France’s President Sarkozy has sparked fierce controversy with his recent proposals for projects about the Holocaust in schools. Meanwhile, a musical about the life of Anne Frank, whose diary has become a symbol of the Nazi extermination of young Jews, is soon to open in Spain. Has the line been crossed between studying the Holocaust as a lesson from the past and marketing it for political or other gains? Can school courses on the Holocaust play a part in combating today’s anti-Semitism, neo-fascism and injustice? MUT correspondent Karen Margolis reports from France.´

If President Nicholas Sarkozy has his way, French school pupils will soon be studying the lives and fates of France’s 11,000 child victims of the Nazi genocide against the Jews during the Second World War. “Ten-year-old pupils should know the name and life story of a child who died in the Holocaust,” President Sarkozy told the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) in a surprise speech on 13 February 2008.

France’s Education Minister, Xavier Darcos, explained that the Holocaust project in schools would “create identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed”. Pupils in the final year of elementary school would conduct research into the victim's family and social environment, and the circumstances in which the child died.

The resulting row has raised issues far beyond the school gates. Opposition politicians attacked the president for playing “preacher” and trying to “impose remembrance”. Sarkozy’s speech to the CRIF has been cited alongside his recent addresses to Catholic and Muslim organisations as evidence that the president is violating France’s time-honoured separation of church and state. Sarkozy actually describes himself as a lapsed Catholic. His personal life with quickie divorce and whirlwind remarriage to an Italian model has kept the paparazzi and gossip columnists occupied for months, and sent his popularity ratings spiralling downwards. His critics allege he has “discovered” religion and morals to brush up his image. On a visit to Rome last year, the French president praised the Catholic clergy’s role in teaching morals to children; more recently, he argued that “people of faith” have a hope and purpose missing in modern society due to the “end of ideology” after the Cold War and the spread of disillusionment with consumer society. Now, it seems, the Holocaust is to help fill the spiritual void.

The proposal that school pupils “adopt” their own Shoa victim brought Sarkozy new critics from many quarters, including parents’ associations and many Jewish organisations in France and around the world. While some commentators pointed to possible traumatic effects on young people if they are expected to identify with child victims, others warned against substituting emotions for historical facts, and even a backlash if the Holocaust becomes compulsory on the curriculum.

One of the quickest reactions to Sarkozy’s proposal — and certainly the most widely quoted — came from Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor who was deported from France to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 16 in 1944. Most of her family perished in the Nazi camps. After the war, Veil became a lawyer and later one of France’s most distinguished politicians. She is now honorary chairwoman of the Foundation for Remembrance of the Shoa. Although Veil previously supported Sarkozy, she has strongly condemned his Holocaust education proposal. “My blood froze when I first heard it,” she said. “It’s unimaginable, untenable and unfair.” The website of the French weekly “L’Express” quoted her as saying: “We can't inflict this on 10-year-old children. We can’t ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”

She warned that Sarkozy’s suggestion risked stirring religious antagonism. “How will a religious Catholic or Muslim family react when their son or daughter is asked to represent the memory of a young Jew?” she asked. Maybe that’s exactly the confrontation Sarkozy is looking for. Maybe he believes that the violence and disaffection of many young people in society today can be avoided if they are forced at a tender age to learn about the consequences of barbarism and inhumanity. Anyway, he almost seemed to enjoy the stir caused by his proposal; dismissing the criticism, he stubbornly reaffirmed that he was going to carry out his plans.

Veil and the Foundation for the Remembrance of the Shoa are taking the issue seriously. They are setting up a commission to examine ways of transmitting the events and meaning of the Shoa to young people. This could be seen as damage limitation: if it’s going to be done, at least it should be done properly. Meanwhile, Sarkozy has received support from some educationalists and schoolteachers who are already involved in projects on the Holocaust and genocide. In the week after the proposal was announced, a French daily paper quoted teachers in various parts of the country who approved the idea in principle but thought it had to be worked out carefully. “I’m not against it,” a woman teacher from Paris said, “but I think it should cover all genocides.” Another, from Calais, said her pupils were “fed up with their Play Stations” and wanted to know more about real life stories. “I would let my pupils choose the name of a Holocaust child victim and then research in Internet.” A male teacher said he would start his Shoa education course with “writings like the diary of Anne Frank” and visits to memorials, “without delving into sordid details”. But that’s just the problem — the Shoa can’t be sanitised to make it palatable for school pupils. Anne Frank’s diary is so powerful precisely because we read it knowing that she died as a Nazi victim in the sordid filth of Bergen-Belsen.

