(This post contains spoilers for Cabaret.)

Following a co-hosted symposium on the Weimar Republic, the Guthrie generously invited the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies to attend a performance of Cabaret. We went last weekend, and it was simply exceptional. If you stop reading here, or take nothing else away from this post, see the show!

—

Act I. The play opens. “Wilkommen.” Soft chugging of a train as Cliff arrives in Berlin. 

Act I of Cabaret is everything a real cabaret should be: decadent, sultry, and dazzlingly hedonistic. It is a modernized—and more carnal—version of Lautrec’s famed portraits of gaudy nightlife, but recontextualized through the sort of Brechtian self-awareness made possible by good directing. However, this illusion of the perfect cabaret splinters at the end of the act, when the Emcee recoils in horror as their gramophone begins playing an eerie and increasingly disconcerting “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” As an audience, we sense a change; we just don’t know what it is yet. 

Sounds of a train, growing louder, intermingle with the ghoulish lilt of the gramophone. 

Director Joseph Haj reinforces the thematic division between Acts I and II by moving the intermission from its usual placement* amid the darker part of the show forward, to follow immediately after “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” This change punctuated the final moment of Act I and intensified the descent into darkness that defines the rest of the show.

Before this moment, the audience is given no hint of what is to come. As Cliff states at the very end of the show, “It was the end of the world, and I was dancing with Sally Bowles, and we were both asleep.” So too is the audience: asleep. Blissfully, and deliberately unaware of what lies ahead. In this asleep-ness, the audience becomes complicit in the events that follow. It is Haj’s intentional and unflinching focus on this complicity that makes his production of Cabaret such a powerful portrayal of the years preceding World War II and the Holocaust.

Act II. The train whistle grows louder. All eeriness from the end of Act I is gone, replaced by an almost mechanical normality. 

Guests gather for Fraulein Schneider’s (gentile) and Herr Schultz’s (Jewish) engagement party. One of the guests removes his coat to reveal a swastika armband (at this point, there was an audible collective gasp from the audience; in theater, as in “real” life, we can lull ourselves into believing that somehow the story ends differently this time). As the party guests grow uneasy, he begins to leave, but a woman persuades him to stay and begins singing a passionate rendition of a nationalist folk song (“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” (reprise)). The other guests join in, one by one, leaving the hosts, along with Cliff and Sally, stunned to discover what their neighbors believe–or, at least, the individuals and ideologies they follow without question. 

A new scene. The train is careening toward us now. The Emcee, dressed in leather and buckles, dons two glittering swastika armbands. The Kit Kat Klub dancers join and form a kick line– a grotesque spectacle that mocks the absurdity of Hitler and the Nazi party. (Unlike The Producers, I find Cabaret to be uniquely equipped to grapple with something deeper: the true tragedy and human cost of fascist ideology and hate.)

The ability to relay this ridiculousness without making light of the subject depends on a capacity to convey tragedy, making it essential that the production communicate the true devastation of the Holocaust. The final scene did so brutally, beautifully, and without compromise.

The Emcee’s role in Cabaret’s messaging is immense. In the original 1966 Broadway production, Joel Grey’s Emcee “represented the city of Berlin itself, their malevolence most obvious in the dark conclusion” (Blum 2024). However, the 1993 London and 1998 Broadway revivals shifted away from portraying the Emcee as a perpetrator.** While there have been many interpretations of the Emcee since, this production returned to portraying the Emcee as a victim. Part of the production’s emotional power lies in Haj’s decision to reclaim this version of the Emcee– one that underscores the tragedy and loss at the heart of the story.

