Uncomfortable entanglements: young German adults and the Holocaust

Abstract

This dissertation is about the relationship of young German adults with the Holocaust. It focuses on the experience of discomfort of young adults in educational encounters with the Holocaust, and is set against the backdrop of tensions inherent in the expectations towards Holocaust education in Germany. It is based on data that has been collected through ethnographic field work in 2013 with young adults in two educational settings in Cologne: with tour guides in a museum, and students in an evening school. German Holocaust education has been crucial for the transmission of social memory in Germany. It has helped to establish Germany as a ‘normal’ democratic nation in the post-war period, and is expected to keep contributing to the creation of democratic citizens who are empathic with the victims of the Holocaust, who develop a sense of historical responsibility, and are immune to right-wing ideologies. These expectations, however, are frequently proved wrong in educational practice, as Holocaust education practitioners encounter young adults who react with boredom or anger towards the topic. The results of the doctoral research presented here have to be seen in relation to a debate that attempts to understand the difficulties in the transmission of the social memory of the Holocaust in Germany. The findings of this dissertation discuss the young adults’ experiences of discomfort in encounters with the Holocaust through images of horror, violence, and crimes; and through narratives on Germanness and guilt, and their coping strategies; they explore how emotions are regarded by tour guides, museum educator, teachers, and students as an important aspect of the success or failure of Holocaust education; they analyze how experiences with the Holocaust as uncomfortable and threatening led young German adults to attribute a human-like agency to the Holocaust; and the young adults often described the German past as an uncomfortable entity in the body, which was found to blur the lines between bodily and political discomfort, and individual and social body. This dissertation explores how young German adults experience encounters with the Holocaust, how discomfort emerges in such encounters, and how the young adults deal with it. The following chapters show the potentials such encounters have, and focus on how they unfold dynamically. Discomfort is found to not be inherent in the relation between young German adults in the Holocaust. Rather, encounters with it can become uncomfortable.