These days there is much debate about successful measures of integration. Learning the language of the country, equal access to education and the labour market are basic requirements without which integration will certainly not succeed.
But in addition, I have come to understand in my work as European Commission Coordinator on combatting Antisemitism that one cannot fully grasp European society, the European integration process, let alone my home country Germany, without knowing about the abysses of the Shoah. In order to allow for full participation in European society it will be necessary to significantly strengthen the knowledge of the Holocaust. And by the way not only among youth with migrant background: According to a study by the Hamburg-based Körber Foundation, only 59 percent of German pupils of 14 years of age or older know that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a Nazi concentration camp. Four out of ten students don’t even know the name.
Since this knowledge often does not come from the parents’ house, educational institutions have a central role to play. This means, first of all, better teach-the-teacher training and stronger history lessons. A teacher must be well equipped with arguments for increasingly multicultural class rooms. He or she needs to know what to say when as soon as the Holocaust is taken up in class a hand goes up and a student claims: “In Gaza, Israel is doing the same.” Some teachers have even faced physical aggression for not simply turning the page and starting with the after-war period.
When students refuse to stand up on Holocaust Remembrance Day, as has happened earlier this year in some French and in German schools, this should not be accepted by the director as “one of two options” or worse “freedom of expression”. No. Then it is high time to present the historical facts and to explain how things unfolded seventy, eighty years ago. The earth is not flat. Of course, this is only possible if the history teacher himself does not believe that “the Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin is a disgrace” – as former Thuringia AfD leader Björn Höcke, a history teacher, proclaimed under the applause of his audience.
In that same history lesson, a broader discussion about discrimination and exclusion might unfold which exposes personal humiliations that some of the students might have experienced. These accounts should then not be dismissed as ‘ less important’. Rather they should be acknowledged. Teachers will need tools for that debate, too – and time for it in the curriculum.
Instead, history class is becoming less and less a subject in its own right. In some European countries, history is no longer taught at all in secondary schools that train for practical professions. So, the 15-year-old electrician or builder-to-be learns nothing about the history of the country in which he lives, about Europe, let alone the Holocaust. Critical thinking such as “How could it come to this? “is no longer stimulated.
And so simplistic responses become acceptable answers to complex questions. Some of the current populists might ask the right questions, but they give the wrong answers. We all should expose them to facts and dismantle their arguments. This is not only a challenge and responsibility for society at large, it is also a precondition for successful integration.
Katharina's blog 