by Sara Zaske
Schilt said there were four themes to the lebenskunde course: learning about human rights, especially the rights of children; skeptical thinking; responsibility toward society and the environment; and the history of humanism, world religions, and other “life stances.”
While these are the broad themes, what is actually taught in each primary school class is mostly guided by the children and their questions. Since they are so young, big discussions about religion or atheism are not such pressing issues for them. Instead, the children want to learn about things like how to handle friendships, take care of a pet, and deal with other matters that are important to them at the moment. Because of this, and because in Berlin, the teachers “are all a little bit like free thinkers,” Schilt said there probably is not a big difference between lebenskunde and a religion class.
For my part, I was quite happy with Sophia’s lebenskunde class, but not all Germans are happy with the way religion classes are offered in their schools. The teachers of each religion or lebenskunde class are certified by their respective organizations, but they also must meet the standards of the education system, including having the right degree and certification. Some people think this amounts to too much government interference in religion, or they don’t like the way the subject is taught in their school. The mere existence of the class also has a peer-pressure effect on students. More than one parent told me that their children’s desire to take religion class was based not so much on what they believed but on whether their friends were in the class.
My friend Judith is raising her kids in the Christian faith, and while her daughter takes religion class, Judith is indifferent to it. “Going to worship and Sunday school is much more important,” she said, adding that sometimes the information her daughter gets from the class doesn’t fit with her church’s teachings. “It may be better to just teach all the kids together, and teach different religions or the different ways of living that there are,” she said. “I don’t know if it makes a lot of sense to separate kids. The parents who are Christian and bring their kids up in a Christian way, they will do it anyway. They don’t need to depend on the class.”
The German example is instructional for Americans who wish to insert religion into public schools. It’s not as easy as it may seem. For one, the religion that is taught in school may not fit the beliefs of every family, and then there’s the problem of providing an appropriate class for the many religious sects in the United States. Most religious Germans are either Roman Catholic or Protestant—and most of those Protestants belong to one of the churches united under the banner of the Evangelical Church in Germany or EKD. Even though there are fewer differences among them, many German Christians still are not happy with the religious courses offered. The introduction of an Islamic religion class in Germany has also proved controversial. (Roughly 5 percent of the German population is Muslim compared with less than 1 percent in the United States.)
On the other hand, teaching religion in such a public place as a school brings it out into the open, allowing students to ask questions and learn from one another. It may seem odd, but the atheist organization in Berlin actually prefers that religion is taught in schools. “We think it’s better when we can discuss religion on a public platform, and it’s not hidden in some private organizations,” Schilt said. “It’s better when there’s an open debate about these themes for both parties.… Maybe they can learn something from each other.”
Through all these tough subjects, I was struck by the incredible amount of intellectual freedom Germans gave their children and the trust they had in their children’s ability to handle what we might consider sensitive or difficult facts of life. As my children grew, I became less and less afraid of their tough questions, not because I had the perfect answers to all of them, but because I soon found I could often best address their questions by turning it back to them and asking, “What do you think?”
I started to trust my children more to be able to absorb information and come up with their own ideas, as they developed their own sense of right and wrong. I know now that if I truly value their independence, I should allow them freedom of thought. I also have to come to terms with the fact that they are not always going to think or believe what I do. Ultimately, when children separate from their parents, they not only physically move away from us but also intellectually and, often times, spiritually. A significant portion of American adults, 44 percent, do not practice the faith of their childhood, according to a 2011 Pew Research study.
This spiritual separation doesn’t always lead to less religiosity. Judith is a case in point. She grew up in East Germany, the daughter of atheist parents, but she is a Christian, and her parents remain close to her. They live nearby and are actively involved with their grandchildren.
Being open about ideas and beliefs with my children has also been a source of joy. My children are constantly bringing back the many interesting concepts they’ve discovered, and in Germany, there was always a lot available for them to discover. Information about a number of topics that would be more controlled in the United States is easily accessible to children. The Mommy Laid an Egg book just sitting on the shelf in the children’s section of the library is a prime example. I have yet to find that book on any U.S. library shelves.
At the age of four, Ozzie became a big fan of audio books. I usually let him pick whatever CDs he wanted from the children’s section at the library. He would listen to them while he played in his room. They were meant for children and were in German, so I often tuned them out when he had them on. For a while, he had a favorite one that was all about life in the Arctic and the Inuit people. He played it over and over.
One day he asked me out of the blue, “Mom, do you think you are a lucky person?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and thinking this was a teachable moment, I began to launch into a list of things I was grateful for. “I’m happy and healthy. I have two fantastic kids and—”
“Great!” Ozzie interrupted. “If you’re lucky, that means when you die you get to come back as an orca.”
Who knew?
