In Germany’s ever-swirling debate about its past, it is a relatively recent, always delicate question: How do you teach Muslim Germans about the Nazis and the Holocaust?
The topic has bubbled up in recent weeks, after discussion in Bavaria about a proposal for all eighth or ninth graders there to visit a former concentration camp or the newly opened center in Munich documenting Nazi crimes.
In Bavaria today, only pupils in a gymnasium, the top rank of high school, are required to make such visits. As the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland approached in January, and as the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has increased, Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has suggested that all ninth-grade students make such trips.
Education in Germany is a matter under the jurisdiction of the country’s 16 states. When the Free Voters, a small group in Bavaria’s legislature, took up Mr. Schuster’s suggestion, they ran into resistance from the conservative Christian Social Union, long the state’s governing party.
One conservative lawmaker, Klaus Steiner, praised the intent, but he suggested that Muslim pupils would need special preparation and implied that some might be exempted.
Lower-ranked secondary schools, he said, have a higher proportion of immigrant pupils, often recent arrivals whose parents sought refuge from war and hardship. “Many are from Muslim families,” Mr. Steiner said. “These children and their parents will need time before they can identify with our past.”
He further questioned whether anti-Semitism, “which is certainly latent here and there,” could “really effectively be countered” with obligatory visits to former camps.
Leftist deputies countered Mr. Steiner’s position, invoking the president of Germany, Joachim Gauck, who has said that Holocaust remembrance is a matter for every citizen.
To illustrate the importance of teaching all teenagers about the Holocaust, especially as the number of survivors dwindles, these deputies cited research showing that Germans are tired of hearing about persecution of Jews.
Gisela Sengl, a lawmaker for the Greens, argued that it was precisely the less educated who were susceptible to antiforeigner, anti-Semitic chauvinism.
“You can read something, and deny or ignore it,” she said. “But anyone who has been to one of these places will not go out and say: ‘All that stuff we’re told, it’s not true.’ ”
For now, the Bavarian education minister, Ludwig Spaenle, has said that, if possible, all ninth graders (and, in special circumstances, eighth graders) should visit a concentration camp or war documentation center. At such sites, he said, pupils can feel Nazi horrors “and develop a clear position in favor of ‘Never Again.’ ”
Outside Germany, the debate predictably stoked controversy. Details appeared in The Jerusalem Post, and the head of the European office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris wrote an open letter to Germany’s federal education minister.
Mr. Steiner’s language, wrote the director, Shimon Samuels, “reeks at best as Holocaust denial and, far worse, a German endorsement” for radical Islamists’ assertion that the Holocaust “is a lie.” He went on to link Mr. Steiner’s behavior to Germany’s recent decision to establish centers for Islam at a number of major universities, part of a program to train educators and scholars to serve the estimated four million Muslims now in Germany.
That program is intended to counter what many experts see as radical Islam propagated at some mosques in Germany, given that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were conceived and perpetrated in part by Muslims who met in Hamburg.
Mouhanad Khorchide, a Palestinian from Beirut, Lebanon, and a professor of Islamic studies in Münster, said any question about teaching Muslim students about Nazi crimes against Jews is an extension of Middle East politics.
“If there was no Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it would look different,” he said by telephone.
The idea of Muslim Germans visiting former concentration camps “is more and more strongly accepted,” Professor Khorchide said. But the effect depends on family background. “Especially Arab children whose parents grew up in the Middle East have stronger prejudices” than, say, Turks or Kurds, he said.
Still, he said, “You notice among the students that they say, ‘We stand for talking about Jewish history, and the crimes that were committed, but why don’t we talk about the Palestinians? Where is the justice here?’ ”
Such questions must be addressed, he argued. “Anti-Semitism is the automatic label if you speak up” about Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, he said. “We must discuss the history of Germany, but it is as important to discuss the Mideast conflict.”
Ese Ural, 27, a political science major at Bamberg University, is a Turkish German, born and raised here. He supports the visits to concentration camps or other memorial sites, he said, because they “show how bad history was, and how good it is that we are now doing something different in Europe.”
Aiman Mazyek, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, emphasizes that Muslims view a visit to former concentration camps as highly important, part of the education of every German. The curriculum for pupils should be the same for everyone, he said in a telephone interview.
And a refugee may well get even more from such a visit, he suggested, by learning that Germany — in its repudiation of the Nazi era — feels an official obligation to offer shelter from violence and racism.
But relaying Jewish history to Muslims, or Muslim history to Jews, or cooperating on what might seem a straightforward project, is fraught. Last summer, Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi, a professor who headed the American studies program at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, quit after he was denounced for taking Palestinian students to Auschwitz. The trip was paid by the German Research Foundation, which is funded by Berlin.
Professor Khorchide was one of three academics who visited Hebron University in the West Bank in April to plan a conference intended to strengthen exchanges of students, professors and materials on teaching about Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
The participants’ Facebook pages were swiftly filled with posts condemning the visit, and evidence of Israeli sway in the West Bank, he said. That visit, too, was funded by a scholarship exchange program operated by the German government.