Probably a little more than 10% would be familiar with the term and loosely relate it to Nazi Germany and Jews but I would guess that maybe 3% or fewer would be able to substantively communicate what actually happened or its significance.
My guess is substantially fewer. I'm in the UK where we spend a significant amount of educational/cultural time on WW2. I'm what the majority would consider highly educated, albeit in unrelated areas. Even so, I cannot say that I could accurately describe Kristallnacht beyond the absolute vaguest of idiot summaries off the top of my head.
I'm with you. I'd consider my education level above average and I hadn't heard of it (or at least recall) until just this week. I get the gist of it based on context but couldn't tell you any details. I even took a couple extra history courses in college but that was almost 20 years ago and I haven't had to think about any of the intricate details since then. Memorizing the intricate details decades later (or even during the semester) wasn't really the point of those courses anyway.
I also remember how those world history courses were taught with a mind toward the grand arc of history, with details skimmed over. Specifically, I had a professor that argued that Hitler was only responsible for 20% of the underlying causes of WW2, so we spent more time on the Treaty of Versailles and draconian war reparations than the rise of the Nazi Party.
Now, not to say that he was wrong in general. Hitler's rise is impossible without a deeply aggrieved nation. Italy and Japan also were aggrieved. But...the specific chain of events and the personalities within the Nazi Party and their methods are something we can learn from. It gives us insight into society's sometimes dark chemistry of human personalities. The Nazis were really weird, highly self-contradictory, did lots of things that were extraordinarily dumb, and still achieved totalitarian power. We should all know their playbook in order to recognize when somebody is using it.
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u/Feeling_Photograph_5 Oct 02 '24
Maybe 10% of America knows what that is.