Mission Textbook: The History of the Georg Eckert Institute [1 ed.] 9783412524715, 9783412524692

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Eckhardt Fuchs Kathrin Henne Steffen Sammler

Mission Textbook The History of the Georg Eckert Institute

© 2022 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht | Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412524715 | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

© 2022 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht | Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412524715 | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Mission Textbook The History of the Georg Eckert Institute

Eckhardt Fuchs Kathrin Henne Steffen Sammler Translated from German by Nicola Watson

Böhlau Verlag Wien Köln © 2022 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht | Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412524715 | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2022 by Böhlau, Lindenstraße 14, 50674 Köln, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria). Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike, V&R unipress. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International license, at https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412524715. For a copy of this license go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Any use in cases other than those permitted by this license requires the prior written permission from the publisher.

Cover Image: Marek Kruszewski Typesetting: SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-412-52469-2 (print) ISBN 978-3-412-52471-5 (digital)

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Contents

Foreword 

6

VI Research Infrastructure 

I

128

1 How the Textbook Collection became

Introduction 

8

the International Research Library 

130

2 Digital Infrastructures for Research and Education  135

II

3 Publications by the Georg Eckert Institute  140

The History of Textbook Revision Prior to 1945 

14

VII III

The Institute and its Regional Significance  146

From the International Institute for

VIII

Textbook Improvement to Member­ship of the Leibniz Association 

26

Appendix 

164

1 Directors of the Georg Eckert Institute

IV

and the International Textbook Institute 

International Work on Textbooks 

50

V Core Areas of Textbook Research 

2 List of Abbreviations  3 Further Reading 

167

4 Picture Credits 

168

78

  1 The Instruments Used for Textbook Revision and the Principles of Textbook Research    2 Democracy and Dictatorship 

80 86

  3 Experiences of Violence, and Resistance 

91

  4 Nation 

94

  5 Colonialism and Post-colonial Perspectives  101   6 Religion 

105

  7 Europe and European Integration 

110

  8 Human Rights Education 

116

  9 Environment 

119

10 Cultural Diversity 

122

11 Digital Educational Media 

126

165 166

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Foreword

The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its foundation in 2015, an occasion which gave rise to the idea to write an introductory history of the Institute since its inauguration in 1975. This work is based on the first comprehensive examination of the diverse material documenting the life and work of the Institute, which is stored in Braunschweig and in the archives of Lower Saxony in Wolfenbüttel. It also incorporates extensive material from those national and international institutions that have provided political and financial support to the Institute and with whom it has conducted numerous collaborative projects related to textbooks and textbook research. This material is stored in the Lower Saxony State Archive, the Braunschweig Municipal Archive, the archives of the Technical University in Braunschweig, the political archive of the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, the central archives of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and the UNESCO Archive in Paris. In keeping with our decision to write an accessible overview of the GEI’s history, suitable for reading by the wider public rather than a narrow academic circle, we have dispensed with extensive bibliographic references and lists of individual archival records. More detailed information is naturally available to readers upon request.

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This book would not have been possible without the support of many colleagues. Our thanks go to Anette Blaschke, Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Robert Maier, Marcus Otto, Falk Pingel, Dirk Sadowski and Gisela Teistler for their critical review of the manuscript and Nicola Watson, who translated the German original version into English. And without the expert guidance of the archivists or the willingness of the interviewees to share their experiences and memories with us, we would not have gained access to many aspects of the Institute’s history. Our research into the Institute’s history and the subsequent writing of this book were generously supported by the Braunschweigische Stiftung, the Stiftung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz and the Hans und Helga Eckensberger Stiftung. We warmly thank all three foundations for their patronage and for the patience they demonstrated during the production of this book. We very much hope you enjoy this journey through the history of our Institute and should this book inspire you to visit us in Braunschweig, you would be most welcome.

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7

I Introduction

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In 2015 the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research celebrated forty years as an independent research institute.

Georg Eckert

However, the roots of the Institute can be traced back even further, namely to 1951 when Georg Eckert launched the Internationales Institut für Schul­ buchverbesserung (International Institute for Textbook Improvement) at the Kant Teacher Training College in Braunschweig. Eckert was resolutely committed to the democratic reconstruction of the education system in the Federal Republic of Germany. His dedication was undoubtedly fuelled by his earlier political work in the SPD, his inner conflict concerning his membership of the Nazi Party, and particularly by his experiences as a naval officer and later, in 1944/45, as a member of the Greek Resistance. 10

Georg Eckert consciously focussed his efforts on continuing the work started by trade unions, governments, and international organisations in the interwar years to revise textbook content. The aim was to rid textbooks of stereotypes and portrayals of others as enemies in order to stimulate international understanding and peace – the central keywords within international education in the 1950s and 1960s. His work in the field of international textbook revision was founded on his deep conviction that reconciliation with neighbouring countries with whom Germany had once been at war was not only a matter of democratic principle but must also be a key aspect of foreign policy for the new Ger-

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communicates its findings beyond academia to the general public: The GEI advises policymakers and practitioners in the field of education and mediates in international projects and matters related to textbooks. The Institute’s core tasks are situated within the three main fields of research, research infrastructure and knowledge transfer. In keeping with the Leibniz template, the GEI has developed a ‘circular model of academic value creation’ that closely interconnects these three fields.

man state. Eckert’s many years of work in the field of textbook revision, culminating with his election as President of the German UNESCO Commission in 1964, shaped the history of the Institute and have continued to do so, even after his death in 1974. The GEI is described in a statement by the senate of the Leibniz Association, of which it is a member, as an Institute that develops and provides ‘high-quality academic infrastructures … grounded in its research results’.1 According to its foundation charter, the Institute conducts and facilitates research with a cultural and historical focus and promotes national and international academic dialogue. In addition, it

All GEI departments are active within these three central fields of activity. They create infrastructures tailored towards scholars and researchers that emanate from the Institute’s unique collection of textbooks. These are research-based, online and on-site and take the form of source materials and tools related to curricula, textbooks and other educational media. The departments conduct research into the production, content and appropriation of educational media for schools in their socio-cultural, political, economic and historical contexts. The ‘circular model’ is concluded through inter-departmental knowledge transfer: All departments utilise critical and elucidative research to generate transferable products and services designed for national and international educational practice, educational media production and education policy making. The Georg Eckert Institute has gained a reputation both domestically and globally that is not only a tribute to its uniqueness and its work in academia and education practice but also enables it to continue to provide the impetus for advances in textbook

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research. This is one reason the GEI actively partners many international education organisations and focusses its work on knowledge transfer. Research findings are disseminated through recommendations, expertise and continuing education, as well as the annual prizes awarded to outstanding textbooks. Textbooks of course continue to occupy a central role in education: They are used by nations and social groups not only to define the knowledge that is to be passed on to future generations and the skills that are to be nurtured in them, but also the

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cultural demarcations of societies. The social, academic, educational and pedagogical relevance of textbooks in subjects fostering a sense of meaning and identity – including history, geography and social studies/politics – extends far beyond solely being aids for teaching. Because the knowledge and information they contain is always the result of negotiation and compromise, textbooks themselves continue to be items of political interest. The rapid growth of discursive and media-­related spheres, which today are witness to a struggle for interpretive dominance and normative power, are changing

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the social arena and the function of textbooks and textbook knowledge. The challenge of sustaining textbooks’ position as representatives and interpreters of truth has become increasingly difficult in this age of digital change, which has brought a proliferation of competing interpretations and meanings. Textbook analysis opens the door to an exploration of processes of identity, patterns of inclusion and exclusion and consequently of ‘integration’. In view of new societal challenges, such as those encountered in the context of societies shaped by post-colonial migration and the latest movements of refugees to Europe, the requirements for textbook research that promotes understanding and mediates between cultures have become considerably more complex in nature. ‘International understanding’ has, accordingly, transformed into ‘inter-cultural understanding’. This book reviews the activities and central research questions of the GEI, starting with the days when, from his modest office, Georg Eckert first began to build a collection of textbooks and to arrange the

first multinational textbook negotiations with colleagues in Europe and the USA. Since its infancy the Institute has grown steadily, not least due to the constant support of the Lower Saxony state government. Over that time the GEI has continuously expanded its research fields and enlarged its collections. We shall begin by explaining where the concept of textbook revision originated and how Georg Eckert came to establish the International Institute for Textbook Improvement.

1 Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, Der Senat, Stellungnahme zum Leibniz-­Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung, Braunschweig (GEI), 11 July 2017, p. 2, https://www.leibniz-gemeinschaft.de/fileadmin/user_upload/ ARCHIV_downloads/Archiv/Evaluierung/Senatsstellungnahmen/GEI_-_ Senatsstellungnahme_11-07-2017_mit_Anlagen.pdf (accessed on 29 December 2020).

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II The History of Textbook Revision Prior to 1945

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Hirt’s Deutsches Lesebuch. Zweiter Teil (Breslau 1939)

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is, therefore, understandable that textbook revision – particularly with regard to history books – tended to be overlooked as an effective strategy towards supporting peace and international understanding among the other, multi-faceted efforts towards the same end. Prior to the First World War, Terminology: however, several institutions were already Textbook revision: improvements made to content as a addressing textbook content. Among these result of bi- and multilateral activities were the Ständiger Internationaler Erzie­ Textbook research: academic investigations into textbook hungs­beirat (Permanent International Eduproduction, content and practices cational Advisory Board; 1885), the Interna­ Textbook activities: all bi- and multilateral activities related tionales Pädagogisches Institut (International to textbooks. Pedagogical Institute; 1905), the Bureau International de Documentation d’Éduca­ At the first Universal Peace Congress in Paris in 1889, tion (International Bureau of Educational Documenthe subject of textbooks was discussed in detail; they tation; 1909), the Carnegie Endowment for Internawere identified as a source of mutual misunderstandtional Peace and the Conseil International d’Éducation ing and it was urged ‘that textbooks be purged of (International Council of Education; 1914).3 1 false ideas about the nature and causes of war’. Military content and accounts of wars should in future be accorded very limited space in textbooks. The pedagogic aspects of peace were addressed at subsequent Universal Peace Congresses: one resulting recommendation being for history teachers to highlight the horror and senselessness of war in their lessons. This illustrates the burgeoning conviction that school history teaching could fulfil an important role in peace education. It is, however, important to take into consideration the fact that history teaching was not afforded equal status in individual country’s education systems – in Great Britain, for example, compulsory lessons in history were not widely introduced until the Albert Malet and Jules Isaac, Histoire de France (Paris 1932) and Siegearly twentieth century and the majority of teachfried Kawerau, Denkschrift über die deutschen Geschichts- und Lesebücher ers did not receive any specific training in history.2 It (Berlin 1927) The idea for textbook revision emerged from the international peace movement, which in its infancy in the late nineteenth century called for ‘teaching in the spirit of peace’.

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The outbreak of the First World War interrupted any attempts to improve textbooks or teaching and, during the war, many organisations were focussed primarily on ensuring their own futures. The social upheaval that many European countries experienced when the war ended generated an entirely new set of requirements for education on peace and international understanding. These circumstances gave rise to the conviction that history was the one subject in schools which could ‘provide the key to the future’.4 In the years following the First World War, the revision of textbooks, and of history textbooks in particular, became the central and driving cause of diverse international organisations, and was a subject discussed at many conferences, among them the

Palais des Nations, Geneva

Comité international des Sciences Historiques (International Committee of Historical Sciences) which was founded in 1926 and which in 1928 established a committee to address the content of history books. This committee developed into an international platform for the exchange of information, especially for textbook authors. In 1932 it initiated a comprehensive survey of textbooks and history teaching, which was, however, unable to be completed before the outbreak of war in 1939.5 The League of Nations and the Norden Association then came to play a considerably more prominent global role in international textbook revision.

League of Nations Within a few years of its foundation in 1919, the League of Nations had established two committees that addressed textbook revision: The International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC) and the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation. The ICIC established a committee for the study of international history textbooks in 1923, which was particularly concerned with the issue of textbook revision. The committee was initially tasked with collecting and evaluating recommendations for procedures and methods for the revision of textbooks, improvement of history teaching and production of an international history book. The results of this first phase were published in 1925 and named the ‘Casares resolution’, after Julio Casares, the Spanish envoy at the League of Nations. In order to foster closeness between nations

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CASARES RESOLUTION OF 1926 THE COMMITTEE ON INTELLECTUAL CO-OPERATION,

it recommended the removal or amendment of false, tendentious or partisan passages from textbooks. Despite the adoption of the resolution in 1926 by the General Assembly of the League of Nations and the efforts of the ‘Sub-Committee of Experts for the Instruction of Children and Youth in the Existence and Aims of the League of Nations’ to subsequently strengthen and publicise the resolution internationally, it was only applied in three cases prior to 1930 and led in only one of these instances to modifications actually being made to a textbook. The ‘Casares Resolution’ was consequently revised in 1932 to include textbooks used for teaching geography, civics and history of civilisation, as well as anthologies and reading primers. In addition, the national committees pledged to respond to criticism of textbook content and to consequently consult the ICIC, which was to play a mediating role. Those national committees were also to draw up lists of textbooks from their own countries, but also from other nations, that they regarded as particularly commendable. Other, more long-term, plans included recommending textbook revision programmes to governments and school administrations and providing support for such measures through the national committees.6 The unofficial character of both drafts of the resolution proved, however, to be a significant shortcoming. Furthermore, requests for amendments were all initiated by non-governmental organisations without the involvement of government agencies. The ‘Casares Resolution’ clearly required an official basis, supported by diplomatic accord. This faltered due to the non-participation of the USA and the lack of 18

CONSIDERING that one of the most effective methods of bringing about the intellectual rapprochement of peoples would be to delete or modify passages in school textbooks of a nature to convey to the young wrong impressions leading to an essential misunderstanding of other countries; BEING CONVINCED that it will be unable to postpone for long the consideration of this problem, which has been brought before it since its creation in the form of suggestions both from its own members and from outside, and realizing at the same time the difficulties which would attend any attempt to undertake an enterprise of this kind on a large scale;

widespread acceptance for the resolution among the major powers represented in the League of Nations, who refused to give it their support and argued that education matters were of national concern.7 The 1937 Declaration Regarding the Teaching of His­ tory constituted a binding intergovernmental agreement. In it, 26 states pledged ‘[to give] prominence, in the teaching of world history, to facts calculated to bring about a realisation of the interdependence of nations’. Growing international tension, the aggressive policies of the fascist states and the outbreak of the Second World War meant that the declaration was never implemented.

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REQUESTS the co-operation of the National Committees in trying, on a limited scale in the first instance, the following procedure, whose extreme elasticity seems of a nature to obviate any risk of wounding national susceptibilities: (a) When a National Committee thinks it desirable that a foreign text concerning its country and intended for use in schools should be amended for the reason indicated in the present resolution, it shall make a request to this effect to the National Committee of the country where the text is in use, at the same time submitting, if necessary, a draft emendation on the desired lines, together with a brief statement of the reasons; (b) National Committees, on receiving a request of this kind, shall decide in the first instance whether the request should be accepted and shall then determine what representations of a friendly and private nature, if any, should be made to the authors or publishers with a view of the proposed emendation. If these representations are success-

ful, the Committee shall notify the National Committee making the application and the International Committee; if not, It shall not be obliged to give any explanation either of the reasons for its failure or of its own refusal to take action; (c) Requests for emendation shall refer exclusively to questions of definitely established fact regarding the geography or civilization of a country, its material conditions of life, natural resources, customs of the inhabitants, scientific, artistic and economic development, contribution to international culture and the welfare of humanity, etc. It is strictly forbidden to make or accept applications for emendations referring to personal views of a moral, political or religious order; (d) All the National Committees will at the same time be requested to specify the publications most suitable for giving foreigners a knowledge of the history, civilization and present position of their country. Source: UNESCO, A Handbook for the Improvement of Textbooks and Teaching Materials as Aids to International Understanding, Paris, UNESCO 1949, p. 156–157.

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The Norden Association The Norden Association (Föreningerne Norden) comprised representatives from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland and was established in 1919 in response to those countries’ experiences during the First World War. The association has frequently been ascribed an influential role in the process of textbook revision. Its aim was to promote cooperation and mutual understanding between the Scandinavian states in order to strengthen their position in the face of the great powers. One of the association’s first steps to achieve this goal was to initiate a study of history textbooks. Similar to other forms of international cooperation in this area, it was guided by the idea that the presence of nationalism and militarism in history teaching hampers understanding between nations. Textbook revision in this case was, however, explicitly designed to promote a regionally-based ‘Nordism’ or a sense of being Scandinavian.8 The members of the Norden Association started their programme of textbook revision at the national level. Instead of reciprocally reviewing one another’s textbooks, the participating nations resolved to each examine their own books, agreeing that outsiders should not make decisions about the content of history teaching in other sovereign states. Working on this same principle, the Norden Association convened the ‘inter-nordic’ committee of historians and teachers in 1932, whose task was to thoroughly analyse contemporary history teaching and to develop a more sympathetic historical narrative for the Scandinavian region; one that took each national 20

narrative into consideration. The joint committee was soon divided into national groups of experts, each with the task of mutually assessing textbooks. However, it soon became clear that transnational collaborative efforts seeking to agree a common history of the region were at odds with both collective interests and national self-determination.9 In the years following the Second World War, the work of the Norden Association was frequently regarded as seminal in terms of developing textbook revision procedures – in particular in the context of agreements and guides released by UNESCO and the Council of Europe – as it expanded upon the principles originating from the ‘Casares Resolution’. These included the composition of: 1. two or three parallel versions of a contested event from different national perspectives; 2. a negotiated, universal version of the contested event; 3. historiographic narratives describing in detail the reasons for dispute between historians from different countries.10

Bi- and multilateral textbook activities Bi- and multilateral cultural agreements in the 1930s, which either envisaged textbook revision or definitively planned it, were principally brokered between the Scandinavian and Baltic states, as well as between the countries of the Balkans, but had only limited impact.

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Bilateral textbook negotiations could also serve nationalistic objectives, as demonstrated by the cultural agreement between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The agreement contained a clause in which the two states pledged that the ‘content of textbooks approved for teaching’ would be committed to ‘historical truth and the spirit of German-Italian cooperation’.11 In addition both countries would prevent ‘the translation or distribution of works directed at the falsification of the historical truth about the other country, or against the state form or leadership, and distorting works (tendentious literature) by political emigres from the other country’.12 The object of the agreement was evidently to protect the two dictatorships from any form of criticism aimed at their governments or leadership, rather than fostering international cooperation. At the same time as textbooks were being revised in Europe, bi- and multilateral textbook discussions were also taking place in the Americas. The work of the Pan-American Union is specifically worth mentioning here as, under the remit of the Pan-American Institute of History and Geography, which was founded in 1928, it prompted the governments of the American nations to enter into regional treaties that included provisions for textbook revision. The first bilateral treaty to include reciprocal revision of history and geography books was that agreed between Argentina and Brazil on 10 October 1933. This agreement was significant in that it not only addressed the accurate and unprejudiced portrayal of both national histories but also called for the elimination from textbooks of ‘whatever might tend to arouse in the immature

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mind of youth aversion to any American Country’.13 In addition, article 4 of the treaty allows any American nation to also join the agreement at a later date, with the consent of the initial two signatories. A convention on the ‘Teaching of History’, which was adopted at the Seventh International Conference of American States held in Montevideo in December 1933, built upon the first bilateral treaty between Brazil and Argentina and pursued its objectives. Three years later this was expanded further when the convenors of the conference called for new textbooks to educate students with a ‘Pan-American spirit’, which echoed the ideas behind the Norden Association.14

The First German-French Textbook Discussions The German-French discussions on textbooks in the interwar period are frequently cited as being the precursor to the textbook revisions that took place after 1945 and as providing the starting point for their resumption. French teaching unions, including the National Union of Public School Teachers in France and the Colonies, had denounced the ‘teaching of hatred’ in 1919.15 The call by Anatole France, at the congress of French Elementary School Teachers at Tours in 1919, to ‘burn the books which teach hatred, burn them all’16 was widely reported. One of the first studies, in which the Germans were not, however, involved, was undertaken in 1921 by the European centre of the Carnegie Endowment and published 22

two years later under the title ‘Enquête sur les livres scolaires d’après guerre’ (Post-war textbook survey). The initiatives advanced in succeeding years by French and German historians and history teachers to organise discussions on textbooks culminated in a joint conference in Paris in 1935. The conference adopted almost 40 recommendations on how to deal with Franco-German history – fifteen of these, however, were agreed upon with reservations from one or more delegations. The participating historians and history teachers were overwhelmingly positive about the results of the conference and the fact that it had produced clear, written statements explaining the different national positions. The reaction to the recommendations in Nazi Germany was, however, so irrefutably negative that the French ambassador André François-Poncet described them in 1938 as having entirely failed.17 The multifaceted efforts to revise textbooks prior to 1945, at both national and international levels, were the result, in most cases, of non-governmental initiatives. Many such programmes and initiatives were never implemented in practice and failed therefore to produce results. The first attempts at institutionalised textbook revision were to take place after the Second World War. The establishment of UNESCO in 1945 played a central role, as one of its initial objectives was to encourage the use of education to promote international understanding. In the two decades immediately following the Second World War, UNESCO’s policies were built upon

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the peace education efforts of the interwar period and were aimed toward a democratic renewal of the education systems in war-ravaged Europe. ‘International understanding’ was the phrase used to connect a diverse range of programmes and initiatives, with textbook revision being a central theme. At its first general conference in 1946, UNESCO adopted a comprehensive nine-point programme for the revision of teaching materials and textbooks, and, in 1949, it published a ‘Handbook for the Improvement of Textbooks and Teaching Materials’, which also included a template for corresponding international agreements. The UNESCO handbook built upon the knowledge of textbook revision gained in the interwar period, particularly by organisations such as the Norden Association, the French teaching union Syndi­ cat National des Instituteurs (National Syndicate of Teachers), and by the South American countries. The UNESCO handbook’s ‘Model Plan’ expanded its ideals beyond this, however, by supplementing the fundamental principles of textbook revision, such as accuracy and fairness, with recommendations for comprehensiveness and balance, as well as ‘world-mindedness’. The International Textbook Institute in Braun­schweig was established during this period of bi- and multilateral textbook revision and the re-education programme implemented by the allied powers of the USA, Great Britain and France in the occupied zones. Georg Eckert became a central figure in the field of post-war textbook revision owing to his per-

‘That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.’ Source: UNESCO Constitution, 1945, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ ev.php-URL_ID=15244&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201. html (accessed on 21 December 2020).

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sonal experiences, his role in the democratisation of the education system in Lower Saxony and his network of international contacts. These factors had all laid the groundwork for the establishment of an international textbook institute.

8 Henrik Åström Elmersjö, The Norden Associations and International Efforts to Change History Education, 1919–1970. International Organisations, Education, and Hegemonic Nationalism, in Paeda­ gogica Historica 51, no. 6 (2015), pp. 727–743. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Schröder, Die Schulbuchverbesserung, p. 78. 12 Ibid. 13 UNESCO, Handbook, p. 163. 14 Schröder, Die Schulbuchverbesserung. 15 UNESCO, Handbook, p. 11.

1 A Handbook for the Improvement of Textbooks and Teaching Materials as Aids to International Understanding (Paris: UNESCO, 1949), p. 10. 2 The Historical Association 1906–1956 (London: The Historical Association, 1957). 3 Carl August Schröder, Die Schulbuchverbesserung durch internationale geistige Zusammenarbeit (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1961). 4 The Historical Association 1906–1956. 5 Ibid. 6 UNESCO, Handbook. 7 Romain Faure, Netzwerke der Kulturdiplomatie. Die internationale Schulbuchrevision in Europa 1945–1989 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).

