Spiegel Online has an interesting article today (in German) discussing the geo-political aspect of maps in school textbooks. Besides obvious examples of the disputed territorial boundaries of Ukraine and Kashmir, there is a great excerpt from a German school atlas from 1925, depicting Germany in its pre-WWI boundaries. This defiant ignoring of the Versailles Treaty had been forced on the publisher by the school administration in (SPD-dominated) Prussia.
Category: Education
German History in Documents and Images
German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source material documenting Germany’s political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present, created by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. in cooperation with the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and IEG-MAPS (Institute for European History, Mainz). It comprises original German texts, all of which are accompanied by new English translations, and a wide range of visual imagery, including maps.
The section on Weimar Germany has been curated by Eric Weitz and Eric Roubinek and is divided into 14 categories, including Politics, Economics and Society, Architecture and Urban Life and Bodies and Sex. Featured documents include the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of 1918, Walter Gropius’ Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar (1919), data on regional secondary school enrollment (1911, 1926/27, and 1938) and George Grosz’s painting ‘Pillars of Society’ (1926).
The Crisis of Reform Schools
In the late 1920s, a collection of auto-biographical texts by occupants of a children’s home, so called ‘Fürsorgezöglinge’, caused an outrage and fuelled a debate about the future of German reform schools.
The texts have now been republished in a critical edition for the first time, making these unique source available again for Weimar research.
Journal Review: Journal of Contemporary History (1/2011)
The new issue of the Journal of Contemporary History features an article on ‘Germany’s Postwar Re-education and Its Weimar Intellectual Roots‘ by Udi E. Greenberg: ‘Historians have often observed the intrusion by the USA into German intellectual and institutional life as part of the USA’s overall plan to “re-educate” Germany and to tie it to its own political traditions and Cold War goals. Through examination of the political theories and academic educational reforms of Carl J. Friedrich, one of the most important intellectuals of the Cold War, this article argues that US policies were simultaneously shaped and determined by intellectual traditions from the Weimar period.’