Authors

Steffen Sammler ¹;  ¹ Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany

Discussion

History textbooks have played a central role in the education for a national consciousness since the 19th century. Education for the nation was often characterised by an exaggerated nationalism and the teaching of stereotypes and images of the enemy, to which a great responsibility for the intellectual and cultural preparation of the young generation to fight in the First and the Second World Wars was attributed. History textbooks have therefore been at the centre of the Council of Europe member states' efforts to promote understanding and reconciliation after 1945. The first goal of these textbook revision initiatives was to identify and eliminate nationalist, bellicose, and xenophobic texts and images contributing to hostility between Europeans. This “negative” revision was, in the eyes of politically committed university professors and schoolteachers, the prerequisite for reconciliation between European peoples after 1945. Beginning with the first series of conferences on history textbook revision (1953-1958), this “negative” revision was successively accompanied by a “positive” revision of history textbooks, that is, working together to write a shared narrative of European history highlighting its traditions of democracy and solidary and its capacity for peaceful cooperation.

In the selection and the definition of Europe, the process of textbook revision has been long time dominated by Western European concepts of history and history education. This paper studies these concepts of Europe, not least with regard to the role and characteristics they attributed to Central Europe as a concept of inclusion or demarcation. In contrast, it shows how Central European historians critically approached Western European initiatives of reconciliation in history education, started to make their voices heard since the 1970s, and developed their own ideas about European history and history teaching for reconciliation and cooperation in the work of the Council of Europe after 1989.The paper studies if and how they were able to change the debates about and the new outcomes in history education in the Council of Europe itself. It asks whether and how Central European history and Central European perspectives on reconciliation and cooperation have found their way into the history textbooks of Western European countries or are textbooks of Western European countries are still oblivious of or exclusionary towards Central European ideas about nation building, peace, and the experiences of persecution under and resistance against authoritarian rule.