Virtual: Advocacy for Holocaust Education in Late 1950s West Germany

In 1958 and 1959, a spate of neo-Nazi youth vandalism in West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany) prompted a reckoning with the state’s education about the Nazi past. The vandalism was attributed to ignorance or improper instruction about the Nazi period. Suddenly the Federal Republic was under intense pressure—both domestically and internationally—to examine what exactly youth were being taught about Nazism and the Holocaust. This presentation will examine how and why this campaign for educational change was successful and in particular will consider the role that domestic and international Jewish organizations played.

Daniela R. P. Weiner is the Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow in the Concentration in Education & Jewish Studies at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the history of the Holocaust and how it has been taught, represented, and remembered in Germany and Italy. Her current book project, “Teaching a Dark Chapter: Representations of the Holocaust and the Second World War in East German, West German, and Italian History Textbooks, 1943-2000,” explores how the post-fascist countries of East Germany, West Germany, and Italy taught about the Second World War and the Holocaust in their educational systems. Weiner’s research has been published in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies and Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society. She has received fellowships/grants from: the Fulbright U.S. Student Program; the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research; the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies; and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. Weiner earned her doctorate and a graduate certificate in Jewish Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2020.

A zoom link will be posted in early October.