Exemplary Protocol
Introduction
On the first day, the workshop focused on laying out the work plan for the entire project. Its two main goals were formulated more precisely: the development of educational concepts and of training for educational staff.
The second day centered on the working groups and their previously agreed upon assignments concerning narratives, materials, interactive sequences and support for educational staff. Representatives of the working groups were presenting preliminary results.
The third day was spent defining research areas, reporting and evaluating, as well as with the presentation of developments and results.
Day 1 (January 16th)
Introduction by Yariv Lapid
The external experts were welcomed at the Mauthausen Memorial.
Before the day was started, Yariv Lapid gave an introduction about the work at the Mauthausen Memorial and the project itself. The basic statements were:
When dealing with topics such as the Holocaust, National Socialism, torture or mass murder, it is important to be aware of our helplessness in attempting to grasp our subject matter. We need to acknowledge the limits of our understanding.
When we attempt to create educational concepts and structures, it is particularly important for us to legitimize this basic helplessness. The sought discourse is to provide the space needed to search for the right questions.
In the course of this project, instead of focusing on what we DO know, we are to allow ourselves to experiment with and talk about what we DON’T know.
That is why it is important for the experts to feel free to admit to helplessness and not understanding. Communication on an equal plane with the participating guides in the working groups is also key.
The challenge at the Mauthausen Memorial is to connect place, history and visitor. Interaction appears to constitute the appropriate means to that end.
Hence, two mayor questions are going to accompany this project:
- What happens when interaction takes place? Which problems arise, which opportunities?
- How can we create a training process for the guides in order to enable interaction?
Another goal for the Think Tank is to find ways to better connect the expert, academic and theoretician with the guide and the grass roots of everyday work with the groups. The idea is for theory to approximate the reality of the groups as much as possible.
The international and interdisciplinary influx represented by the experts is seen as an especially promising attribute of the project.
After Yariv Lapid’s introduction, each Think Tank member was given the opportunity to introduce themselves to the group.
The Pedagogical Concept and its Challenges
The main foci of tours at the Mauthausen Memorial are supposed to be:
- Interaction
- Involving people, talking about what all this means
- Discussing environment
- Embedding the concentration camp in the (social, economic...) environment
- But it seems not to be enough for a complete tour. For some there is the impression that the narrative of a tour ends at the main gate.
- A lot of questions arise when thinking about how to improve guided tours at the Mauthausen Memorial:
- How do we handle difficult subjects like the victims and the detention camp itself using interaction, especially after entering the main gate?
- How can we authentically ask questions that convey a sense of real interest for what a group has to say?
- How do we not seem suggestive or manipulating? Which kinds of questions can help us avoid that?
- What is an open question that creates a learning process - for the guide just as much as for the group?
- How can you identify with somebody and come close to a situation without it becoming kitschy? At this point Paul Salmons asked how far it is even possible to imagine what it must have been like for the victims. In his opinion, historical and biographical documents can offer insights into those peoples’ thoughts and open up new perspectives – sometimes that insights may surprise us. Christian Staffa added that, acknowledging the imminent dangers of simplifications and kitsch, we cannot do without identifying with the victims. We must avoid ruling out identification or “demonizing” the need for it.
How would we define our goals? Prevention is definitely one of them. On a methodical level, we focus on observing processes in order to ask for their meaning (it is about the why, not the how). Yariv Lapid says that the main goal is to create reflection. To achieve that, we present certain pieces of information that can cause reflection.
The meta-narrative accompanying a visit to Mauthausen Memorial is: How was it possible that 100.000 people were murdered amidst a civilian society? A discussion on the term meta-narrative unfolds, and Paul Salmons offered instead the term "Exploration Questions".
Research has focused on what happened, but hardly on why things happened. Christian Gudehus talked about the lack of understanding of human behavior (what engenders and motivates it) among people involved in the work at memorial sites. If prevention is a goal one must first understand what makes people behave in such ways. Then you have to ask if prevention can be at all achieved through a visit to a site like this.
What can this place teach that other places can’t?
