A polish border stone (left) and a German border sign at a shared border crossing.
The presentation recently held in Warsaw followed all the correct diplomatic protocols. Indeed, German and Polish experts had started preparing for the important event two years earlier.
Teams of experts from both countries developed individual chapters, which were then either approved or rejected by panels with equal German-Polish representation. Katarzyna Hall, Poland's education minister, and Cornelia Pieper, a senior official at Germany's Foreign Ministry responsible for German-Polish relations, provided a warm opening address that was carefully divided between the two government ministries involved. In fact, to order to avoid any and all mistakes, careful balancing went into everything.
The issue at hand that December day was one of the touchiest subjects in German-Polish relations: a textbook — or, more precisely, recommendations for a future textbook. And since the meeting proved to be a success, it is now all the more likely that Polish and German high schools will soon experience something revolutionary: History classes in both countries will teach from books that, although translated into the two languages, are otherwise identical in their treatment of historical material stretching from ancient Mesopotamia to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and beyond.
German Territory, Past and Present
The Geogrpahic Spread of Ethnic Germans
This arrangement is particularly noteworthy because the period stretching from the dawn of civilization to the emergence of al-Qaida includes a number of historical episodes that are sensitive subjects for Germans, Poles or both. Prime among these are Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland and, later, the expulsion of Germans from former ethnic-German territories ceded to Poland in 1945. Likewise, they also include events further back in time, such as the presence of Teutonic Knights on the Polish side of the Oder River, the present-day border between the countries.
Touchy Subjects
On closer inspection, it's hardly surprising that a textbook can be such an explosive issue. As German historians Jörg-Dieter Gauger and Günter Buchstab put it: "As we know, schools are the only places in every society that no individual can get around and that involve the systematic transfer of knowledge." In this respect, the historians continue, "schools, classes, syllabuses and textbooks" can be viewed as "a seismograph for the significance placed on historical topics."
These touchy subjects have generated a lot of friction in the past. But, compared to those times, the commotion that the textbook initiative triggered in 2007, when it was jointly launched by the countries' respective foreign ministers, was only minor. "Of course, historians will always disagree," says Michael G. Müller, an expert on Eastern European history who hails from the eastern German city of Halle and oversees the project on the German side. "But they no longer disagree along the same frontlines as conflicts between nations. What divides them instead are, for example, differing methodological schools, and these are frontlines that run right through our national delegation."
The 135-page outline of the project expresses a desire to move away from "national creation stories" in favor of exposing students to the importance of "sub- or supranational communities." The debates of recent years, it continues, should give way to an "open representation of history."
One point on which conflict has repeatedly flared up involves the insistence of the Polish representatives that the word "expulsion" not be used to describe the forced flight of millions of Germans as World War II ended and after national borders had been redrawn. Instead, they prefer to call it "resettlement." There has also been growing mistrust among Poles since the revival of interest in this topic in Germany following the 2002 publication of the Günter Grass novel "Crabwalk" and the more recent discussions surrounding a proposed documentation center on German expellees.
Balancing Historical Narratives
Textbook experts in the eastern German state of Saxony and in the neighboring Polish voivodeship, or administrative district, of Lower Silesia, worked together between 2005 and 2007 to develop guidelines for teachers in the region. In the process, they got to experience for themselves just how tricky it can be to create historical narratives. Their handbook, "Understanding History — Shaping the Future: German-Polish Relations from 1933 to 1949," tackled the most difficult chapter in the countries' shared history, promptly earning itself harsh criticism from Polish historians who felt that the text placed too much emphasis on the German resistance movement against Hitler while minimizing the Polish resistance and failing to even mention the Warsaw Uprising. "It leaves the impression that Poland is expected to adapt to the German terminology," said Boguslaw Kopka, from the Warsaw-based Institute of National Remembrance, at the time.
So far, the historians behind the current textbook project have managed to avoid striking such dissonant chords. "An attempt to come up with some sort of middle position between the differing perspectives would have been doomed to failure," says Robert Traba, chair of the Polish expert panel for the textbook. Far more important, he adds, is increasing understanding of the fact that "European history arises out of different national memories."
Still, despite their efforts, the textbook project has not always been marked by peace and understanding. Organizations representing German expellees and the historians championing their cause resent how textbooks currently in use as well in the planning stages depict historical events. For example, they claim that the textbooks marginalize and even somewhat suppress the issue of Germany's former eastern territories.
Too Multicultural?
"Students graduating from German schools are illiterate when it comes to Eastern Europe," says Jörg-Dieter Gauger, a history professor at the University of Bonn whose works are mainly published by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a think tank associated with Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Gauger complains that Germany's historical eastern territories — which were home to major cultural and historical achievements, but now belong to Poland — are hardly mentioned as having once belonged to Germany. He also thinks that school materials lack any "indication of regret over the loss of the eastern provinces," and he credits German textbook authors with having a "self-destructive approach" that has them constantly presenting Polish-German relations as a "story of victims and suffering." In fact, Gauger also believes that schools tend to put too much focus on Islam when they present the Middle Ages and too little on the East. He also believes that this "clearly has its roots in certain current 'multicultural' domestic policies."
