A transnational perspective on the culture of remembrance: educational science students and lecturers visit the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In December 2024, bachelor’s students from Goethe University’s Faculty of Educational Sciences travelled to Poland on an excursion organized by Sandra Binnert. The group was accompanied by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Meseth, Susanne Thimm, Julia Kaufmann, Johanna Christ and Jonas Riepenhausen, and joined on-site by Dr. Andreas Kahrs (managing director of what matters.), who provided participants with further historical training. The excursion to Oświęcim and Krakow gave the students insights into the significance of a culture of remembrance from a transnational perspective, enabling them to reflect more deeply on the Holocaust and its contemporary relevance. Preparatory seminars held prior to the visit already had addressed the pedagogical challenges related to memorial site work and introduced educational perspectives on the culture of remembrance. The knowledge gained here was further and more deeply explored on site. The visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and the International Youth Meeting Centre in Oświęcim/Auschwitz shows just how closely the culture of remembrance is linked to historical and political education.
From idea to implementation
Sandra Binnert is a member of the ELLVIS project team (Successful Teaching and Learning – Diversity and Internationalization in Higher Education). Her dissertation focuses on Holocaust and camp literature; this is also where she first got the idea to organize an excursion on the subject. “My approach was to combine political education work with internationalization, or put differently: How do our attitudes change when we encounter the remembrance work of another country?” Binnert received a lot of positive feedback from the “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” [post-Auschwitz education] teaching and research forum. In addition to visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which is located in the Polish town of Oświęcim and includes the grounds of the Auschwitz I concentration camp and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp (also Auschwitz II), the plan also called for a supplementary visit to Krakow, with guided tours on the subject of the ghetto and occupation policy as well as a visit of the former Plaszow concentration camp. To enable the students to join and make the visit as cost-effective as possible, applications for funding were submitted. Students applied with a letter of motivation; and in the end a total of 22 were able to join the excursion.
Once the funding was secured, content preparations got underway and two preparatory seminars were scheduled. Jonas Riepenhausen, research assistant at the Faculty of Educational Sciences and a participant in the excursion: “The preparation also included a visit from Prof. Michel Friedman, who shared some interesting facts about his family history with the students. His parents and grandmother were among the so-called ‘Schindler Jews’, who worked in the businessman’s factory and therefore enjoyed a certain degree of protection. Once the Nazi era ended, the two families remained in close contact. With regard to our excursion, hearing about Michel Friedman’s family was one of many close thematic links between Frankfurt and Krakow and the Auschwitz camps at the time.” Susanne Thimm, who works at the Institute of General Educational Science [Institut für Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft], points out another connection to Frankfurt, one that ties in with the history of Westend Campus: “The third, perhaps somewhat less well-known camp in Oświęcim was in Monowice, the Buna-Monowitz concentration camp, also known as ‘Auschwitz III’. This is where the IG Farben Group’s own concentration camp was located.” In 2008, the Wollheim Memorial was put up on Westend Campus, where it serves as a reminder of the crimes in which the IG Farben industry was involved, and commemorates the victims murdered in the camp, who hailed from almost all European countries. “The trip allowed us in an impressive way to deal in detail with the disturbing and complex contexts of the extermination of the European Jews,” emphasizes Wolfgang Meseth, Professor of Education and Head of the Teaching and Research Forum “Erziehung nach Auschwitz”. Meseth adds that when dealing with Nazi history, it is important “to differentiate between the many different historical-political interests and the scientific findings of Holocaust research”. An important goal of the excursion was to initiate and professionally accompany this process of cognition.
How can experiences be processed?
An essential component of the excursion concept was that participating students choose their own thematic focus. Prior to the visit, Michel, a sociology student with a minor in educational sciences, had thought that his great interest in the Frankfurt School and its intensive study of the Holocaust and fascism would result in him working out the links to today’s right-wing radicalism. However, the intensive experiences on site changed his mind: “My original topic made way for a consideration of the Holocaust’s historical dimension – an aspect that fascinated me much more.”
Pauline, who is majoring in educational sciences, also had originally planned a completely different approach to processing the experiences and findings of the excursion: “I knew from the preparatory meetings that the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial is a very diverse place: it is a cemetery, a memorial, a museum and a place of learning all at the same time. In cultural anthropology, the ethnographic approach is a research method connecting the researchers to their environment through participant observation. As part of my chosen autoethnographic approach, the focus thus lies on oneself.” However, in view of the dense program, which required participants’ full attention, she had to distance herself from the ambitious method.
Places of remembrance and their didactics
Both students told of diverse, intense and sometimes contradictory impressions that left them with a lot of food for thought. Michel immediately recalls a strange juxtaposition in the town of Oświęcim: “You arrive at the busy central bus parking lot of the memorial’s visitor center, right next to which the former camp is located. The State Museum, which attracts millions of people every year, is another mass processing point, followed by a guided tour whose contents is more or less the same for every group of visitors. Of course, this has to do with the very extensive and complex transnational negotiation processes between the various victim groups, but it is irritating nevertheless.”
Michel says he was able to understand a lot more after visiting the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, located a few kilometers outside the city center. That being said, the iconic entrance building, of all things, was not completely visible during the students’ visit: Ahead of the January 27 celebrations marking the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, the entrance was covered with a tent
Pauline was very impressed by the memorial in Plaszow (Krakow), where the outlines of those buildings that no longer exist have been replaced by text panels. “This definitely had to do with the fact that there were far fewer visitors here, meaning you didn’t get the impression of being rushed through somewhere. Maybe it’s just part of my personal approach; we did, after all, acquire a lot of factual knowledge about the camps ahead of the excursion. Other visitors may not have had the same background knowledge.” Looking back, both Michel and Pauline agree that visiting the memorial sites as part of a group was a great advantage: After the tours, they came together again to reflect on what they had experienced and observed. “It was only during our seminar that I truly came to realize how Auschwitz became a symbol of the Holocaust in the first place, and how differently this memorial site was and is viewed from a German and Polish perspective,” Pauline says.
Educational experiences and reflections
Sandra Binnert emphasizes that, from an educational point of view, historical engagement with the crimes of the Holocaust is always inextricably linked to a reflection on one’s own educational work. “Based on Pauline and Michel’s experience reports, we were able to discern how a visit to these memorial sites stimulates and raises questions, like: What do you take away from it as a prospective educator, what would you yourself use, and what might you do differently?” Her colleague Susanne Thimm also emphasizes this importance for those lecturing on the subject: “As an educator and researcher, I have many highly individual references to historical knowledge, i.e.: What does this experience do to me? What can I observe in other memorial visitors? One should not underestimate the social aspect of such an excursion.” Jonas Riepenhausen adds: “I think it would be great if all Goethe University students – regardless of their subject – were given the opportunity to join an excursion like this. That would be an important signal, especially in times of increasing racism and anti-Semitism, but also in light of this campus’ history.”
The excursion was funded by: Freunde und Förderer der Goethe-Universität; DAAD/Promos; Hessische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Dr. Andreas Kahrs, managing director of what matters; QSL project funds for teaching.
