Democracy is opposed to dictatorship: Danish Holocaust memory and the didactic practices of Danish history teachers

This article addresses the collective memory of the Holocaust in Denmark. It suggests that narratives about Denmark as a particularly democratic nation generate a national bias, which may impede the understanding of the Holocaust as a transnational event and the development of an intercultural and analytical approach to Holocaust education. Through the lenses of Jan Assmann’s theory of communicative and cultural memory and based on interviews with 25 informants, the article explores how the didactic practices of Danish history teachers intermingle with the communicative memory of the students’ families and social networks to stabilize the canonized narrative of the Denmark as a democratic nation, but also how this narrative might be challenged by drawing on alternative archives.