A global mapping of the holocaust in textbooks and curricula

Abstract

How is the Holocaust presented in secondary-level history and social studies curricula worldwide? And how is it conceptualised and narrated in textbooks? To answer these questions, researchers at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, in cooperation with UNESCO, documented and compared historical understandings of the Holocaust found in 272 currently valid curricula from 135 countries, and in 89 textbooks published in 26 countries since 2000. They found that the Holocaust is represented in broadly shared patterns, which convey recurrent spatial (geographical) and temporal scales, protagonists, interpretive patterns (according to definitions, causes, relativisation, or banalisation), narrative techniques, and didactic methods. At the same time, all countries demonstrate narrative idiosyncracies by emphasising selective information and the local significance of the event, or by appropriating it in the interests of local populations.