On the one hand, a memorial influences public discourses. Thus the concepts and attitudes memorials develop influence society. On the other hand, the question about the impact on the individual visitor is diffuse. Still, there are people who affirm that a visit at the memorial site has had a deep and lasting impact on their lives.
In comparison to the Mauthausen Memorial, at the Anne-Frank-House guides tell about Anne Frank and World War II in general, as Ayellet Grassiani pointed out. They try to connect small-scale and large-scale history and pose the question why no one helped. Sometimes they bring up the subject of bullying.
In Dachau, Waltraud Burger said, the “master-narrative” is the “path of the prisoners”- the usual stations and situations a person had to endure as a prisoner. They hardly talk about the perpetrator, that’s a taboo. The main goal at Dachau in the future could be talking about the consequences of war and how it affects us today. But that’s all still very vague.
What do we need for our debate in May?
Representing perpetrators: They were NOT monsters, and they were NOT forced to do what they did. Not everyone did what most did, so it wasn’t a purely rational decision that everyone shared – it was more complicated than that.
Historical narrations can never be free from intents of manipulation – usually you deliberately pick what you want to talk about for specific reasons. Yet you can never know what visitors find interesting and what they will remember – can you ever really control what the students actually take with them?
Without a specific goal you will have to talk on an abstract level, thus the question about the specific goals was raised again.
Staff Education
The main difficulty for guides is to accomplish useful interaction. The crucial challenge is to create a setting conducive to a discussion within the group. Often the guide’s planned agenda conflicts with giving a group the chance to really ask questions and develop interests.
How do you convey to the group that you are genuinely interested in them?
How do you find within you real questions that aren’t manipulative, that have several possible answers, or that you have no answer to and are struggling with yourself?
How do we empower the participants not to be afraid to expose their opinions and notions, how do we alleviate their fear of being made fun of or being put to shame? How do we enable guides to see the positive potential in the participants contributions and thus reflect his positive attitude onto them? How do we teach a guide to trust himself and the group enough not to be overbearing and censoring?
Which kinds of historic materials/questions open/close discussions?
Maybe the second part of the tour doesn’t need to be fully interactive. Maybe a very interactive first part of the tour creates a setting that makes it unnecessary.
Relation between the working groupsmade up of guides at the memorial and the ThinkTank
Working Group 1 (13 people)
Dealing with three out of the five themes: Narratives, Station Sequences, Materials.
Within the bigger working group individual members will focus more or less exclusively on one of these specific themes.
Working Group 2 (5 people)
Three out of five team members are social workers.
The group is dealing with: How could we go about developing ideas for supporting our guides?
Challenge: How can we enable the guides to connect with each other?
Evaluation Group (?)
Tasks of the Think Tank
Using the varied expertise of the international participants to help the guides with the groups.
Finding constructive ways of giving feedback to the guides.
Day 2 (January 17th)
Session on Narratives (working group 1)
The group presented their preliminary foci and main questions as well as new ideas:
- Might there be other master-narratives than the existing one (How was it possible that 100.000 people were murdered amidst a civilian society?)?
- Which subjects/themes are there? Are there any missing?
- Do we have the right balance between surroundings/bystanders – perpetrators – victims within the guided tours?
- Does the splitting into these groups make sense? It’s tempting to assign guilt, and the splitting may encourage more of that.
- Relations/influences between the three groups?
- The above mentioned terminology may carry various connotations (e.g. perpetrators = active — victims = passive)
- How do we talk about the lives of the inmates during a tour?
- How can we present the perpetrators?
- A biographical approach is important and helps to
- show individuals instead of groups
- look at a victim’s life before, during and after the experience of victimisation.
- Draft for a different master-narrative
- talk about “what happened to different people at this place, what did they do?”
Discussion
Christian Gudehus suggested using “master-narrative” instead of “meta-narrative”, because the term can be misleading (it was subsequently changed in the bullet points above). Paul Salmons suggested using the term “inquiring question with sub-questions”, because different groups of visitors may chose to talk about different narratives when confronted with the same question.