Many people would criticize Gauger's position, given former approaches to the issue. Until well into the 1960s, the country's textbooks were dominated by stories of the suffering of German expellees. At that point, there was no sign of any repressing of the history of Germany's former eastern territories — nor any sign of balanced representation, for that matter. The loss of those ancestral homelands was far too recent, and the expellees' organizations had too much of a presence in the political landscape of what was then West Germany.
Part 2: A Long History of Distortion
Indeed, poorly veiled expressions of a German sense of superiority often found their way into schoolbooks of the period. One textbook from 1952 described the eastward expansion of Germans in the Middle Ages as follows: "German colonists brought foreign groups (Poles, Bohemians and Hungarians) the most valuable aspects of their cultures." A 1959 textbook from the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein even resorted to nationalistic vocabulary to honor the settlers' achievements: "Joint endeavors on the part of all the German groups allowed them to recapture ethnically Germanic lands. This eastern expansion enhanced German tribal structures and made Germany Europe's easternmost frontier."
Another textbook, this one from 1962, frames it as an eastward expansion of the Christian Occident: "There were considerable east-west cultural divides at work. The elevation of these underdeveloped regions to the cultural and economic level of the Occident was possible at that time only with the help of German immigrants."
Meanwhile, there was little research into why the Germans were expelled. For example, when it comes to tensions between the Germans and the Czechs, Historian Frauke Wetzel has determined that "German textbooks consider a desire for revenge to be the primary reason for the expulsion of Germans from the eastern territories."
In 1956, West German education officials at the federal level drew up their own recommendations on how to teach the history of Eastern Europe. They emphasized using the classroom to maintain "an awareness of German unity and the desire for reunification" as well as "to anchor the achievements" of Germany's east in "Germans' sense of history." A set of guidelines for geography classes put the "problem of Germany's eastern territories" under the subject of "major German geographic regions" and referred to Germany as being "split into three parts." In fact, maps in German classrooms showed the German Reich with its 1937 borders and labeled the western parts of Poland as "currently under Polish administration."
These recommendations weren't amended until 1973, when then-Chancellor Willy Brandt and his coalition made up of the center-left Social Democrats and the business-friendly Free Democrats were championing so-called Ostpolitik, their policies aimed at normalizing relations and de-escalating Cold War tensions with the communist states of Eastern Europe. Suggestions from a German-Polish textbook commission founded in 1972 also provided a considerable push in this new direction.
From the 1970s on, the focus turned more toward structural questions and away from general analyses of individual suffering. At most, the suffering issue was mentioned as just one of the reasons behind the mass expulsion, as can be seen, for example, in this textbook from 1995: "What the Germans inflicted upon other groups during the Nazi regime was then suffered at the end of the war and following surrender by many Germans living in the sphere of control of previously oppressed peoples."
From a Federal to State Issue
Soon after Germany's 1990 reunification, federal education officials rescinded all recommendations regarding what to teach about Eastern European history. Instead, they handed over responsibility for developing content guidelines to education authorities in Germany's 16 federal states. Since then, political constellations in the governments of each state have played a role in determining just how much attention is given to the subject of flight and expulsion in the classroom.
The core curriculum for university-track high schools in the state of Lower Saxony, for example, has included the topics of "flight and expulsion" along with "forced labor" and "total war" since 2008. In 2007, the then-conservative-led state government of North Rhine-Westphalia added "flight and expulsion" to the curriculum for its own university-track schools. "One in four citizens of our country has family roots in the expellees' old homeland," explained Barbara Sommer, the state's education minister at the time, who is a member of the CDU. Erika Steinbach, a fellow Christian Democrat and the controversial president of the German Federation of Expellees (BdV), declared the measure "wonderful."
The topic receives similarly increased attention in other states that have traditionally been ruled by the CDU or its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), including Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Thuringia. At the same time, according to Gauger, the historian, it gets short shrift in the current curricula of the states of Brandenburg, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saarland.
Imperfect, but Still Progress
Even so, not everyone would agree that this indicates schools are really suppressing the issue. "The idea that the subject of the expulsion is neglected in history classes is a complete myth created by Erika Steinbach," says Wolfgang Benz, head of the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Berlin's Technical University. Likewise, Thomas Strobel, organizer of the current German-Polish textbook project at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI) in the central German city of Braunschweig, considers the current portrayal of history appropriate and emphasizes how far German and Polish textbook experts have come in such a short time.
Indeed, it took more than 50 years of reconciliation to complete a previous project of this type: a joint German-French textbook, which has been available since 2006. What's more, the collaboration with Poland, Germany's largest neighbor to the east, should go much more quickly. Publishers from both countries are currently bidding to turn the plan into a reality and publish the textbook, and a first edition is scheduled to be used in classrooms beginning in the 2013-14 school year.
Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein
Part 1: Can a Jointly Written History Erase Centuries of German-Polish Strife?
Part 2: A Long History of Distortion
©spiegel.de
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