was undoubtedly helped by Arendt’s famed Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), where she developed her seminal, albeit profoundly criticised, concept of the banality of evil.
Given this, it is hardly surprising that the 1960s saw the first attempts to teach about the Holocaust in Israel, which were inspired by Theodor W. Adorno’s radio talk symptomatically entitled “Education after Auschwitz.” In Adorno’s view, the primary responsibility of education was prevention, that is, making sure that the Holocaust would never happen again. His vision of education was emphatically anti-authoritarian, as it excluded pedagogy from any participation in building a totalitarian state. In Adorno’s framework, Holocaust education was essentially underpinned by empathy.38
As a matter of fact, empathy still seems to be axial to education today, even though the methodology of teaching about the Holocaust has already developed mechanisms that promote going beyond the emotional level towards intellectual generalisation and historical knowledge. With these three learning levels in place, didactic practices, which lead from emotions to understanding, to ←21 | 22→embedding events in the historical context, guarantee safe, non-traumatising Holocaust instruction at school.39
Notably, besides the obvious task of teaching about the event, Holocaust education today has other responsibilities ascribed to it. The more remote the historical period of the Holocaust grows, the more frequently Holocaust education gets inscribed in discourses which are only tangentially related to its original pedagogical purposes. Bogusław Śliwerski contends that postmodern pedagogy dispenses with the traditional question “By what methods and for what aims must we educate today?” and supplants it with a new one: “What social function does education still perform today?”40
Consequently, contemporary Holocaust education does not stop at fostering empathy or providing knowledge about the past, but is instead incorporated into the modern project, which is fundamentally informed by the concepts of intercultural and/or postcolonial education. The former, which makes Holocaust education part of efforts aimed at educating society to be prepared for living in the realities of cultural diversity, is based on intercultural learning in contact with the Other. The latter, while safeguarding the memory of the Holocaust, also evokes other narratives which call for inclusion within cultural memory. Such a model of education promotes flexible thinking and the authentic and profound experience of encounter with the Other. Crucially, a shift in the educational approach to the Holocaust entails adopting a multidirectional model of memory, one inclusive of and legitimising the multiplicity of narratives without promoting any of them to be a dominant one.
In the model of education derived from Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy, “encounter does not involve asking ‘who am I?’ or ‘who are you?’; instead, encounter takes place when we are faced with ‘where are you?’ and when responding ‘I’m here’ we engage in a relationship with the Other.”41 Such a ←22 | 23→relationship demands that we constantly negotiate the positions from which we address each other. This seems to be a fundamental task of education because without it our contact with the past will inevitably be limited to repeating the same gestures all over again.
To better grasp this, we can usefully draw on the insights of Ernst van Alphen, who is apprehensive of repetition as, in his view, it fosters acting out the Holocaust instead of working through it, since the hunt for the most archival, i.e. allegedly the purest representation (e.g. a list or a chart), can mutate into a replication of the perpetrators’ practices, whereas the goal of education is not to multiply repetitions, but to make change through conscious reiteration.42 Importantly, Van Alphen recommends a limited trust in knowledge about the Holocaust. His teaching experience suggests that students are tired of what could be called the etiquette of Holocaust education, which dictates the rules and norms of conduct. They want to experience the memory of the Holocaust in different ways, first and foremost through emotions. Advocating the reinstatement of affects in Holocaust education may imply that there is a surfeit of facts and data, an overdosing which paralyses action, breeds stagnation, induces apathy and turns against memory.
Such learning experiences can result in a refusal to participate in the “theatre” of memory, which is exquisitely shown in We Won’t See Auschwitz by Jérémie Dres (born in 1982).43 With the title sounding like an emphatic statement of counter-memory, Dres’s popular comic book tells a story of a thirty-year-old man who goes with his brother on a trip to Poland to look for his Jewish roots. When travelling across the homeland of their ancestors, the young men deliberately steer clear of Auschwitz, convinced that the truth about the past and simultaneously about their identity cannot be found in the extermination camp museum.
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In Poland, the memory of the Holocaust is shaped in young people chiefly at school. Without examining the role that history lessons play in this process,44 I will focus on the obligatory reading lists for Polish classes. The school canon of texts about the Holocaust has been comprehensively discussed by Sylwia Karolak.45 In her examination of opulent literary and didactic resources, Karolak distinguishes two moments of particular relevance to the presence of writings about the Holocaust in Polish language education. One of them is 1947, when Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Dymy nad Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau) was put on the obligatory reading list for primary schools as the first literary text about the Holocaust. The book had a long and powerful formative impact on the post-Holocaust imaginary of the following generations of Poles. The other crucial moment came in 1991, when the inclusion 77777of Hanna Krall’s Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (To Outwit God) on the reading list proved to be the last essential change in the school canon. Karolak additionally enumerates a few minor turning points marked by the addition of new titles to the list, such as Zofia Nałkowska’s Medaliony (Medallions) in 1950, Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz short stories in 1972, Jerzy Ficowski’s poems in 1982, and Leopold Buczkowski’s Czarny potok (Black Torrent) alongside Janusz Korczak’s Pamiętnik (Ghetto Diary) in 1984.46
Interestingly, Karolak’s exploration of the “scholastic” history of literature about the Holocaust concludes with the observation that until 1991 there hardly was any tolerably fixed Polish canon of texts about the Holocaust, and that the reasons for this failure of canonisation processes are to be attributed to combined ←24 | 25→political and social factors.47 This would suggest that after 1991 a canon of texts about the Holocaust was eventually forged.
In another study, Agnieszka Rypel analyses the topos of the stranger/foreigner in Polish language textbooks and notices that the ethnic identity of writers (actually not only those of Jewish descent) was long ignored in educational policy: “Paradoxical though it may sound, the vision of an ethnically homogenous Poland […] which was forged in the interwar period to tout the Polish nation as the only creative agent was actually sustained under the People’s Republic of Poland and still holds sway today. Polish textbooks frame the great aristocratic families (e.g. the Wiśniowieckis and the Czartoryskis) as Polish, obscuring their Ruthenian or Lithuanian background. The same strategy is applied to German bourgeois families, therein Cracow-based printers. […] Textbooks for primary schools and now for junior secondary schools as well are very careful not to highlight the contributions of Jews or people of Jewish origin to