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Three generations of distance enable Austrians to discuss Holocaust
MARGOT COHEN
However, they may now be prepared, but do they have access to Jewish people to discuss it?
“Except in the bigger cities of Austria, and especially Vienna, young Austrians have very few opportunities to make contact with Jews and to learn about Jewish life,” said Dreier at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre last week. Since 2001 he has been the Austrian delegate at the education working group of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
“In Austria, our relationship with Jews is burdened by their persecution and our shame. The more people know about the horrors of persecution, the harder they find it to belong to families and a society that were responsible for the horrors,” Dreier pointed out.
He explained that before the Second World War there were more than 200 000 Austrian Jews in the country – about 2,5 per cent of the total population. In Vienna Jews made up 10 per cent of the population.
After the Holocaust, the Jewish population numbers dwindled to a tiny minority of between 15 000 and 20 000 out of a total of eight million people. In Vienna, many Jewish children and teenagers attend Jewish schools and this created very few opportunities for contact between Jews and non-Jews.
He pointed that there is now new anti-Semitism regarding Israel. “Our seminars in Israel have shown how complicated the relationship with Israel and Austria is, even where all concerned have the best of intentions and are keen to talk to one another. Some misunderstanding is always lurking around the corner.”
Dreier believes that a self-critical approach to crimes committed by one’s own country and the possible involvement of members of one’s own family, as established in Germany and subsequently in Austria, is a major cultural achievement of the “reappraisal generation” of 1968.
The descendants of the war generation also researched and wrote about their families perpetrators’ past in many novels and through films..
“There is a dichotomy. On the one hand we want people to reflect on what the history of National Socialism’s evil means for them on the conclusions to be drawn for their future.
“On the other, we don’t want National Socialist atrocities to be employed to legitimise political interests and divert attention from the urgent questions confronting us today,” he said, cautioning: “Deconstruct the narratives, identify the interests they reflect and adopt a coolly, rational approach.”
Dreier says it is a fact that survivors’ memories and stories grip us emotionally.
Some of the paradoxical effects of Holocaust education are: The more people learn about the Holocaust and the greater their distance of their generation from (such) historical events, the greater the wish to give the family a positive spin – the so called “righteous gentile interpretation”.
In the 1980s the baby boomers who benefited from the educational reforms introduced by the Social Democrats, received a good education. They established memorial sites and had empathy for their victims. More eyewitness accounts of Holocaust survivors and opponents and victims of the National Socialists were published and they were invited to speak in public.
At the end of 1970 an eyewitness programme for schools was set up that still exists today. These biographies increasingly found their way into history books and Austrian literature. Most of the eyewitnesses in the school programme experienced the Nazi period as children.
The 1986 Kurt Waldheim dispute also generated much public awareness. The misleading and reluctant response of the former UN Secretary General in his biography about the Nazi period, developed into a scandal on an international scale.
In 1997 the Austrian parliament declared May 5 the “Day of Remembrance” for the victims of National Socialism and changes to school book texts and history curricula were made. The Holocaust is now a compulsory subject for all learners.
The website erinnern.at was founded in 2000 at the initiative of the Ministry of Education. The first Austrian Teachers’ Seminar on Holocaust Education was held at Yad Vashem in Israel in 2000. This summer the 30th and 31st groups will travel to Yad Vashem and Ghetto Fighters House for a seminar.
In 1979 15 per cent of Austrians said there was no proof of the Holocaust, but in 2007 only seven per cent held this view.
However, Holocaust remembrance is again under threat because, says Dreier, it is seen as part of the liberal agenda established by the current dominant elite.
He believes that “the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust will not lose its relevance, which means that debate in the interpretation of history will not lose its relevance either”.
