I apologize if this isn't the right subreddit for this - if there's a better place to ask, let me know and I'll be happy to delete this and post it somewhere else.
I am homeschooling my 15-year old, and she has chosen to study the Holocaust as our next unit. I am choosing to start with a brief (!) overview of World War I, then move through the Weimar Republic, the Golden Age, The Great Depression, then on to the rise of the NSDAP and the Holocaust itself. My thinking was that the period before World War II is critical in understanding how things happened the way they did.
I am trying to incorporate many different subjects into these themes - for example, I would like to talk not only about political and military events, but look at art movements during these times, gender issues, rationalism, etc.
There is so much material out there that I'm finding myself struggling to identify good resources so we can do some broad learning, but still stay somewhat focused on the unit's "theme". So far I have identified the following resources as supplemental materials:
I feel like I'm already getting into huge overload territory - this seems like enough stuff for a year's worth of study. What recommendations do any of you that focus on this time period have for either narrowing this down more or replacing some of what I have listed with better options? Additional options? My daughter is smart, so I don't have to simplify it too much, but I do want to make sure that I'm keeping things broad enough to explore tangents if we feel compelled to do so.
Your lesson plan is quite ambitious! Personally, I would prefer to go in depth on a limited number of topics but that is of course entirely up to you. I don't know what you are prepared to expose your daughter to, but in case you feel she is mature enough for some rather overwhelmingly impactful material, I have some suggestions.
Documentaries and Films
Claude Lanzmann's masterful Shoah documentary which concentrates on the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno. Be prepared to weep. This is by its nature not a pleasant subject and Lanzmann takes his time to really let things sink in. It is also the only documentary I know of that includes not only interviews with perpetrators (some with hidden camera) and survivors, but also, and this is especially rare, the reactions of Polish neighbours of the death camps. The whole thing was filmed in the seventies and eighties and there were many people left in the villages near the camps who remembered the war years very well. They are astonishingly frank with Lanzmann as this is the first time anyone from outside has ever asked them about these things and they have not had an opportunity to construct a “PC” narrative around the events. The hidden camera interviews with SS camp officers are very revealing as well. The testimonies of the Jewish survivors go into great and explicit detail. As the whole thing is nine hours long, I am going to recommend that you concentrate on this 45 minute part on Treblinka. (first 45 minutes of this video). This documentary was instrumental in awakening my life-long interest in the Holocaust when I watched it for the first time at your daughter's age.
An Unfinished Film by Israeli documentary maker Yael Hersonski is a deconstruction of Nazi footage of the Warsaw Ghetto that was intended to be made into a propaganda film denouncing the Jews. The 60 minutes that have survived are the most detailed footage we have of the appalling conditions in the ghetto. Even though many scenes were staged to cast the Jewish inhabitants in a bad light (this manipulation is skillfully uncovered by Hersonski), yet the background, the starving people, the corpses and the filth caused by the forced overcrowding are very real indeed.
The Pianist by Roman Polanski is to my mind the only “fictional” Holocaust movie that does not suffer from the Hollywood treatment. It captures the conditions in the Warsaw ghetto as perfectly as is humanly possible (the extreme emaciation of a large number of the ghetto inmates can of course not be replicated) and it follows the historical facts to the letter. On top of that, it is a masterpiece of a film by a director who has personal experience of life in a wartime ghetto, in his case Kraków.
Memoirs and Primary Documents
If this is a man by Primo Levi was written in 1946, just a year after Levi had returned to Italy from Auschwitz. It has an immediacy and a clarity of vision that many later memoirs lack. Levi had the admirable ability to see the good as well as the bad under the most trying of circumstances.
Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum: Ringelblum was an historian confined in the Warsaw Ghetto who encouraged as many people as he could to record their experiences in the ghetto as well as their lives under nazi occupation before they were rounded up in the ghetto. He was determined to leave as exhaustive a record of German crimes as he possibly could, taking down testimonies, writing articles, collecting all kinds of data. He and his helpers buried the archives in three different locations in Warsaw, two of which were recovered, in 1946 and 1950. The archives contain letters, newspapers and photos as well. If you can't get a copy of his journal, there are excerpts from the archives in Kassow, Samuel D. Who will write our history?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes archive. Indiana University Press, 2007.
Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess. " Those were the days": the Holocaust through the eyes of the perpetrators and bystanders. Hamish Hamilton, 1991. (also published as Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds. " The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Konecky Konecky, 1991.): the voices of various perpetrators (members of the Einsatzgruppen, death camp SS officers) and bystanders (truck drivers,etc) as they emerge through official and private letters, court documents, diaries and more. Very confrontational and eye-opening.
I could go on for quite a while... If there is a particular area you would like recommendations for, feel free to ask.
How long are you hoping to spend on this topic? Like you mentioned, it is really easy to chase different tangents so it will be easier for others to help you narrow it down if you can give an idea of how much time you wish to dedicate to this topic.
I wouldn't skimp too much on WWI as many people argue that WWI and WWII are the same war with the 1920s just merely being an interlude.
Metropolis is available on Netflix (US) as is Ken Burn's The War (I've never seen it but Ken Burns never fails to disappoint me) although the entire documentary is a solid 14 hours or so (broken into 7 episodes).