11
Facing the Past
Sophia was climbing on a tall rock at a playground near our house when she called me over. “Mom, what is this?” she asked. I walked around to where she was pointing, and there set in the stone was a plaque with two names, dates ending in the 1940s, and a Star of David. Oh.
“It’s a memorial,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“For people who died,” I said. “So they would be remembered.”
Sophia seemed to accept that at face value, and I thought I’d dodged a difficult question, but it was only for the moment.
Some weeks later while walking through the streets of Berlin, Sophia stopped in front of two golden stones. They were small squares, the same size as other paving stones on the street, but they were golden and stood out. “Mom, what are these?” A pair of names were engraved on the stones, side by side, a husband and wife. Then the dates: birth, deportation, and death at two different concentration camps. It was hard not to imagine the scene of the couple being torn from their home, which we were standing in front of right now, how they were taken away to separate camps to die not ever knowing what had happened to the other.
“These people used to live here, and they died,” I said to Sophia. “People put these stones here so they’d be remembered, like the plaque we saw in the playground.”
“Why are they in the sidewalk?”
“They wanted to make sure no one forgets,” I said, realizing that was the point of these stones—that even children would ask. I knew I shouldn’t skimp on the truth. We were in Germany after all. I took a breath: “So there was this big war back when my grandparents were young.…” I began to explain to my daughter the basics of what happened with the Nazis, how they sent the Jews and other people they didn’t like to camps, and how many died there, like the people named on these two stones.
We talked about W
orld War II with our children many times when we were in Berlin, not because Zac or I brought it up on purpose, but because it was everywhere. It was in those golden “stumble stones” set right into the sidewalk, at memorials in the middle of parks, and in all the museums, not just the ones focused on the war and the Holocaust. For instance, we once visited the Deutsches Technikmuseum, a great place for kids because it features all kinds of transportation, including full-scale planes, ships, trains, and automobiles. On the floor dedicated to trains, there among all the shiny engines from different periods of history sat a humble wooden railcar. It looked like the kind used for cattle, only this one had been used for humans. So we talked about that cruelty, right then and there.
“In Germany, it’s such a big topic you can’t really avoid it when you have kids, especially when you have kids who are interested in things,” Annekatherin told me. As a teacher, Annekatherin said she’d never encountered kids who were new to the topic. They’d already heard about it early on from their families, at museums, in books, or on TV. When I asked my German friends about World War II, they also told me they could not remember a time when they didn’t know what their country had done.
The toughest subject of all for German parents might be their own history, but no one I met in Germany tried to hide the topic from their children. Remembering World War II and its atrocities is seen as a culture-wide activity, and as with many things in the German language, there is a long, special word for this: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means “coming to terms with the past.”
In addition to the museums, monuments, TV programs, and films, German children are formally taught about the Nazi years in depth at school, and not just in history class. It’s often taught in courses such as German literature, ethics, and even English-language class. “I felt like in all subjects, there was always some point when we were talking about it,” Jörg said. High school students also often visit memorials and the sites of former concentration camps.
Oddly enough, I heard from several Germans that part of their education involved a book and film based on a true American story, called The Wave. In 1967, Palo Alto teacher Ron Jones decided to conduct an experiment in authoritarianism in his high school history class. He instituted some simple discipline routines, and they quickly caught on. Within days students were saluting each other in the hall and wearing shirts to show they were part of the group. He ended the experiment by telling the students they were part of a national movement, and then revealing their leader at a packed assembly. He played them an old movie of Adolf Hitler speaking to his Nazi youth. The effect was devastating.
A fictionalized version of the events was made into an ABC After-school Special in 1981, and author Todd Strasser turned it into a novel that same year. In 2008, German filmmakers made a modern adaptation called Die Welle, turning the tale into a thriller that challenges the notion that the rise of Nazi-like authoritarianism could never happen in today’s Germany.
It’s a compelling story that makes the dangers of authoritarianism real for teens, and it’s an appealing tool for teachers to use—perhaps too appealing. As a student, Annekatherin encountered the story in three different classes. “Now, there’s a movie, but I can’t see it,” she said. Although Die Welle is a new interpretation, Annekatherin couldn’t stand to see any version of The Wave story told one more time.
As a teacher, Annekatherin felt the most powerful experience she could arrange for her students was to have a concentration camp survivor speak with them directly. “This is always very moving,” she said. “The boys, who are maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, are at an awkward age, and they usually laugh things off, but here they are really solemn. And they ask good questions.”
As time passes, German students have fewer opportunities to talk with survivors face-to-face. In fact, the whole way that Germany treats its past is evolving as the years put more distance between the present and 1945.
