How do past-related discourses influence the professional beliefs of history educators? What occupational and biographical factors are relevant for the formation of these beliefs? This PhD project focuses on a group of educators who, despite their importance, have thus far received little attention: tour guides at memorial sites.

Memorial sites are of particular importance to the discourse on learning about the National Socialist regime. However, we know very little about the views and practices of those who actually perform the educational work. By conducting interviews and group discussions with guides at Austria’s most significant Nazi memorial site, the Mauthausen Memorial, the project explores whether and how the concept of ›Holocaust education‹ shapes the guides’ professional beliefs and develop a typology of the formation of these beliefs. This research design allows for an analysis of the interplay between individual past-related concepts and collective identity discourses.

Michael Hollogschwandtner is a historian whose research focuses on public history, memory politics, and history education. He studied the teaching subjects History, Social Studies and Political Education in combination with Psychology and Philosophy (MA) as well as Communication Studies (BA) at the University of Vienna and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Public History at the University of Vienna. For over ten years, he has been working as an educator for different institutions dedicated to political education, particularly the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW). This professional activity fueled his interest in the empirical study of teaching and learning at Nazi memorial sites, a topic to which he dedicated his doctoral thesis. For this research project he was awarded with scholarships by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the University of Vienna.