In the final scene, the Emcee drops their train conductor’s coat and removes a wig to reveal cropped hair and a striped prisoner’s uniform—the kind worn in concentration camps. They bear a striking resemblance to the famous photographs of Czesława Kwoka, a fourteen-year-old Polish girl murdered at Auschwitz. Still performing a cabaret song, the Emcee grows more frenzied by the minute. The lights go dark. When they come up, everything else has vanished: the performers, the band, the props– even the lights themselves. The dim, sparkling glow of the cabaret has been replaced by a stark white light. It is cold and clinical. The illusion has lifted, replaced by the brutal clarity of reality. Was any of it real? Or was the entire performance imagined– an invention of the Emcee’s mind as they performed for fellow prisoners in the camp? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Part of the set transforms into train cars. The cast returns, clutching small suitcases, and silently takes their places inside. The doors slam shut with a terrible finality. Blinding white lights shine through the cars and flood the audience. Lights out. The train leaves the station.

The lights come back up for bows, and the accompanying jaunty cabaret music is grating. It is harsh after the vulnerability and violence of the previous scene. The message is loud and clear. As Joseph Haj stated in one interview: “Cabaret reflects a society that is determined to dance as fast as it can, to keep the lights twirling as long as possible, to turn the volume up as loud as possible, to keep from seeing the train that is thundering toward them.”

–

*For theatre nerds, this was between “Tomorrow Belongs to Me (Reprise)” and “Kick Line.”

**As many people know, the lines between perpetrator/victim/bystander are often blurry, and at times, nonexistent– but this is not the focus of Cabaret. 

Sources:

Gillian Blum, “Cabaret 2024 Musical Ending Explained”, The Direct, June 29, 2024.

URL: https://thedirect.com/article/cabaret-2024-musical-ending-explained

Kyra Layman is a recent graduate of Macalester College and is excited to be working with CHGS this summer. She believes that Holocaust and genocide education is more important now than ever and is honored to be assisting the Center in supporting educators and developing genocide education curriculum. Her areas of academic study primarily center on individual and collective resistance in mass atrocities, altruism amidst genocide, and the use of collective memory in transitional justice efforts. In addition to her academic work, she is active in the theatre world and weaves her interests together wherever possible. 

Last week, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies had the honor of hosting a two-day workshop with 25 educators in partnership with Yahad–In Unum, an organization internationally recognized for its work uncovering forgotten sites of mass violence and amplifying survivor voices.

We were thrilled to see so many educators sign up, eager to learn and engage with challenging, timely material. The energy in the room was palpable, from the very beginning, participants asked thoughtful questions, shared insights, and leaned into the difficult but vital work of studying genocide and mass atrocity.

It was especially meaningful to learn from Yahad–In Unum’s educators, whose field investigations and oral history work continue to expand our understanding of the Holocaust and of genocide more broadly. Yahad’s research began with documenting the Holocaust by bullets in Eastern Europe, and they are now applying these same investigative methods to other contexts, including crimes committed against the Maya people in Guatemala, the Yazidi in Iraq, and Ukrainians during the ongoing Russian invasion.

These cross-regional connections help deepen our understanding of patterns of violence, silence, and resistance. Yahad is also playing a leading role in developing educational materials based on these oral testimonies—resources that make it possible to bring these stories directly into our classrooms.

Workshops like this are essential not only for building knowledge, but for building community. They offer educators a chance to come together, reflect, and prepare to pass on these lessons in meaningful, thoughtful ways. We are incredibly grateful to Yahad–In Unum for sharing their expertise and for the powerful work they continue to do around the world.

We look forward to future collaborations—and to bringing these stories and tools to the next generation of learners.

June 2025

“Do high school students in the United States learn about the Armenian Genocide?” 

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. K-12 education in the United States is highly decentralized and localized, with decisions about what is taught and learned made by districts, schools, or, most often, individual teachers at the classroom level. Some state-level surveys of genocide education have been conducted, but the variability of curricula among schools and the high rate of teacher turnover make it challenging to draw meaningful conclusions. While Holocaust education has become a mainstay of American curricula for decades, education about so-called “other genocides,” including the Armenian Genocide, is still much less common.

