Berättelsen om Förintelsen : En kvalitativ studie om hur Förintelsen skildras i svenska historieläromedel för gymnasieskolan

Sammanfattning

This qualitative study examines how the Holocaust is depicted in Swedish history textbooks for upper secondary school, and how the event is situated within a broader narrative of Jewish life and antisemitism. The aim is to analyse which causes, perspectives, experiences and actors are foregrounded in textbook narratives, and to discuss how these narratives may shape students’ historical understanding of the Holocaust and it’s place within a longer historical continuum. The empirical material consists of four history textbooks. The study is conducted as a qualitative content analysis, informed by narrative theory and an understanding of history as narrative meaning-making. The analysis focuses on four themes: causes and explanatory frameworks, actors and responsibility, perspectives and experiences, and temporal and spatial framing. The results show that the Holocaust is primarily depicted as part of a narrative about the rise of Nazism, radicalisation and the development of genocidal policy. The textbooks generally provide a coherent historical explanation in which the political, economic and social crises of interwar Germany are given considerable importance. At the same time, the narratives tend to be perpetrator-oriented. Hitler, the Nazi movement and the Nazi state are presented as the central driving actors, while Jews are often depicted mainly as victims of Nazi persecution.The study further shows that the Holocaust is only partly integrated into a longer narrative of Jewish life and antisemitism. Although the textbooks include references to Jewish history and antisemitism outside the Holocaust, these elements are not always connected explicitly to the Holocaust narrative itself. Consequently, the Holocaust tends to appear primarily as a narrative of the path towards genocide and its legal aftermath, rather than as part of a broader historical context of Jewish life, antisemitism and the destruction of European Jewish communities.