Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys

In her memoir, What Did You Do in the War,Daddy? Growing Up German, the West German writer Sabine Reichel recalls her 1960 school history textbook: “ There was an extra chapter, about three-quarters of a page long. It was titled ‘The Extermination of the Jews,’ and I had read it in my room at home many times. I always locked the door because I didn’t want anybody to know what I was reading. Six million Jews were killed in concentration camps, and as I read about Auschwitz and the gas chambers a wave of feelings— fearful fascination mingled with disgust— rushed over me.” Even though Reichel’s class often read textbook sections aloud, she remembered that the class never read this chapter. Indeed, Reichel’s teacher, Fräulein Lange, became visibly uncomfortable as the class of thirteen- year- olds moved toward the year 1933 in the history book, saying, “We are now getting to a dark chapter in German history. I’m sure you all know what I mean?” 1 In contrast, a ninth- grade student in a Bavarian Gymnasium who opened the 2021 edition of the textbook Geschichte und Geschehen (History and Events) would find far more than three- quarters of a page. This textbook— sixty- one years later— offered extensive discussion of Nazi terror and the Holocaust, with five pages instructing students about “The Genocide of European Jews,” two pages on “Further Victims of Nazi Terror,” and two pages considering “The German Population and the Holocaust: Knew Nothing?” 2 Furthermore,the ninth grader likely would have encountered the topic in other ways. The president of the Deutscher Lehrerverbandes (German Teachers Association), Josef Kraus, said in 2015, “National Socialism is a core topic of our history classes, and I would hope, for example, that every German pupil leaving school, after appropriate preparation and discussion, has visited a concentration camp.” 3 What a diff er ent textbook— what a diff er ent educational world— than the one that young Reichel experi Teaching a Dark Chapter explores how textbook narratives about the Fascist/Nazi past in Italy, East Germany, and West Germany followed relatively calm, undisturbed paths of little change until isolated "flashpoints" catalyzed the educational infrastructure into periods of rapid transformation. Though these flashpoints varied among Italy and the Germanys, they all roughly conformed to a chronological scheme and permanently changed how each "dark past" was represented. Historians have often neglected textbooks as sources in their engagement with the reconstruction of postfascist states and the development of postwar memory culture. But as Teaching a Dark Chapter demonstrates, textbooks yield new insights and suggest a new chronology of the changes in postwar memory culture that other sources overlook. Employing a methodological and temporal rethinking of the narratives surrounding the development of European Holocaust memory, Daniela R. P. Weiner reveals how, long before 1968, textbooks in these three countries served as important tools to influence public memory about Nazi/Fascist atrocities. As Fascism had been spread through education, then education must play a key role in undoing the damage. Thus, to repair and shape postwar societies, textbooks became an avenue to inculcate youths with desirable democratic and socialist values. Teaching a Dark Chapter weds the historical study of public memory with the educational study of textbooks to ask how and why the textbooks were created, what they said, and how they affected the society around them.