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 centre 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 Schuster’s suggestion, they ran into resistance from the conservative Christian Social Union, long the states 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,” 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.

A citizen’s duty

Leftist deputies countered 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 anti-foreigner, 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.’”

“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 Steiner’s behaviour to Germany’s recent decision to establish centres for Islam at a number of major universities, part of a program to train educators and scholars to serve the estimated 4 million Muslims now in Germany.

Radical Islam

That program is intended to counter what many experts see as radical Islam propagated at some mosques in Germany, given that the September 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 Muenster, 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,” Khorchide 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?’”