A colleague reminded me that high school teachers cannot reasonably be expected to know everything. “It’s not that I’m purposefully not teaching it. I was never taught about the Armenian Genocide, and so I don’t include it in my class,” he said. A 2015 survey of American adults revealed that only 35 percent had any knowledge of the Armenian Genocide. However, compounding this lack of knowledge are two trends that have come to shape academic research and social awareness of the Armenian Genocide in the US: (a) Distortion and denial of the genocide and (b) Neo-Ottomanism and Ottoman nostalgia. These trends shape what American high school students learn in World History classes, especially Advanced Placement World History. 

Denial and Distortion

The Turkish and Azerbaijani governments, primary deniers and distorters of the Armenian Genocide, have long attempted to shape narratives of violence perpetrated against Armenians. While there are instances of outright denial of the genocide, narratives that distort or minimize the violence are more common, especially those that minimize the number of Armenians murdered in the genocide. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote: “Turkey does not deny the suffering of Armenians, including the loss of many innocent lives, during the First World War. However, greater numbers of Turks died or were killed in the years leading to and during the War. Without belittling the tragic consequences for any group, Turkey objects to the one-sided presentation of this tragedy as a genocide by one group against another.” 

Another subtler tactic is the representation of the Ottoman Empire as one of tolerance and ethnic and religious diversity. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote against narratives of violence and genocide, stating: “As a consequence, eight centuries of Turkish-Armenian relationship, which was predominantly about friendship, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, is forgotten.” This focus on tolerance and diversity, often minimizing or omitting any mention of ethnic or religious conflict or violence within the Ottoman Empire, is a form of Neo-Ottomanism and has been termed Ottoman Nostalgia. 

Ottoman Nostalgia

Neo-Ottomanism is a political ideology that seeks to promote Turkish political and economic influence over the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. Neo-Ottomanism often relies on Ottoman nostalgia, which promotes a narrative of the Ottoman Empire as diverse and tolerant of the various ethnic, religious, and cultural groups that once lived under its rule. While true to a degree – for example, the Ottoman Millet system granted non-Muslim Abrahamic religious communities, including Armenians, a degree of autonomy and self-rule – this narrative, especially when shared uncritically, minimized the ethnic and religious violence in the Ottoman Empire. These two trends – distortion and, especially, Ottoman nostalgia – can be clearly identified in US high school world history curricula. 

World History Curricula

Roger Back et al.’s World History Patterns of Interaction (first published in 1998) is one of the most popular high school-level world history textbooks in the United States. In fact, if you took a world history course in the US in the last 30 years, there is a good chance you encountered this text. The current (2010) edition only mentions the Armenian Genocide (referring to it as the “Armenian Massacre” in a call-out box in the margins of the chapter on World War I. The three-sentence-long text box also states that “more than 600,000 died of starvation or were killed,” when many academics put the number of deaths between 1 and 1.5 million. 

Roger Beck et al.’s World History: Pattern of Interaction Textbook

While texts like Beck et al.’s minimize the Armenian Genocide, Ottoman Nostalgia can be clearly seen in the formal and informal Advanced Placement World History curricula. 

Advanced Placement World History

While there is no national curriculum in the United States, there are curricula that are used across the country, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses. AP courses, created by the College Board, a division of the Educational Testing Service, are meant to be college-level courses taught by high school teachers. Students may earn college credit based on their score on a comprehensive end-of-course exam. In 2024, 11 percent of all American high school students took the AP World History: Modern exam. As much as 10 percent more may have enrolled in APWH courses but did not sit for the exam. Additionally, in many schools, APWH curriculum influences non-AP world history classes. 

Formal and informal APWH’s curriculum includes: (a) the “Course and Exam Description” (CED), which lists the skills and content that must be covered in the course; (b) AP-recommended textbooks and exam preparation guides, and (c) teacher-created resources. 