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16 Ibid. 17 Faure, Netzwerke der Kulturdiplomatie; see also Corine Defrance and Ulrich Pfeil, Symbol or Reality? The Background, Implementation and Development of the Franco-German History Textbook, in Karina V. Korostelina and Simone Lässig, eds, History Education and Post-conflict Reconciliation. Reconsidering Joint Textbook Projects (London: Routledge, 2013); Romain Faure, Vom internationalen zum historiographischen Konflikt. Der erste Weltkrieg in der deutsch-französischen Schulbuch­ kommission, in Eckert. Das Bulletin 11 (2012), pp. 11–14, http://www.gei.de/fileadmin/gei.de/pdf/publikationen/Bulletin/ Bulletin_11/EB_11_03_Faure.pdf (accessed on 29 December 2020); Karl-Dietrich Erdmann, Internationale Schulbuchrevision zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft, in Internationale Schulbuch­ forschung 4 (1982), pp. 249–260.

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III From the International Institute for Textbook Improvement to Member­ship of the Leibniz Association

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The Foundation Period

Biography of Georg Eckert (14 August 1912–7 January 1974)

1931 A-levels and commencement of studies in history, geography, German studies, ethnology and folklore; joined the SPD

1935 Awarded PhD in ethnology 1937 Joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party From 1940 Member of the Wehrmacht

1943 Habilitation and venia legendi (university lecturing qualification) completed in Bonn

1944 Directed the meteorological observatory in Thessaloniki, Greece. Joined forces with the Greek Resistance

Georg Eckert

1946 Appointed as lecturer for history and methodology of history teaching at the newly founded Kant Teacher Training College in Braunschweig

1952 Appointed professor of history education 1964–1974 President of the German UNESCO commission

1972 Awarded the Großes Verdienstkreuz (Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany)

Minister President of Lower Saxony Alfred Kubel presents Georg Eckert with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on 4 July 1972.

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Shortly after being appointed as lecturer to the Kant Teacher Training College in Braunschweig in 1946, Georg Eckert formed a working group for history education with like-minded teachers and school administrators. The group’s aim was to create new teaching materials for history lessons that reflected contemporary international research findings. Its members wished to conduct more in-depth histori­ cal and pedagogical research in order to create a foundation for those new teaching materials. Eckert also envisaged an endowed fellowship programme that would enable academics from Germany and abroad to take part in research studies initiated by the working group for history education.1 The activities of the working group were unequivocally supported by the Textbook Section of the British military administration’s education department, whose director, Terence J. Leonard, involved Georg Eckert in the revision networks for history teaching from an early stage. These networks had close ties to the education departments of the allied military administration and, in particular, of UNESCO. Eckert was successful in his efforts to win the commitment of the Arbeits­gemeinschaft Deutscher Lehrerverbände (Consortium of German Teaching Unions), later the Gewerk­schaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft (German Education Union), to the revision of history books and to combine their work with international initiatives organised by the allied education departments and UNESCO, which in turn resulted in the formalisation of international textbook activities in Braunschweig. Terence J. Leonard introduced Georg Eckert 30

to the UNESCO representatives for international textbook activities and his subsequent meeting with the American historian Richard Perdew, who had coordinated textbook activities for UNESCO since 1948, proved to be pivotal. In 1950 Perdew invited Eckert to participate in a UNESCO summer school in Brussels titled ‘Textbook Improvement’. The event provided the catalyst, and the international contacts, for Eckert to formalise the initiative, first conceived with the Consortium of German Teaching Unions and the working group for history education, to establish an international centre for textbook revision. In 1951, with the firm objective of establishing such an international centre, Eckert invited colleagues to Braunschweig from teaching unions and professional associations in Belgium, Demark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA, whom he had met at the UNESCO seminar in Brussels in 1950 and come to respect. At the resulting conference of history teachers, instigated by the Consortium of German Teaching Unions, the ‘International Institute for Textbook Improvement’ was founded in the presence of the UNESCO representative, Richard Perdew. The founding of the Institute was the result of a series of negotiations between the teachers’ unions involved with UNESCO textbook activities, the British occupying authorities and the Consortium of German Teaching Unions concerning the methods and processes for revising textbooks both domestically and internationally. Eckert viewed the Institute as a forum providing access to a collection of international textbooks for those par-

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Caricature of the German-English historian conference in Braunschweig, July 1949 Source: Ursula A. J. Becher, Rainer Riemenschneider (eds), Internationale Verständigung. 25 Jahre Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung in Braunschweig, Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung 2000, p. 119.

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ticipating in textbook discussions, which they would use as the basis for analysing, revising and developing new textbooks for history and, later, for geography. Following the successful launch of the ‘International Institute for Textbook Improvement’, Eckert then sought to convert the working group for history education into a public foundation. This would provide a secure framework to continue reforming history teaching in Lower Saxony while also allowing him a great deal of organisational leeway and the freedom to stipulate content. In parallel to these efforts he explored the possibility of establishing a UNESCO institute and investigated opportunities to obtain funding from American trusts and foundations. When the authorities in Lower Saxony refused the request to create a foundation2 the rector of the Teacher Training College in Braunschweig, Heinrich Rodenstein, petitioned the minister of education and cultural affairs for Lower Saxony requesting that the ‘International Institute for Textbook Improvement’ be granted an institutional home at the college. The ministry accepted this proposal and in 1953 established the ‘Interna­ tionales Schulbuchinstitut’ (International Textbook Institute or ISBI) as a research institute affiliated with the Teacher Training College in Braunschweig. The ISBI was charged with carrying out research into teaching methods and the design of teaching materials. Particular emphasis was placed on history teaching and its related subjects, which were to be studied explicitly within the framework of international cooperative ventures.3 The Institute had two 32

full-time members of staff, financed from the state budget for Lower Saxony: the first was a lecturer in ‘comparative textbook studies’ and the second a secretary. Together they formed the institutionally financed ‘backbone’ of international textbook activities in Braunschweig until the mid-1960s.4 The lecturing position was filled by the historian OttoErnst Schüddekopf, who had worked closely with Georg Eckert since 1950. Schüddekopf contributed enormously to the success of the Institute, not only through his research but particularly through his proficiency in foreign languages and his management skills. Until 1970 the bulk of the financial obligations for international textbook activities were met by the Department for Federal Cultural Affairs at the Federal Ministry of the Interior. During this period the Institute also received regular financial support from the Federal Foreign Office, the Consortium of German Teaching Unions, the Council of Europe and the City of Braunschweig. With these funds the ISBI financed bi- and multilateral textbook conferences with its partners in Europe and the USA and published its findings. The Consortium of German Teaching Unions provided the majority of the necessary funding for the publication of the Institute’s history teaching yearbook the ‘Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichtsunterricht’ (International Yearbook for History Teaching; later the ‘Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichts- und Geographieunterricht’, International Yearbook for History and Geography Teaching). Georg Eckert had

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Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf (left) and Georg Eckert (2nd from right) with two members of staff at the ISBI

Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf (20 November 1912–19 October 1984)

1931 A-level exams and commencement of studies in political geography, history and German literature at Berlin University.

1937 Awarded PhD from the Institut für Wehrpolitik und Wehrgeographie (Institute for Defence Policy and Defence Geography), started work as a researcher for the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) department of war studies.

1940–1941 Military service and service in the ‘War History Department’ of the Wehr­macht High Command

1942 Transferred to Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, organization subordinate to the Schutz­ staffel (SS)), Office VI ‘Intelligence office’ (Foreign Intelligence Service), Department VI-D ‘West’

1945–1948 British prisoner-of-war. Denazification by the British

1950–1953 Assistant to Georg Eckert 1953 Appointed as lecturer at the Kant Teacher Training College

achieved the desired autonomy in terms of selecting partners and subjects for international textbook discussions. However, the funding was not sufficient to allow for a core staff of researchers and librarians to be engaged long-term, which the success and continuing expansion of the bilateral textbook discussions now warranted.

1965: Council of Europe Textbook Centre The success of the Institute’s work in the field of biand multilateral textbook revision for history and geography books (see chapter IV) led the delegates at the 1964 Council of Europe Conference on the Revision of Geography Textbooks, held in Reykjavik, to suggest the International Textbook Institute be developed into a European research and documentation centre for the teaching of history and geography. The Council of Europe’s education department supported this proposal without hesitation. The Institute’s many years’ experience of implementing biand multilateral textbook discussions were certainly a decisive factor as was the collection of international textbooks upon which its work was based. A Braunschweig-based Institute was also consistent with the Council of Europe’s ‘philosophy’ to

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establish centres of competence throughout its member states in order to avoid the overwhelming centralisation of institutions in Strasbourg, which would contradict the principles of European cooperation grounded in federalism. In the summer of 1965, Anthony Haigh, then director of education

‘The International Schoolbook Institute at Brunswick (Federal Republic of Germany), has already acquired valuable experience in this field and has a library of European history and geography textbooks as well as a collection of source material, concerning the revision of history and geography textbooks in Europe and other parts of the world.’ Source: Recommendations of the Fourth Conference on Geography Teaching and the Revision of Geography Textbooks and Atlases (Reykjavik 1964), in E. C. Marchant, ed., Geography Teaching and the Revision of Geography Textbooks and Atlases (Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Co-operation, 1967), p. 139.

and cultural and scientific affairs at the Council of Europe, invited the Institute to assume the role of a European information and documentation centre for the improvement of history and geography books.5 The Institute and the Teacher Training College accepted this invitation and in January 1966 began the work that the GEI continues today. Upon the foundation of the European Textbook Centre the government of Lower Saxony provided funds for two researchers, who were not only experts in the fields of history and geography as school subjects, but also combined this knowledge with cultural 34

expertise in a specific region of the world. Additionally, the funding allowed professional librarians to be employed. The Council of Europe’s interest in the work of the International Textbook Institute corresponded with the Federal Republic of Germany’s renewed focus on foreign cultural policy, which was rapidly becoming a ‘third pillar’ of its foreign affairs policy. From the end of the 1960s onwards, international cooperation on education played a particularly important role in this area of policy. In autumn 1970 the Foreign Office assumed responsibility for the international projects at the ISBI that had, until that point, been financed by European funds from the interior ministry budget, and steadily increased the grants. The Foreign Office’s interest in consolidating transnational projects within Europe and strengthening cooperation on education and development policies beyond the remit of traditional political and cultural frameworks resulted in intensive discussions at the beginning of the 1970s

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on the institutional requirements for the achievement of such aims. The state government of Lower Saxony entered into an agreement with the Foreign Office that was designed to provide the Institute with greater long-term financial security. Simultaneously, the first exploratory talks were taking place regarding a joint funding of the Institute by the federal government and the German Bundesländer (federal states). The unexpected death of Georg Eckert in 1974 lent a new urgency to the deliberations.

1975: The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research Georg Eckert died suddenly on 7 January 1974 during a lecture at the Teacher Training College in Braunschweig. Countless colleagues expressed their sadness at his passing as well as their hope and belief that the valuable work of the International Textbook Institute would continue. Although there were some who were sceptical that the Institute could continue to exist without the charismatic leadership of Georg Eckert, the government of Lower Saxony, led by Alfred Kubel, and the Foreign Office made it quite clear that they were willing to undertake the necessary legal and financial steps to ensure that international work on textbooks could continue in Braunschweig. They advocated the separation of the Institute from the Teacher Training College and the creation of an independent, non-university research institute. Within a month of Georg Eckert’s death, Alfred Kubel had convened a meeting with representatives of the Teacher

Training College in Braunschweig to discuss the future of the ISBI. The participants formed a working group that included the rector of the Teacher Training College and representatives from the state chancellery and the Ministry of Culture. The group examined the legal requirements for setting up an independent institute and drafted a bill. Alongside Alfred Kubel, the SPD politician Rolf Wern­stedt, the Lower Saxony Minister for Science and Art Joist Grolle, the CDU members of parliament Werner Remmers and Georg-Berndt Oschatz and the FDP politician Walter Hirche were all instrumental in convincing the ministers in the state parliament of Lower Saxony that work on international textbooks should continue in Braunschweig. Walter Hirche wholeheartedly supported the plan in his role as president of the education committee in the Lower Saxony parliament. He was also a member of the German UNESCO commission and tirelessly campaigned for UNESCO’s continued involvement in international work on textbooks. During the intensive debates about the foundation of the Institute that took place in the Lower Saxony parliament, the SPD particularly emphasised the significance of the ISBI in the cultivation of ‘understanding with our European neighbours’ which, ‘after reconciliation to the west‘ would be conducive to reconciliation with neighbours to the east. The parliamentary discussions also anticipated the logical expansion of the work on textbooks to include textbook research. During a period in which textbooks and educational content were being reinvented and debated, and completely new kinds of textbooks were needed on the market, all parties represented in the par-

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liament advocated for an academic institution that could provide teachers and policy-makers with new knowledge, grounded firmly in international comparative studies and which could objectively contribute to the emotionally charged national debate concerning the ideological content of textbooks. The proposed bill was unanimously accepted by all parties in the Lower Saxony parliament at its second reading in June 1975. By 27 November 1974 Joist Grolle had convened a board consisting of four professors who were to assume the executive management of the Institute in the interim period leading up to its official foundation. They were to continue the work on textbooks and conceive the future academic orientation. Comprising the historians Rudolf von Thadden and Wolfgang Marienfeld, the sociologist Siegfried Bachmann and the political scientist Walter Mertineit, as well as the geographer Wilhelm Wöhlke who was appointed as a fifth member in 1977, the panel possessed experience in the field of international work on textbooks and represented, in the form of the Braunschweig Teacher Training College and the German UNESCO Commission, those bodies that had supported the Institute’s work in the past. The expertise brought by Marienfeld and Bachmann in the fields of history didactics and social sciences also opened new perspectives for the international activities that the planned Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research was to undertake. The panel ensured the continuation of bilateral textbook discussions with Poland, Romania and Tunisia and initiated or reanimated 36

Alfred Kubel, 25 May 1909–22 May 1999

discussions with Israel and the USA. At the same time the five academics successfully concluded multilateral research projects with the Council of Europe and UNESCO (see chapter IV). The legal incorporation of the ‘Georg Eckert Institute for Textbook Research’ on 26 June 1975 established the judicial framework for the dissolution of the ISBI at the Braunschweig Teacher Training College on 30 June 1975 and the foundation of the ‘Georg Eckert Institute for Textbook Research’, which officially started work on 1 July 1975. The government of Lower Saxony invited the other federal states to work together to make the Georg Eckert Institute a shared resource for the entire country. It viewed this as a significant step towards improving and expanding international work on

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textbooks within the parameters of the Kultus­ ministerkonferenz (KMK; Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany) and in terms of cooperation with international partners. The Lower Saxony government successfully negotiated administrative agreements with the state governments of Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-­ Palatinate, who, following the constitution of the board of trustees in 1977, jointly funded the Georg Eckert Institute. Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein later also signed corresponding agreements. In addition, the Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research have also made significant financial commitments since the 1970s. Foreign Office funding after 1978 was based upon the programme ‘Auswärtige Kulturpolitik im Schul­ wesen‘ (Foreign Cultural Policy in Education). This plan provided financing for collaborative bi- and multilateral projects exploring textbooks and teaching that were aimed at peace and reconciliation, sustainable environmental, social and cultural development and the capacity to cooperate. The board of trustees, whose members represented the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Education and Research, the German UNESCO Commission, the Teacher Training College and those federal states that supported the Institute, elected Alfred Kubel as chairman at their inaugural meeting in 1977. Christoph Stollenwerk, permanent secretary of state in the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Culture, was elected as vice-chairman. The following year, the

board appointed Karl-Ernst Jeismann as director of the Institute and adopted the Institute’s charter. The historian and history educationalist Wolfgang Jacobmeyer was appointed deputy director. The charter laid the foundations for the constitution of an academic committee, as suggested by the Institute’s domestic and international partners. This body would build upon the work of the academic advisory board that had presided over the Institute in the period between the death of Georg Eckert and the new incorporation of the Institute. With the appointment of the new director and the constitution of the academic advisory board, under the chairmanship of the Göttingen historian Rudolf Vierhaus, the Institute was able to commence work under the new institutional framework in the autumn of 1978. The states of Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria had refused the initial request to contribute financially to the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and were given another opportunity in 1990 when a renewed appeal was sent to all states in the newly reunited Germany to contribute to its funding. Apart from Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the new states agreed to co-sponsor the Institute. Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria, however, reproduced the same argument of the 1970s, citing the fact that responsibility for schooling lay in the remit of each individual federal state. Reunification also brought enormous changes to the Institute’s academic personnel. In the early 1990s several members of staff, including Karl-­Peter

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Fritzsche, Michael Riekenberg, Wolfgang Höpken, and the long-serving deputy director Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, were appointed professors at German universities and left the Institute. At the same time, new employees brought additional academic and cultural expertise in geography and history teaching in areas such as Eastern Europe and central and southern Asia.

2011: The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research – Member of the Leibniz Association

creation of the Scientific Commission of Lower Saxony to evaluate the Institute. The evaluation, which took place later the same year, was led by the historian Winfried Schulze. In its report, published in October 2004, the Commission recommended that ‘in view of the important and well-respected work of the Institute, which is of national significance and reflects the overall interests of the state in terms of academic policy, joint institutional financing by the federal government, while maintaining the commitments of the individual federal states, [should be pursued] – perhaps within the Leibniz Association (WGL)’.6

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the limitations of the organisational and financial structure adopted by the Georg Eckert Institute in 1975 were becoming apparent. The specific expectations of research oriented explicitly towards teaching practice, expressed by the ministries of education and cultural affairs of the federal states that financially supported the Institute, were becoming more difficult to combine with the demands made upon the Institute by national education institutions in Asia, Africa or the Middle East and the diverse international initiatives introduced by UNESCO or the Council of Europe. The decisions by the governments of Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, in 2002 and 2004 respectively, to terminate their financial support for the Institute raised the increasingly urgent question of securing long-term, sustainable financing. Responding to a recommendation made in 2004 by the remaining members of the board of trustees, the government of Lower Saxony mandated the

Karl Ulrich Mayer, President of the Leibniz Association (2010–2014), at the ceremony marking the acceptance of the GEI into the Leibniz Association

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Simultaneously the board of trustees asked the government of Lower Saxony for the directorship of the Institute to be made a joint appointment with a regional university. This, they argued, was common practice in instances of joint federal and state funding and would ensure continuity in the work of the Institute. The appointment in autumn 2006 of Simone Lässig as professor of modern and contemporary history at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and as director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, saw the Institute return to its roots, which had lain in the close association between textbook research and lecturing at the Teacher Training College. The fundamental institutional changes recommended by the board were gradually introduced over the next few years. A significant driver of these changes was the positive evaluation by the German Council of Science and Humanities, which recommended in its report of summer 2009 that the GEI be admitted to the respected Leibniz Association as an independent research facility and infrastructure provider. The GEI was officially accepted into the WGL in 2011 and the statute, charter and boards were amended accordingly. The board of trustees consequently consists of representatives from the host state (Lower Saxony), the federal government and the Foreign Office, the President of the Tech­ nische Universität Braunschweig as well as representatives from academia, the library sector and industry. The Academic Committee was renamed the Academic Advisory Board and a User Advisory Board was appointed.

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Chairs of the board Alfred Kubel, Minister President of Lower Saxony (ret.) (1977–1985) Georg-Bernd Oschatz, Minister of Education, Director of the Federal Council (Bundesrat) (1985–2014) Rüdiger Eichel, Ministry of Science and Culture in Lower Saxony (2014–2015) Dr Barbara Hartung, Ministry of Science and Culture in Lower Saxony (2015–2019) Dr Diana Reers, Ministry of Science and Culture in Lower Saxony (since 2020)

Chairs of the Academic Advisory Board Prof. Rudolf Vierhaus (1978–1994) Prof. Jörn Rüsen (1994–2003) Prof. Bodo von Borries (2003–2007) Dr Ute Wardenga (2007–2015) Prof. Peter Haslinger (2015–2017) Prof. Sabine Reh (since 2017)

Chairs of the User Advisory Board Dr Peter Lautzas, Verband der Geschichtslehrer Deutschlands (VGD) (Association of History Teachers of Germany) (2008–2011) Frank Biewendt, Thüringer Institut für Leh­ rerfortbildung, Lehrplanentwicklung und Medien (Thuringian Institute for Teacher Training, Curriculum Development and Media) (2011–2015) Dr Doris Bambey, The German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), (2015–2021) Prof. Dr Christoph Bläsi, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (since 2022)

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Trends in Textbook Research and Related Activities 1951–1989: The original aim of the International Textbook Institute was to begin a process of systematic textbook revision, using clearly defined principles, with partners in countries that had fought against Nazi Germany. Various tiers of networks had therefore to be consolidated in order for them to work together. Preconditions for national and international cooperation established by the Western allied powers required the Institute to work with both civil organisations and teaching associations when organising textbook revision. In addition, the Institute initiated and coordinated collaborations between national and international teaching unions, history teaching associations and the respective national UNESCO commissions. It was important to justify the trust placed by the Western European and American partners in their German colleagues. Georg Eckert certainly appreciated this and was fully aware that, just a few short years after the end of the National Socialist regime, the significance of cooperating on the revision of history textbooks with representatives from countries that had been invaded and occupied by National Socialist Germany and whose populations had been so widely repressed, should not be underestimated. The requirements for productive and successful work on textbooks were a mutual

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Principles of Textbook Revision As a result of cultural agreements between participating states or in response to initiatives from the UNESCO commissions, trade unions or teaching associations, there was an exchange of textbooks for the corresponding subjects. History teachers and lecturers from schools and universities in one country examined textbooks from the partner country, and vice versa. The resulting reports were discussed at joint textbook conferences and mutual recommendations, composed in the respective languages of the participating countries, were generally adopted.

commitment to the creation of democratic societies and a unanimous interest in the development of transnational perspectives on European history. Efforts were already being made in the 1950s to include Eastern European countries in the textbook revision process. Equally, it was crucial that the partners were satisfied that the revision work was academically independent. Georg Eckert believed that ‘although textbook revision should be funded as far as possible by government authorities, the work itself should remain exclusively in the hands of experts – historians, textbook authors and educators’.7 Despite the fact that the European and American partners agreed on this principle, the implementation by the state authorities and textbook publishing houses of the specialist and didactic recommendations resulting from the textbook discussions was a source of ongoing discussion and controversy.

