Today, memorial sites of national-socialist (NS) crimes are crucial parts of Germany’s culture of remembrance and conceived, addressed, and perceived as places of learning. They are regarded as essential components and central actors of the culture of remembrance in Germany and, in this role, are confronted with complex dynamics of social transformation (Meseth 2012). The discussion about transnationalization and migration (society), about inclusion and democratic memory in the light of a growing presence of right wing (memory) politics challenges the work of NS-memorial sites. Also, in in a practical sense, global realities are part of their daily work in post-migrant society (e.g., Henderson/Lange 2017, Meseth/Proske 2013). By understanding these developments as conflicts of translation, we focus on the negotiation of knowledge in NS-memorial sites as democratic institutions of memory (Bretting/Engel 2021, Siebeck 2016).  

The proposed research project addresses NS-memorial sites as (pedagogical) organizations, or more precisely: with an organizational educational perspective, it focuses on the organizational learning of NS-memorial sites arenas and actors of knowledge exchange and negotiation. With our project, we ask how memorial sites learn to cope with the changing conditions of their work and how they learn to design and provide conditions for knowledge exchange and negotiation in a globalized and transnationalized context (Göhlich/Engel/Höhne 2014, Rothberg 2009). By doing this, we aim to get a deeper understanding of the institutionalization of knowledge for organizational education research. The funding for this research project is under review at the German Research Foundation which will decide on the funding in February. At ECER 2022 we would like to present first empirical findings and the theoretical and methodological framework of the project. 

In order to trace the NS-memorial sites as arenas and actors in the field of a globalized and transnationalized remembrance culture, the focus on organizational education is combined with pedagogical perspectives on dealing with knowledge in the context of an 'Education after Auschwitz'. Organizations produce their own practices of knowledge exchange and negotiation due to their own organizational history and culture. From an organizational research perspective (Göhlich et al. 2018, Göhlich 2015), NS-memorial sites and their organizational practices are of particular interest as they started as social movements and processes of democratizing memory in the 1980s in West-Germany, which produced todays “hybrid institutions” (Wüstenberg 2017) combining state-funded organizations with civil society.

The interest in organizational practices of dealing with knowledge constitutes the organizational ethnographic research design which pursues the main goals: On the basis of ethnographic studies, different organizational practices of dealing with the tension between commemoration and knowledge transfer will be made empirically visible and contrasted as institutionally-specific forms of an 'Education after Auschwitz'. In the course of this ethnographic research, the project aims for a theoretical-empirical condensation of the concept of knowledge exchange as a contribution to the virulent question of an "Education after Auschwitz" under transforming conditions. 

Proceeding from the fundamental methodological assumption that ethnographic research is concerned with practices as a state of aggregation of the social (Breidenstein et al. 2013), an organizational ethnographic research strategy centers around organizational practices of the generation, exchange, and negotiation of knowledge (e.g. Yanow 2009). The research project explores the ways in which NS-memorial sites, as ‘memory organizations’, produce organization-specific practices of knowledge exchange within the potentially conflictive context of institutional and local expectations as organizational learning (Engel 2018). Ethnographic research on NS-memorial sites as actors aims to uncover organizational modes of knowledge exchange and negotiation in a globalized and transnationalized context. In doing so, it links to and builds on previous work by the DFG-network TRANS|WISSEN (TRANS|WISSEN 2020) and continues the theoretical-empirical development of a pedagogical theory of knowledge exchange between institutions and organizations (Göhlich 2014). Our ethnographic research is based on three main assumptions. Firstly, there are organization-specific ways of producing, negotiating, and exchanging knowledge (Cziarniawska 2008). Secondly, ethnographic research can investigate these ways in specific ways of working-together (Engel 2014). And thirdly, conflicts of translations and knowledge exchange can be found in an area of tension between local and scientific knowledge, certain expectations addressed to the organization by politicians, teachers, media, and the organizational ways of working-together (Marcus 2009).

The findings of the research project will contribute to the interdisciplinary debate about transnational and global questions of Holocaust Education and their recent challenges with migration, right-wing movements and changes in memory(-politics) in terms of expanding the debate by an organizational education research perspective. It will moreover provide an understanding of organizational learning in NS-memorial sites that deals with the current challenges of these sites from an organizational education perspective on the one hand and on the other hand focusses on knowledge exchange and negotiation from a translational perspective. Our presentation at ECER 2022 will present first empirical findings and it will outline and discuss the theoretical and methodological frames of the project.

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