Should we avoid to use labels such as “victim” and “perpetrator”, but just describe people and their actions? With groups there’s also the option to talk about “who is a perpetrator?”. Paul Salmons: “Maybe if it’s a good question in here, it’s also a good question out there (for the groups)”.
During the tours we might offer biographies, tell stories about persons and actions. This way we can create a more detailed view.
While today we call the SS-guards “perpetrators”, at the time most of these people didn’t consider themselves perpetrators. How can we talk about these complicated issues without totally confusing the pupils with that level of complexity?
We can and must confront pupils with complex structures and horrible things, the question is how we can do so in a careful way. What about displaying moments of decision-making for prisoners?
How can we do so in a way that avoids to create kitsch as well as the impression that students can now understand what it’s like to be a prisoner (e. g. to be tortured)?
Still, especially young students may benefit in some way from simplification – so we also shouldn’t have too much fear of kitsch/simplification (e. g. saying “put yourself in this victim’s position”).
We cannot just mention the prisoners who had the chance to perform acts resistance, who created art, who managed to preserve a sense of self and agency. How do you talk about prisoners who were passive, who had given up, who's agency had been eradicated? They also need to be represented in the tour.
Session on Interactive Sequences (working group 1)
During the second presentation the working group members were contemplating the integration of more diverse places within the Mauthausen Memorial into tours. Other questions were: How can we combine places and topics in new ways?
How do we deal with the creation of suspense in relation to the basement system and the gas chamber / crematoria at the end of the tour?
How do we share and discuss “good questions” among guides?
Discussion
Most visitors are here to see (among other things) the gas chamber, some even exclusively for that. After the visit, other places may become more important. Is there a chance to start a tour with the gas chamber?
Maybe a good way to address this is to implement a “good” station right after the gas chamber while still getting to it near the end of a tour.
Possibility: Demystify the gas chamber by pointing out that the actual technical process of a gas chamber killing is a very simple process. That way the realization may emerge that what really is more complex and interesting are the people involved and responsible.
Another interesting chance for discussion: It’s difficult to talk about the fact that lots of buildings and structures related to the SS aren’t visible anymore, the reason being that the people who established the memorial didn’t want it to depict the “perpetrators' side”.
This could offer a chance to discuss how and with which thoughts the memorial was established and how it changed over time.
Session on Material (working group 1)
- Guides need more material about the everyday lives of prisoners and guards
- What defines useful material? “What questions do I have relating to that material?”, “What questions could other people/pupils have?”
- How do we choose material?
- Is there a main goal? What should visitors learn?
- Do we create a connection to present times?
- How can we increase the flexibility of the intermediary/guide? (different groups, questions, …)
Discussion
Possible ways of categorizing material:
- It has to be representative of more than one group of prisoners
- The facts need to be correct
On the other hand, strictly defining categories may be counterproductive . Different places and thoughts require different impulses.
Conclusive Discussion
The pedagogical team will keep supporting the working group during the time until the second Think Tank Workshop.
The guides could experiment with giving a tour without using the terms “perpetrator” or “victim”. Also, they could try integrating the garage yard as a station during their tours.
Teachers may have an expectation that the place alone will convey a special, significant emotion. But in reality, you also need material and stories at these historic places to facilitate that. The guide’s task could be to create that authenticity that the place alone cannot convey.
Session on Support (working group 2)
The working group 2 gave a short introduction on the current situation of the guides at the Mauthausen Memorial. The group emphasized three dimensions that could and should be worked on in order to improve the conditions/situation:
- Self-positioning:
The first important topic would be the self-positioning of the guides (e.g. towards the guide pool, the educational team, the administration framework, the memorial etc), which would help to achieve some clarity regarding the representation of interests, communication and so on.
- Self-image:
- What would a job description contain? Do we need a job description? Is it even possible to formulate one?