At the heart of these debates were the participants’ widely different experiences and expectations of the capability and organisational structures of state institutions, whether federally or centrally organised. Participants also had different perceptions of the degree of freedom and autonomy that teachers and textbook publishers should be afforded throughout the process. It was a considerable challenge to maintain the momentum of bilateral textbook discussions after their initiation. During the Cold War, UNESCO was a forum for the debate between Western and Soviet models of society and their influence on the young nation states of Asia and Africa. However, the Institute made a notable contribution to penetrating the boundaries between the political systems in East and West. This was achieved through the active support of the UNESCO commissions in several Eastern European countries. Although textbook discussions with Czechoslovakia were eventually terminated as a result of the violent suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’ by the military forces of the Warsaw Pact, the ‘Neue Ostpoli­ tik’ (New Eastern Policy) introduced by Chancellor Willy Brandt’s government and the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) process provided a suitable environment for textbook discussions to be arranged with Poland and Romania. The Polish discussions proved to be particularly successful as agreement was reached between a large number of Polish representatives and their German colleagues on one crucial point: the revision work must

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not be dictated by the state; rather it must be driven by open and objective discussions between experts committed to the ethos of academic impartiality. Bilateral textbook discussions were, however, viewed only as a preliminary step towards international agreement on the content and interpretation of history teaching in Europe. From 1953 onwards, the Institute took an active role in the conferences organised by the Council of Europe to address the revision of history textbooks. Georg Eckert also considered it important to expand bi- and multilateral textbook discussions beyond Europe and the USA and to engage with historians and history teachers in Asian and African nations. He believed that first-hand experience of the democratisation processes underway since 1945 could be applied to the design of history teaching in other countries and that the Institute could raise its profile

as a result of the institutional competition with educational policy initiatives in the USSR and the GDR. UNESCO provided the ideal framework to expand the Institute’s horizons beyond Western Europe and to involve young nation states in Africa and Asia in the programme of international textbook activities. By the beginning of the 1970s, the Institute’s resources were being stretched by the speed and intensity with which its work had expanded eastwards to include socialist countries such as Poland and Romania. This rapidly developing transnational orientation created organisational challenges and prompted some to question the Institute’s (historical) political role and its theoretical and methodological direction. In addition to being criticised for neglecting its work with Western European countries and the USA, the Institute had to decide whether achieving international understanding and reconciliation justified academic compromises within the field of

Willy Brandt (front row; centre) and Georg Eckert (front row; right) at the 1968 UNESCO conference in Paris

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historical and political studies, and how this complex set of problems could itself become a subject of research. In response, the Georg Eckert Institute developed a programme in 1978 for textbook research that addressed the requirements for future work on textbooks. Karl-Ernst Jeismann was convinced that it was no longer possible only to pragmatically negotiate the process of textbook revision but rather the process itself should become the subject of critical analysis. In his view work on textbooks was met ‘inevitably with assertions of legitimising effect or intent. The requirements of national political legitimisation were particularly strongly reflected in the necessarily condensed portrayals in text­ books – whether as a result of the direct influ­ ence of government guidelines and approval procedures or whether through unquestioned national attitudes and patterns of interpreta­ tion. A precise understanding of the effects of such legitimising elements, and the extent to which they are well-founded scientifically and what justification they are accorded, is essential for textbook revision on an international stage. Without this knowledge it is impossible to under­ stand reciprocal patterns of perception despite all efforts towards factual accuracy.’8 The GEI was continually required to strike a balance between the needs of academic work on textbooks on one hand, and different political interests on the other; both domestically and in the inter-

The Director of the GEI Ernst Hinrichs and Secretary-General of UNESCO Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow at the award ceremony in 1985 in Paris

national arena. This was especially true during the last 20 years of the Cold War. As a result, Jeismann repeatedly insisted that the GEI should only be included in such activities if it were actively involved in their planning and management and if the influence of political representatives was minimised. He argued that participation in multilateral research projects should be dependent upon the specialist academic and didactic standards underlying their workflows and representations of findings. In view of an increasing awareness of problems in the global order of peace that extended far beyond the control of national and European institutions, as well as a new (self-) awareness of cultural and gender equality and of threats to the environment, Ernst Hinrichs, who succeeded Karl-Ernst Jeismann as Director of

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Biography of Robert-Hermann Tenbrock (2 April 1908–23 November 1995)

1927 Completed school leaving exams and commenced studies in history, philosophy, history of art and English language and literature. the Georg Eckert Institute in 1984, continued the strong commitment to strengthening multilateral collaborations and cooperation with international organisations. The Institute’s commitment to transnational and intercultural work on textbooks in Europe and beyond was honoured in 1985 when it was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education.

1933 Awarded doctorate in history from the University of Münster

1933–1939 Taught at various schools 1939–1945 Intelligence officer, later taken prisoner by the British. After 1946 Returned to the teaching profession, and became a successful textbook author

This international recognition provided the motivation and foundation for the steady expansion of the transnational network for textbook research. A fellowship programme strongly oriented towards foreign academics was launched in 1985 by Ernst Hinrichs, having first been conceived by Karl-Ernst Jeismann. The advantages for the Institute were clear: ‘International cooperation will be intensified and expanded; research at the Institute will be broadened and invigorated through the input of colleagues from foreign institutions. This in turn will enable the Institute to interact more immediately with academic and pedagogic work in other countries, which will directly benefit the Institute in its own work.’9 The programme was funded by the UNESCO peace education prize money and was made 46

Robert-Hermann Tenbrock (centre) with Georg Eckert (right) awarding the inaugural prize to Gerhard E. Neumann (1972)

1956–1960 Director of the German School in Istanbul, Turkey

1969 Endowed the Robert-Hermann-­ Tenbrock Prize

1974 Awarded Federal Cross of Merit, first class.

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possible by rededicating the funding of the Robert-­ Hermann-Tenbrock Award and turning it into a fellowship grant. 1989–2011: The end of the Cold War opened fresh perspectives for work on textbooks and provided the chance to involve several states from the former Soviet bloc in the process of textbook revision. These included Russia and other former Soviet Socialist Republics, later the Czech Republic, and other Eastern and Central European countries. The focus was not on bilateral textbook revision, but rather on conveying specialist academic and didactic knowledge to enable teaching to be reconceived in these countries. The social transformation initiated in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 was infused with the hope that the traditional images of political enemies that had characterised the regions’ textbooks during the Cold War could be dismantled and that Europe could grow closer together. This situation presented new challenges for history and politics teaching. The Georg Eckert Institute carried out a series of research projects after 1990 that addressed the contradictory realities of an expanding Europe. While some Central and Eastern European societies devised community projects with Western European partners, a new kind of nationalism erupted in other societies in the former Soviet bloc. Newly created nation states, in South Eastern Europe for example, saw the resurrection of old prejudices, which were exploited within the framework of a new nationalistic historiography to exclude ethnic and cultural minorities. The

conflicts that broke out in South East Europe and in a number of Soviet successor states illustrated the necessity of continuing to examine history and politics textbooks for the presence of negative images of ‘enemies’ as well as ethnocentric, xenophobic and nationalistic portrayals. The Institute’s original mission clearly became even more significant in this context. In contrast to traditional textbook discussions carried out at government level after the end of the Second World War, that is to say upon conclusion of a violent conflict and with the aim of achieving reconciliation and understanding between former enemies, it was now necessary for research into textbooks to take place in post-conflict societies or those experiencing periods of acute conflict. In addition to eliminating nationalistic portrayals from textbooks, it was also essential to explore the potential for conflict between religious and cultural communities within a society and to create a foundation for textbook portrayals which could foster peaceful cohabitation between those different communities. The Georg Eckert Institute was faced with the joint challenges of implementing this mission through numerous bi- and multilateral textbook projects and simultaneously conducting fundamental research in this field. These projects, which increasingly involved civic representatives and organisations, also demonstrated the difficulties associated with implementing research findings in practice despite government reservations. In 1993 the Institute began advising and consulting with textbook authors in the Baltic states, and in

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2000 it became involved with the reorientation of political and historical education and the creation of suitable educational materials within the framework of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe; being particularly active in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These activities only loosely followed the classical model of bi- or multilateral textbook discussions. It was frequently more appropriate to develop other forms of project work, involving intensive discussions in a seminar format, or for the Institute to assume the role of advisor, expert and arbitrator. At the heart of this work was the dissemination of knowledge and expertise. In addition to advising on the development of new textbooks, this transfer of knowledge took the form of a textbook centre for the Baltic States. It was financed by the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Robert Bosch Foundation) and the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and was opened in Vilnius in 1998. Through its involvement with the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe the Institute could contribute its expertise to discussions with regional experts on academic and didactic findings from textbook research, enabling them to use that knowledge to develop new curricula and textbooks. The work undertaken by the Institute in response to the global situation after 1989 clearly illustrated that textbook revision remained a topical instrument for smoothing transformations and for conflict management, and one that was much in demand. This was not only the case in South Eastern Europe or the Soviet successor states but also in the Middle East and East Asia, where the empirical knowledge accu48

mulated by the GEI served as a model and provided inspiration. It also became apparent that textbook revision needed to address conflict within societies as well as between states. Since the 1990s it had become clear that the substance and format of traditional textbook revision were no longer adequate. In light of contemporary issues, such as globalisation and the prevailing disparities in development, growing heterogeneity and cultural dynamics, more complex methods and approaches were needed. The fact that international tensions as well as inter-societal conflict between different groups were not only ignited by social distribution conflicts but increasingly also involved struggles for the recognition of collective identities, emphasised that textbook revision must evolve beyond simply removing national prejudices. This was the basis for collaborative projects in former-Soviet states as well as in Latin America. 2011 and beyond: Since becoming a member of the Leibniz Association in 2011, the Institute has continued to pursue its bi- and multilateral textbook projects while also developing a coherent research profile that systematically explores the academic field of textbook research. In addition to investigating how national concepts of identity, collective patterns of interpretation and perceptions of ‘the self and the other’ are presented in textbooks, the GEI now also links its research to other aspects of educational content by questioning textbooks’ production, use

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and appropriation. Digital educational media factor increasingly in the work of the Institute, thus continuing the research begun in the 1990s by the then director, Ursula A. J. Becher, into learning with digital media in the classroom.

4 See also Rainer Riemenschneider, Das Tandem Eckert-Schüd­dekopf und das Institutsgedächtnis, in Ursula A. J. Becher and Rainer Riemen­schneider, eds, Internationale Verständigung. 25 Jahre Georg-­ Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung in Braunschweig (Hanover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2000), p. 123. 5 Kjk (abbreviation for chief reporter Karl-Joachim Krause), Schul­ buchinstitut wird Europazentrum. Europarat entschied sich für Braunschweig, in Braunschweiger Zeitung, 20 July 1965, p. 18. 6 Wissenschaftliche Kommission Niedersachsen, Forschungsevaluation an niedersächsischen Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen, Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung. Ergebnisse und Empfehlungen (Hanover, October 2008), p. 21. 7 Georg Eckert speaking to Trützschler, 16 March 1957, 143 N, Zg. 2009/069, no. 175, NLA. Lower Saxony State Archive, Wolfenbüttel.

  1 143 N, Zg. 2009/069, no. 259, NLA. Lower Saxony State Archive, Wolfenbüttel. 2 President of the Lower Saxony administrative district Braunschweig (educational section) writing to the Teacher Training College in Braunschweig, 3 December 1951, 143 N, Zg. 2009/069, no. 263, NLA. Lower Saxony State Archive, Wolfenbüttel. 3 Nds. 400 Acc. 121/81, no. 556, NLA. Archive of the State Capital, Hanover.

8 Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Introduction, in id., ed., Geschichte als Legitimation? Internationale Schulbuchrevision unter den Ansprüchen von Politik, Geschichtswissenschaft und Geschichtsbedürfnis, Studien zur Internationalen Schulbuchforschung, vol. 29 (Braunschweig: Georg-­ Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung, 1984), p. 7. 9 Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Einrichtung von Forschungsstipendien am Georg-Eckert-Institut, Policy paper for the 13th meeting of the board of trustees on 27/28 October 1981, 15 September 1981, AA B 93, no. 1158. L.

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IV International Work on Textbooks

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« Georg Eckert at the meeting of the German-Polish Textbook Commission in the Old Town Hall in Braunschweig (17 October 1972)

After the Second World War, work on revising textbooks, which had been marked since its earliest days by tense relationships between academia, educational practice and policymakers, was resumed across a number of different, yet connected, levels. At the national level – in Germany – the textbook departments of the allied occupying forces worked with representatives from the newly democratic country to revise textbooks in line with the ‘re-education’ policy. Internationally, initiatives by UNESCO and the Council of Europe provided the stimuli for centrally organised national and bilateral projects for textbook revision.

‘Re-education’ and Textbook Revision Textbook revision in Germany was the responsibility of the occupying powers. Together with the redesign of the curricula, this was the central component of the re-education policy which aimed to democratically reform the German education system. National Socialist ideology was to be removed from both curricula and textbooks, and materials for history, geography, social studies and German came under particular scrutiny. The occupying powers worked from the premise that democratisation would only be effective if the population participated voluntarily in the process. The Allies viewed the restructuring of the education system and the associated rewriting of curricula and textbooks as a key aspect of their occupation policy. From the outset, the British administration focussed on working with those Germans who had been critical about the Nazi state 52

or had actively opposed it. Terence J. Leonard, who had been a member of the Textbook Section of the occupying authorities’ Education Branch since 1945, and became its head in 1948, worked with teachers and representatives of education authorities and publishers in a specially created Central Textbook Committee. The committee also included members of the Geschichtspädagogischer Arbeitskreis (Working Group for History Education), which started producing a series of short thematic textbooks in 1947 designed to be used by (trainee) teachers. These were titled Beiträge zum Geschichtsunterricht (Contributions to History Education) and addressed German history and its orientation, covering the period from the early modern era up to the twentieth century. They discussed opportunities, failures and different perspectives in the development of democracy throughout German history, thus providing urgently needed teaching materials and helping to develop a new curriculum for history teaching. Parallel to these activities, Georg Eckert campaigned within the Consortium of German Teaching Unions for history books to be revised. This consortium of German teaching associations decided at its 1948 annual conference to create a committee for history teaching, with Georg Eckert as its chairman. At a conference of history teachers held in January 1949, he used this role to call for international cooperation on textbook revision. The occupying forces were not Georg Eckert’s only partner on the issue of textbook revision. As a member of the German UNESCO commission (Deutsche

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UNESCO Kommission: DUK) he helped establish a committee for textbook improvement in 1952, under the DUK’s remit, of which he became chairman in 1956. The aim of the committee was to support collaboration between teachers and teaching associations, both nationally and internationally, as well as to expand work on all types of textbooks and teaching materials and to put forward recommendations for textbook improvement in line with UNESCO’s principles. Under Eckert’s leadership the committee adopted basic principles for improving teaching materials that were based on advice for international textbook revision he had developed in 1949 in collaboration with the Consortium of German Teaching Unions and the Verband der Geschichtslehrer Deutschlands (Association of History Teachers in Germany), and which the Institute translated into practice in the coming years.

Bilateral Work on Textbooks As a result of the close cooperation between Georg Eckert and the British occupying authority’s education department, the British Education Ministry financed a joint German-British conference for history teachers, which was held in Braunschweig in July 1949. This conference marked the start of the bilateral textbook discussions which to this day remain a central pillar of the Institutes’ work. German and French history teachers met regularly after 1951 following the release of the ‘Deutsch-Französische Vereinbarungen über strittige Fragen europäischer Geschichte’ (German-French

Work at the ISBI

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Participants in the German-British textbook discussions in Braunschweig (1949)

agreement concerning contentious issues in European history). These French-German textbook discussions were organised by the two teaching associations: the Association des Professeurs d’Histoire et de Géographie (History and Geography teachers) and the Association of History Teachers in Germany. Their formalisation within the framework of a textbook commission, under the leadership of Edouard Bruley and Georg Eckert, lent a new dimension to bilateral textbook activities. The commission ensured a stable working partnership, and the overall structure enabled the French-German Textbook Commission to fulfil its remit of producing a lasting body 54

of work, not only examining the historical relationship between the two countries in textbooks but also exploring wider topics within European history. In reaction to criticism from German and French historians and history teachers, the commission later investigated more controversial subjects including imperialism and colonialism, war guilt and the Nazi dictatorship. From the mid-1960s onwards, the commission addressed questions emanating from didactic and social studies research on history teaching. In addition to bilateral discussions with France and Great Britain, in the 1950s and 1960s the ISBI ini-

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tiated numerous similar discussions on textbooks between Germany and Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the USA and Yugoslavia, which involved representatives from national teaching associations and professional bodies for historians and history teachers. The Institute rapidly became an internationally renowned clearing house for international textbook revision.

Early bilateral textbook activities in Europe and the USA Great Britain (from 1949) Yugoslavia (from 1953) France (from 1951) Belgium (1954) USA (from 1952) The Netherlands (1956) Denmark (1952) Austria (from 1956) Italy (from 1953) Luxembourg (1957) Norway (1953) Sweden (1957)

The ISBI gathered international expertise in the field and assumed a central role in the area of bilateral textbook revision. It established a broad, multi-di-

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mensional network which created de facto transfer channels extending across geographical borders and forming an international hub with Georg Eckert at the centre. Eckert utilised his extensive institutional connections to implement his projects and to instigate new undertakings; initially working with the British Textbook Section and later with the DUK. UNESCO recommendations for work on international textbooks were communicated and modified within that network. During this period the process of textbook revision became gradually standardised. The established format consisted of either directly contacting potential partners or representatives of the appropriate federal states, or establishing contact through the respective Foreign Office, then arranging for textbooks to be exchanged. The next step was for initial exploratory talks to be held at a political level, textbook analyses to be conducted by external experts and the findings to be presented at conferences. The process culminated with recommendations for textbooks being adopted.

UNESCO and the Council of Europe By the early 1950s UNESCO had already begun to scrutinise its Euro-centric focus with regards to multilateral activities. A conference of education experts held in Paris in 1952 established that it was essential for textbooks, curricula and other teaching materials to be revised and called for all nations to participate.1 In 1953, UNESCO asked all member states and national committees in the West and in Asia 56

to conduct a quantitative analysis of how they portrayed each other as regions in their textbooks. The resulting reports from 16 countries were discussed at a UNESCO conference in Paris in 1956 and provided the basis for the ‘Major Project on the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural “Values”, which was launched the following year. The aim of the project, which came to be known as the ‘East-West Major Project’, was to support dialogue between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ by developing special programmes that could be introduced into schools, universities, youth organisations, academia, museums and other institutions. The ISBI was a key player in the organisation and implementation of this project and Eckert joined the International Advisory Board of the ‘East-West Major Project’ in 1961. The board comprised representatives from 18 countries and prepared the UNESCO recommendations for Asian-Western cooperation on textbooks. The recommendations’ principal focus lay on building cooperation between teachers and academics at regional and inter-regional meetings. Eckert’s idea that UNESCO should work with the national UNESCO commissions to create national study centres for matters relating to history and social studies teaching was a central aspect of the recommendations. The ISBI was instrumental in preparing the concept for the 1958 Tokyo conference, which was organised by the Japanese UNESCO commission and attended by 42 representatives from 25 countries. The delegates included education policy makers, head teachers, history teachers and employees of research institutions and publishing houses, and they approved an agreement laying out the central

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objectives and principles of the project. Georg Eckert was elected as one of the four vice-presidents of the congress. The textbook revision aspects of the ‘EastWest Major Project‘ were concluded at the fourth conference, held in Goslar (approximately 40 km south of Braunschweig) in May 1962 and organised jointly by the DUK and ISBI. The role of this conference was to evaluate the project’s activities and to propose principles and methods for future work on textbooks as well as to recommend ways these could be developed further. In addition to their involvement in a broad spectrum of bilateral projects the ISBI continued to work closely with UNESCO and the DUK even after the conclusion of the ‘East-West Major Project‘. The ISBI participated in, or helped conceive, numerous multilateral conferences such as the 1968 conference held in Ghana on ‘Textbook Writing for Develop-

Ryon Kwai Kim and Gerhard E. Neumann

ing Countries’ and the 1978 conference in Finland on ‘Adaption of the UNESCO-Recommendation on International Education to Educational Curricula’. The ISBI was also involved in the production of documents such as the ‘Report on the final meeting of the project for multilateral consultations on school history, geography and social studies text books, 1971–1974’ or the ‘Recommendation concerning education for international understanding, co-operation and peace and education relating to human rights and fundamental freedoms’, which was agreed at the UNESCO general conference in 1974. The ‘Promoting International Understanding through School Textbooks’ project was initiated and coordinated by the ISBI and conducted jointly with UNESCO between 1971 and 1974, under the aegis of Ryon Kwai Kim, head of the Section of Education for International Cooperation and Peace at UNESCO. In this project 70 textbooks from seven countries on four continents were analysed to principally investigate multi-perspectivity and explore quality standards for good textbooks. Eckert’s work on the ‘East-West Major Project’ was closely linked to the ISBI’s bilateral work on textbooks in Asian countries. As the DUK’s representative within UNESCO he saw it as vital that his work with the DUK should be closely linked with the work of the Institute. The majority of ISBI projects were conducted with partners in Asia or directed by the UNESCO commission. The German UNESCO commission financed German-Japanese and German-Indian conferences for historians, and tasked the Institute with organising them. The DUK provided Eckert with two consid-

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erable advantages for his work with Asia: Firstly, he could establish valuable contacts at UNESCO meetings, which he attended in his role as the representative of the German commission. On his visits to Japan in 1958 and Indonesia in 1960, for example, he took the opportunity to visit a range of academic, pedagogic and policy-shaping institutions. The second advantage was the frequent support he received from the commission, or its textbook committee, when organising bilateral textbook discussions. The Institute not only worked closely with UNESCO – it also cultivated a successful cooperation with the Council of Europe, which held twelve conferences on history textbooks and history teaching between 1953 and 1983. In the context of these conferences – which essentially continued the work of the League of Nations – almost 1000 textbooks from 17 countries were analysed.2 One significant

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product of the Council of Europe’s history conferences was the publication, in 1964, of an encyclopaedia of basic principles and terminology for European history.3 In 1965, the ISBI was able to expand its bilateral textbook activities and shift to a multilateral, European level when it was invited by the Council of Europe to establish the European Information and Documentation Centre for the Improvement of History and Geography Textbooks. The ISBI subsequently became more visible in its role, as ‘the central hub linking historic research, pedagogy and teaching material production’4 both within Europe and beyond. The Institute hosted a Council of Europe textbook conference in 1969 that examined history teaching in secondary schools. This event and a follow-up meeting in 1971 in Strasbourg resulted in the recommendation that ‘the history of Europe should be viewed in a world perspective’ and that the inclusion of European and world history in curricula should reflect this objective.5 As a result of the conference on ‘Co-­operation in Europe since 1945‘, which was held in 1979, the Institute expanded its research beyond history teaching to include geography, social studies and politics teaching. The

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Gerhard E. Neumann and Georg Eckert

1990 conference on ‘History and social studies – Methodologies of textbook analysis’ introduced new forms of investigation and methodology to the Institute’s work, which it combined with its analysis of textbook content. During the 1990s the Institute participated in an inter-­governmental programme aimed at redesigning history teaching in Europe, which had been created in response to recommendations made by the European education minister for Europe to be taught as a cross-sectional topic and to incorporate relevant information in textbooks for a range of different subjects. The idea of implementing a standardised, homogenous version of European history was, however, rejected at the 1997 Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education in Kristiansand, Norway. It was deemed much more important to familiarise teachers with Europe’s common history. The project ‘Learning and teaching about the history of Europe in the 20th century’ was discussed and initiated by heads of state and government from Council of Europe member states at summits in 1993 and in 1997 and the results have since been the subject of a series of conferences and related publications.

Despite the numerous activities undertaken by the Council of Europe, history teaching in European countries retained a predominantly national focus until the late 1990s. In response to the Council of Europe resolutions, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the German Federal States released guidelines on the subject of ‘Teaching about Europe‘ in 1978 and again in 1990, which stated that the creation of a ‘sense of European awareness should be one of the educational aims of schools’.6 However studies of curricula reveal that this objective was not widely implemented, certainly not in the lower years of secondary schools, and no appropriate didactic methods appear to have been developed. Nevertheless, corresponding evaluation criteria were introduced to the approval process for teaching materials. Experts from the GEI advised the Council of Europe on many initiatives aimed at reforming history teaching and textbooks in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Bilateral Cooperation with Asia The GEI’s multilateral activities included a number of bilateral partnerships with countries in Asia. The Institute worked with the German UNESCO Commission to organise the first two conferences involving Japanese and German historians, which were held in Braunschweig in May and September 1953. In October of the same year, the DUK textbook committee officially requested that the ISBI seek ways to strengthen its cooperation with Asia.

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The recommendations that resulted from the bilateral Japanese-German discussions contained a brief overview of Japanese history, which was published in 1954 in the International Yearbook for History Teaching. Although the contact between the Georg Eckert Institute and the International Society for Educational Information in Tokyo was maintained,

textbook discussions did not resume until spring 1982. The discussions were followed by new bilateral consultations in Braunschweig in October 1987, which this time focussed on geography textbooks. A year after the initial German-Japanese meetings, a conference of German and Indian historians was

Wolfgang Höpken (left) and Rainer Riemenschneider (right) in conversation with the Secretary General of the South Korean UNESCO Commission Kim Yersu (2001)

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held in Braunschweig, in October 1954. The conference adopted the ‘German-Indian Theses’ which contained recommendations for textbooks. Initial planning discussions for the first conference of German and Indonesian historians took place in February 1956 and again in January 1957. The conference was subsequently held in May 1957 within the remit of the ‘East-West Major Project’. The recommendations it produced were considerably shorter than those resulting from the Japanese-German cooperation, and unlike the latter were only adopted for German textbooks, but they were still released as a stand-alone publication.7 The impact of the first German-Indonesian conference should not be underestimated. Georg Eckert was particularly keen to organise visits and research trips by Indonesian academics to Germany as well as a book exchange. At the beginning of the 1960s he therefore collected textbooks and academic literature from around the country to send to Indonesia. The ISBI also coordinated the translation of Indonesian curricula into German (1962) and the publication of a history of Indonesia for teachers (1963).