Educating the Educators

Perhaps the main criticism to be made of Sarkozy’s proposal is that he has launched a key discussion in such a careless, superficial way. The Shoa could come to be seen as a panacea for curing juvenile delinquency, boredom and anti-social behaviour: a good dose of Holocaust medicine, and all the bad kids will face up to their own blood lust and evil urges, and grow up as reformed characters. If Sarkozy and his education minister really want children to learn from the genocide against the Jews, they should start by educating themselves, and providing courses for the educators. France doesn’t even offer Holocaust studies in higher education. A 2006 report by the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research found that:

“There are no Holocaust studies in French universities. The subject is only mentioned during general lessons on World War II, Nazi Germany, or the Vichy regime. There are plenty of articles and books in French concerning this period in history, but future teachers do not necessarily get academic courses about the Holocaust. There are some specific courses given by non-academic professors (from non-governmental organizations [NGOs]), etc…”

If the French want to teach their children about the Holocaust in a sensitive and relevant way, there are plenty of good examples abroad. They should look at the excellent work that has been done for years now, particularly in the USA and Israel, on Holocaust education and the reception of the Shoa by successive generations. Aside from academic studies and teacher training, many organisations worldwide offer practical educational kits and guidance.

* The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington advises students and teachers on its website under http://www.ushmm.org/education/ and provides contact to holocaust education centres all over the world.

German sources on Holocaust education include:

— the Jewish Museum Berlin (http://www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de/), which offers educational projects and has links to international Holocaust memorials and study centres

— the website published by the German Fund for Cultural Education in Bonn (http://www.holocaust-education.de — also in English and Polish)

— the Hamburg-based Forschungs- und Arbeitsstelle “Erziehung nach/über Auschwitz” (http://www.center-for-holocaust-education.de)

— national and local memorial centres throughout Germany and Eastern Europe offer educational programmes and projects on the Shoa specifically for young people.

The Risk of Backlash

What is absolutely clear — and many Jewish groups have been concerned to point this out — is that any kind of compulsory teaching on the Nazi genocide against the Jews is likely to do more harm than good. There are signs of this in Germany, where the history of the Holocaust has been a central part of school curricula for several years now. Some parents of young school pupils have complained that their children suffered guilt and fear after being made to read victims’ stories and see horrific documentaries at an age when they can’t digest the ideas properly. Such criticisms can’t always be dismissed as anti-Semitic prejudice or the desire to gloss over the crimes of the past. British educationalists have also questioned whether there is an over-emphasis on the Nazis and the Second World War in their country’s school history curricula, partly because they’re worried about encouraging cults of evil among young people. We have to ask how the story of the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe is being communicated in schools, and what changes have to be made in presenting this terrible history again for each new generation.

It’s also important to find ways of assessing the effect of Holocaust education. Just because it’s about Jewish victims and Nazi crimes doesn’t make it a good thing. In the Communist era in East Germany, for example, learning about the fascist past was compulsory, and Jewish survivors were sent to schools to lecture about their experiences under the Nazis. A friend born in the 1950s once told me about his own school experience of Holocaust education in East Germany: he and his schoolmates waited eagerly for the class outing to a concentration camp at around the age of 13. For him, the unforgettable moment was not what he saw in the camp, but what came after. “For most of us, it was our first trip away from our parents,” he recalled, “so lots of kids grabbed at the chance for their first sexual experiences in the youth hostel right next to the concentration camp.” He didn’t see that as a sign of disrespect towards the victims of Nazism, but as a sign of rebellion and subversion against the authoritarian system that forced school pupils into Young Pioneer uniforms and took them on trips as a moral warning against the evils of fascism. His reaction was the result of imposing a polarised ideological view of history that justified the Berlin Wall as an “anti-fascist bulwark” and cynically used the victims of racism and fascism to score political points against the West in the Cold War.

This is the kind of backlash that experts are warning Sarkozy against. Showing young people the unspeakable crimes of the past carries the risk of making evil deeds interesting and even exciting, or making the next generation despise everything about their forefathers who created the terror (and consequently despising themselves or feeling inherited shame). What’s more, concentrating on the Jews as victims and picking out individual Jews to identify with not only ignores all the other victims of Nazism, but can also feed ancient stereotypes. Moving away decisively from the “sympathy for the victim” approach, many modern Holocaust education programmes make a point of highlighting resistance, as well as showing how passive acceptance of dictatorship and injustice make ordinary people complicit in genocide.

More than two generations after the end of the Second World War, with a huge store of documentation on the Shoa in books, archives and films, and a mass of factual and fictional literature, historians, educators, psychologists, literary scholars and many other kinds of interpreters and communicators are still debating how to transmit its meaning. There is no common consensus, and perhaps there never will be, because the story of the Holocaust defies our usual modes of telling. Indeed, some survivors have argued that words and pictures are not capable of transporting the meaning of the Shoa. Andres Nader, a psychologist and consultant of the Antonio Amadeu Foundation in Berlin, discusses this issue in his recent book about concentration camp poetry, “Traumatic Verses” (Camden House, Rochester, NY, 2007). He shows that the poems of Nazi victims, however imperfectly expressed, can still speak to us with a special urgency today, because they are the words of people from inside the terror.

