative roles, and they are barely elaborated. They are not made comprehensible or plausible.

19. "The roots [of the Holocaust] are to be sought in the perpetrators, not in the victims whom one had murdered under the most miserable pretenses" (Adorno)

20 Do the people responsible for bringing up children feel negative roles are not constructive and are bad for the child? (first question for discussion)

21.Do the people responsible for bringing up children think it serves an educational purpose to show the Holocaust without showing the perpetrators, everyone who helped them, the collaborators, the passive bystanders? (second question for discussion)