Early bilateral textbook activities with Asia Japan (1953) India (1954) South Korea (1957) Indonesia (1956–1959)

By the beginning of the 1960s the ISBI had established itself as a hub for international work on textbooks – its work extended around the world from the USA, across Europe and to Asia. It functioned as an intermediary between international partners but also fulfilled an important political role in the context of German foreign cultural policy. By the end of the 1950s the first phase of European textbook revision, based principally upon establishing bilateral relationships, had been completed. These were

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German-Indonesian meeting in Braunschweig (1968)

to be expanded to include multilateral textbook discussions, as highlighted by Eckert in a letter sent in 1958 to his financial supporters in the Federal Ministry of the Interior. (See text box, right) A retrospective look at the work of the ISBI proves this to be an accurate assessment. Its work within a global network included numerous conferences, the development of recommendations, textbook exchanges, the International Yearbook for History Teaching and other publications, and their distribution to hundreds of academic, political and civic institutions and individuals. All of which meant that by the 1960s the Institute had firmly established its international reputation. 62

‘A few years ago, this initial phase of our work moved into its second stage. Working closely with the Council of Europe we are attempting to establish the most significant areas of common ground in European history and culture, both to overcome the nationalist views of the nineteenth century and to encourage European thinking and a sense of European solidarity. We humbly believe that this process has made a valuable contribution to the policies of the Federal Republic over the last 10 years.’ Source: Georg Eckert, 19 March 1958, 143 N, Zg. 2009/069, no. 178/2, NLA. Lower Saxony State Archive, Wolfenbüttel.

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A new phase of bilateral cooperation The Institute continued its bilateral activities into the following decades, having entered a new phase in the 1970s when the focus increasingly shifted towards content that transcended the goal of reconciliation and centred more on consolidating transnational relationships and introducing European and global perspectives. After focussing its international textbook activities on international understanding beyond Western Europe and the USA in the early 1970s, such as the textbook discussions with Romania and Tunisia and particularly the work of the German-Polish Textbook Commission, Karl-

Ernst Jeismann steered the GEI towards a new series of textbook discussions with Western European partners such as Great Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and France, as well as the USA. As had been the case in the 1950s and 1960s, the German-­ French discussions proved particularly successful and a German-French Textbook Commission was established. This series of activities also included German-­ American textbook discussions, which started in 1979 and revolved around the Holocaust, and the German-­Israeli Textbook Commission, which was founded in 1981. The German-American discussions illustrated how difficult it was to effect reform measures, especially in cases where the school systems and subjects taught were so diverse and where the partners had very different backgrounds and did not necessarily share the same agenda for the textbook discussions. The process prompted a re-­examination of the tried and tested joint recommendations that had generally resulted from bilateral work on textbooks in the past; it was time to find alternative result criteria. The participants in this instance agreed to a revision of the expert opinions, which addressed the Georg Eckert (2nd right) and the President of the Romanian UNESCO Commission Jean Livescu (2nd left) (1968)

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central problems of textbook discussions in detail, using the findings from this case as an example. The first German-Israeli Textbook Commission, which met six times between 1979 and 1987, was the culmination of a wide range of German-Israeli initiatives. The work of Hanover-based history education expert Wolfgang Marienfeld was central to this process, as was that of Chaim Schatzker from the University of Haifa. The president of the German-Israeli Association, Erik Blumenfeld, used the occasion of a speech by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt at the 1978 conference of German historians as an opportunity to ask the chancellor to convene a German-Israeli textbook conference the following year. The suggestion was received positively by German politicians and by the KMK, and despite the controversy surrounding the German-Polish recommendations (see below), and the fact that the Israelis had no institution equivalent to the GEI, the GEI board

of trustees endorsed the German-Israeli textbook discussions. The Institute did, however, campaign for the bilateral discussions not to be conducted at a political level; in contrast, it favoured a commission composed of academic experts that should function independently of political bodies. Four bilateral textbook conferences were held between 1981 and 1984, which resulted in the formulation of mutual recommendations for the treatment of Jewish history in both countries. Alongside the German-Israeli Textbook Commission, the GEI also encouraged cooperation between representatives from Israeli and Palestinian civilian organisations. This included projects such as ‘From Peace Making to Peace Building: An Israeli-Palestinian Comparative Research of History and Civics Textbooks and Curricula Statements’ in 1996/1997, which involved Bethlehem University and the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, and aimed to analyse how both Israel and Palestine depicted their relationship in the twentieth century. In 1996 the GEI was invited to be an advisor on a collaborative project with even greater potential for conflict: the development of a joint Israeli-­Palestinian textbook. The research organisation Palestine Consultancy Group assembled a group of researchers and teachers who were tasked with analysing and comparing contemporary textbooks, in order to use them as a basis for joint teaching materials. In German-Israeli textbook discussions in 1985, from left: Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Yehuda Ben Avner, Reinhard Rürup and Chaim Schatzker

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2004 the GEI started providing the ‘neutral location’ required for such controversial discussions, acting as an inter­mediary between the participants and providing advice and guidance on the methods of textbook research as well as the principles of international textbook comparison. The first Israeli-­Palestinian comparison was completed in 2001. Joint teaching materials were produced between 2003 and 2009 under the leadership of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East in Beit Jalah. These included sections where the authors had placed their respective national narratives in opposing columns, with an empty space in the middle for pupils to add their own comments. Although the political situation prevented this joint, bilateral teaching resource entering into official use, the manner of its conception and the unique approach implemented provided a model for future transnational textbook activities.

During this period most of the fellowship holders at the Institute also came from the region. The German-Czech textbook discussions had been started in 1967 on the initiative of the UNESCO ˇ and the Federal Republic commissions in the CSSR of Germany. The related conference held in Braun­ schweig the same year discussed the social efficacy of the Hussite movement and the Reformation, which were to be portrayed from a European perspective in the same way as the respective national

The second German-Israeli Textbook Commission, which was formed in 2010, no longer exclusively addresses the traditional subject of textbook revision, it also tackles the depiction of the Holocaust, and societal challenges such as globalisation and migration. The joint development of digital teaching modules represents a new stage in this collaborative process. In addition to augmenting its activities with western partners, in the 1990s the Institute increasingly looked towards Eastern Europe. Wolfgang Höpken, a historian specialising in Eastern Europe, took over as director of the Institute in 2000 and many new institute employees were experts in Eastern Europe.

Joint Israeli-Palestinian Textbook (2006)

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movements in both countries prior to the 1848 revolution. The discussions broke down because of the ‘Prague Spring’ repression in 1968 and the contact between Czechs, Slovaks and Germans was not resumed until 1987. A textbook conference held in Prague in 1988 addressed problems in school history books’ depiction of the nineteenth and twentieth-cenˇ and the FRG. tury relationship between the CSSR The conferences held in the two succeeding years addressed national movements, imperialism and the First World War. Personnel and organisational restructuring resulting from the collapse of the USSR meant that discussions were not resumed until 1994, and these were then exclusively German-Czech conferences. The fourth conference, held in Braunschweig in 1994, and the fifth, held in Prague in 1995, continued to chronologically examine the history of German-Czech relations, focussing specifically on ‘German-Czechoslovakian relations up until the middle of the thirties’ and ‘Czechs, Germans and the Second World War’. Two subsequent conferences on the subject of ‘nation’ took place in 1997 and 1999. In September 2000 the Czech section of the commission was officially institutionalised and the Joint German-Czech Textbook Commission was formally constituted in November 2002 in Dresden, after 35 years of cooperation on textbooks. Since then, the commission has organised biennial textbook conferences on a range of historical and history education themes. Most recently, the commission also began to include issues pertaining to geography. 66

German-Polish Textbook Commission, Władysław Markiewicz and Georg Eckert

The German-Polish Textbook Commission, which was founded in 1972 under the auspices of the German and Polish UNESCO commissions, forms a central pillar of the Institute’s textbook activities. Its aim is to explore possible prejudices, stereotypes and misrepresentations of facts in the history and geography textbooks used in both countries, to advocate for objective representations of the often-­ contentious history of relations between the two countries and to overcome nationalist points of view. The work of the commission had begun during the Cold War and had been shaped from the beginning by the prevailing political climates in the two countries. The publication of the ‘Recommendations for History and Geography Textbooks in the Federal Republic of Germany and the People’s Republic of Poland’ in 1976 led to controversial public debates in the Federal Republic, having touched upon particularly sensitive issues such as ‘expulsion’ after 1945 and the ‘Oder-Neisse line’. The Recommendations were alleged to have formally defined this border, despite a legal opinion having been issued by the Federal Republic stating the illegality of any such recognition owing to the lack of a peace agreement between the two countries. A further criticism of the

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The 1972 German-Polish Textbook Conference in Braunschweig

Recommendations was that they made no reference to the ‘Hitler-Stalin pact’. The German-Polish textbook discussions perfectly illustrate how the situation during the Cold War required the bilateral textbook commissions to constantly explore and redefine boundaries. In the succeeding decades the commission held biennial academic conferences, produced a series of teaching materials and edited volumes designed for teachers in both countries. The handout for teachers published in 2001 and titled ‘Ger­ many and Poland in the Twentieth Century’ achieved a print-run of 32,000 copies and has had an especially broad impact.

The end of the Cold War

the enemy would no longer be necessary in future. While some parts of Europe were quickly finding common ground and moving closer together, a new wave of nationalism was flaring up in several countries in the former Soviet bloc. Within newly created nation-states, particularly in South East Europe, old preconceptions were now being replaced by prejudice towards ethnic and cultural minorities, shaped by nationalist interpretations of history. Ethnocentric resentment was frequently stoked by national elites. Alongside this new nationalism, conflicts also erupted between religious and cultural communities within the same society. Disputes about the virulent and violent conflicts in South East Europe in particular presented further challenges for international textbook activities.

The end of the Cold War dissipated the traditional political enmities that had shaped textbooks during the East-West confrontation. However, newly erupting conflicts in the Balkans and several Soviet successor states dampened hopes that examining textbooks for prejudices and images of

The Institute’s traditional areas of focus were consequently highly topical again and were in need of conceptional and methodological development. Textbook revision had gained new significance, but it no longer necessarily followed the classic model of bi- or multilateral textbook discussions. The new

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circumstances demanded a different approach by the GEI to its work on textbooks. This involved the introduction of intensive, seminar-style discussions while simultaneously assuming the role of mediator, advisor and consultant. The bilateral textbook commissions were also expanded and reorganised; they were no longer solely centred on the perspective of a conflict-laden national or historical relationship, rather they now also focussed on the effects of European integration on the concepts of identity depicted in textbooks. The Georg Eckert Institute addressed this issue in collaboration with the Fon­ dazione Giovanni Agnelli (Giovanni Agnelli Foundation) in a study that started at the end of the 1980s and ran until 2003. The study aimed to redefine the outlook of European education in history, geography and politics during the period of political openness and the intensification of European integration that occurred after 1989. It combined content analysis with investigations into curricula development

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and the differing disciplinary cultures in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain. The textbook analysis focussed particularly on the depiction of the European Community and of European thinking in the textbooks of its member states. The recommendations resulting from the study advocated the accentuation of the European integration process rather than national historical approaches. Preliminary discussions concerning the commencement of textbook discussions with the Soviet Union began in the mid-1970s during a period of détente that followed the conclusion of the German-­Soviet cultural agreement. The talks did not, however, lead to the establishment of a bilateral textbook commission. Textbook discussions on history teaching collapsed due to the refusal of the Soviets to consider central details in contemporary history, such as the secret protocol appended to the ‘Hitler-Stalin Pact’, to be established facts. In contrast, the geographers succeeded in holding five bilateral conferences between 1983 and 1989. After 1989 the Institute’s expertise was in demand in several Soviet successor states. For the first time the Baltic States, Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Georgia were able, and indeed needed, to produce independent textbooks. Between 1997 and 2000 the GEI participated in a project sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation, with representatives from Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Azerbaijan, which analysed history and social studies textbooks and developed recommendations for improvements in their content and design. The new textbooks not only helped legiti-

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mise the national identity of those states but also helped pupils orientate themselves within a diverse, increasingly interconnected and frequently contradictory world. An additional project aim was to implement a culture of critical textbook revision in the countries concerned. The wars in South East Europe and the ensuing need for reconciliation were the motivation for the GEI’s engagement, from 2000 onwards, in the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, which was a framework of initiatives for sustainable peace in the region introduced in 1999 by the international community. These measures were aimed particularly at providing support to the region during the reorientation of historical, political and geographical education and assisting in the creation of appropriate teaching materials. The Institute was able to provide advice and expertise, meaning that new academic and didactic approaches derived from textbook research were applied to the development of new textbooks in the region. Cross-regional working groups revealed the potential for change and compromise through continuous analysis and the comparison of materials. The initial focus was on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Croatia. The first conference took place in 2000 and its aim was to discuss teacher training and development and to support the integration of comparative, transnational history lessons, the discussion of sensitive or controversial topics, and the introduction of active learning and inquiry-based teaching approaches. Yugoslavia – at that time, an alliance between the current states of Serbia and Montenegro – was included as an equal member in

In addition to its cooperation with UNESCO and the Council of Europe, since the end of the 1980s the Institute has also worked closely with international foundations who have initiated school programmes encouraging education on European integration, environmental issues or religious diversity. Among these are the Agnelli Foundation and the Aga Khan Foundation.

the Stability Pact in autumn 2000, followed in 2002 by Albania. In subsequent years a range of conferences, summer schools and teacher training workshops were carried out and a virtual network was created for textbook research in South East Europe. At the same time the GEI was supervising the development of the ‘Common Core Curricula’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a process centred on the comparison and development of textbooks for the region. The principal focus was on the depiction of minorities and the development of concepts enabling multi-­ ethnic, multi-denominational or multi-national societies and their histories to be appropriately portrayed.

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The political dimension came to the fore at an international conference held in Braunschweig in 2005, which brought together Bosnia and Herzegovina’s education ministers, textbook experts from Croatia and Serbia as well as specialists in textbooks and curricula from German education ministries. The dual aims of the conference were for textbook reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina to be placed in a wider South East European context, and for the respective education ministers to consult on a document, drafted by a panel of experts, that contained common guidelines regarding future history and geography books. The overarching aim was for ministers to agree on the binding adoption of the common guidelines within their respective jurisdictions. The ‘Guidelines for the Writing and Evalua­ tion of History Textbooks for Primary and Secondary 70

Schools’ were successfully completed and released a year later. This process underpinned the Institute’s continuing consultancy work in the region, offering advice to textbook authors and history teachers. Textbook development in the Republic of Moldova was also starkly influenced by politics. In the course of another Stability Pact project conducted jointly with the Council of Europe, the GEI mediated during an internal political controversy surrounding the character and reform of history and language teaching. The result was the release of collaboratively produced textbooks for the 2006/2007 academic year. In parallel to its work within the Stability Pact, the GEI responded to a request by the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo and the Ministry

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for Science and Technology to help evaluate history textbooks in Kosovo. The local education ministry tasked the GEI with appraising all Albanian-­ language textbooks and Serbian history textbooks for use in Serbian schools that had been newly commissioned by the ministry. The GEI was requested to provide its expert opinion on academic and educational aspects of the books and to offer recommendations for improvements. The results of its investigations were presented in 2004 and discussed with representatives from the ministry as well as with a commission for textbook approval. The networks the GEI built up over many years prior to 1989 enabled the Institute, as an authority in its field, to mediate between the different ‘parties’ attempting to re-orientate their textbooks in order to promote a stable peace. It cemented its position as an internationally recognised institution, well-known and respected for its competence and knowledge of textbooks and for disseminating and communicating that knowledge. The Institute took part, for example, in the UNESCO seminar on ‘Education in Societies Emerging from Conflict’ in 2002, where many countries requested the Institute’s input and assistance, resulting in several cooperative ventures. In the 1980s the GEI was asked for its support by countries in East Asia, particularly China, Japan and South Korea, where controversial discussions surrounding history books continue to this day: influenced by political and social dimensions. The work of the German-Polish Textbook Commission had

drawn renewed attention in the region to the Institute’s role as a guide and observer. Discussions with Japan, which this time extended to geography textbooks, resumed in 1981 and were analysed at a conference in 1992. Contact with China was established in 1993 through bilateral textbook discussions. The collaboration with South Korea was intensified at the start of the 1980s and relationships with institutions such as the Korean Educational Development Institute that had been initiated in the 1950s were re-established and strengthened, on both occasions due to a textbook conflict between Japan, China and Korea. A project conducted jointly with the Universities of Leipzig and Erlangen between 2003 and 2006 addressed constructions of identity in the history textbooks of China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The study demonstrated that questions related to the depiction of a common history can be greatly complicated by nationalism fuelled by contemporary political conflicts, fears of globalisation and by the need for political legitimisation. The findings from this project proved vital in underpinning the recently resumed relationships in the region: such as collaborations with the Northeast Asia History Foundation in Seoul, the National Institute for Compilation and Translation in Taipei as well as universities in Beijing and Shanghai. These relationships led to the GEI becoming an advisor in diverse regional joint ventures, particularly those within the framework of the Japanese, Chinese and Korean project ‘A History to Open the Future’. A wide range of events were held in Braunschweig, Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul, to

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tiated and coordinated by the GEI, produced teaching materials on the history of East Asia for German grammar schools. The GEI also continues to be actively involved in long-running projects in Latin America and Africa. Following on from a German-­Argentinian textbook comparison that took place in the early 1990s, a wider Latin American project was launched at the end of the decade. The latter examined the function of history teaching in the context of national constructions of identity in multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies. Researchers from the GEI worked closely with partners in Mexico and Guatemala. More recently, the Institute has been addressing questions related to transitional justice and has been cooperating with several universities and research institutes, particularly in Colombia.

Teaching materials for German schools

which the Institute could contribute its experience in the development of joint textbooks and through which it could support the consultation processes related to the complex and conflict-prone recent history of these countries. The translation of a tri­lateral textbook, coordinated by the GEI and published in English in 2017, was instrumental in raising the international profile of textbook work in South East Asia and making the findings more widely known. In 2014, a joint German-East Asian project that was ini72

The Institute started working in cooperative projects with African countries as far back as the 1950s. In its early years the ISBI approached a number of recently independent African states, such as Morocco, Kenya, the Republic of the Congo and Uganda. The initial purpose was to provide those countries with textbooks, but the ISBI also participated in teacher-training events. In 1966, for example, the Institute organised a seminar as part of the third German-­Africa Week. The seminar, held in Braunschweig, was designed for heads of education colleges and teacher-training institutions and addressed ‘Primary school teacher training in developing African countries’.

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Bilateral textbook discussions with Tunisia demonstrated that such talks do not always end successfully. After two conferences examining history and geography textbooks, held in 1976 and 1977 respectively, the talks ended in 1980 with no agreement on joint recommendations. The participants precisely explained their reservations, which related both to the definition of the thematic fields and to the interpretation of central concepts and processes of historical development. These textbook discussions illustrated the challenges associated with European and Arab societies attempting to combine and link different interpretations of each other’s history. The case prompted the Institute to focus more research on the history and culture of the Arab world and to reflect upon the methods and forms of results traditionally used in their work on textbook revision (which had also been strongly criticised by countries such as Great Britain, the Netherlands or the USA, societies which place a strong emphasis on the autonomy of education). Following the end of apartheid in South Africa, the GEI was consulted on the creation of new textbooks and curricula. The initiative came from South African academics who had been critical of the apartheid regime, but who were engaged in the subsequent process of understanding and reconciliation between the country’s different cultural communities. The South African Society for History Teaching, with support from the Federal Foreign Office and the Deutsche Stiftung für internationale Entwicklung (German Foundation for International Development), worked with the GEI to organise two conferences,

the first in 1993 and the second in 1994, which aimed to develop curricula and history textbooks for the ‘new’ South Africa. The South African delegates were especially interested in how discussions on textbooks, organised within the process of international textbook revision, had contributed to the reconciliation of politically hostile societies in Europe after 1945. The project provided the GEI with important stimuli for research into history books in ethnically and culturally diverse societies. The starting point for the consultations was the methodology behind textbook revision, but as well as discussing the revision of existing textbooks and curricula and the development of new ones, they also addressed the principles of textbook production and approval. Over the last twenty years it has become increasingly clear that the content and form of traditional international textbook revision are no longer adequate. Topical issues such as globalisation and the resulting disparities in development, growing heterogeneity and cultural dynamism necessitate the development of more complex approaches and methodologies. The fact that international tensions and conflicts between different groups within individual societies are not only inflamed by social conflicts over the distribution of resources but also increasingly by struggles surrounding the recognition of collective identities, illustrate that textbook revisions must progress beyond eliminating national prejudices to consider new social conflicts and challenges in the context of migration, heterogeneity and diversity.

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Bilateral Textbooks The first attempts to develop bi- and multilateral textbooks were made in the interwar period but had limited success. Early UNESCO projects such as the multi-volume ‘History of the Cultural and Scientific Development of Mankind’ or later projects such as the ‘Illustrated History of Europe’, which was written by twelve European historians and published in 1992, were largely ignored by schools as they were not primarily conceived as textbooks. They did however prompt a more in-depth discussion about a ‘European textbook‘. The idea of contributing to common, transnational textbooks that address reconciliation, conflict resolution and good neighbourly relations and which employ a multi-perspective approach to coming to terms with the past

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has only really received new impetus in the last twenty years. Such teaching materials have subsequently been created, for example, in East Asia and the Balkans, as a result of initiatives by diverse social protagonists and institutions. The joint German-French and German-Polish textbooks are particularly notable as they are state-supported, officially approved and conform to national curricula. Following their resumption in 1980, the German-French textbook discussions led, by the end of the century, to the development of a series of digital teaching materials named ‘DeuFraMat: Frankreich und Deutschland auf dem Weg in ein neues Europa‘ (DeuFraMat = Deutsch-französische Materialien für den Geschichts- und Geographie­ unterricht; Franco-German materials for history and geography lessons: France and Germany on the way

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to a new Europe). The idea to develop a joint bilateral textbook was born from this process in 2003, and marked a shift in the format and quality of results achieved from such talks. On the occasion of celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Élysée Treaty, the French-German youth parliament proposed not only the strengthening of cultural exchanges and mutual language acquisition but also the development of a history book with the same content for both countries. This last suggestion echoed work in the field of German-French education that had been coordinated by the French Germanist Brigitte Sauzay and the German historian Rudolf von Thadden within the framework of an initiative by the German Chancellery. Their work was welcomed and supported by former French President Jacques Chirac and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The project, which was

launched in 2006 and in which the GEI took part, culminated in 2011 with the publication of the third and final volume of the joint history book. Despite the two countries having different curricula, differing concepts of didactic implementation and diverging interpretations of certain historical events, the project produced the first textbook that had been jointly developed by two nations and was officially approved for use in the schools of both. The book was soon translated into other languages and served as a model for what could be achieved. The joint German-Polish history book was also the result of a state initiative. In 2006 the then Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier instigated a similar project, which has been coordinated since 2008 by the GEI and its Polish partners within the framework of the German-Polish Textbook Commission.

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Launch of the first volume of the joint German-Polish History Book with the two foreign ministers, Frank-Walter Steinmeier (3rd from right) and Witold Waszczykowski (3rd from left) (2016)

The textbook, which was published in four volumes between 2016 and 2020, addresses European history with a particular focus on Poland and on the relationship between Germany and Poland. It is based on an analysis of the curricula in both countries and implements innovative didactic principles such as multi-perspectivity, controversiality and an open approach to the historical picture. This process illustrates that such bilateral activities can be successful,

despite political turbulence and completely opposing interpretations of historical events, when based on mutual trust and understanding and enjoying the support of the state.