The CED includes teaching and learning about “Genocide, ethnic violence, or attempted destruction of specific populations,” including “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I,” as one of several illustrative examples. In contrast, the Ottoman Empire is mentioned 32 times in the document, and highlighted for its diversity and inclusiveness: “Many states, such as the Mughal and Ottoman empires, adopted practices to accommodate the ethnic and religious diversity of their subjects or utilize the economic, political, and military contributions of different ethnic or religious groups.”

Textbooks

Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, a textbook recommended for APWH students, includes “Armenian Massacres” in the glossary, while in the text, it offers credence to Turkish distortion and denialism, writing: “The Turkish government in particular rejects the label of genocide and claims the Armenian deaths resulted not from a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination but from communal warfare perpetrated by Christians and Muslims, disease, and famine.” 

Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past passage on the Armenian genocide [sic] and glossary entry

Teacher-Created Materials and Professional Development

Perhaps most telling is a Facebook Group, “AP World History Teachers,” with nearly 9,000 members, in which educators share resources, professional development opportunities, and discuss topics related to the course. In a post, a teacher reflected: “I did a 3 week NEH seminar on the Ottomans in Turkey back in 2013. They really ARE all that.”

Many posts within the group highlight Ottoman nostalgia. One particular post for an upcoming teacher-facilitated professional development workshop stated: “Just a reminder that TONIGHT I’m offering another free workshop! It’s at 7PM ET/ 4PM PT, I’ll discuss how we teach an empire that started as a small medieval state around 1300 and lasted until 1922. I’ll focus on how we can help students understand the Ottoman Empire as a dynamic state that continually evolved and was an ethnically and religiously diverse state.”

APWH Facebook Group Post

A teacher-created presentation on the Ottoman Empire included a focus on Pax Ottomana, or a “More positive view of Ottoman rule/expansion,” as well as a slide on the “M&M’s” of the Ottoman Empire, including the millet system. While using a lighthearted shorthand for students is an effective tool, it reduces history to a few keywords and scrubs it clean of any nuance. 

APWH Teacher-Created Presentation Slide

Teacher-created materials reflect a wide range of influences, including personal reading and professional development. However, given the teach-to-the-test nature of APWH, many materials follow the narrative of the CED and minimize the Armenian Genocide while highlighting Ottoman nostalgia. 

Conclusion

Highlighting narratives of diversity and tolerance while minimizing violent pasts is certainly not isolated to Turkish/Ottoman history. Indeed, such narratives would be very familiar to many American teachers who were often educated within a system that promoted similar narratives about the United States. Reducing history into a nice narrative or a marketable product ultimately does the students learning about it a disservice. Likewise, Ottoman nostalgia is part of a larger liberal discourse of multiculturalism that subsumes and minimizes ethnic, religious, or racial violence by the state. 

However, Ottoman nostalgia may be more difficult for American educators, even critically-minded ones, to discern and challenge in their classrooms. In the post-9/11 era, many critical social studies educators sought to provide students with knowledge about Islam and narratives of Islamic states that countered those that framed all Muslims as terrorists. For many social studies educators, simply teaching about the Ottoman Empire, something they likely learned little about in their own education, is a critical stance. While highlighting for students the tolerance and religious and ethnic diversity of the Ottoman Empire does seemingly little harm, such framing is often part of a larger narrative that also minimizes or denies the Armenian Genocide.

George Dalbo is an Assistant Professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College and a Research Fellow with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. Previously, George was a middle and high school social studies teacher. 
Kipper Bromia is a student at Beloit College majoring in sociology with an interest in how social systems affect individual people and relationships that they have with each other. Kipper also has an interest in animal behavior and welfare, and the relationships that animals and ecosystems have with humans.

“They Really ARE All That”

Ottomania and the Armenian Genocide in World History Curriculum

By George Dalbo and Kipper Bromia

June 2025

“Do high school students in the United States learn about the Armenian Genocide?” 

