The Florida Council for the Social Studies (FCSS) hosted its 67th Annual Conference from October 31 to November 2, 2025, at the Florida Hotel & Conference Center in Orlando, Florida. Under this year’s theme ,“Rock the Republic!”, the event gathered K-12 social studies educators, university faculty, and curriculum specialists from across Florida for professional learning, networking, and exploration of inquiry-based, innovative instructional practices. The schedule included a complimentary pre-conference workshop on civil discourse, a keynote presentation on the history of communism, a costume contest, and an awards banquet recognizing outstanding teacher-leaders in the field.

HERC education director, Lauren Crampton, gave a presentation entitled “Art and Experience in the Holocaust.” This presentation explored methodologies of teaching the Holocaust through the visual art created by its victims and survivors, situated within the art-historical context of modernism, German Expressionism, and the aesthetics of Nazi propaganda. Paintings and drawings made during or after the Holocaust are not simply illustrations of historical events, but primary sources and document. They sit at the intersection of lived experience, trauma, artistic training, and the political destruction of European modernism.

Survivor artwork is often described as a form of witnessing, yet it is more than a literal representation of memory. Many survivors trained as artists before the war, absorbing elements of modernist experimentation, avant-garde techniques, and the psychological intensity of German Expressionism. These traditions privileged subjective experience, emotional truth, and distortion of form—qualities that resonate strongly with attempts to convey trauma. Artists such as Samuel Bak, Yehuda Bacon, and David Olère drew upon these modernist precedents, whether consciously or intuitively, to transform memory into visual language. Their work often features compressed pictorial space, heightened color, and symbolic figuration, each of which enhances the emotional impact of historical testimony.

Understanding German Expressionism is particularly important for contextualizing the visual strategies used in Holocaust survivor art. Expressionism, which emerged in the early twentieth century through two main groups of artists known as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, which rejected naturalism in favor of raw emotional force, expressive gestural lines, fragmented, jagged edges, and intensified color contrasts. Its artists sought to convey inner turmoil and critique modern society. These same visual devices appear in many postwar depictions of ghettos, deportations, and camps, although often stripped of the vibrancy of prewar expressionism and replaced with a harsher, more muted palette that reflects the gravity of the subject matter. Teaching students to identify these elements allows them to connect formal techniques to the emotional and historical weight of the images.

This modernist lineage cannot be separated from the Nazi regime’s systematic attack on avant-garde art. Beginning with the 1933 campaign against so-called “degenerate art,” the Nazis denounced modernism, including German Expressionism, as racially impure, politically subversive, and culturally corrupt. The 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition sought to humiliate modernist artists by mocking their works and labeling them as evidence of moral and racial decline. At the same time, the regime promoted a visual style in reaction to modernist forms that glorified classical proportion, racial aesthetics, and militarized muscularity. The goal was not creativity but propaganda, which was carefully constructed visual communication designed to legitimate exclusion, violence, and nationalism. This dichotomy explicates the juxtaposition between modernist art, which sought to communicate an inner truth, often through distortion, while Nazi art aimed to erase complexity and impose a singular ideological vision. This tension provides an essential backdrop for the visual culture created by victims and survivors.

In the classroom, integrating survivor art with the study of modernism and propaganda encourages a richer understanding of Holocaust history. Students learn not only to analyze images formally but also learn to observe how stylistic choices, such as line, color, composition, and perspective, shape the transmission of memory and construction of meaning. This approach deepens historical empathy by helping students see that the Holocaust is not simply narrated in words or numbers but is also encoded in the expressive marks made by those who endured it. By situating survivor works within their broader cultural and artistic contexts, educators give students the tools to engage the Holocaust as both a historical catastrophe and a profound source of artistic testimony. Through this lens, painting and drawing become indispensable primary sources that illuminate the human dimension of genocide and the enduring power of visual witness.