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ALBANIA
The sample
The sample consists of five textbooks designed for sixteen to eighteen-year-old pupils
studying history, published in Tirana either in 1997 (T3) or 2010 (T1, T2, T4 and T5). The
books all focus on world civilization with the exception of T4, which is devoted more loosely
to ‘modern history’, while T2 and T3 cover only the twentieth century. All place the Holocaust
within the context of the Second World War, and none contain a section devoted specifically
to the Holocaust. The national curriculum prescribes education covering ‘the history of
world civilization’ and more specifically about ‘the period of the great upheaval, 1914-1945’,
a theme which is reflected faithfully in books T2, T3 and T4. T1, by contrast, focuses on the
history of Albania, south-western Europe and resistance, that is, the ‘antifascist struggle’
against German occupation. The books contain between a few lines (T4) and three pages
(T3) about the Holocaust.
Scale
The titles of sections contextualize the Holocaust within the Second World War as an event
taking place either in the world, in Germany, in south-eastern Europe and in Albania (T1), or
else as a world event (T2 and T3), as a world and German event (T4), or solely as a German
event (T5). T2, T3 and T4 focus specifically on the topography and locations of concentration
and death camps, while T4 uses a map to show the locations of camps between 1933 and
1945. Few dates indicate the temporal scale of the Holocaust (T2, T3 and T5 offer none at
all), and the events are not presented chronologically. Those dates which are mentioned
pertain to war, either 1914 to 1945 as the ‘period of the great upheaval’ (T2 and T4) or 1942
to 1943 as the period of ‘antifascist struggle’ (T1). One exception is the reference to the
Nuremberg laws in 1935 (T4).
Protagonists
Victims are referred to generically as ‘victims’, ‘Jews’, ‘Poles’. Perpetrators are referred
to equally generically as ‘Nazis’, ‘Germans’, ‘Aryans’, ‘Ukrainians’, ‘Poles’ and ‘normal
population’ (T5). Further victim groups are not named. The only individual named (in all five
books) is Hitler, whose image is juxtaposed with images of concentration or death camps,
such that motivation for and causes of the event are (via visual association) personified,
in the absence of other named or ‘ordinary’ perpetrators. Numbers involved include six
million Jewish victims (T1 and T3) and fifty-five million victims generally (T2). Jews are
presented only as passive objects of perpetration, while relations between perpetrators
and victims derive primarily from the focus on concentration and death camps (T1, T3 and
T4) or on racial laws (T2 and T5). The majority of images depict perpetrators, and those
which depict victims reinforce stereotypical images of camp prisoners (T2, T3 and T5).
The Albanian resistance plays a prominent role in T3, while there is no mention of Jewish
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