Forgetting Hitler

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And so while Germany's record on national accountability is laudable, it is perhaps somewhat misleading as well. More than half a century after the Holocaust, Jews are still considered an anomaly. Every formal Jewish institution exists behind a fortress of police and state-of-the-art security. Furthermore, despite a population of some 3 million Muslim immigrants, many of whom span multiple generations in the country, a debate continues about who is a German and who is a foreigner.

Just outside southwestern Berlin, near the banks of Wannsee Lake, is an elegant gated villa where Reinhard Heydrich and a group of prominent Nazis gathered to draw up plans for the Final Solution in 1942. Since 1992 Wannsee has been used as a memorial and educational site, offering workshops to youth groups and classes studying National Socialism-Nazism-and the persecution of European Jews.

Wannsee receives lots of immigrant students, and Elke Gryglewski, a political scientist who is one of the center's educators, says that over the past four years she has noticed what she calls a kind of a competition over historical discourse. The Holocaust, mixed up with the broader conflicts in the Middle East, is the catalyst. 'Some [immigrant] kids have a high level of empathy for the Jewish population during National Socialism,' she says. 'They've experienced racism here in Germany and can well imagine better than Germans can what it means to be discriminated against.' But visiting the site also raises other questions about their own stories. In the case of Palestinian refugees, she says, 'there is a big debate over history. They want to know who should be guilty for the expulsion of Palestinians.'

Young kids, she says, 'have their own traumas that are passed through generations. Then there is what they are learning in school. They see what is important in this society, and sometimes they do things to provoke and get attention for their own history. '

After September 11, 2001, Gryglewski heard Arab children taking credit for the terror attacks. 'They said, 'It was me, I did it,'' she recalls. In many cases, she says, 'their behavior was a cry for attention.'

Wannsee reaches out to Muslim and Arab students by translating its information into Arabic and Turkish and offering material relating to their backgrounds. 'When they feel accepted,' she says, 'they are more willing to deal with the Holocaust.'

Unfortunately, few of the nation's Holocaust studies programs take that kind of approach. Classes are still largely based on a West German model of re-education meant for a homogeneous student population: the children and grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators and victims. It has yet to adapt to a multicultural society or to cope with rising right-wing extremism. There is no centralized curriculum. The scope and breadth of studies is left up to the 16 German states, which in turn may leave it to the discretion of teachers. There are many dedicated teachers and activists committed to Holocaust studies. Still, a number describe a curriculum badly in need of reform. The average age of instructors is 50; there is an emphasis on horribly graphic images and statistics.

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