1 Laura E. Wong, Relocating East and West. UNESCO’s Major Project on Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values, in Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008), pp. 357 f.

4 Das Schulbuchinstitut ist die Schaltzentrale, in Braunschweiger Zeitung, 4 February 1971.

2 Council of Europe, Against Bias and Prejudice. The Council of Europe’s Work on History Teaching and History Textbooks (Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Co-operation, 1986); Maitland Stobart, Fifty Years of European Co-operation on History Textbooks. The Role and Contribution of the Council of Europe, in Internationale Schulbuchforschung 21 (1999), pp. 147–161

6 Recommendation of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany, Europabildung in der Schule, 5 May 2008.

In an interview in 2015, former Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasised the significance of the textbook commissions but also spoke of the hurdles the partners had had to overcome during their collaboration.

5 Council of Europe, Against Bias and Prejudice, pp. 7 and 36.

7 Indonesien–Deutschland. Empfehlungen der indonesisch-deutschen Historikertagung (Braunschweig 1957).

3 Grundbegriffe der Geschichte. 50 Beiträge zum europäischen Ge­ schichts­bild, published in collaboration with the Council of Europe and the International Textbook Institute (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1964).

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Interview with Angela Merkel by the Jewish daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, 02.10.2015 The German-Israeli commission for school textbook research recently published a study that says Israel’s image in German textbooks is very negative. The committee wrote that ‘The amazing thing is that since the first German-Israeli committee’s findings were published in 1985 – nothing has changed.’ How can this situation be changed? ‘First of all, it‘s [a] good thing we have the Israeli-German textbook review committee, which pays attention to such things. If the study‘s findings are correct, we can change something through co-writing text for schoolbooks, so they also give the Israeli perspective. We have very good experience with German-French history textbooks – it took a long time until we managed to arrive at an understanding about a shared perspective on historical events. It was a very instructive process; maybe we should think about outlining a similar process between our two countries.

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V Core Areas of Textbook Research

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1 The Instruments Used for Textbook Revision and the Principles of Textbook Research

Systematic textbook research did not emerge on the world stage as an independent field until late into the 1970s. In the years immediately following the Second World War, textbook analysis had been subject to political and normative goals. The spotlight was turned on the social and political function of textbooks as a result of the process of societal change characterised by demographic developments, social movements, political crises and expanding economies. Reform movements in education systems that started at the end of the 1960s led to textbooks and their production becoming a subject of open debate in political, academic and publishing circles. Such discussions focussed primarily on textbook content and called for the body of knowledge in textbooks to be ‘modernised’. Academic criticism was directed predominantly towards ideological content and the comprehensibility of teaching materials. The textbook was now viewed as a ‘product and factor of social processes’ (Ernst Horst Schallenberger) and as an arena for political interests. The subsequent analysis and ideological critique of textbooks stemmed from the Institut für Schulbuchfor­ schung (Institute for Textbook Research) in Duisburg, which was led by Ernst Horst Schallenberger and Gerd Stein. Stein’s definition of textbooks as political, informative and educational objects had an enduring effect on research. It asserted for the first time that textbooks not only disseminated knowledge but that they were also a political medium. The GEI’s contribution to these debates came initially in the context of its bi- and multilateral work on textbooks. It later began to develop its own programme of textbook research independently of the Duisburg Institute. 80

This process benefited from the formal establishment of the GEI in 1975, which provided a sound financial, personnel and legal basis upon which to build. By the end of the twentieth century this enabled the Institute to employ a staff of nearly 30 people, seven of whom were researchers, thus providing a solid foundation from which the Institute could expand its academic work. Evidence of the Institute’s development in this direction could be seen later in its foundation year when the academic committee was appointed. The appointment of Karl-Ernst Jeismann as the first director in 1975 was also a sign that the Institute would be focussing more strongly on research. Methodological choices stayed true to the central working theme of the Institute and drew primarily upon the experiences gained through bi- and multilateral textbook work. The majority of the projects carried out by the Institute’s researchers before the turn of the millennium examined and compared different international patterns of interpretation, stereotypes and resulting concepts of what constitutes the enemy. These projects were generally collaborative ventures with other researchers, educationalists, teachers and textbook authors both at home and abroad. Their aim was to analyse and revise content which was perceived as having the potential to promote nationalist or chauvinistic attitudes, or which ran counter to processes of international understanding. Jeismann expanded the academic foundation of Georg Eckert’s work while continuing it in a slightly different vein. He formulated a precise and theoretically sound concept of ‘international textbook research’, which responded to the demands

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of target-­oriented education and regarded the textbook as a ‘teaching aid within the framework of the overall curricula’. Textbook research should recognise the use of textbooks in the classroom and ‘their significance within the learning process’ as well as ‘noting the conditions and constraints under which textbooks were created and under which the authors worked’.1 In his methodological examinations he considered that the history of foreign nations could never be portrayed in the same way as one’s own history, that history teaching should seek to introduce pupils to the culture of another society and that its primary objective was not to provide comprehensive historical knowledge nor to instruct, and that the aim of international textbook revision was not to adopt the historical view of other states. These ideas provided the foundation for textbook research at the Institute during Jeismann’s tenure and he developed programmes that combined textbook analysis with methodological approaches from history education, thus lending them a specialist, didactic frame of reference. This history education approach, in which textbooks were determined to be a medium of historical awareness, continued to play a significant role in the research conducted by the Institute under his successor. Criteria such as competence in the subject matter, classification and orientation skills or multi-perspectivity, as they relate to history teaching, developed by Jeismann and the International Society for History Didactics, retain

their relevance today and remain an integral part of textbook analysis at the GEI. The experience gained from work on international textbooks that was based in comparative textbook research, consistently constituted the primary foundation for work on theoretical and methodological principles in subsequent years. This applied both to procedures behind international agreements on textbooks and to their practical implementation in education as well as to the expansion of revision activities; it also applied equally to themes, objectives and the products themselves. Falk Pingel’s UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision, first published in 1999, presented for the first time systematic categories for textbook analysis as well as methodological guidelines for textbook revision and praxis. The stages of textbook discus-

Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Geschichte als Horizont der Gegenwart. Über den Zusammenhang von Vergangenheitsdeutung, Gegenwartsverständnis und Zukunftsperspektive (Paderborn 1985)

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sions that are recommended in the book, as well as their modes and practices, were all derived from practical experience. The Guidebook was the first handbook for international textbook revision and research and its subject matter is continually being refined and advanced by the Institute to this day. Its clear focus on didactic topics stems from one of the primary criticisms of the ‘recommendations’ that resulted from work on international textbooks in the first decades of the Institute’s work, which, as the long-serving deputy director Wolfgang Jacobmeyer pointed out in 2005, were less than optimally aligned with classroom teaching or didactic principles and were limited to history teaching.2 In addition to conducting textbook revision, the GEI created new impetus for history teaching in terms of new didactic paradigms by opening transnational and world history perspectives. In 2002 it worked

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with the German Studies Association, the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies and other partners in the USA to organise an event on the teaching of ‘world history’. One year later a corresponding working group was created to address questions related to curricula and appropriate source material that would enable world history to be taught. The working group’s findings were presented in 2005 at the European Congress for World and Global History and subsequently published in a ground-breaking book. The Institute also brings this specialised didactic perspective to public debates in its role as an evaluator of textbooks. In 1971 it presented the inaugural Robert Hermann Tenbrock Textbook Award, which was then awarded every four years. The award honoured ‘outstanding didactic and methodological presentation of the history of the European peoples in a school history book, utilising the newest findings from academic research and paying particular attention to recent moves towards economic and political integration.’ In 1993 the award was converted into a fellowship for academics and textbooks authors. In 2012 the GEI introduced the ‘Textbook of the Year Award’ under the aegis of KMK and in collaboration with the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal

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Agency for Civic Education: Bpb) and the Didacta Association. This award honours editors and authors for the development and implementation of innovative textbook concepts. The award invites nominations for books in the categories of science, society and languages alternating between material for primary, and lower and upper secondary levels in a three-year cycle. As a result of the Institute’s principal focus being on international textbook work and network building in the field of history textbooks, theoretical and methodological textbook research beyond the field of history education had remained on the margins of the Institute’s work before the turn of the new millennium. International developments such as neo-­ institutionalist macro-studies or approaches using impact and reception research, which were introduced to textbook research in the 1980s, were not initially adopted by the Institute. This was partially due to the fact that the Institutes’ resources were already thinly stretched trying to balance its research commitments and role as service provider, leaving little surplus for in-depth, independent research.

Ernst Hinrichs presents the Tenbrock Award to Scipione Guarracino (1989).

With the formulation of an academic profile in 2008, the Institute established corresponding research departments and conceived research programmes that have defined its work since. The primary focus was on a cultural and history studies approach, which addresses textbook research from a critical perspective and places it within a broad societal, political, cultural and economic context. This takes place within the framework of a broad range of research topics which cover national, European and transnational history and which explore

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the relationship between conflict and textbooks and examine questions of diversity and heterogeneity, the environment, religion and human rights. Furthermore, since establishing its academic profile, the development of basic historical, theoretical and methodological principles has constituted a central component of the GEI’s work. Historical research, which had previously concentrated predominantly on the history of textbook revision, subsequently expanded to include the history of educational media production in the twentieth century, for example, or the changing relationship between textbooks and other media. In addition to conducting historical research the Institute started to investigate how educational media are appropriated by pupils in the classroom. This required innovative approaches to history teaching, and the focus on memory practices in projects such as ‘Teaching 84

the Cold War‘, for example, established an entirely new research field. This cultural studies approach, which placed the focus on the mediality of educational media, led to new methodologies being introduced to textbook research; among them ethnographic and media studies approaches. Publications such as ‘Das Schulbuch in der Forschung‘ (Research on Textbooks) and the ‘Palgrave Handbook of International Textbook Studies’ released in 2018, constituted milestones in this research field by providing an important overview of the multi-disciplinary field of textbook research from historical, theoretical and methodological perspectives, and enabling an accurate assessment of the discipline. The GEI has been breaking new ground for several years by turning its attention to digital media and by examining the interplay between media

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mBook – Das multimediale Lernbuch (Eichstätt: Institut für digitales Lernen, 2016)

shift, media content and media appropriation, and the associated social, cultural and political negotiation processes. The effect of digital media on schools is at the core of this topic and is investigated using empirical case studies that also consider the socio-political implications of digitisation. This research also questions the appropriation processes behind memory culture in the classroom, particularly when presented using ethnographic approaches that place the pupil’s perspective front and centre. This is leading to theoretical and methodological advancements in educational media research, especially in the areas of mediality, memory culture and appropriation practices. Within the context of the digital shift, the GEI is also intensively involved in developing the field of digital humanities. Researchers working on the

‘WorldViews’ project have not only developed a digital platform for source materials, but have also created useful tools for digital historiography. The GEI played a leading role in the collaborative ‘Children and their World’ project, which ran between 2014 and 2017, and was one of the first largescale research undertakings in this area. At its centre was the development of new ways to process mass source material for historic research. Using 4,000 digitised textbooks and children’s books, researchers reconstructed intertextual connections, specified thematic clusters and established semantic fields. The aim was not only to assemble qualitative findings but also to provide historical contextualisation and explanation. The digital methods and tools were contrasted with classical hermeneutic approaches in order to identify the limitations and the potential of digital humanities.

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2 Democracy and Dictatorship

What should school history books look like if they are to enable young people to actively contribute to a peaceful and democratic society? This was a question that shaped the work of the ISBI from the outset. Georg Eckert was convinced that: ‘the construction of a viable democracy in Ger­ many can only succeed if the citizens of the future receive the intellectual means while in school, that enable them to become more involved in public life and to make independent and responsible political decisions’. Source: Georg Eckert, Der Beitrag der Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft zur Reform des Geschichtsunterrichts, in: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Lehrerverbände, ed., Geschichtsunterricht in unserer Zeit (Braunschweig: Limbach, 1951), p. 147.

Eckert assigned history education a singular role in civic education that contributed towards a democratic society. For this role to be fulfilled, teachers must familiarise themselves with topics and protagonists in German and European history that represented democratic conventions and traditions. Together with his colleagues from the working group for history education, Eckert produced material for teachers that succinctly described the emancipatory social models of social and democratic movements in the sixteenth century, the Vormärz (period preceding the 1848 March revolution), the 1848/1849 revolution and the Weimar republic. 86

Above all, if history teaching were to serve a democratic society it must explain how authoritarian forms of political power and totalitarian regimes prevailed in the twentieth century and how the crimes of National Socialism were possible. This raised the question of how the depiction in textbooks of the National Socialist regime and its crimes should be weighted in relation to the depiction of democratic traditions and resistance against dictatorships; an issue of central concern for the first generation of participants in bilateral textbook discussions. The members from Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway were particularly insistent from the 1950s onwards that the mass crimes of the National Socialists should be unambiguously portrayed in German textbooks.

Fritz Fikenscher, Der Geschichtsunterricht. Teil IV (Ansbach 1964)

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Historic references that could serve democratic societies were also a component of the textbook discussions between the USA and Western European partners. The German participants emphasised the significance of the Weimar Republic as having been an opportunity for the development of a democratic Germany following the end of the First World War and the 1918 revolution. They argued that this period of German history should not simply be presented as a pre-cursor to the National Socialist regime, and that it should be made clear that the seizure of power by the National Socialists was not ‘naturally inevitable’ in the German historical narrative. In their eyes, the elections to the National Assembly and the drafting of the constitution were evidence of the democratic potential of the Weimar Republic, which was also reflected in domestic and foreign policy during its period of stabilisation. Even after the drafting of the ‘German-French agreement on controversial questions in European history’ in October 1951, discussions concerning the weighting and interpretation of the Weimar Republic remained a recurring topic of bilateral textbook discussions until well into the 1980s. The participants in these discussions emphasised the importance of embedding the democratic traditions of the twentieth century within a wider-reaching historical perspective. Italian members initiated a deeper discussion about the various intellectual currents and characteristics of democratic movements, from the middle ages to the Risorgimento, including comparative depictions of resistance to the fascist regime in the twentieth century.

Democracy and democratic movements in Europe While the depiction of the right to resist authoritarian regimes, and resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship played an important role in the work of the Institute, research into the depiction of democratic social institutions and social conflict surrounding the constitution and development of such institutions had been of lesser importance until the 1970s. The second generation of German-American textbook discussions provided important stimuli for research into the concept of democracy, its institutions and the social movements that shape democratic societies. These discussions prompted debates about the concept of political culture and highlighted the necessity of connecting education about democratic institutions with the depiction of social movements. The participants examined the American civil rights movement in order to draw comparisons with the social movements of the Federal Republic in the 1960s. Since the end of the 1980s, the exploration of how the values, norms and institutions of democratic societies are taught in schools has been closely linked to research into human rights, which (see chapter V.8) called for an examination, from a historical perspective, of the development of principles underlying democratic societies and also asked how these principles could be codified at national and international levels. International organisa-

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tions began in 2000 to redevelop their programmes of education for democratic societies. UNESCO, for example, launched the Global Citizenship Education initiative to which the Institute contributed projects specific to textbooks. The GEI produced several consultative reports in this area for UNESCO and also conducted research projects, such as the ‘Prevention of Violent Extremism in Education’ project, which concluded in 2019, and a project on democracy education in Germany. Questions related to the depiction of the political institutions of dictatorships, their underlying ideology and the social groups that support or resist them became more prominent in the Institute’s research activities after 1989. Research topics emanating from textbook discussions started with academics from the Baltic states at the beginning of the 1990s and the German-Russian discussions, which opened in 1994. These themes were the focus of German-Polish and German-Czech discussions on the subject of history teaching and a core area of the collaborative work with colleagues from South East Europe within the framework of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. Studies by the GEI explored how the Stalinist regime was portrayed in history books and questioned the reasons for the willingness of large sections of a population to support dictatorial regimes. Proposals were made for ideologies to be included in textbooks’ portrayal of political institutions. 88

Between 1997 and 2000, another project explored the tension between national self-affirmation and international orientation to be found in history and social studies books from within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). It reconstructed democratic efforts and authoritarian tendencies in the education sectors of Ukraine, Belarus, the Republic of Moldova and the Caucasus. Taking an exclusively historical approach to research into democratic societies and dictatorships, researchers warned against portraying the establishment of authoritarian regimes as the direct consequence of philosophical considerations and identification with them. The socialist visions prevalent in the nineteenth century had been refined in many different political cultures and should not necessarily be ascribed to the establishment of authoritarian regimes. The research advocated that the political systems in countries formerly under Soviet control should be studied from a comparative perspective. In addition to identifying commonalities, this perspective would invite scrutiny of the different phases of development in the individual socialist countries, which would be reflected in textbooks. Research from a didactic perspective revealed the fraught relationship between chronological and systematic approaches in the depiction of the history of socialist countries. It therefore particularly empha-

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sised the historical perspective, which could prevent history in Eastern European states, especially Russian history, being teleologically portrayed as the antithesis to democratic Western European development, characterised by authoritarian regimes since the early modern period. Systematically comparing authoritarian and democratic societies illustrated that authoritarian regimes did not represent a form of political culture that had characterised Eastern European societies exclusively. The aim of such studies was to enable pupils to use comparisons when considering authoritarian regimes in order to better understand democracy and self-determination as fundamental principles of political organisation in human society. In addition to synchronous comparisons, academics such as Wolfgang Jacobmeyer also favoured diachronic comparisons of twentieth-century dictatorships. The task of addressing communism, National Socialism, and the GDR as part of a structured, historical context rather than as individual phenomena, should not only be undertaken for practical research reasons ‘because these three systems of dictatorship have become historic’ but primarily ‘because the problems of scope in contemporary textbooks can only be solved with structural solutions, as the amount of material will continue to expand’. Jacobmeyer viewed this as a ‘qualitative leap, because it would bring a new dimension to historical insight and would raise the level of historical factual judgement’.3

The French Revolution of 1789 provided a key example of how the disputes over the emergence of modern democratic societies in Europe since the eighteenth century were represented in textbooks. The ISBI reacted in 1959 by publishing, in its Book Series (Schriftenreihe), a study on 1789 as depicted in Western European textbooks that had been conducted within the framework of a Council of Europe programme of textbook revision. Questions related to the processes and institutions involved in social change, which had been key to the research field since the 1959 study and were prompted by the textbook discussions with the USA and with Western European partners, were subjects of research conducted by the GEI during the 1980s on Latin America, and research started in the 1990s on Central and Eastern European nations. A larger-scale investigation into ‘Images of a revolution’, which examined the portrayal of revolutionary change in societies, revisited the issues that had been addressed in the 1959 study. This new study, which was coordinated by Rainer Riemenschneider and published in 1994, covered depictions of the 1789 revolution in textbooks from 47 countries across Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. It answered questions about the development of democratic societies and their reinterpretation from a number of (historical) cultural perspectives, against the backdrop of events in 1917 and 1989.

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Approaching the subject from a perspective of international comparison, the authors questioned whether 1789 was interpreted and portrayed in textbooks as a reference point for the formulation and codification of human rights and the foundation of democratic societies. Was the French Revolution included alongside the American independence movement as a constituent event in the creation of modern democratic societies since the eighteenth century or did it symbolise a model of social transformation in which a period of Terreur led to authoritarian rule and dictatorship? In addition to the events of 1789, the Institute’s research also increasingly explored the political and cultural dimensions of the 1848 revolutions and the 1968 movement. The significance of the revolutions in 1848 to the formation of European democratic movements was studied as one of the central events in European history (see chapter V.7) within the framework of a programme started in 2002 by the Council of Europe that had the aim of researching the European dimension in history teaching. The developments of 1989 provided the impetus to study the initiatives and movements towards democratic societies and their depictions in history and politics textbooks, using a 90

comparative Western and Central European perspective, and to re-examine the epochal events of 1968 in the light of those of 1989. The exploration questioned whether there was a discernible continuity in the organisation and stance of democratic movements, which approaches or political practices used by the 1968 protagonists had influenced the 1989 revolutionaries and the communication contexts in which these references were discussed. The resulting research, which explored 1968 from a Central and Western European perspective, was also inspired by aspects of entangled history. It analysed the phenomenon of 1968 from the perspective of trans­national history, which revealed some common ground in the multifaceted contacts and meetings between protagonists from Central and Eastern Europe with their Western European counterparts, but mainly the diverging positions and subsequent misunderstandings. These studies demonstrated that the contrasting accentuation of images of the enemy in the form of imperialism or the communist regime made a perceivable contribution to phenomena such as those described by research on transformations as processes of crossing and missing between East and West. The Central European perspective provided a variety of ideas for revisiting the portrayal of 1968 in Western European textbooks.

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3 Experiences of Violence, and Resistance

Addressing the shared experience of resistance to the National Socialist regime constituted an important connection for textbook discussions between Germany and its European neighbours in the immediate post-war years. The historian Hans Rothfels posited the following theory at the first German-­ American conference of historians and history teachers held in May 1952 in Braunschweig: The German resistance movement … [was] part of a European movement of resistance against the National Socialist regime and … [was sub­ ject to] the universal problems facing oppo­ sition to a totalitarian system. It also faced specific difficulties due to it not being an insur­ gency against a foreign conquering power but against its own government, with all claims to legality. It was therefore not only a national lib­ eration movement but also essentially an eth­ ically motivated outpouring of outrage from people with wildly diverse world views and political leanings protesting against totalitarian violations. Source: Hans Rothfels, Die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung 1933 bis 1945, in Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichtsunterricht 2 (1953), pp. 155–156.

These thoughts formed the underlying argument put forward by the German participants in textbook discussions with colleagues from the USA and Western European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Such ideas resonated with and were supported by the Italian partners in particular, who were quick to address the European dimension to partisan resistance movements against the National Social-

ist regime, and emphasised that Germans had also joined such partisan movements. Research into resistance against authoritarian regimes was also significant in bilateral textbook discussions between Yugoslavia and Poland. This research addressed the different interpretations and emphasis placed on anti-fascist and anti-communist resistance movements, and later played an important role in the textbook discussions held with colleagues from countries in the former Soviet bloc, which started in the 1990s. The portrayal of the crimes perpetrated by Germans, which culminated with the genocide of European Jews, and the acknowledgement of responsibility and guilt, had been expressly demanded by the Dutch, Belgian and Norwegian colleagues during the bilateral textbook discussions that took place in the 1950s. The resolution made by the KMK in 1960 and 1962 regarding the treatment of the recent past and totalitarianism in history and civic education lessons provided important stimuli for further research. This resolution was the prelude to scholarly investigations into the depiction of the persecution and murder of the Jewish population. The ISBI entrusted the director of the UNESCO Institut für Pädagogik (UNESCO Institute for Education) in Hamburg, Saul B. Robinsohn, with this task. Working with Chaim Schatzker, a history teacher from Haifa, he studied how Jewish history was presented in German history textbooks. As a result of their findings Robinsohn and Schatzker called for an account of the persecution and elimination of the majority of European Jews by the National

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Socialist regime to be included in textbooks, which should expand the focus beyond German and West European Jewry to the many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. In addition to Israeli partners, French colleagues associated with the Jewish B’nai B’rith, called for textbooks to explicitly address the crimes of the National Socialist regime. The participants at a joint German-French conference held by the International Textbook Institute in Paris in 1961 included representatives from Jewish organisations and publishing houses as well as historians, who described it as ‘vital’ that pupils were ‘made fully aware of the extent to which the National Socialists elevated racial discrimination, terror, torture, degra­dation and ultimately the extermination of entire groups of people to the status of a system of government’.4

The questions and findings documented in the 1963 study by Saul B. Robinsohn and Chaim Schatzker were frequently re-examined over the following years. Their research, and that which followed, questioned the perspectives from which the murder of the Jews was being presented and explained, and examined the responsibility attributed to the persecution of the Jews and the genocide. They advocated a paradigmatic approach to examples of anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, which would widen the topic to include an examination of similar mentalities and conditions with the potential for violent crimes. These demands were included in the first ‘round’ of German-Israeli textbook recommendations in 1985:

‘Attention should be drawn to the central position of anti-Semitism in the National Socialist ideology and its significance for the “Third Reich”. The start of anti-Jewish policies in Germany in 1933 that culminated in systematic mass murder must not be treated casually. […] The genocide of European Jews, planned and executed to a shocking degree by the National Socialists, requires detailed, accurate and informative presentation, which allows pupils to comprehend the singular administrative and technical stratagem behind these events. It is important, therefore, that events are not solely presented from the perspective of the perpetrators and the documents and records they left, but also that the experiences of the victims […] are expressed. Questions related to the responsibility 92

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This topic was pursued over the next twenty years, particularly within the framework of the German-­ American and German-Israeli textbook discussions. These involved numerous textbook analyses and conferences on teaching and learning about the Holocaust, which the GEI coordinated and for which it provided expertise. One of the high points of these activities was the international conference ‘Lernen und Erinnern – Holocaust, Völkermord und staatliche Gewaltverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert‘ (Learning and Remembering – Holocaust, Genocide and Violent Crimes Committed by the State in the Twentieth Century), which was held in 2003 and organised by the GEI, the International Committee of Memorial Museums for the Remembrance of

Victims of Public Crimes and the Berlin foundation Topography of Terror. Its aim was to address the subjects of the Holocaust, genocide and violent crimes committed by the state from a comparative perspective and to consider how education in schools and in wider contexts could best be used to communicate such events. Further milestones at the beginning of the new millennium were the first German-Israeli Textbook Commission and the collaboration with UNESCO and the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, which culminated in the publication of the GEI’s study on ‘The International Status of Education about the Holocaust. A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula‘, in 2015.

and shared culpability for the persecution of the Jews and the genocide should be asked and genuine attempts should be made to provide answers and not to avoid them.’ Source: Deutsch-israelische Schulbuch­ empfehlungen. Zur Darstellung der deutschen Geschichte und der Geo­ graphie der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in israelischen Schulbüchern, Studien zur Internationalen Schulbuchforschung, vol. 45 (Braunschweig: Georg-Eckert-­ Institut für internationale Schulbuch­ forschung, 1985), p. 26.

