ABSTRACT
Dealing with the Holocaust—in German, the Umgang with it—has proven itself to be a repeatedly contentious issue in public life and historiography throughout the Western world. Nowhere is this more evident than in a classroom whose entire subject is the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews during World War II. As many teachers could attest, it is not the students who wonder or even protest about an apparently morbid fixation on the details of millions of murders. Rather, as I myself have discovered, it is their friends, their relatives, their colleagues, and even strangers who wonder at their ghoulish fascination. In America, they are usually spared the “schon wieder” that Rolf Steininger encountered when requesting support for a lecture series in Innsbruck in 1992-1993 on the Umgang mit dem Holocaust. Students today are nonetheless asked why they would want to deal with a subject so gruesome and so far away, both in physical distance and in popular perceptions of time and history.
