Subcontractors of Guilt by Özyürek Esra;

Author:Özyürek, Esra;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The houses were originally used by the SS soldiers who ran the concentration camp. If you pay attention, even after lots of renovation, you can still see the camp insignia. The woman we went together with were shocked that we were going to be sleeping in what used to be part of the camp. I have taken many groups to these camps, and not a single [ethnic] German group reacted to staying in these houses, whereas the immigrant women had a very difficult time sleeping in the building.

The next day of the tour, they learned that the SS had used human ashes from the crematorium to pave the roads of the camp.

The last time this happened was in 1943. The roads have been paved many more times [since then], so we were not walking on [the road] the SS had paved. But of course, we knew that the entire camp is a mass graveyard. There were many rushed burials for people who died of a disease, and they could have been buried anywhere. This information, and especially the fact that the roads had been paved with the ashes of the victims, was too much for the immigrant women. It was so strong that they refused to walk on the paved road and walked instead on the side of it.

At the end of the tour, Erhard said, they decided to stop taking immigrant-background women to visit concentration camps. They talked over the events with their colleagues and decided that learning was not possible when such strong emotions were involved. He said that he personally considered this level of traumatization to be an impediment to learning, calling to mind instances right after the war when American troops forced Germans to come face-to-face with their crimes. Once again, how Germans learned about the Holocaust immediately following the war is somehow seen as relevant to the question of how best to teach immigrant-background Germans some seventy-five years later.

We have descriptions of how Germans were forced to confront the horrors the Nazis had committed after the war. One theory is that at the time, Germans could not come to terms with their crimes because it was too big [a crime] to confront. And I think that’s what I have in mind. If people are in deep shock, how can they learn?

At that point, Erhard paused, leaving his judgment on this issue open ended. He, too, had been traumatized by what he had learned, he said, but he also wondered if being deeply unsettled would be better than simply remaining ignorant. In this conversation, it was clear that the way Germans learned about the Holocaust immediately following the war was a significant referent for ethnic German educators when approaching the education of immigrant-background Germans on the Holocaust today. But Erhard’s uncertainty about what exactly had helped Germans confront their past crimes and what it was that had hindered them left him undecided about the best approach to teaching immigrants.

Overall, Erhard said, his impression of Middle Eastern people’s reactions to the history of the Holocaust is very positive.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.