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4 Nation

Overcoming nationalism in textbooks was the most conspicuous area of the ISBI‘s work well into the 1970s and laid the groundwork for the Institute’s subsequent research into how ‘the nation’ was represented in textbooks. Georg Eckert shared the conviction of Georges Lapierre, general secretary of the French teaching union Syndicat national des insti­ tuteurs (National Primary School Teachers’ Union), that to successfully revise textbooks one must build upon national traditions and endeavours to teach young people the concepts of international solidarity and cooperation. Eckert believed that the respective national history should continue to play a central role in textbooks, unburdened by nationalist sentiment and portrayals of the enemy and more firmly anchored in European and global history. The nation was at the centre of the ‘first generation’ of bilateral textbook discussions and was the starting point for the analysis and revision of history textbooks under-

taken by the delegates of the history conferences held by the Council of Europe since 1953. It was also the motivation behind their calls to ensure the portrayal of national history more clearly illustrated its European and global relationships. The topic of the nation was debated by French and German historians in July 1955 during the German-­ French textbook discussions in Sèvres. The participants emphasised that ‘the French concept of nation is based on natural law and the free will of the people’ whereas ‘the German concept of nation is shaped by Herder and the Romantics’ and rests upon affiliation with a society defined by ancestry, language and culture’.5 They pointed out the risks associated with both definitions: the French in which cultural diversity is subordinate to a unified idea of state and the German, whose cultural essentialism has proved itself particularly susceptible to racist and nationalistic ideas. New life was breathed into research on the topic of the nation by the German-Austrian textbook discussions that were held in 1956. The Habsburg monarchy was discussed as a multinational model of statehood, which should be compared in history lessons with models of the nation state. The delegates at the German-Czech conference of historians held in Braunschweig in November 1967 warned against using modern definitions of the nation when describing medieval and early modern history. They advised that ‘when describing Hussite history […] the significance of the national element for the

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movement as a whole should not be [overstated]’. The Hussite revolution had been a religious, social and national movement with deep inner contradictions. It was not appropriate in this context to speak of ‘nationalism’ or even ‘chauvinism’ in the nineteenth or twentieth-century sense.6 The nation remained a definitive topic of research and analysis at the Georg Eckert Institute even after Georg Eckert’s death. For Karl-Ernst Jeismann it constituted a form of social and cultural group identity that had shaped European history since the early modern period. The comparative examination of the history of the German nation as portrayed in textbooks in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the German Democratic Republic consequently became one of the Institute’s largest research

projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Involving historians, geographers and political scientists from the universities of Braunschweig, Hanover, Oldenburg, Hildesheim, Trier and Münster, the study analysed teaching materials for history, geography and social studies from both the Federal and Democratic German Republics published from 1949 until the 1980s. As well as examining curricula and textbooks for general schools the study also included material for vocational schools and federal German schools abroad. The researchers identified different post-war political phases, in which curricula and textbooks delineated an affiliation with the respective German nation. Jeismann highlighted the particular significance afforded to the German nation in early textbooks produced in the GDR: ‘The GDR viewed itself as the immediate successor to factions such as the workers’ movements in German history that had fought, since their inception, against the dominance of the Junker and the Bourgeoisie. From this national view, 1945 was a year of liberation, which would finally provide an opportunity for progressive and humane forces to take effect. The year the GDR was founded, 1949, appeared then to be the high point of German history. It would be consummated by reunification, under socialist auspices. Overcoming the division of the Volks­nation [in the sense of a politically divided German nation] meant reuniting it as a Klassen­nation [nation of working men

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and women of one social stratum]. The adversaries of this German unity were those who prevented the creation of a closely bound all-­ German Klassennation.’ Source: Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Nationalgeschichte als Lernziel des Unterrichts in Deutschland, in Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, ed., National­geschichte als Problem der deutschen und der polnischen Ge­schichtsschreibung, Proceedings of the XV. deutsch-polnische Schulbuchkonferenz der Historiker, 16 to 20 November 1982 in Braunschweig, Schriftenreihe des Georg-Eckert-Instituts für internationale Schulbuchforschung, vol. 22/VI (Braunschweig: Georg-­ Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung, 1983), p. 139.

While the Federal Republic’s resolve to see a united German nation had been strengthened by a resolution passed by the KMK in 1978, the GDR meanwhile declared its plan for an independent socialist German state. Researchers deemed that any study of the image of Germany would be most productive if linked to an examination of the German question in both countries’ textbooks, as the different accentuation of the desired (or expected) solution to the problem of German unity was closely linked to differing interpretations and traditions within German history. The results of the study into the image of Germany and the German question as portrayed in the textbooks of the two Germanys gained hugely in significance and topicality given the developments of 1989. In Karl-Ernst Jeismann‘s view the nation state had not lost any significance in its role as a fiscal, financial and administrative centre which constituted ‘the basis for social support systems and the concrete community of solidarity between the generations’.7 Given the experiences of 1989 he called for 96

the depiction of nation and state to be reconceived for the classroom, and for the portrayal of a ‘modern, democratic, industrial nation in the process of expanding its constitutional, welfare and federal traditions, its regional characteristics and national comparability’ to be further developed. National history must be recast against the backdrop of an increasing awareness of the coexistence of different cultural communities within a society and state that they must create together.8 The national question not only played a decisive role in the revolutionary movements of autumn 1989 in the GDR: a renaissance of national movements brought social upheaval to all states of Central and Eastern Europe and led to a resurgence of national state sovereignty in the former member states of

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the Soviet Union. This process was accompanied by a new ‘boom’ in those states in comparative studies of the concept of nation in textbooks. Consequently, at the beginning of the 1990s new research pro­ jects conceived with colleagues in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were at the core of the Institute’s work, although by the end of the decade attention had turned more towards South East Europe. The projects undertaken by the GEI and colleagues from the suc-

cessor states to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia analysed how the foundation of nations was depicted in textbooks, and whether it could be considered in terms of a self-definition of ethnic societies used to exclude other cultural groups. These projects focussed especially on the resurgence of national stereotypes and images of the enemy which had been the dominant identifying characteristic of history teaching in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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In contrast to their Western European colleagues, numerous historians from Eastern and South Eastern Europe interpreted supranational institutions to be negatively connoted counter-projects to the nation state and construed the legitimation of newly-popular national narratives to arise from the failure of these supranational institutions. They were somewhat critical of the theory that a nation could be ‘invented’. However, in terms of the valorisation of the nation, they saw an important argument for the enforcement of equal rights for individual nations within the European Union, where recent heteronomy would, or should, be counteracted by larger European neighbours or European institutions. A research project carried out by the Georg Eckert Institute therefore highlighted the synchronous nature of the non-concurrent aspects of these processes. While research into the depiction of the nation in textbooks was viewed in Central and Eastern European states as an important precondition for the development of a national consciousness, Western partners were much more sceptical of this idea in the 1990s. They had historicised the concept of the nation to a much greater extent and viewed the challenge for future societies to be in the formation of transnational perspectives.

Research into the concept of the nation was expanded and intensified during the 1990s by studies exploring concepts of society that formed the basis for the constitution of individual nations. Creating politically mature citizens through education was viewed as essential to preventing an uncritical and unreflected identification with the nation state.

In view of the use of ethnic stereotypes and images of the enemy for political gain, Wolfgang Höpken warned in the mid-1990s against identifying the phenomenon of newly-ascendant nationalism as a problem limited to South East Europe. His plea to widen the perspective beyond the region has lost none of its relevance today.

At the same time the Institute initiated research into the concept of the nation beyond European borders. One such study investigated the political function of history in national legitimation discourses in Argentina and Guatemala in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Another project examined national constructions of identity and their implementation in his-

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The initial studies by the GEI, in the 1980s, of the depiction of the nation in textbooks had been conducted from a purely historical perspective. Subsequent research began to employ ethnographic and linguistic approaches. One such undertaking was a project exploring history and social studies books in non-Russian CIS states. Researchers in this project, which ran from 1997 to 1999, analysed the nation as a semantic construction and explored whether it served a community-building and/or discriminating function in textbooks. These studies were resumed between 2008 and 2013 as part of a research pro­ ject into ‘Cultural Patterns of Interpretation in Socialism’, which employed a comparative perspective to examine which interpretations of the socialist past compete for interpretive dominance in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Lithuania, three societies on the periphery of the post-Soviet region.

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tory teaching in Germany and Mexico. In Latin America the concept of the nation constitutes a central aspect of ‘positive self-assurance’,9 whereas, due to its distinct history, this type of positive self-­assurance is viewed with more suspicion in Germany. Such research projects on the representation of the nation in Latin American textbooks highlighted the identity- and community building characteristics of nineteenth and twentieth-century national movements by focussing on ethnic diversity in Guatemala and Mexico. They also underlined how the focus on the unifying function of the concept of nation was used to make social and cultural contrasts disappear behind a constructed and historically propagated national unity. The definition of nation has also been a core aspect of the research undertaken since the 1990s on the depiction of Palestinian and Israeli history in textbooks issued by the Palestinian National Authority. Researchers investigated the self-perception of the

constitution and development of their own nation described by the authors of the first generation of Palestinian textbooks to be published since the conception of a national curriculum by the Palestinian authorities, and compared this with the depictions of Palestinians in Israeli textbooks. They placed the nation in the context of the Jewish and Islamic religions and of pan-Arab perceptions. One aim of the study was to reveal how the relationship between the two nations was depicted in their textbooks. The study did not find generalised negative portrayals of the Jewish or Islamic religions, but it did find criticism of specific political ideas and of measures and action taken by the Israeli state and the Palestinian organisations respectively. The historical and political discourses dominating the early twenty-first century illustrate the importance of focussing more on regional and global levels when researching the construction of the nation in textbooks. This had already been recognised as a necessity when work on international textbooks began

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at the GEI, as the participants of the bilateral textbook discussions sought alternatives to nation states forged by the will of the people or founded on the principle of consociationalism. Sovereign territories and cultural landscapes were examined from a historical perspective during the German-Polish textbook discussions. In connection with the emergence of European regional movements in the 1970s, international textbook researchers became interested in the ‘small space’ or the region as the immediate extent of a person’s life experience. Jeismann combined this perspective with a transnational angle. He viewed the region as an access point, through which

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national borders could more easily be mentally and organisationally transcended. Textbook researchers should, he claimed, therefore focus more closely on the historical perspective of cross-border cooperation between Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, for example, or in the German-Dutch and German-French border regions. Research begun by Ernst Hinrichs involving European comparisons of regions and regional identity were expanded in the 1990s to explorations of ‘small spaces’ in South East Asia and have been continued in the last ten years by studies of the transnational construction of the Upper Silesia region and the historic ‘Pruzzenland landscape’.

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5 Colonialism and Post-colonial Perspectives

The portrayal of colonialism and independence movements in colonies has been a particularly contentious aspect of bi- and multilateral textbook discussions between European nations since the 1950s. During such discussions representatives from France and Belgium highlighted for many years the contribution made by colonial policies to the modernisation of colonised societies. Their interpretation of national independence movements was of the voluntary withdrawal of colonial powers following the successful ‘education’ of the indigenous populations in the formation of ‘modern’ societies according to the Western understanding of the term. Such interpretations contrast with the recommendations that were produced as the result of textbook discussions in 1954 and 1956 with India and Indonesia respectively. While the latter recommendations did highlight the technical and civilising influence of the West, they also expressed clear criticism of the exploitation and suppression of colonised communities by the colonial powers. The recommendations emphasised the demands for national self-determination and referred to those same colonial powers’ own political traditions of democratisation and self-determination. This issue was a clear manifestation of the ambivalent relationship between the newly independent nation states and the former colonisers. Being situated in a country with a relatively brief colonial history meant that the Institute was particularly suited to the role of mediator between the colonial powers and their former colonies. Accord-

ing to Georg Eckert, the experience of the recreation of a democratic society after 1945 meant the Institute was also able to contribute independently to the challenge to establish social and education policy foundations suitable for the young nation states to build upon. The Institute was also able to respond to the socialist developments supported by the Soviet Union and the GDR in a number of African and Asian states. From the beginning, the Institute had worked towards changing the portrayal of Africa and Asia in German textbooks and encouraged research stays in Braunschweig by African and Asian academics who wanted to develop new educational media for their countries under the auspices of UNESCO and in the context of the international labour (education) movement. Among these academics were Gérald-Félix Tchikaya from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Jogindra Kumar Banerji from India. Representatives from Tunisia at the bilateral textbook discussions held in 1976 and 1977 in Braunschweig and Tunis called for equal treatment of the respective histories and for equitable discussions on religion and social development perspectives. They suggested that there should be more prominent mention in Western European textbooks of development potential and opportunities that had been obstructed or interrupted by colonial conquest. A central criticism focussed on the depiction of the national independence movement in European textbooks, which in the eyes of the Tunisian participants was dominated by the geopolitical involvement of the European powers during the cold war

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enabled different colonial powers and former colonies to be contrasted but also permitted a comparative overview between different colonial systems and development paths in former colonies in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. The work of African, Indian or Latin American researchers was given the same consideration as Western European views. At the same time, the intensive discussions being held between researchers from former colonies and their European colleagues led to research on the portrayal of non-­European cultures in European textbooks being intensified.

Georg Eckert (centre) with Professor Suri (right, New Delhi) and Gérald-Félix Tchikaya (left, Brazzaville) (Goslar 1962)

and did not adequately represent the perspective of the indigenous North African population, which was ascribed a passive role in events. The multilateral projects undertaken by the Institute in the 1970s, under the auspices of the Council of Europe and UNESCO, were instrumental in starting a gradual shift in the depiction of colonialism in Western European textbooks, leading to African and Latin American perspectives being featured more prominently. Research projects designed to draw multi-­dimensional comparisons not only 102

Following a study by Georg Eckert in 1970 on the image of Africa in English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish history books, a complementary study examined the depiction of Africa in geography books for Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, England, France, the Netherlands and Wales. The analysis was framed within the context of the respective national understanding of self and of social discourses surrounding the colonial past of the European countries examined, as well as specific academic and didactic traditions in the cases of Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, England, France and the Netherlands. It criticised the overwhelmingly Euro-centric perspective demonstrated in the textbooks studied in their selection of topics, categories and questions and recommended that ‘non-European peoples and cultures [should be] interpreted and evaluated on their own merits’.10 It also called for increased inclusion of ethnological methods in textbook research, which would enable the Euro-centric bias of the dominant theoreti-

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cal and methodological approaches used to date in political science and economic geography to be recognised and resolved.11 Until well into the 1980s, research at the International Textbook Institute, and later the Georg Eckert Institute, had focussed strongly on the portrayals in German and European textbooks of colonialism and imperialism in Africa. In later years attention turned more towards history discourses and textbook depictions in the former colonies themselves. Since the end of the 1980s this subject has been studied using examples from Guatemala and Algeria, which were compared with the discourses and textbooks of former colonial powers. Research into colonialism from a post-colonial perspective formed one of the GEI’s core research areas in the early years of the twenty-first century. A conference held in Braunschweig in 2004 titled ‘Der Algerienkrieg: Erinnern, debattieren, lehren‘ (The Algerian War: To Remember, to Debate, to Teach) provided a springboard for research. It was inspired by postcolonial studies and transnational history perspectives and used the contentious politics of memory surrounding the Algerian war as an example of the typically complex relationship between former European colonial powers and their former colonies, resulting from their shared history. The GEI pursued this approach through its research programme by bringing together geographers, educationalists and historians to study the representation of colonialism and decolonisation in European textbooks in a post-colonial and transnational comparison. Particu-

lar focus was placed on the programmatic questions regarding the extent to which the colonial past had shaped and altered not only the former colony but also the society of the former colonising power; particularly in terms of its national, or even European, self-image. Several GEI projects have used textbooks as a way to address in greater depth debates concerning interpretations of topics such as colonialism, modernisation, repression and genocide that have intensified since the beginning of the new millennium in Europe and Africa. These projects have also linked their textbook analyses with studies investigating wider discourses on the way societies view and describe themselves. This research contributed valuable insights not only into the academic history of colonialism and de-colonisation but also contributed to studies into national and European post-colonial memory cultures and memory politics. Several multi-disciplinary projects cooperated in explorations of how colonial representations and knowledge of Africa are reproduced in German and English textbooks; the depiction of the colonial past in German, British and French textbooks; the corresponding debates on post-colonial memory politics in nation states and within a European framework, as well as the significance of decolonisation for social discourse on national or European identity, using France as a case study. Overall, these studies have shown that the representation of the colonial past, and the social debates surrounding it, have acquired a central role in shaping the national and European identities of the respective countries.

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Comparative studies of history and civics textbooks, on which the GEI worked with researchers from several North African and Middle Eastern countries, clearly demonstrated that the interpretation of European influence remains a contentious area, not only in Europe but also in its former colonies. There is an ongoing struggle between a focus on exploitation and repression on one hand, and an emphasis on cultural references important for the construction of modern societies on the other. The pervasive power of the colonial legacy is still evident today in numerous conflicts on the Afri-

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can continent. Against this backdrop a study conducted by the GEI and UNESCO titled ‘Learning to Live Together in Africa through History Education’ analysed history teaching and how it has developed in 28 African countries and produced recommendations describing the contribution history education can make to resolving existing conflicts. The study called for transnational history narratives and curricula to be developed based on the ‘General History of Africa’, complied by African academics, which would recognise the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of the continent as an ‘enrichment’.

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6 Religion

Participants in bilateral and multilateral textbook discussions viewed religion as an important uniting element in European societies. In the mid-1960s they therefore launched a separate analysis of the ideational conditions, belief and knowledge systems that lay at the heart of political and economic decision-making and institution building. Later in the 1960s they were able to return to the subject with the support of the Vatican, which had called for an aggiornamento (renewal) during the Second Vatican Council requiring the Church to be more open to the problems of the contemporary world and expressing the desire to enter into dialogue with representatives from other religious communities. Representatives from the Vatican suggested, in 1968, undertaking a comparative study of the treatment of religious and church history in the textbooks of the Council of Europe’s member countries. The ISBI coordinated the project, which ran from 1969 until 1977 and examined the depiction of religion during three time periods: antiquity, the epoch between the Reformation and Catholic reform in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and post-industrial revolution. The project, which was financed by the Council of Europe and the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk (precursor of the Volks­ wagen Foundation), brought together church historians, sociologists of religion and educationalists from Italy, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Spain, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, France, Austria and the Vatican. They investigated the development of religion in close connection with milestones for societal change and were in favour of analysing

Georg Eckert (centre) in conversation with Michele Maccarone (left, Rome) and Professor Léopold Genicot (right, Leuven) (1969)

Islam and Judaism ‘in their own right’. However, the study’s chosen perspective clearly favoured Catholicism and Protestantism. When addressing the subject of religion in industrial societies the topic was expanded to focus on civic religions. Comparably the discussions and analysis undertaken by the German-Israeli Textbook Commission between 1979 and 1985 focussed heavily on the portrayal of Jewish history, culture and religion. The findings and recommendations issued in 1985 concentrated overwhelmingly on Jewish history from antiquity up to 1945 and only a small section addressed the depic-

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tion of Israel and/or Germany after 1945. While the Commission’s 1985 findings did praise the value placed on ‘the religious and historical significance of Judaism for Christianity’ in contemporary German textbooks, they also pointed out omissions and inaccuracies and criticised the occasional stereotypical portrayals of Jewish life and religion that were found particularly in textbook chapters on ancient and medieval history. Key suggestions for a comparative examination of Christianity and Islam came in the 1970s from the bilateral textbook discussions conducted with Tunisia. The Tunisian represenExperts discuss the treatment of religious history in European history textbooks (1969) tatives called for the two religions to be investigated with the same levels of academic ‘integrity’ and for entrenched comparwere again portrayed as contrasting religions and isons in European textbooks that associated Islam that ‘one’s own’ religion was emblematic of a guarprimarily with military violence and a lack of develantor of peace while ‘the other’ was presented as opment, and Christianity with promoting peace and legitimising military violence. social advancements, to be resolved. Examinations of the role of violence and peace in religion and the In the 1980s the Georg Eckert Institute responded in function of religion in economic development and their textbook research to concerns raised by educain conflicts surrounding environmental risks have tion policy-makers. The study published in 1987 on shaped the central research questions that have ‘Turkish as a Mother Tongue in the Federal Repubremained at the core of the Georg Eckert Institute’s lic of Germany’, which had been carried out by the GEI, Turkish and German linguists, and sociologists, textbook studies since the 1990s. Studies of textfocussed on textbooks for the Turkish population books published after the civil wars in South East whose children were to receive a cultural education Europe, including those in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, revealed that Christianity and Islam in Germany. These books aimed to provide the chil106

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dren with the tools they needed to integrate into life in Germany, but also prepare them for their possible return to Turkey. At the same time the Georg Eckert Institute was closely involved with a study initiated by the Isla­ mische Wissenschaftliche Akademie (Islamic Academic Academy) investigating how Islam was portrayed in textbooks in the Federal Republic of Germany, the findings of which were published in the Institute’s Book Series between 1986 and 1990. The study questioned whether German textbooks fairly represented Islam in a way that promoted mutual cultural understanding and laid the foundations for cooperation between different cultural communities within the Federal Republic. It emphasised that analyses of Islam must not be geographically limited to North Africa and the Middle East but that Muslim communities in Europe and Asia

should be equally included. The study criticised depictions of Muslim societies as apparently unable to create ‘modern’ economies and societies according to the Western model. Such portrayals featured nomadism too heavily as a social format in the Islamic world and paid too little attention to urban development in the present or the past in predominantly Islamic countries. Ernst Hinrichs who, in his role as director, supported these research projects and the publication of their findings in the Book Series, praised the change of perspective represented by the examination of Islam in German textbooks and called for the cultural dialogue initiated between Christian and Islamic religions in relation to textbooks to be continued in an examination of the portrayal of Christianity in textbooks for predominantly Muslim communities.

