The Burden of the Past and History Education: The Holocaust and the History School Books of (West) Germany The German word, Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung, hardly to translate into another foreign language, is a representative symptom of German mind in the post-war period. It signifies all the efforts of west German society to keep the negative experiences of Nazi regime, representatively the Holocaust, in their collective memory and to reconcile with the victims of it, including the reasonable remuneration for them, in order to prevent the evils of past from repeating. The history education and the history text books of west German school about the Holocaust in the post-war period have been one of the highly controversial points in the public discussions to confront with their evil legacy of National Socialism. Nowadays the treatment and writing of German school books on the Holocaust is well praised as a model case of Vergangenheistsbewa¨ltigung in general. The bitter experience of Holocaust is in the nearly all school books detailed described and treated in good balance. The educational intention of this treatment is also clear enough in consistence with the collective consensus of German Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung. However this satisfactory state of school books is the result of long yeared dispute over the evil German past. The improvement of school books is propelled more through the public disputes and conflicts than the efforts inside of historical scholarship and history education.