The History of Memory
Immediately after World War II, there was a lot of denial in Germany around what had happened. Harold Marcuse, a German history professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, said that three myths surfaced at the end of the war: victimization, ignorance, and resistance. Many Germans said they were victims of the Nazis too, that they were not active supporters but were forced to do things by the people in power. Many also said they had no idea what was going on at the camps, and it was popular to claim that they or their family resisted Nazi power in some way and offered help to Jews or other victims of the camps.
The Germans who were born immediately after the war are known for challenging their parents and these myths. What is often called the ’68 generation rejected almost everything associated with their parents’ generation. This was also the era when some of the biggest Nazi war crime trials occurred, and as more light was shone on their horrific acts, the younger generation felt an incredible amount of shame and guilt over what their culture had done.
Even at this point, Marcuse said the myths of victimization, ignorance, and denial still existed, but they morphed. For example, some Germans now saw themselves as victims of the Allied powers. These entrenched myths didn’t really come crumbling down until much later. Marcuse points to the airing of the American-produced TV series The Holocaust in Germany in 1978 as a key moment, when much that was hidden had to be faced. “It really inoculated a whole new era of dealing with the Nazi past, in the schools,” he said. “It had a huge impact. It just bowled people over.”
Interest grew in uncovering the past, no matter how difficult. A “dig where you stand” movement began, which purported that anyone could discover history. In 1976, sixteen-year-old Anna Rosmus dug a little too far. Her Bavarian town of Passau had a reputation for being part of the resistance to Nazism, and this is what Rosmus had expected to find when she started digging into the town’s past. Instead, she uncovered evidence of anti-Semitic fervor and that current prominent people in Passau, including priests, had been active Nazis. She won an award for her first essay, “Passau and the Third Reich,” and followed that later with a book. For her efforts, people called her das schreckliche mädchen, or “the nasty girl,” and in 1990 a fictionalized account of her discoveries was made into a popular movie of that name.
Rosmus’s story is emblematic of the intergenerational strife in Germany, when the younger generation was openly questioning a still-powerful older generation. In the face of all the historical facts that were being uncovered, no one could claim ignorance. Not everyone had been part of the resistance, and many Germans had to come to terms with the fact that their relatives, friends, and neighbors hadn’t all been victims but perpetrators. They were culpable.
Around this time arose an interesting controversy about the nature of that culpability. On the one side is the argument put forth in books like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, published in 1992. Browning showed that average men willingly committed mass murder in Poland, even though they had a chance to opt out of the duty with no repercussions. His book put forth the idea that when regular people are placed in a certain setting, they will generally follow the orders of the designated authority. (The Wave experiment in Palo Alto backs up this theory as well.)
Daniel Goldhagen took issue with this argument and launched a huge controversy with his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, in which he essentially contends that it was not that they were ordinary people, but that they were German and part of a long history and toxic culture that hated Jews.
The Germans ate it up. Or a certain segment of the population did. Goldhagen made appearances on many German talk shows, and he was even given the Democracy Prize in 1997 by a prestigious German political journal because he had “stirred the consciousness of the German public.” Yet others called out Goldhagen for cherry-picking his evidence to make his case—and for making an essentially racial argument that there is something distinctly German about people committing these atrocities, rather than seeing
a capacity for evil and hate as a danger among all people in every society.
The idea of the specific cultural menace of the Germans was even reflected by such revered German figures like the novelist Günter Grass. Grass won a Nobel Peace Prize for his novels that explored the Nazi years. Once seen as Germany’s conscience, Grass famously fought against the reunification of the country after the fall of the Wall for fear that the nation would again become a belligerent force in the world. He ultimately lost credibility with many people when late in life he admitted that as a youth he had been briefly part of the Waffen-SS at the end of the war, a particularly aggressive and violent military unit.
Grass was a prominent example of a divide in how Germans see themselves. He was part of a generation that sought to come to terms with the past through a type of cultural penance (even while perhaps still hiding its own personal crimes). The younger generations, on the other hand, have a different struggle: what do they do with this cultural identity, this horrible past that they had taken no part in, but yet belonged to them? Many Germans born in the 1960s and later see a need to play an active role in the political world, both personally and as a nation—not to remain a country forever divided or humbled into silence, but to face the past, accept responsibility, and, with that knowledge, move forward. When Grass died in 2015, journalist Jochen Bittner wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times about this generational conflict, saying that Grass came from a different Germany than he did.
Yet the argument that Grass represented can still be seen in Germany today. In Berlin, I was always puzzled by a banner that hung off a balcony of a building in Friedrichshain that read: “I still don’t believe Germany has a right to exist.” This struck me as hypocritical in so many ways, and even more so because the banner was in English. I wanted to argue with the banner’s creator—because Germany did exist, they were in it and obviously benefitting from it.
