Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I think it is obvious and of course unavoidable that the questions we have been asked to address in this panel are general question, i.e. they don’t refer to special cases. Germany, however, in my opinion still is – and will be for a long time – a special case when it comes to the question: how to teach about the Holocaust? This is why I would like to start with a few remarks on the history of Holocaust research and teaching in Germany.

Nowadays, teaching about the Nazi period is of course essential in German school classrooms as well as in universities. But this was not always the case. During the first decade or so after the war there were quite many hesitations and strategies to avoid talking about the Nazi past. From the 1960ies on, however, the majority of German school-children got reasonable information about Nazi anti-Semitism and about the so-called Final Solution. Being a schoolboy during the sixties, I am talking here not only as a historian who at the moment is doing research in this field; I am talking also on the basis of personal experience. I know that while history lessons in my school – which was named after Anne Frank – were probably better than the average, the average during the sixties was not too bad anymore. And from than on, the situation gradually improved.

I would even argue that schools (of any kind) where even ahead of the universities, where in the early sixties contemporary history to a large extent was still perceived as unsuitable for serious academic scholars and neglected by the conservative majority of historians. Interestingly enough, it was not until 1960 that the first scholarly book on the Holocaust, written by a young German historian, was published. To be sure, Wolfgang Schefflers work was not the first book on the Holocaust in Germany, but it was the first one by an academic historian and not by a survivor of the Holocaust.

I cannot go into detail here about the development of German historiography on the Holocaust. But I would like to say that there had been a period of remarkable beginnings in the early sixties during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. This was the time when Martin Broszat and others published some path-breaking essays which were published under the title ”Anatomy of the SS State”. In the seventies, however, German historiography, while debating about the decision-making process which led to the Holocaust, sort of lost its track. It became purely academic, even more so because of the bitter fight between ”intentionalists” and ”functionalists”.

In fact, it was much due to the screening of the Hollywood TV serial ”Holocaust” in 1979 that contemporary historians in Germany started to think about the way they were presenting their subject to the public. To say the least, they had not been very successful in telling the story. Obviously, journalists, filmmakers and popular writers had achieved much more attention. Nonetheless, I have to admit that it took us another ten years or so before a thorough change in research strategies came into being. But this re-conceptualization had also much to do with a new generation of researchers and new research opportunities which opened up in Eastern Europe after 1989.

Since then, however, a broad stream of empirical Holocaust research is under way in German historiography, and those younger scholars who are doing this research are producing rather impressive results.

Parallel to this renaissance in research, the early nineties saw new developments on the institutional level. In Frankfurt, the Fritz Bauer Institute was founded as the first German center for Holocaust education and research; many historical sites which formerly had been ignored now were turned into museums; and above all the debate about a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was taken on by the media. To be sure, all this happed before the Goldhagen book became a best-seller in Germany.

Certainly, the Goldhagen event was something unique, but it would be completely wrong to assume that since then the history of the Holocaust has ceased to be of interest to the German public. Rather, I would argue the other way round: While public interest in the Nazi past in Germany has proved to be a vital factor of the political culture for the last 20 years or so, it now more and more tends to narrow down to the history of the Holocaust. In fact, we are witnessing tendencies of a de-contextualization of the Holocaust in Germany, and I would add: not in Germany alone.

Applied to the questions we have been asked to adress in this panel, I should think that the problem of too little understanding of modern European history is not – maybe not yet – a main problem we have in Germany when teaching about the Holocaust. Also, because of a reasonable solid school teaching of history, there is still enough of adequate prior preparation.

But there is a tendency of declining interest in the overall Nazi history; if I am not completely mistaken – and I know I am generalizing –, our students today are less eager to get the full picture than ten years or so ago. Today, students are less interested to learn about the pre-war years in Nazi Germany, to learn about the foreign policy of the Third Reich, about its economic or cultural history. In short, the historical interest of our students is developing in the same direction than the general interest in the Nazi past.
At this point, I think one has to consider the two sides of the ongoing process which one could call the universalization of the Holocaust: Indeed, in the memory of mankind the Holocaust is about to become the ultimate symbol of crime, the most terrible ”crime against humanity”.

We all know about the positive implications of this for the development of a renewed and hopefully forceful international law. However, there is also the risk that the "historical Holocaust" is loosing much of its meaning. While being instrumentalized as an argument for legal policies – even for those which are commonly considered to be an achievement –, while being used as a general warning lesson for future generations, the Holocaust is in danger to undergo a profound de-historicization.

To simply join this path would make it perhaps easier for the Germans to cope with the burdens of beeing the nation of the perpetrators, but to me, it would be the wrong path. As Germans, we are not allowed to let the Holocaust just become a universal warning; we have to keep it with the context and to remember it in the context of our own history. Therefore, one could reasonably argue that indeed every university should have a chair in Holocaust studies in order to ensure a proper, non-instrumental teaching of the Holocaust and to preserve the dignity of its victims. However, one can also argue that the Holocaust should not be isolated from its historical context but rather be taught as an integral part of German and modern European history. Within the German university system, and with respect to Germany's particular historical responsibility, the latter seems to me the more plausible way.