Pixel International Conferences

The Holocaust is one of the most harrowing events of the twentieth century. Over 70 years after the liberation of the Concentration Camps, the Holocaust has become common cultural property: it is taught and commemorated all over the world; it is represented in art, in literature, in visual media; it is now even represented in Social Media and on Entertainment Shows. A welcome development for some – the more commemoration, and the more diverse, the better – it is hotly debated by others who warn of inappropriate forms of commemoration and representation. This paper focuses on the education aspect of Holocaust Commemoration: in the UK, teaching the Holocaust is part of the national curriculum, but it is not specified in which subject context and how long this topic has to be covered. As a result, Holocaust education is patchy and, in my cases, very basic, relying on pupils reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjama instead of having regular history lessons on the theme. As an academic teaching Literature at university-level, I have been teaching the Holocaust in a literary context for over fifteen years and have had to develop special techniques to, in the first instance, respond to my students’ very diverse background knowledge and, secondly, to engage them in different and meaningful ways of Holocaust commemoration. I want to share and discuss my practice of offering classes that assess historical sources, critically read literature from and about the period, discuss films or representations of the Holocaust in art and media. In addition to writing traditional academic essays my students are encouraged to produce creative responses to the Holocaust to widen their own horizons and test various approaches to Holocaust studies in a meaningful context. 

Keywords: Holocaust; Commemoration; Uses of Memory; Class-room techniques.

References:

[1] Department for Education. “Written Evidence Submitted by the Department for Education.” Education Committee Inquiry into Holocaust Education, HOL0053.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/education-committee/inquiries/parliament-2015/holocaust-education-15-16/publications/.
[2] Pearce, A. “The Holocaust in the National Curricul after 25 Years”, Holocaust Studies 23.3 (2017): 231.
[3] For a discussion of the ethical implications of literary representations of the Holocaust see, for instance, Berberich, C. “‘Writing Fiction, Making History: Historical Narrative and the Process of Creating History’, in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), New Critical Thinking: Criticisms to Come (Edinburgh: EUP, 2017), pp. 123 – 39.
[4] See Stewart, K. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
[5] Berberich, C., Campbell N. & Hudson, R., “Introduction: Affective Landscapes”, in Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, p. 1.
[6] Levi, P. If this is a Man. London, Abacus, 1991 [1959], p. 32.