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. K-12 education in the United States is highly decentralized and localized, with decisions about what is taught and learned made by districts, schools, or, most often, individual teachers at the classroom level. Some state-level surveys of genocide education have been conducted, but the variability of curricula among schools and the high rate of teacher turnover make it challenging to draw meaningful conclusions. While Holocaust education has become a mainstay of American curricula for decades, education about so-called “other genocides,” including the Armenian Genocide, is still much less common.

A colleague reminded me that high school teachers cannot reasonably be expected to know everything. “It’s not that I’m purposefully not teaching it. I was never taught about the Armenian Genocide, and so I don’t include it in my class,” he said. A 2015 survey of American adults revealed that only 35 percent had any knowledge of the Armenian Genocide. However, compounding this lack of knowledge are two trends that have come to shape academic research and social awareness of the Armenian Genocide in the US: (a) Distortion and denial of the genocide and (b) Neo-Ottomanism and Ottoman nostalgia. These trends shape what American high school students learn in World History classes, especially Advanced Placement World History. 

Denial and Distortion

The Turkish and Azerbaijani governments, primary deniers and distorters of the Armenian Genocide, have long attempted to shape narratives of violence perpetrated against Armenians. While there are instances of outright denial of the genocide, narratives that distort or minimize the violence are more common, especially those that minimize the number of Armenians murdered in the genocide. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote: “Turkey does not deny the suffering of Armenians, including the loss of many innocent lives, during the First World War. However, greater numbers of Turks died or were killed in the years leading to and during the War. Without belittling the tragic consequences for any group, Turkey objects to the one-sided presentation of this tragedy as a genocide by one group against another.” 

Another subtler tactic is the representation of the Ottoman Empire as one of tolerance and ethnic and religious diversity. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote against narratives of violence and genocide, stating: “As a consequence, eight centuries of Turkish-Armenian relationship, which was predominantly about friendship, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, is forgotten.” This focus on tolerance and diversity, often minimizing or omitting any mention of ethnic or religious conflict or violence within the Ottoman Empire, is a form of Neo-Ottomanism and has been termed Ottoman Nostalgia. 

Ottoman Nostalgia

Neo-Ottomanism is a political ideology that seeks to promote Turkish political and economic influence over the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. Neo-Ottomanism often relies on Ottoman nostalgia, which promotes a narrative of the Ottoman Empire as diverse and tolerant of the various ethnic, religious, and cultural groups that once lived under its rule. While true to a degree – for example, the Ottoman Millet system granted non-Muslim Abrahamic religious communities, including Armenians, a degree of autonomy and self-rule – this narrative, especially when shared uncritically, minimized the ethnic and religious violence in the Ottoman Empire. These two trends – distortion and, especially, Ottoman nostalgia – can be clearly identified in US high school world history curricula. 

World History Curricula

Roger Back et al.’s World History Patterns of Interaction (first published in 1998) is one of the most popular high school-level world history textbooks in the United States. In fact, if you took a world history course in the US in the last 30 years, there is a good chance you encountered this text. The current (2010) edition only mentions the Armenian Genocide (referring to it as the “Armenian Massacre” in a call-out box in the margins of the chapter on World War I. The three-sentence-long text box also states that “more than 600,000 died of starvation or were killed,” when many academics put the number of deaths between 1 and 1.5 million. 

Roger Beck et al.’s World History: Pattern of Interaction Textbook

While texts like Beck et al.’s minimize the Armenian Genocide, Ottoman Nostalgia can be clearly seen in the formal and informal Advanced Placement World History curricula. 

Advanced Placement World History

While there is no national curriculum in the United States, there are curricula that are used across the country, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses. AP courses, created by the College Board, a division of the Educational Testing Service, are meant to be college-level courses taught by high school teachers. Students may earn college credit based on their score on a comprehensive end-of-course exam. In 2024, 11 percent of all American high school students took the AP World History: Modern exam. As much as 10 percent more may have enrolled in APWH courses but did not sit for the exam. Additionally, in many schools, APWH curriculum influences non-AP world history classes. 

