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and its educational traditions. In this respect, the authors of textbooks, who have been
conditioned by a specific sociocultural milieu, in turn determine the narratives contained
in textbooks. Above all, however, narrative provides a common ground upon which to
compare textbooks in all languages worldwide. Narrative is a quasi-universal form of
representation which forms the bedrock of all forms of historical writing and learning and
facilitates the formation of historical consciousness. 41 It therefore provides a basis upon
which we measure the degree of convergence or divergence of representations in very
disparate national contexts. By recording the nuances with which facts and knowledge of
an event are transmitted in different countries and regions, we may establish similarities,
differences and analogies between representations (in this case, of the Holocaust) on a
worldwide scale. The comparative mapping of the status of the Holocaust in textbooks in
this report is therefore both semantic (drawing attention to differing conceptual renderings
of the event in terms of a catastrophe, breach of civilization, massacre or genocide, for
example) and contextual (drawing attention to national, local and regional specificities,
archetypes, paradigms and analogies where they arise, in line with the criteria outlined
above for the selection of countries in which close textbook analysis was carried out).
The part of this report which discusses the presentation of the Holocaust in textbooks
contains two sections. The first of these provides short country-by-country summaries of
national narrative patterns recorded in the textbook samples. The second section defines
transnational narrative patterns in the form of a typology based on common spatial and
temporal scales, characteristics of protagonists, interpretative paradigms, narrative points
of view and didactic approaches. These transnational patterns can, but do not have to,
correspond to the criteria underlying the initial selection of countries whose textbooks
formed the basis of this report, that is, those involved in or not involved in the event, those in
which mass violence or genocide has taken place, those which are former members of the
Warsaw Pact or part of the Soviet Union, those which are committed or not committed to
education about the Holocaust, those which are ‘western’ or ‘not western’, and those which
have Arabic-speaking or Muslim majority populations. In short, the conceptual and narrative
method is designed to define criteria with which the report may map representations of
the Holocaust as they emerge specifically from curricula and textbooks, and which do not
necessarily conform to (and may even deviate from) the status of the Holocaust in the mass
media or in family stories in the country in question.
41 Hayden White defines narrative and narration as ‘panglobal facts of culture’. See White, H. 1987. The Content of the Form.
Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 1.
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