Above all, the Nazi genocide against the Jews should not become a political football, either for Holocaust deniers like Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, or for opportunist politicians. Sarkozy’s motives are certainly open to question. His embrace of religion could be a convenient way to avoid current major problems in France that have dogged his presidency from the start. Everyday violence, racism, anti-Semitism, rising neo-fascism, riots in migrant communities and urban ghettos, unemployment and homelessness, economic scandals, rising prices and the growing gap between rich and poor are becoming endemic here, as in many other European countries.

The Holocaust Industry

Reacting to the French president’s proposal for Shoa teaching in schools, one of Sarkozy’s opponents went as far as to accuse him of “Holocaust marketing”. The term is shocking, but reflects a growing trend in treatment of the Shoa (and other historical events of the past) in the 21st century. It is a cliché that anything and everything can be marketed nowadays, and the genocide against the Jews is no exception, because it is concerned with communication. A type of industry has grown up around commemoration of the Holocaust, and much of it is valuable for retelling the past and bringing it to life in the present. (This includes films like “Schindler’s List” and “La vita è bella”, books and photo collections, musical works, theatre, paintings and sculptures, research institutes, memorial centres, and plaques on city streets.) On the other hand, there’s a great deal of false information, misinterpretation and malicious rewriting of history, not to mention blatant bad taste. Internet, in particular, is responsible for a huge amount of propaganda and disinformation about the Shoa.

The question is: who should control the information flood and “marketing” associated with the Holocaust? In the past, the main authorities have been survivors like Simon Wiesenthal, who have become watchdogs and arbiters; their warnings against the resurgence of anti-Semitism and fascism have carried weight in many parts of the world. But now the time of personal witnesses is passing, and a new generation is growing up that demands the right to look at the past with its own eyes. The conflict this generates is illustrated by the controversy over a new Spanish musical based on the life of Anne Frank, due to premiere in Madrid on 28 February 2008.

The musical is titled “Anne Frank — a song to life”. Its producers argue that a musical is a legitimate way to bring the world-famous story to the younger generation. They have the backing of the Anne Frank Foundation, which runs the national memorial centre in the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank hid with her family. The musical’s director, Rafael Alvero, who heads the Spanish cinema federation, says he got the idea for a musical on a visit to Anne Frank’s house. “This production respects the message of tolerance inherent in the tragedy, that we want to keep alive,” Jan Erik Dubbelman, head of the foundation’s international department, said when the cast visited the house in January 2008. The Foundation is hoping that the musical will tour in South America, bringing Anne Frank’s story to a much wider Spanish-speaking audience.

Strong opposition to the musical project has come from Anne Frank’s only surviving cousin, 82-year-old Buddy Elias, who runs the Swiss-based foundation with sole rights to the diary that made Anne Frank into an icon of the Shoa. “We are very much against it — the Holocaust is not a theme to be made into a musical,” Elias told Agence France Presse. He added that his foundation had supported a large number of “realistic” interpretations. Yet the number of survivors able to control the transmission of the Holocaust is dwindling, and their judgement is often no longer accepted by young people seeking their own perspective. In the case of the Anne Frank musical, the dividing line between the guardians of the legacy and the communicators trying to reach the broadest possible audience is clear. It is the line dividing the people who experienced the terrible persecution themselves, and those who were born much later, who have grown up in a time of other wars and genocides, and have quite a different view of the Holocaust.

Whichever generation we belong to, all these debates and controversies will remain academic and sterile unless they relate to our lives today. The Holocaust is not a subject to be taught by rote in school, like Shakespeare, Goethe, or arithmetic. It is not a religious issue, nor the exclusive preserve of historians and moralists. It is part of the heritage of all humankind, and warns each of us to be careful how we treat other people in every aspect of our lives, and how important it is to fight injustice and threats to humanity wherever we find them. The eternal flame that burns in many holocaust memorials is not just in remembrance of the dead: it is to remind us that we are alive, and responsible for the world we live in.

© Karen Margolis for mut-gegen-rechte-gewalt.de/17 February 2008 / Photo: H.Kulick, seen in Belzig

Für deutsche Leser: „Sarkozy verteidigt Holocaust-Paten-Idee“ (Spiegel-Online — Schulspiegel): http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/ausland/0,1518,535618,00.html

„Anne-Frank-Musical in Spanien“ (Website des Anne-Frank-Hauses, Amsterdam — also in English, French, Spanish) : http://www.annefrank.org/content.asp?PID=829&LID=3

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