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Research by the Institute into the depiction of Islam in German textbooks gained renewed attention at the beginning of the new millennium. The public debates concerning Islam that came to the fore following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 made the need for appropriate descriptions in German textbooks more pressing. The new studies emanated from Germany’s perceived self-image as a country shaped by immigration and the fact that Islam could no longer be viewed as a ‘foreign’ religion in Germany, given that many Muslims in Germany were the third generation of their families to live and work there. In 2002 the Georg Eckert Institute carried out an analysis on the depiction of Islam in German textbooks released between 1995 and 2002, the results of which were published in the journal ‘Internationale Schulbuchforschung’ (International Textbook Research). Similarly to the investi108

gation by the Islamic Academic Academy, the study analysed textbooks for history, geography, social studies and politics as well as those for protestant and catholic religious education. The study’s authors criticised specific material on Muslim communities for continuing to ignore their economic development and for highlighting the backwardness of such societies. Economic successes were described in relation to the availability of natural resources that had only been developed and exploited with the help of specialists from Western Europe and the USA. They also objected to the portrayal of Muslim cultural achievements being limited to folklore, belly dancing and exotic cuisine, and argued that the cultural and economic contributions of Muslims to German society, specifically first-generation migrants and German citizens with an immigrant background, should be recognised. In subsequent years, experts in religion and Islam working at the GEI extended these studies to include textbooks from a number of European countries. In their longitudinal study on the presentation of Islam in European textbooks they criticised the persistence of traditional contrasts between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the textbooks and called for comparative depictions of plural value systems, norms and organisations to replace depictions of a Christian heritage shared by all. The most important findings from research into current representations of Islam in textbooks from Spain, Great Britain, France, Germany and Austria were published in 2011 in a study named ‘Keine

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largely ignored the historic tradition of coexistence between Christian and Muslim societies in South East Europe as well as debates in the Islamic world concerning postcolonial perspectives, interculturalism and diversity.

Chance auf Zugehörigkeit?’ (No Chance of Belonging?). The study questioned whether Islam continued to be portrayed as a unitary religion and Muslims as a homogenous group. The study also examined whether the historical development of predominantly Islamic societies was presented as overwhelmingly static or whether textbooks referenced the many diverse strands of development. Instead of presenting engagement and dialogue between different cultural communities, the authors found that Islam continues to be portrayed in textbooks as the antipode of a constructed European identity. Social backwardness and a propensity towards violence were still put forward as arguments emphasising the differentiation and separation between Muslim societies and Europe. Depictions of the subject in Western European textbooks

Comparative studies exploring the depiction of religion in lessons are a core part of the research carried out by the Georg Eckert Institute today. Some studies take a historical approach: Between 2014 and 2018, German and Israeli academics investigated the significance of references to Jewish religious tradition in the transformation of German-speaking Judaism during the period of modern societal development between 1750 and 1850, known as the ‘Sattelzeit’ (threshold time, a term coined by Reinhart Koselleck). Researchers have systematically examined sermons, hymn books, translations of the Bible, catechisms and textbooks for Jewish religious instruction in the context of cultural translation processes that formed the basis of fundamental changes in Jewish education and society. Other studies pay particular attention to the development of Islam and dialogue between religions. The joint appointment, in spring 2016, by the Institute and the University of Göttingen of an expert in Islamic studies ensures the progression of the Institute’s research into images of the self and the other related to Islam in European textbooks and in teaching materials in predominantly Muslim societies. The appointment also reinforces application-oriented research into Islam at the GEI and its interfaces with religious education, diversity and migration.

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7 Europe and European Integration

Throughout its life the Institute has made important contributions to research into how Europe was represented in Western European history textbooks, in particular within the framework of the Council of Europe textbook conferences that were held between 1954 and 1958. Eckert viewed the examination of common developments in European history and their treatment in history teaching as an important tool in overcoming the nationalist views that had been prevalent in the nineteenth century and as a way of encouraging European thought and a feeling of European solidarity. He agreed with the Kiel-based historian Karl Dietrich Erdmann, who later became chairman of the Verband der Historiker Deutschlands (Association of German Historians), that research into depictions of European history could transcend the limitations of the bilateral textbook discussions, which were restricted to examinations of national history and the bilateral relationship, and could open a transnational perspective for history teaching. Since the 1950s the Council of Europe has supported European cooperation across the continent, not simply limited to the member-states of the European Economic Community and its successors. This was mirrored by the efforts of the Institute to involve Yugoslavian and Czech researchers in its studies. Discussions that took place at conferences held by the Council of Europe illustrated that research into individual countries’ perceptions of central concepts and lines of European development should be the first step towards common definitions in curricula and textbooks. At the third conference, which was 110

Two pioneers of European history teaching: Georg Eckert (left) and André Puttemans (1954)

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held in Rome in 1955 and focussed on the revision of history books, delegates agreed to prepare a lexicon of key historical terms in European history. The Institute assumed responsibility for coordinating and editing the document.

one to processes of democratisation and secularisation. Their studies highlighted the historical connection between a number of Central European societies and ‘Europe’, but excluded Cold War-era Eastern Europe from European history.

By helping to compile and edit the lexicon ‘Grund­begriffe der Geschichte: 50 Beiträge zum europäischen Geschichtsbild‘ (Basic concepts of history: 50 contributions to the European view of history), which was written by 25 historians and political scientists from Austria, Belgium, France, the FRG, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland, the Institute made an important contribution to the clarification and understanding of Europe’s self-­image as well as defining central concepts and historical trends that should be portrayed in history textbooks in future. The selected concepts were not limited to Western Europe, and consisted of groups of terms that traced the path of economic development and the democratisation of societies, described social change within processes of reform and revolu­ tion, and addressed colonialism in a historical perspective from antiquity to the decolonisation process.

Studies by geographers and political scientists at the ISBI on how history was taught in Western European and Turkish textbooks from the 1960s onwards provided a springboard for many more in-depth studies of the European unification process and its effects on the spatialisation of social, economic and cultural processes. The recommendations that resulted from these studies called for the history and geography of Europe not to be explicitly portrayed in European textbooks as a continuation of traditional national histories and national geographies on another spatial level, but for them to be depicted from an independent perspective of economic, political and cultural development. A long-term historical consideration would prevent a view shaped by national antagonism being uncritically transposed onto other historical periods, thus enabling the development of an essentialist European concept. The European unification process should be presented in the context of the conflict between alternative development concepts and should therefore pay more attention to transnational coalitions such as the Hanseatic League or the Duchy of Burgundy.

The historians involved in the project distanced themselves throughout from an essentialist definition of Europe. They were, however, under pressure from European politicians, who wished to make the European integration process the guiding theme for future history teaching. The researchers took a normative approach in the 1950s and 1960s, basing their research on the understanding that belonging to Europe, both currently and historically, bound

The foundation of the Georg Eckert Institute in 1975 occurred during a period of increased demand for research into Europe, led predominantly by those European states that had successfully surmounted

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dictatorships and established democratic systems, such as Greece and Spain, and which supported a European education policy. In 1978 Karl-Ernst Jeismann viewed a multilateral research project on the subject of ‘Europe in the Textbooks of the European Peoples’, in this context as a central aspect of the Institute’s work, and one which he hoped would shape its work into the 1980s.12 He called for this research into Europe to become the basis for a joint, collaborative research project with European colleagues on a mutually agreed subject, which would respond to the challenges associated with the economic, legal and cultural changes in the decade of the CSCE negotiations. Such a project should encourage a renewed contemplation of each country’s self-image and the knowledge they were disseminating about a shared history. To mitigate the danger of misunderstanding such a European project as a political instrument to be abused by Europeans, or more precisely Western Europeans, in setting themselves apart from the rest of the world, textbook discussions would be continued with states in the ‘Third World’ and combined with the European project. In 1979, historians and history teachers from Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Poland gathered for a conference on ‘European History to Teach to Europeans’. The Institute succeeded, through this conference, in overcoming the prevailing separation of Western, Central and Eastern European research perspectives. It was no coincidence that in his chapter ‘Jus Publicum 112

Europaeum’ the Polish historian Franciszek Ryszka addressed the formation of a common public European legal understanding as a key element of a common European history. In addition to research into how European history was portrayed, by the end of the 1970s the Council of Europe and the Ministries of Education and Cultural Affairs of the federal states that supported the Georg Eckert Institute were demanding a stronger focus on the depiction of the European unification process in textbooks for social studies and politics. Particular emphasis was laid in this context on mitigating the danger of attributing European integration in the latter part of the twentieth century entirely to Europe’s history. Since the 1970s historians, geographers and political scientists have called for a multi-perspective view of the European unification process. They have resisted political ideas of using school teaching to directly legitimise a clearly defined form of European cooperation. Yet at the same time they have taken a critical look at the task of developing a sense of European awareness as a legitimising fundament of the European Community. Pupils should be given the opportunity to openly discuss the subject, without bias. The conference on ‘Co-operation in Europe since 1945’, held by the GEI in 1979 at the invitation of the Council of Europe, examined political, economic and cultural cooperation between Western European states since the end of the Second World War and defined this as a central aspect in encouraging

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pupils to identify with the process of European integration. European cooperation should be treated as an independent, interdisciplinary topic in social studies teaching. The success of European integration processes in the 1980s was accompanied by an upsurge in research on how the European dimension was portrayed in the textbooks of European countries. The education policy-making institutions of the European Community appealed for the unifying aspects of European history to become the bedrock of textbooks being developed for social studies subjects. The decisions made in June 1985 by the Council of Europe to place more significance on the European dimension in education, in conjunction with the decisions made by the KMK, created the ideal conditions for new research concepts. The Georg Eckert Institute subsequently developed a project, financed by the Agnelli Foundation, which, between 1990 and 1994, analysed how Europe was depicted in French, German, Spanish, Italian and British textbooks. This was the first time a study had systematically linked content analysis with a comparative analysis of textbook systems and curricula development in those European countries. In order to illustrate new perspectives on the way in which Europe was portrayed in textbooks, Falk Pingel argued in favour of separate chapters being developed on the history of the movement towards European unification. In view of the increasing proliferation of references to Europe in everyday life the ‘underestimation of European contexts in political and historical educa-

‘By the end of this century, the European Union will have expanded and internal economic and political integration will have progressed. This will also affect the education systems of member states. Professional and academic qualifications are already widely recognised within the Union, even though this process is still hindered by many practical obstacles. If academic qualifications are to be valid throughout the Union then in the long term the content of education will align. At the very least, however, Europe and the processes of European integration will have to be addressed in history, geography and social studies lessons.’ Source: Falk Pingel, Introduction to Macht Europa Schule? Die Darstellung Europas in Schulbüchern der Europäischen Gemeinschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Diesterweg, 1995), p. XI.

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tion to date [could] deepen or consolidate defensiveness or ignorance with regards to European responsibilities both within its borders and beyond’.13 Calls to cultivate a sense of awareness that European borders have changed in the past and that Europe will continue to change in the future, as well as questions related to the porosity of its borders, take into account the shifts in the political framework stemming from the revolutionary and transformative processes that swept through Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The Agnelli study of the 1980s was limited to Western Europe, but in the mid-1990s new comparative studies, supported again by the Agnelli Foundation with the addition of the Council of Europe, were carried out with colleagues in Central and Eastern Europe. These studies were designed to bring together the views expressed on Europe by textbook authors in the West and East of the continent and focussed on different lines of development in European history. During this period, the Institute’s geographers and political scientists were exploring, within the framework of the German-Polish Textbook Commission, how the new economic and living opportunities offered by European cooperation were portrayed in textbooks. The researchers questioned how cooperation within an expanded Europe could help solve problems associated with increasing mobility, increased mass transport or growing environmental pollution and destruction, as these were issues that could no longer be solved purely in a national context. 114

From the mid-1990s onwards the Council of Europe increasingly involved civic organisations, such as the European Standing Conference of History Teachers Associations, in the conception and execution of research into the depiction of European history in European textbooks. This provided the Georg Eckert Institute with the opportunity to work with EUROCLIO (European Association of History Educators) and the European Educational Publishers Group, to develop a research project called ‘Learning and Teaching about the History of Europe in the 20th Century’. This project, which ran from 1997 to 2001, responded to the expansion of member states in the Council of Europe by studying a representative selection of countries that illustrated the diversity of textbook systems and teaching cultures. The GEI worked with researchers from Germany, France, the Nether­ lands, Russia, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Norway and Finland to produce textbook studies that were published in 2000 as ‘The European Home: Representations of 20th Century Europe in History Textbooks’. The publication of the book ‘Crossroads of European Histories – Multiple Outlooks on Five Key Moments of the History of Europe’ to which the GEI contributed a study on the revolutionary year of 1848, and the publication of the digital European history book ‘Shared Histories for a Europe without Dividing Lines’ in 2014, enabled the Council of Europe’s History Teaching Unit to broaden the view of European twentieth-century history beyond the years of crisis and to focus as well on key years, events and movements that represented political, cultural and economic upheaval.

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Analyses of representations of Europe and of identification processes within it became a constituent part of the GEI’s medium-term research and working programme focussing on ‘Europe in the World – the World in Europe. Representations, Practices and Transfers in the Context of Schools and Teaching’ when it became a member of the Leibniz Association in 2011. The GEI introduced research projects that investigated differentiation and overlap between national and European history using case studies from France and Germany as well as a comparative study of Eastern European states such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova. These studies established the various contexts and connections in which there were strong arguments for either the individual nation or for Europe and explored the relationships between the two concepts.

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8 Human Rights Education

Since its foundation the ISBI had explored the depiction of human rights within the framework of the bi- and multilateral textbook discussions. The initial impulse came from the textbook discussions held in the 1950s and 1960s with Great Britain, the USA and France, which frequently touched upon the depiction of fundamental rights in the shape of the ‘Bill of Rights’, the ‘Declaration of Independence’ and the ‘Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme’ (Declaration of Human Rights).

given the necessary skills to actively address threats to and violations of human rights.

Ultimately however, the most significant stimulus for the Institute’s research into human rights came from UNESCO. In the 1970s and 1980s the GEI organised several international conferences that examined how, and to what extent, the ‘Recommendation Concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and Peace and Education Relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms’ adopted in 1974 at the UNESCO General Conference, was being implemented in schools. The events and projects undertaken in the 1980s were reflected in the 1991 publication of the ‘UNESCO Guidelines for Curriculum and Textbook Development in International Education’. The guidelines called for pupils to be taught civic rights and responsibilities on a global, national and local level and for them to be 116

The work undertaken by the Georg Eckert Institute on the subject of human rights education gained renewed significance in the 1989/1990 transitional period that marked the beginning of a process of transformation in the states of Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to discussions in those states after 1989 about the development of human rights education in the American and Western European tradition, growing cultural diversity within a globalised society presented its own challenges for traditional human rights education. The GEI responded both to these social developments and to changes within the culture of teaching in subjects such as history and social studies/politics, where curricula and textbooks increasingly included questions and topics that extended beyond national borders and whose practitioners reported to the GEI the growing need for research. Human rights education was a research field that had been consistently supported and encouraged by the members of the Georg Eckert Institute’s academic committee. Peter Weinbrenner, a political scientist at Bielefeld University, was committed

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to human rights education and worked alongside Klaus Hüfner, the Berlin-based educationalist and then vice-president of the German UNESCO commission, and the historian Jörn Rüsen from Bielefeld. Weinbrenner worked with the GEI to design research projects and systems of Source: Peter Weinbrenner, Menschenrechte lehren – Empfehlungen für die Entwicklung von Lehrbüchern zur Menschenrechtserziehung, in id. and Karl-Peter Fritzsche, Menschenrechtserziehung. Ein categorisation that became the Leitfaden zur Darstellung des Themas “Menschenrechte“ in Schulbüchern und im Unterricht (Bonn/ standard for social and cultural Braunschweig: Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission/Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung, 1998), p. 24. comparative analyses on the subject of human rights in textbooks. The design took into account the changes and discussions concerning how it can be further in the concept of human rights education that had developed from a culturally comparative perspecoccurred over time by questioning whether the histive must be the focus of research into human rights tory of human rights should be presented in the education in the future. textbooks as a succession of declarations or whether the background conflicts and advances should be Using this research design as a basis, the GEI organised two conferences, in December 1992 and depicted. It also stipulated that textbooks should ­February 1993, on the depiction of human rights in be more closely examined to establish whether European textbooks for history, social studies and they depicted the development of human rights politics, and on human rights in textbooks worldacross different generations as an open-ended prowide. Later that year the findings were incorporated cess. Another important aspect of research was the in discussions to create a world action plan for eduweighting of the definition and recognition of one’s cation on human rights, which took place in Monown rights in relation to the rights of other cultural treal, and at the United Nations World Conference communities. on Human Rights, in Vienna. The aim of such textbook analyses is ultimately to The 1992 conference on the depiction of human clearly identify whether the textbooks in question rights in European textbooks brought academics address possibilities for citizens to be involved in from Denmark, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Northe definition and implementation of human rights. way, Poland, Russia and Sweden to the GEI. The A critical examination of the universal validity of a comparative perspective used in the resulting study human rights definition shaped by Western culture

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was expanded beyond Europe in 1993 to include Australia, Israel, Canada and Turkey. The didactic dice model designed by Peter Weinbrenner was discussed in these later studies. The model was concerned with how textbooks and curricula addressed human rights and linked spatial and temporal developments with the theoretical-systematic dimension of human rights and the different dimensions of learning.

The findings from comparative cultural research coordinated by the GEI at the European level were incorporated into concrete recommendations for the development of curricula and for textbook design, published by the German UNESCO commission and the Georg Eckert Institute in 1993 under the title ‘Teaching Human Rights. Suggestions for Teaching Guidelines‘.

The findings from the country studies revealed that most textbooks over-represented the normative level in their treatment of human rights. The empirical level of human rights abuses, human rights implementation and the responsibilities of citizens were, in contrast, neglected. However, human rights education should not be limited to normative and factual depictions; rather, it must transmit knowledge about the development of human rights from a multitude of perspectives. Lessons should combine the ability to analyse the present with a view to the future and should enable pupils to apply knowledge as well as cognitive and emotional skills gained in lessons to everyday life. The basis of human rights education was a skill- and practice-oriented perspective through which pupils could develop ‘an understanding of their rights and responsibilities as citizens in local, national and global communities, as well as for the necessity of eliminating all kinds of discrimination and threat’.14 The historical dimension, communicated through the multi-generational model of human rights, should teach pupils to consider future developments in human rights. 118

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9 Environment

The depiction of the environment and climate in school textbooks has been of academic interest to geographers in particular since the 1970s. Geographers from France, Poland, the Soviet Union and China who have taken part in the bi- and multilateral textbook discussions on geography organised by the Institute since the 1970s, have repeatedly highlighted the need for research into textbook coverage of the endangerment and preservation of natural living conditions. Their calls were largely in response to growing public and scientific criticism of the prevailing model of industrialisation that has not addressed the risks of technological developments, such as nuclear energy, and has ignored the environmental implications of the industrialisation process. In 1989, at the end of his first term as director, Ernst Hinrichs recognised that colleagues from former socialist countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union were expressing great interest in research into environmental education. In his view the subject would also provide an opportunity for the Institute to expand its work to include collaborations with experts in the natural sciences and environmental research. These ideas have been expressly supported since the late 1980s by the Institute’s academic committee and the board of trustees. According to them the subject of the environment should be included in social science teaching and not just confined to geography lessons. They regard it as particularly suited to deciphering perceptions and patterns of interpretation and for examining the formation of value concepts by comparing history, geography and

social studies. Such an approach would enable controversial positions with regard to modern society’s self-understanding to be revealed as well as developmental perspectives for solving environmental problems. The Institute therefore developed a research project that focussed on how environmental issues were depicted in German curricula and textbooks. In 1993 this project analysed curricular requirements in German states with regard to climate change, air pollution, water contamination, soil degradation and the associated reduction of land available for agriculture as well as measures that could be taken to reduce damage to the natural environment. The findings revealed that the environment was presented in textbooks as an external quantity to be controlled by humans and that German curricula and textbooks overwhelmingly presented ecological problems in geographically distant regions in Asia, Africa or Latin America. The study concluded that examples of European industrial societies should be included as well. It also called for a move away from environmental problems being primarily addressed from the perspective of how one would personally be affected and frequent attempts to place the blame elsewhere, rather to view problems and development potential in an international context. Some of the research into geography teaching undertaken in subsequent years by the Georg Eckert Institute was inspired by the German-Chinese textbook discussions. One example is an analysis of how the subject of environmental awareness was

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addressed in curricula and textbooks for Chinese primary and middle schools, conducted by Wang Min, a geographer and educator at Beijing Normal University. His work was published in 2007 in the journal ‘International Textbook Research’. In order to establish an interdisciplinary perspective, the Hamburg-based historian and educator, Bodo von Borries, a member of the Georg Eckert Institute’s academic advisory board, developed a parallel research process for history teaching. In his findings

Wang Min, Teachers‘ Handbook on Environmental Protection (Beijing 2009)

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Borries called for teaching that highlighted interdependencies, particularly between people and the environment, and for a critical view of the ‘downside’ of scientific curiosity and industrial growth in the modern Western world as well as a comparison with alternative moral systems and ways of life.15 The Institute took up these suggestions in subsequent years and in 2005 undertook an investigation of how natural disasters were portrayed in German history, social studies and geography books. The researchers carrying out this study criticised the fact that questions of environmental destruction were still only being addressed from a Euro-centric perspective. Above all, they were of the opinion that textbook authors appeared reluctant to discuss natural disasters or present possible solutions stemming from the residents of the affected areas for dealing with such catastrophes and with the consequences of climate change and environmental damage. At the same time, the study called for geography and social studies textbooks to present application-oriented knowledge focussing on prevention and that encouraged a measured reaction to natural disasters. The cooperation initiated during the German-­ Chinese textbook discussions between the geographers of the Beijing Normal University, the University of Würzburg and the Georg Eckert Institute was renewed in 2005 within the framework of the ‘International Dialogue on Educational Approaches to Sustainability‘, initiated during the United Nations Decade for Sustainable Development. Colleagues from the USA, China and Palestine joined the Georg Eckert Institute in researching academic and didactic

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approaches to the subject of sustainable development, which were presented, jointly with the Alfred Toepfer Akademie für Naturschutz (Alfred Toepfer Academy for Nature Conservation), at teacher training events. Investigations into the relationship between ecology and the economy were also an important subject in the bilateral textbook discussions conducted

with Poland, the Czech Republic and Israel during this period. Research into the depiction of environmental problems and perspectives on sustainable development in geography textbooks was increasingly being linked with questions from peace and conflict research. The correlation between environmental problems, political and social conflicts, and educational media feature prominently in the GEI’s current work.

