The P2P4F project concept was based on the need for engaging youth in innovative, youth-led history education whose purpose is closely related to contemporary challenges. Through interactive pedagogy, creative input, experiential visits to historical sites of National Socialist crimes and service-based voluntary projects, youth involved in P2P4F developed a deep sense of historical awareness and of the legacy of history.
Furthermore, in the face of the recent resurgence in World War II historical revisionism in the Western Balkans, this project provided an opportunity to exchange with German youth. They compared and learnt how to face history and deal with it and how these processes (or lack thereof) influence our societies. Given the presence of (extreme) right-wing political parties and calls for historical revisionism, this project was needed, as young people today may run the danger of taking Europe for granted. European values and integration needed to be underlined – and youth involved in this project developed a keen understanding of and commitment to these ideals.
Finally, through the combination of participant-driven content and creative inputs, historical sites visits, engaging lecturers, critical pedagogy-based trainers, intermediary group action projects and joint educational material co-creation, P2P4F seeked to become a new, integrated and comprehensive model of youth civic engagement through historical human rights education.
The project took place from June 2020 to November 2021.
Project goals
- Young people study the history of National Socialism in an original way that they have not experienced before, developing critical historical consciousness and conscience in the process;
- Young people deal with both historical narratives of World War II as well as current narratives about Europe (migration, populism, historical revisionism, European integration), which promote sharing experiences and European solidarity among youth from Germany and the Western Balkan;
- Strengthening youth understanding and sense of agency in (creative) involvement in remembrance, commemoration, and (personal) activism against historical revisionism, anti-semitism, romaphobia, and xenophobia;
- Young people inspire their peers and are role-models for others (through the P2P4F documentary and accompanying lesson plan) to engage in historical examination and remembrance.
Project results – educational materials
There were created one documentary and five videos on memorial sites and places of remembrance that were studied by applying the memory walk method.
For the videos, there are subtitles either in English or in German.
Here you can find the lesson plan in English.
The documentary and the lesson plan are also available in the following languages:
- Bosnian: documentary and the lesson plan,
- Croatian: documentary and the lesson plan,
- Serbian: documentary and the lesson plan,
- German: the lesson plan
The memory walk movies are accompanied by lesson plans:
- in German,
- in English,
- in Bosnian,
- in Croatian,
- in Serbian.
Jasenovac Memorial Site in Croatia remembers the victims of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp, one of the largest in Europe in terms of victim numbers. Documented are 83,000 names, but the estimated total number of people killed at Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945 is much higher.
For the "Past2Present4Future" project, our partners visited the Jasenovac Memorial Site and talked to its director and custodian Ivo Pejaković. You can listen to the interview and visit the Jasenovac Memorial Site virtually in the video they created.
Contact
Kerim Somun
Kreisau-Initiative e. V.
c/o Allianz AG
Merlitzstraße 9
12489 Berlin
Tel.:+49 (0)30 / 53 89 31 63 63
