Explore the vast range of titles available.

Teaching a Dark Chapter explores how textbook narratives about the Fascist/Nazi past in Italy, East Germany, and West Germany followed relatively calm, undisturbed paths of little change until isolated \"flashpoints\" catalyzed the educational infrastructure into periods of rapid transformation. Though these flashpoints varied among Italy and the Germanys, they all roughly conformed to a chronological scheme and permanently changed how each \"dark past\" was represented. Historians have often neglected textbooks as sources in their engagement with the reconstruction of postfascist states and the development of postwar memory culture. But as Teaching a Dark Chapter demonstrates, textbooks yield new insights and suggest a new chronology of the changes in postwar memory culture that other sources overlook. Employing a methodological and temporal rethinking of the narratives surrounding the development of European Holocaust memory, Daniela R. P. Weiner reveals how, long before 1968, textbooks in these three countries served as important tools to influence public memory about Nazi/Fascist atrocities. As Fascism had been spread through education, then education must play a key role in undoing the damage. Thus, to repair and shape postwar societies, textbooks became an avenue to inculcate youths with desirable democratic and socialist values. Teaching a Dark Chapter weds the historical study of public memory with the educational study of textbooks to ask how and why the textbooks were created, what they said, and how they affected the society around them.

During the Allied occupation of the Axis countries, education and the revision of educational materials were seen as a means of ensuring future peace in Europe. Most scholarly literature on this topic has focused on the German case or has engaged in a German-Japanese comparison, neglecting the country in which the textbook revision process was first pioneered: Italy. Drawing primarily on the papers of the Allied occupying military governments, this article explores the parallels between the textbook revision processes in Allied-occupied Italy and Germany. It argues that, for the Allied occupiers involved in reeducation in Italy and Germany, the reeducation processes in these countries were inextricably linked. Furthermore, the institutional learning process that occurred in occupied Italy enabled the more thorough approach later applied in Germany.

The end of the Cold War did not mean an end to public discussions about how to teach about the Holocaust. Rather, these debates shifted into a new and higher gear. Undeniably this postcommunist transition was a fourth flashpoint, catalyzing a frenzy of educational reforms and the production of new textbook series to meet the needs of a drastically reconfigured world. Communist-era narratives fell away, and the Holocaust assumed a new prominent position in national and transnational memory in many countries throughout the world. In both Italy and the Germanys, the Cold War’s end had a major impact. For the

This dissertation explores how the postfascist countries of East Germany, West Germany, and Italy taught about the Second World War and the Holocaust in their educational systems and specifically explores the representations of these events in textbooks. Postwar textbooks were initially reluctant to discuss mass murder, but a discourse eventually developed in all three countries’ textbooks that was largely influenced by the needs of rebuilding postwar nations. While West German textbooks and their treatments of the Holocaust have been highly studied, the East German and Italian cases have thus far suffered from a paucity of scholarship. Using process-, product-, and reception-oriented methods, this three-country comparative project deals not only with the actual textbook products, but also with the processes by which these textbooks were developed, the educational structures that supported their production, as well as their reception among student and the public. The East-West German comparison permits us to evaluate how governmental ideology affected educational reform, while the comparison between both German states and Italy allows one to consider how the ambiguities of perpetrator status helped determine educational policies. This dissertation dates the first instances of increased attention to Holocaust education to the late 1950s. This finding challenges scholarly narratives that argue that the 1961 Eichmann Trial and/or the 1968 student movements were central to focusing public attention on Holocaust memory and Holocaust education. This is an important distinction because it suggests that this new attention to education about Nazi crimes in secondary schools in the late 1950s could have had a causative influence on the increased attention that the Nazi/fascist past received during the student revolts in the West. Overall, this project examines larger questions of how textbooks both contributed to and reflected the processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past] and building postwar national identities. It investigates how these countries approached the process of nation-rebuilding, both incorporating and sometimes selectively ignoring the painful legacies of the fascist attempts at racial empire-building. Most broadly, it illuminates how post-dictatorial states democratize and rebuild.

This thesis examines how post-fascist countries—East Germany, Italy, and West Germany—represented the Second World War and the Holocaust in middle school history textbooks. History textbooks were important actors in the creation of new democratic communities in East Germany, Italy, and West Germany. Through a transnational comparison of one leading textbook published in each country, this paper answers why and how West Germany was eventually more successful than East Germany and Italy in conveying its youth with a more nuanced and self-critical national memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust. This paper also shows how West German textbooks both reflected and contributed to this relative success. Such knowledge is imperative, not just to understand the past, but also to provide a better grasp of how to democratize youth in the future—an important topic given the specter of right-wing ethno-nationalism that has seen a revival in recent years.

This chapter addresses the formation of resistance narratives in the Italian, East German, and West German contexts. The resistance narrative served a dual purpose. All three states believed that teaching young people about the resistance would allow them to emulate these heroes and therefore take on an appropriately democratic mindset, necessary for the postwar world. More practically, the resistance narrative also allowed postfascist states to deflect complicity for wartime crimes by presenting themselves as heirs to the resisters. However, the resistance did not play exactly the same role in Italian and German textbooks. Although there was public ambivalence toward the resistance in both Italy and West Germany during the early postwar years, it can be argued that in both German states the Allied occupiers and postwar politicians had made it clear that the Nazis were irrevocably “evil,” while the resisters were to be perceived as “good.” Italy, however, struggled with a more ambivalent legacy. Because of the divided memory of Italian partisans and general Italian uneasiness regarding teaching contemporary history, the resistance did not play as large a role in Italian textbooks until the early 1960s.

This chapter discusses how the reeducation project began in Italy, which was the first Axis power to come under occupation. Hampered by limited resources and buffeted by petitions from various competing Italian interest groups—including the royalist government in the South, progressive anticlerical reformers, the Catholic Church, and the partisans—the Allied educational officers and their Italian educationalist partners muddled along in a highly disorganized situation, trying to create new educational material suitable to instill Italian youth with a new democratic worldview. The Allied educational officers were keenly aware of the historical importance of their task. Yet, while Italy presented many unique challenges and represented the first major British–American reeducation venture, the Allied officers involved also knew that Italy was just the first reeducation project. Thus, they continuously kept an eye to the future—anticipating the challenges that they would face in Germany. In this way, Italy was a laboratory of democracy, where the Allies learned lessons that they would subsequently apply in Germany. The chapter then looks at the philosophy of textbook revision and considers Italian textbooks.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a turning point in how the Italian, East German, and West German school systems dealt with contemporary history. Both domestic and transnational events underlined the dangers of not teaching about the Fascist/Nazi past and catalyzed efforts to start to grapple with Fascist and Nazi crimes. But even if transnational and national forces were pushing for textbooks to treat Fascist and Nazi brutality, were the textbook producers ready to focus on the Fascist and Nazi governments’ anti-Jewish policies? This chapter explores this question, considering Italy, East Germany, and West Germany in turn. Italian textbooks