Praktiken der Erinnerung

Overview & Synopsis

The engagement with the Holocaust and National Socialism must be updated for German language teaching: on the one hand, official forms of remembrance scarcely reach a younger generation anymore, and on the other hand, the very concept of remembrance itself needs to be reformulated. Knowledge that enables remembrance can no longer be assumed; it must first be created and prepared. German language teaching must respond: one possibility lies in expanding the textual foundations, adapting them to current requirements, and linking them with practices. As it is becoming increasingly difficult to draw on direct experiences of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes, the transmission of memory is becoming ever more dependent on media of preservation and their interpretation. The responsibility of German language teaching also concerns the transformation of the media and aesthetic constitution of “memory texts”: it is about creating and accompanying experiences of their formal and aesthetic particularities and, consequently, about developing interpretive competencies. For literature teaching, this may involve using not only (digitally stored) eyewitness testimonies but above all innovative and multimodal text formats (e.g., films, graphic novels, multimedia learning environments, etc.). The contributions highlight aspects of this transformation and the resulting challenges from subject-specific didactic as well as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. In addition to didactically oriented commentaries on texts, the perspective of teachers is also considered, since a younger generation in this field likewise possesses changing convictions and orientations.