Goal: the self-reflective educational/didactical/political self
- Self-empowerment:
- create spaces and methods that help the guides to progress in their work
- the group presented an assortment of methods (ranging from ways to facilitate easier access to specific knowledge to various possible forms for psychological support (e.g. individual supervision, intervision, feedback dialogue etc))
Goal: learning, communicating/communicative and acting network
Discussion
Important facts about the guide pool were told to the experts. One of the most important questions is: How can we create a good basis for networking among the guides in the pool? There needs to be something in it for the guides, some kind of significance, because people would offer their time and have travelling expenses. When asynchronous communication doesn’t work, maybe another possibility is synchronous communication like Skype. That would also eliminate travelling costs.
Should we have meetings for all 100 guides? What would motivate them to come to such meetings? Perhaps it's a matter of themes: themes that are important to everyone, or themes that are important to specific groups with specific agendas for meetings. Why not start working on several ideas simultaneously, visible for everyone, and let everyone see the results to get/keep them interested? An effect could be that small groups with big cohesion would continue to organize themselves and work on one project together. Issues that turn out be of little interest for the guides could be allowed to “fail” and could be stopped anytime. Most important might be providing a framework that helps starting the work on specific issues.
Why is there so little initiative from the guides? Maybe because the guides don’t work at the memorial full-time and they can’t be sure that their ideas will even be heard.
The pedagogical team has more of an idea of funding. Is there any space in which these ideas could be developed?
Conclusion
Apparently initiatives mainly depend on finding funding – so it’s a top-down process since obviously the educational team needs to take care of that.
As far as the system and structure of communication is concerned, the primary goal must be for the guides to get the feeling of being helped and supported.
Apart from that, guides need to know who to contact if they want to start initiatives. This means that in the future, institutionalized rules and forms of taking up the guides’ interests must be established.
In the next phase of the EU project, the support group will continue to work on the different tools and methods which could help to achieve the three goals mentioned above.
Evaluation
Defining the goals is basic for evaluation, but these goals can’t be named yet. Therefore the next steps are:
- Defining goals and sub-goals of guided tours
- Clarifying: Which of these goals can’t even be achieved? Which ones can?
- The main idea: Is there any way to evaluate what people perceive during tours? To evaluate which parts of the tours work and which don’t? The intention is to create a way to evaluate everything that happens during a tour, and subsequently to define a standard process that would allow the memorial to continue the evaluation process by itself.
- On the other hand there could be some kind of original research. Maybe the newest knowledge on violence research combined with concrete material you can find at the memorial?
- If those are the goals – what are the methods with which I can evaluate those goals?
Day 3 (January 18th)
Before continuing the discussions, the external experts started off the day by taking a look at some places within the historical part of the former camp: The former SS garage yard and the former gas chamber. They talked about how these places could be handled during guided tours. Then the group of experts returned to the visitor’s center to start of the meeting.
Short Term Tasks
Questions concerning goals
Questions for guides generally are going to be of this type:
- What do you think are the tasks of memorials in general?
- What do you think are the tasks of the Mauthausen Memorial?
- What brought you here?
- What are the goals of a guided tour?
Questions for the Think Tank members are yet to be decided upon but are going to be formulated along these lines:
- What do you think are the goals of memorials in general?
- What do you think are the goals of the guided tour?
Assignments for the working groups
- Develop a new tour corresponding to the inquiring questions
- Develop interactive stations about the inmates in the inner part of the camp
Material
Concept for communication (structure)
Program Elements for May
- Start to develop a module on “violence” for the tour
- Unit for the Think Tank on human behavior, given by Christian Gudehus
- New tour/parts of a new tour (about inmates)
- Dividing the Shrek group into smaller working groups
- Evaluation (still not in focus)
Flow of information
January 23th: Protocol incl. “wall of keywords”
January 31th: Definition of the goals
April 15th: Materials for the next workshop will be made available for the Think Tank
Biographies of perpetrators (different kinds of backgrounds and functions)
Photos, films (Dropbox etc.)
E-mail addresses, Web space
First Thoughts on Long Term Ideas
Dealing with the perpetrators (Paul Salmons)
Study visit of the teachers development program (Paul Salmons)
Study trips with schools to the Mauthausen Memorial, the focus being the environment (Paul Salmons)
Material exchange Mauthausen Memorial – Dachau (Waltraud Burger)