Formal and informal APWH’s curriculum includes: (a) the “Course and Exam Description” (CED), which lists the skills and content that must be covered in the course; (b) AP-recommended textbooks and exam preparation guides, and (c) teacher-created resources. 

The CED includes teaching and learning about “Genocide, ethnic violence, or attempted destruction of specific populations,” including “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I,” as one of several illustrative examples. In contrast, the Ottoman Empire is mentioned 32 times in the document, and highlighted for its diversity and inclusiveness: “Many states, such as the Mughal and Ottoman empires, adopted practices to accommodate the ethnic and religious diversity of their subjects or utilize the economic, political, and military contributions of different ethnic or religious groups.”

Textbooks

Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, a textbook recommended for APWH students, includes “Armenian Massacres” in the glossary, while in the text, it offers credence to Turkish distortion and denialism, writing: “The Turkish government in particular rejects the label of genocide and claims the Armenian deaths resulted not from a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination but from communal warfare perpetrated by Christians and Muslims, disease, and famine.” 

Jerry Bentley et al.’s Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past passage on the Armenian genocide [sic] and glossary entry

Teacher-Created Materials and Professional Development

Perhaps most telling is a Facebook Group, “AP World History Teachers,” with nearly 9,000 members, in which educators share resources, professional development opportunities, and discuss topics related to the course. In a post, a teacher reflected: “I did a 3 week NEH seminar on the Ottomans in Turkey back in 2013. They really ARE all that.”

Many posts within the group highlight Ottoman nostalgia. One particular post for an upcoming teacher-facilitated professional development workshop stated: “Just a reminder that TONIGHT I’m offering another free workshop! It’s at 7PM ET/ 4PM PT, I’ll discuss how we teach an empire that started as a small medieval state around 1300 and lasted until 1922. I’ll focus on how we can help students understand the Ottoman Empire as a dynamic state that continually evolved and was an ethnically and religiously diverse state.”

APWH Facebook Group Post

A teacher-created presentation on the Ottoman Empire included a focus on Pax Ottomana, or a “More positive view of Ottoman rule/expansion,” as well as a slide on the “M&M’s” of the Ottoman Empire, including the millet system. While using a lighthearted shorthand for students is an effective tool, it reduces history to a few keywords and scrubs it clean of any nuance. 

APWH Teacher-Created Presentation Slide

Teacher-created materials reflect a wide range of influences, including personal reading and professional development. However, given the teach-to-the-test nature of APWH, many materials follow the narrative of the CED and minimize the Armenian Genocide while highlighting Ottoman nostalgia. 

Conclusion

Highlighting narratives of diversity and tolerance while minimizing violent pasts is certainly not isolated to Turkish/Ottoman history. Indeed, such narratives would be very familiar to many American teachers who were often educated within a system that promoted similar narratives about the United States. Reducing history into a nice narrative or a marketable product ultimately does the students learning about it a disservice. Likewise, Ottoman nostalgia is part of a larger liberal discourse of multiculturalism that subsumes and minimizes ethnic, religious, or racial violence by the state. 

However, Ottoman nostalgia may be more difficult for American educators, even critically-minded ones, to discern and challenge in their classrooms. In the post-9/11 era, many critical social studies educators sought to provide students with knowledge about Islam and narratives of Islamic states that countered those that framed all Muslims as terrorists. For many social studies educators, simply teaching about the Ottoman Empire, something they likely learned little about in their own education, is a critical stance. While highlighting for students the tolerance and religious and ethnic diversity of the Ottoman Empire does seemingly little harm, such framing is often part of a larger narrative that also minimizes or denies the Armenian Genocide.

George Dalbo is an Assistant Professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College and a Research Fellow with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. Previously, George was a middle and high school social studies teacher. 
Kipper Bromia is a student at Beloit College majoring in sociology with an interest in how social systems affect individual people and relationships that they have with each other. Kipper also has an interest in animal behavior and welfare, and the relationships that animals and ecosystems have with humans.

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