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g. Countries customarily referred to either as ‘western’ (including formerly colonial) or
‘not western’ (including formerly colonized) countries.
3. Pragmatic factors
a. Constraints on the accessibility of curricula and textbooks in some countries.
b. Limited availability of language expertise.
2.4 The international status of the Holocaust
in educational media
In addition to the documentation of concepts and narratives of the Holocaust in particular
countries, the report will also draw conclusions regarding the international patterns
according to which topics and interpretations are presented in the sample of curricula
and textbooks. The catalogue of criteria used to assess textbook representations of the
Holocaust therefore focuses on basic information such as the structure of the textbooks,
their historical content, their contextualization of the Holocaust, imagery, protagonists,
narrative structure, causes and effects attributed to the event, narrative points of view,
interpretations of the event and analogies with other events. Overarching questions were
therefore extracted from the initial findings in order to define likely transnational trends.
Does education about the Holocaust, as represented in the textbooks, foster understanding
of the military, political, legal or moral aspects of National Socialist rule What role
does Adolf Hitler play in the textbooks’ depiction of the Holocaust What meanings are
ascribed to the system of concentration and/or extermination camps Are aspects of recent
academic research reflected in textbooks, such as the definition of the Holocaust as the
result of a form of colonialism Do curricula and textbooks address human rights, mutual
understanding, democracy, civilization or ethics Do they frame such approaches in national
or international contexts What didactic methods (whether enquiry-based, reflective, moral
or multiperspectival) 29 are applied to textual and visual representations of the Holocaust
Assessment of the international status of the Holocaust in curricula and textbooks entails
a level of analytical abstraction based on a series of meta-historical questions: Is the
Holocaust ‘universalized’, as has been claimed in recent research Is the Holocaust made
to function as a model, paradigm or measure of representations of other atrocities in
accordance with a process of narrative ‘Holocaust transfer’, 30 of ‘frame switching’, 31 or via
29 Kübler, E. 2012. Europäische Erinnerungspolitik. Der Europarat und die Erinnerung an den Holocaust. Bielefeld, Transkript,
p. 171.
30 Buettner, A. 2011. Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe. The Cultural Politics of Seeing. Burlington, Ashgate, p. 97.
31 ‘Wechselrahmung’, according to Ebbrecht, T. 2011. Geschichtsbilder im medialen Gedächtnis. Filmische Narrationen des
Holocaust. Bielefeld, Transkript, p. 324.
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