In the former East Germany, childcare facilities enabled women to work more easily. |
It’s
taken several years, but students across the country are now learning a common version
of history that takes stock of everyday life and dissident movements in the former
East Germany
The shock of unification
reached classrooms in the “new” Länder (states) of former East Germany as the
1991 school year began. Germany was united once again. But not its school curriculum.
As a result, the West German version was imposed. East German history textbooks were
rejected because they faithfully reflected the ideology of the fallen regime.
“The publishers quickly brought out new books,” says Falk Pingel, deputy director
of the Georg-Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (see previous pages).
“But they were just new editions of the ones written in the West in the 1980s, with
an added chapter on reunification. It wasn’t at all representative of the idea East
Germans had of their own history. The repressive nature of the Communist regime was
emphasized, along with East Germany’s membership of the Soviet bloc. Reunification
was presented as a positive thing, without mentioning the dashed hopes of those from
the East.”
Looking
back without nostalgia
In
the space of a year, teachers in the East had to switch to a very different version
of history. “Many of them didn’t know how to explain to their pupils why yesterday’s
truths no longer held today,” says Andrea Schwärmer, who had taught history
in the eastern state of Thüringen. “Those teachers lost all credibility and
had to resign themselves to leaving the profession.”
In the mid-1990s, the education ministers of the Eastern states, who were in charge
of supervising the curriculum under the federal system, began to push for change.
“Many teachers in the East requested that we come up with a less biased textbook
and we did in 1995,” says Walther Funken, head of Volk und Wissen, the largest textbook
publisher in the Eastern states, based in Berlin. 0nce tied to the Communist regime,
the publisher was taken over in 1994 by Cornelsen, a West German publisher.
“It wasn’t a matter of writing a textbook for people who were nostalgic for life
in the old East Germany,” says Funken, “but of presenting in a more subtle way all
the aspects of East German society through individual portraits. For example, one
chapter compares the different roles of women in East and West German societies,
noting the large number of them in the East’s workforce and the political and historical
reasons why women in the West tend to stay home.”
Last year, the state of Brandenburg officially revised its history curriculum for
the first time since 1991. More space is given to daily life in East Germany, the
Nazi period and the Holocaust, a comparison between Nazism and Stalinism, as well
as how citizens’ movements helped bring down the Communist regime.
Sparking
debate
“In
the East,” says Pingel, “National Socialism was depicted as a perversion of the capitalist
system. It was obviously not compared to Stalinism and very little was said about
the concentration camps and their victims. Dissident movements weren’t mentioned
either.”
The vast majority of German historians now agree on a common version of the history
of East Germany, says Pingel. Because the new generations have not lived the history
being taught to them, “the textbooks discuss the rise of the 1989 citizens’ movements
and use a range of sources and accounts to show how young East Germans experienced
reunification. This open way of teaching doesn’t present a single truth, but various
points of view,” he says. “It seeks to encourage debate in the classroom.” |