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10 Cultural Diversity

The question of how cultural diversity should be portrayed in textbooks for history, geography and social studies/politics has, since the 1980s, become an increasingly significant part of the research conducted by the Georg Eckert Institute. Textbook discussions with countries in the Arab world had clearly highlighted a lack of understanding for one’s own and other’s cultural identity and revealed the need for research in the area of cultural self-images and images of others. The textbook discussions with Israel, in contrast, sharpened awareness of the tradition of coexistence between different religious and cultural communities, which had shaped development in Europe. This tradition, and its conflicts and successes, should be clearly portrayed in textbooks, both for history before 1933 and after 1945, in addition to the breach of civilisation represented by the Holocaust.

siderations with Dutch and Canadian academics, whose countries had a long tradition of coexistence between different religious and cultural societies, and which, in contrast to Germany, defined themselves as destination countries for immigration and had consequently developed the requisite cultural and legal standards. Participants in the 1997 bilateral textbooks discussions with Canada pointed out that ‘one of the distinguishing features of Canada is its attempt of being a multi-cultural society yet one that is based on the principle of the two founding nations [France and England]’. The ‘third group present at the time of Canada’s formation, the aboriginal natives, are unfortunately frequently forgotten in this model’. At the same time, they emphasised that Canada’s aim was to create a modern multi-cultural national structure which was in clear contrast to the melting pot concept of countries such as the USA.16

Against the background that Germany had, since the 1960s, been increasingly shaped by migrations and cultural diversity, civil organisations and politicians called for a more intensive study of the portrayal of these factors in textbooks. Such research was a prerequisite for the creation of teaching materials that would empower pupils of different cultures to learn together for a society they could mutually shape. Researchers at the GEI discussed their con-

During his period as director of the Institute, Ernst Hinrichs elevated the debate surrounding the question of how people in different regions of the world could work together as ‘one world’ with different cultural values systems and material living conditions, to be a central pillar of the Institute’s work. A new research perspective was needed in order to achieve this goal, one which transcended traditional perspectives of the nationstate and regional perspectives of history and geog-

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raphy teaching and which must make central topics and problems of international peace frameworks and the creation of culturally diverse and economically and ecologically sustainable societies a subject of research and teaching. Addressing the portrayal of cultural diversity, in 1987 the Institute worked with researchers from the universities of Bamberg, Berlin, Essen, Gießen and Mainz to study textbooks and teaching concepts for lessons in which Turkish-speaking children in Germany were taught in their mother tongue. As a result, the GEI highlighted the necessity of developing textbooks that encouraged pupils to apply their linguistic and cultural knowledge of two cultures to their advantage in their everyday lives. The textbooks should replace the perspective of integrating a ‘foreign’ culture into a pre-existing national society with a transnational perspective, which prized multilingualism and cultural skills as important characteristics in the construction of multi-cultural societies. The processes of unification and social transformation in the Federal Republic of Germany, which immediately followed the social upheavals of 1989, led to an even stronger focus by the Institute on cultural diversity. There were calls to study the causes of the xenophobia that became increasingly prominent in Germany at the beginning of the 1990s, and to research the conditions required to peacefully coexist and mutually shape German society. These studies increased awareness of the fact that the population of Germany consisted of different religious and cultural communities and pointed out the necessity, in such a period of social and cul-

tural uncertainty, of conducting research in the five new federal states into how these different social and cultural milieus could communicate with one another, learn together and create a new society. Pupils needed therefore to learn to recognise, understand and respect different cultural experiences, historical traditions and ways of living. Textbooks should not only explain xenophobic and racist statements but must also make it possible for pupils to understand their own and other’s prejudices in order for them to actively resist hostility towards foreigners and strangers. Two studies demonstrated the constructive nature of the ‘other’, and asked which people and cultures were viewed as ‘other’. Interviews with teachers conducted within the remit of the first study, titled ‘Schulbücher gegen Fremden­ feindlichkeit’ (Textbooks to Combat Xenophobia), were supplemented in subsequent years by a second research project that questioned pupils and carried out a further survey of teachers. The findings were published in 1997 under the title ‘Der Umgang mit “Fremden”. Eine deutsch-deutsche Schülerbefragung zum Thema Schulbuch und Fremdenfeindlichkeit’ (Contact with ‘Others‘: A Survey of Pupils in Eastern and Western Germany on the Subject of Textbooks and Xenophobia). The study highlighted the relationship between formulated preconceptions or even hate towards groups perceived as ‘other’ and the social and economic conditions under which this prejudice emerged. Preconceptions increased accordingly when these groups occupied a higher social position or had better economic living conditions. Ascribed

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essentialist characteristics of inferiority and backwardness evoked feelings of impotence and hate, and to overcome them would require new concepts of mutual learning. The members of those cultural communities that had been the target of xenophobic attacks should be freed from their unilateral treatment as victims and be given the opportunity to communicate their own cultural self-image. This would, however, only be a first step on the path to a sustainable process of mutual consultation, as it is only possible to resolve the confrontation between ‘them’ and ‘us’ or even ‘us’ and ‘not us’ if the experiences necessary for coexisting and jointly shaping society are clearly articulated. The research conducted by the Institute since the 1980s on cultural diversity and debates about xeno124

phobia in Germany was accompanied by academic studies of cultural diversity in Latin American, Arab and southern Asian societies. Geographers involved in the projects put forward important conceptional considerations. They critically addressed the underlying principles of field research undertaken in regions with strong Muslim communities that explicitly or implicitly reproduced a sense of Western superiority. They also criticised a European perspective, which only described the development of non-European regions from the perspective of Western modernisation. In the early 1990s geographers worked closely with geography educators on a GEI project investigating ‘Foreign cultures in geography teaching’, which had the aim of creating knowledge for textbooks that would make pupils curious to encounter new cultures. The teaching materials created by the project on ‘Foreign cultures in geography teaching’ for secondary school social studies, politics and geography lessons was tested in schools in Lower Saxony and subsequently selected to be the official German contribution to the 2001 United Nations Year of Dialogue Among Civilisations. The work conducted by the Institute since the 1980s on cultural diversity had demonstrated that it was both worthwhile and necessary to repeat textbook studies at regular intervals and to measure current textbooks against the recommendations from previous studies. The Institute, in collaboration with the University of Hildesheim, was therefore commissioned by the federal government to conduct a study on the depiction of migration and integration in German textbooks for history, geography and social

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studies teaching. In their findings the authors recommended that migration should be portrayed more clearly as a characteristic of the social and cultural mobility required in a globalised world. They also emphasised that emigration, immigration and remigration should be treated in a more historical context and not reduced to contemporary issues related to flight and asylum. Pupils must be able to understand the genesis of contemporary migration within its historical context. This historical perspective makes it possible to explore the motives and experiences behind migration from German territories from the time of the German empire through to the period of National Socialism and on to the post-war years. On the basis of these considerations the Institute’s most recent projects have studied, from a histori-

cal and current perspective, how society has been shaped by migration in the Federal Republic. These projects analysed the self-image of different religious and cultural communities within the education system as well as the difficulties and successes in jointly forming this society. They also investigated how migration has had an impact on the way in which history is taught in schools. Historical research also applied these questions to metropolises and regions that had been particularly characterised by cultural and religious diversity, such as Berlin, Lodz and the region of Upper Silesia. Using the ‘Pruzzenland’ project as an example, researchers from the Institute worked with Polish historians to examine how pluricultural historical regions can be rendered in textbooks, and also to develop digital teaching materials.

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11 Digital Educational Media

In response to the challenges of the current digital shift, the GEI has expanded its research to include examinations of the transformation taking place in educational media for schools. Working on the premise that media change is always closely linked to processes of social change, this research particularly explores the socio-political effects of educational media for schools. Using approaches from cultural theory, it analyses the structural impact of the increasing use of digital educational technology on the ‘post digital school’. The Institute’s research examines whether and, if so, how, the development and introduction of new technology fundamentally shapes or, from a historical perspective, reconfigures, lessons, schools and consequently society. The current starting point for such research is the observation that digital technology is no longer necessarily ground-breaking in itself but has become a background element in everyday life, and the belief that it is becoming increasingly important to critically reflect on the effect of digitality in this ‘post-digital’ configuration. This contemporary examination is also

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historically embedded in the discourse on pedagogical technique and education concepts in schools over the last 150 years. The Institute has expanded its research activities in this regard in the last few years to include explorations of how educational media are appropriated in specific interactive situations in schools and lessons. Ethnographically based, ‘thick’ descriptions of media practices in schools contribute to cultural and social studies debates on the media transformation of educational practice. Research projects have explored, for example, how technical infrastructures frame school media practices and how they have framed them historically, as well as the role played by educational media in processes that attribute meaning. Schools are places in which it is possible to observe public communication, media appropriation and societal processes of change and where implicit patterns of appropriation and action can be made more visible and subsequently capable of being reflected upon and examined.

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One aspect of research into digital educational media explores how digital media technology, such as school clouds or digital textbooks, change teaching and learning practices. Other research investigates how datafication affects social, legal and education policy aspects of the school system and asks how the changes caused by the introduction of global data flows will intensify, reproduce or remove social inequality. The GEI has established a creative space in the form of ‘The Base-

ment – The Georg Eckert Institute’s Digital Lab’ where future-oriented research, teaching and learning can be conducted within these research fields, and which will concentrate the GEI’s research into digitality. The lab will also generate new stimuli for decision makers in education policy and school administrations as well as teachers and representatives of the business community, such as publishing houses or other producers of educational media for example.

1 Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Internationale Schulbuchforschung. Auf­gaben, Arbeitsweisen und Probleme, in id., Geschichte als Horizont der Gegen­wart. Über den Zusammenhang von Vergangenheits­deutung, Gegenwartsverständnis und Zukunftsperspektive (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1985), p. 1183.

9 See also Verena Radkau García, Zu den Schwierigkeiten lateinamerikanischer Gesellschaften im Umgang mit der Differenz, in id., Javier Pérez Siller, eds, Identitäten – Mythen – Rituale. Beispiele zum Umgang mit der Nation aus Lateinamerika und Spanien, Studien zur internationalen Schulbuchforschung. Schriftenreihe des GeorgEckert-­Instituts, vol. 98 (Hanover: Hahn, 1998), pp. 7–19.

2 ‘Empfehlungen’. Arbeitsform, Medium und Ergebnis der international vergleichenden Schulbuchforschung, in Zeitschrift für Geschichts­ didaktik 4 (2005), pp. 196–209. 3 Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Die Geschichte der DDR im Lehrbuch der Bundesrepublik. Bemerkungen zur Qualität von Schulbuchtexten, in Isabelle de Keghel and Robert Maier, eds, Auf den Kehrichthaufen der Geschichte? Der Umgang mit der sozialistischen Vergangenheit (Hanover: Hahn, 1998), p. 60.

10 Elfriede Hillers, Afrika in europäischer Sicht. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung zur Behandlung außereuropäischer Völker in ausgewählten europäischen Erdkundelehrbüchern, Studien zur internationalen Schulbuchforschung. Schriftenreihe des GeorgEckert-­Instituts, vol. 38 (Braunschweig: Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung, 1984), p. 191. 11 Ibid.

4 See also Kommuniqué des Deutsch-Französischen Colloquiums, 11 to 12 November 1961 in Paris, in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 13 (1962), p. 113.

12 See also Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Skizze eines Forschungs- und Arbeits­ plans des Georg-Eckert-Instituts, 18 February 1978, 143 N, Zg. 2009/069, no. 255, NLA. Lower Saxony State Archive, Wolfenbüttel.

5 Thesen der deutsch-französischen Geschichtslehrertagung, 18 to 25 July 1955 in Sèvres, in Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichts­ unterricht 5 (1956), p. 310.

13 Falk Pingel, Befunde und Perspektiven – eine Zusammenfassung, in id., ed., Macht Europa Schule? Die Darstellung Europas in Schulbüchern der Europäischen Gemeinschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Diesterweg, 1995), p. 289.

6 Empfehlungen der deutsch-tschechoslowakischen Historikertagung, 28 to 30 November 1967 in Braunschweig, Schriftenreihe des Internationalen Schulbuchinstituts, vol. 14 (Braunschweig: Internationales Schulbuchinstitut, 1968), p. 7. 7 Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Deutschland in Europa. Erfahrungen und Wahrnehmungen. Thesen zum historischen Lernen im nationalgeschichtlichen Kontext, in id., Udo Margedant, Wolfgang W. Mickel and Bernhard Sutor, Deutschland und Europa im Unterricht und Schulbuch (Sankt Augustin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 1994), p. 11. 8 See also Karl-Peter Fritzsche, Hannelore Ifert, Ingrid Krieger, Arnim Mennecke, Petra Moritz and Beate Schneider, Schulbücher gegen Frem­denfeindlichkeit? Ein Forschungsbericht (Braunschweig: Georg-­ Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung, 1993), p. 16.

14 See also Peter Weinbrenner, Menschenrechte lehren – Empfehlungen für die Entwicklung von Lehrbüchern zur Menschenrechtserziehung, in ibid., p. 5. 15 See also Bodo von Borries, Lernpotentiale der Umweltgeschichte. Kategoriale Einsichten, regionale Beispiele und praktische Erfahrungen, in Internationale Schulbuchforschung 12 (1990), pp. 9–33, here p. 15. 16 Recommendations on the Treatment of Germany/Canada in Geography Textbooks, in Alfred Hecht, Alfred Pletsch, eds, Geographies of Germany and Canada. Paradigms, Concepts, Stereotypes, Images. Perspectives on German and Canadian Textbooks and Atlases (Hanover: Hahn, 1997), p. 343. 

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VI Research Infrastructure

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1 How the Textbook Collection became the International Research Library

The international textbook collection as a cornerstone of textbook revision The motivation for work on international textbooks stemmed from a desire to be involved in the production of textbooks for history, geography, social studies/politics and religion that could empower a new internationally minded generation to share responsibility for ensuring a peaceful and democratic society. Awareness of neighbouring countries’ teaching materials was as crucial a part of this process as the critical analysis of one’s own textbooks. It was therefore important that politicians, textbook authors and publishers not only had access to contemporary textbooks but also that a historical collection of textbooks should be established in order to enable continuities and changes in didactic methods and subject content to be examined from a historical perspective. The constitution of a textbook collection formed the basis for the Institute’s work. The textbook section of the British military administration’s Education Branch helped assemble a basic inventory of German and international textbooks and specialist literature. The textbook collection was quickly expanded through donations from institutions, such as the Preußische Staatsbibliothek (Prussian State Library), and private individuals, so that by the time the International Institute for Textbook Improvement was founded in 1951 it already had a collection of over 2,000 textbooks. The collection was continually expanded over the next decades through cooperative agreements with German textbook publishing 130

houses, book exchanges within the bi- and multilateral textbook discussions and with financial support from the foreign office. In 1956 the Institute relocated to larger, multi-­ storey, premises in Okerstraße 8b (see chapter VII) in order to accommodate the ever-expanding collection. The new location for international work on textbooks not only afforded a view over the city, but also provided space for the textbook collection to be properly arranged. The availability of work spaces, seminar and meeting rooms nearby made the Institute an attractive venue for those early discussions on textbook revision. The tenacity and care with which the team at the ISBI had assembled the textbook collection was recognised in 1965 when the Council of Europe entrusted the Institute with the creation of a European Information and Documentation Centre for History and Geography Textbooks. The library has been the official Council of Europe reference library for history and geography as school subjects since 1966. In addition to assigning the library this new function the Council of Europe recommended that the education ministries of member states should make copies of newly published textbooks and curricula available to the ISBI library for free or at a reduced price, a request that was, unfortunately, only sporadically honoured by the respective education ministries. In addition to the commitment by the Council of Europe, the Stiftung Volkswagen­ werk (Volkswagen Foundation), by providing initial funding to the textbook library of 100,000 DM for

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material and personnel expansion in 1965, played a significant role in enabling the Institute to double the size of the collection from 20,000 to 40,000 volumes within the first decade. In 1965 the Institute also moved again, this time to a new building on the campus of the Teacher Training College on Rebenring, which contained an archive room and a compact space for the textbook collection that could hold 50,000 volumes. On top of the initial funding by the Volkswagen Foundation the library was provided with consistent financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG) who, in 1969, put the Institute in charge of textbooks within the DFG’s system of special subject collections, a role it performed until 2015.

University in Braunschweig formulated a report that proposed a development plan for the library and for engaging specialist library personnel, which was implemented in stages from 1975 onwards as part of the foundation process for the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. The library received a separate budget for its two departments, the academic collection and the textbook collection, which were formally incorporated into the Institute in 1978 by the new management and organised successfully by two librarians. The move to the new institute building ‘Villa von Bülow’ in 1981 provided the necessary space (see chapter VII). During the 1980s the library developed into a service centre for domestic and international textbook research. In addition to systematically enlarging

The journey from textbook collection to academic library After the death of the Institute’s founder, Georg Eckert, in 1974 there were intensive discussions regarding the reorganisation of international work on textbooks in Braunschweig which resulted in the decision that academic research on textbooks would be given equal weighting in future alongside textbook revision. Specialists from the Landesbibliothek Hannover (State Library Hanover) and the university library at the Technical

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the inventory the staff compiled bibliographies of new releases in the field of textbook research and synopses of books approved for use in the Federal Republic of Germany. By providing these selective bibliogra­phies on research themes central to the Institute’s work as well as corresponding teaching materials designed to help teacher orientation when preparing lessons, structuring lesson plans and selecting topics, the library could make a valuable contribution to research while simultaneously bridging the gap to teaching practice. In 2012 the research library also started collecting textbooks for religion, ethics and values education and since 2015 it has shared responsibility for the Specialised Information Service (FID) on Educational Science and Education Research with the Information Centre for Education at the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in

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Frankfurt am Main and its Research Library for the History of Education in Berlin (BBF), as well as the university libraries of Erlangen-Nürnberg University and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

The historical textbook collection In the 1980s the historical dimension of the textbook collection became increasingly important and the history of textbooks in social studies subjects became itself a subject of research. The Institute began researching textbooks as a key source material in the understanding of the development of education in schools, of specialist and pedagogic knowledge, as well as the constitution and transfer of knowledge within different societies and cultures. Gisela Teistler, the head of the textbook collection, determinedly pursued the expansion of the historical textbook collection and demonstrated a keen nose for tracking down widely scattered volumes of historical textbooks. She convinced institutions and private collectors to lend or donate their collections to the Georg Eckert Institute library. In 1988 the collection was significantly enlarged by a permanent loan from the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in Frankfurt am Main and the acquisition of the publisher Ferdinand Hirt’s historical textbook collection. During the same period the publishing house Volk und Wissen was instrumental in establishing a complete collection of books from the GDR for history, geography and citizenship, which laid the foun-

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dations for numerous research projects into the history of social studies teaching in the GDR. In addition to collections of textbooks for history, geography, social studies/politics and religion/ethics, the reading books and primers that had been collected since the immediate post-war years represented a significant part of the historical collection. This collection now comprises approximately 25,000 volumes and represents the most complete collection of historical textbooks in any German library.

Indexing and cataloguing Financial support from the German Research Foundation enabled the textbook collection and research literature to be systematically catalogued from 1989 onwards. In 1994 the library began to digitally capture the textbook collection and research literature and to computerise the lending process. Databases for GEI internal publication series were established in 1995 in order to simplify search and access. The library became an active participant in interlibrary lending schemes in mid-2000. In 2005 the digital catalogues for academic literature were first accessible over the internet, and in 2006 the textbook catalogue was also made available online. The library joined the

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Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund (Common Library Network – GBV) in 2007, and in the same year the separation between the two collections was abolished and the textbook collection was once again an integral part of the academic library. As a result of these processes the library was able to grow from a specialist library into a research library for international textbook research. This was partially possible through progressively focussing library services on the requirements of textbook and educational media research but also due to interlinking the library with all areas of the Institute’s academic work. Since the Institute’s admission into the Leibniz Association in 2011 the library has increasingly worked to become a hybrid research library,

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where users have access to both analogue and digital materials. The information system ‘GEI-DZS’ (Datenbank der Zugelassenen Schulbücher für die Fächer Geographie, Geschichte, Sozialkunde (Poli­ tik) in Deutschland: Database of approved textbooks for geography, history, social studies (politics) in Germany) was one of the first to be developed by the library and went online in the 2010/2011 academic year. It contains all geography, history and social studies/politics textbooks and atlases approved for use in general education and vocational schools in Germany from year 5 upwards. Because the digital shift in education is changing what we understand as a textbook and therefore also altering the research requirements, in 2016 the library started to include digital educational media in its acquisitions.

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2 Digital Infrastructures for Research and Education

Initial approaches to digitality at the GEI in the early 2000s were reflected in an area that had not traditionally been within the Institute’s remit: researchers at the GEI began to work in cooperation with partners from bilateral textbook discussions on the development of digital teaching materials for specific segments. Subsequently German and Canadian academics from the GEI, the Philipps-­Universität Marburg and the Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, working within the framework of a traditional bilateral project in 2001, developed ‘Virtual Geography Texts on Canada and Germany’ and launched the ‘[email protected]’ project, which addressed the challenges of the internet as a tool for information and materials. This joint pilot project devised digital educational materials and modules for geography teaching in both countries.

In the same year a collection of online material on German and French history and geography was compiled, which was designed to complement a joint German-French textbook for use in schools in both countries. Named DeuFraMat, the project was led by the Marburg geography professor Alfred Pletsch with financial support from the Robert Bosch Foundation. The aim of making significant texts, tables of statistics and cartographic images available for teaching in schools and universities was to illustrate both the parallels and disparities in the development paths of the two countries since the start of the industrial revolution in terms of society and economy, culture and education, state and politics. The platform was completed in 2005 and the GEI was responsible for maintaining the materials as part of the German-French textbook project.

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The creation of digital teaching materials on socially relevant topics remained an important, if not defining, area of work for the Institute. Between 2005 and 2011 the GEI undertook specialist research on ways of life in predominantly Muslim societies within the ‘1001 Ideas’ project and made it available as web-based teaching materials. The material incorporated contemporary discourses on the narratives and history concerning the relationship between Europe and the East and between Christianity and Islam, in the context of self and other as well as an examination of whether cultural transfer was adequately portrayed or neglected. The aim was to achieve a more pluralistic perception of Muslims and Islamic traditions, history and cultures in history, social studies/politics, German, literature, music and ethics teaching. Since 2013 the GEI has run the online platform ‘Zwischentöne – Materialien für Vielfalt im Klassen­ zimmer‘ (Nuances – Teaching Materials for Diversity in the Classroom), which continues this theme. The Institute develops teaching modules to be made freely available on this platform, which are based 136

on its own research findings and conceived with the help of external authors possessing subject-­specific and didactic expertise. The distinctive feature of these multimedia materials is their change of perspective, through which Islam and the diversity of Muslim lifestyles are illustrated as part of diverse societies. The original focus on themes related to Islam has been expanded in subsequent years – in line with socio-political discourse and research by the GEI into migration and integration – to include aspects of diversity shaped by migration. As part of the module development, Institute staff organised training workshops with teachers and students that introduced them to the subject and tested and evaluated the modules. The digital shift also led to profound alterations in the provision of academic infrastructure tools – a core area of the Institute’s work since its foundation. In 2008 the Institute established a department to focus on digital information and research infrastructure, which worked closely with the research library to continually develop new digital products and services. One of the first was the ‘Edumeres’

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(Educational Media Research) online platform, which brought together information, data and publications from the field of international textbook and educational media research. This also included setting up and maintaining specialist and institutional repositories that provide free access to online and open-access academic publications. In 2009 the research library began digitising its valuable historical and out of copyright textbooks. The ‘GEI-Digital’ project, initially financed by the German Research Foundation, aimed to create a freely accessible digital infrastructure through which digitised textbooks would be available, regardless of location, and fully searchable. ‘GEI-Digital’ not only plays a part in the sustainable and long-term preservation of textbooks as part of cultural heritage and as repositories of a society’s knowledge, it also provides a high-quality portfolio of data and source material and makes it available for researchers. Current and historical curricula covering the school subjects at the centre of the GEI’s work have also been made available online, as far as possible, in

fully searchable form by the Institute since 2011. Researchers can search the ‘Curricula Workstation’ for metadata as well as refining searches according to the country in which the curricula apply, subject, education level and year of publication. The GEI’s international networks and its reputation as a unique global institution for collecting, cataloguing and researching educational media have resulted in the Institute assuming a new role in the last ten years or so, as a central hub enabling digital access to educational media collections around the world. Funds made available by the DFG and the state of Lower Saxony between 2011 and 2017 enabled the research library to create a research tool named ‘International TextbookCat’, which complements the library’s OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) by providing a standardised link between the GEI’s collection and other international collections of textbooks. Using classifications specific to textbooks enables multilingual searches of these collections for the first time. The successor project, the Global Textbook Resource Center (GLOTREC), expands the inter-operable design of the ‘International Textbook-

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Cat’. It aims to develop a non-localised, multi-lingual catalogue that homogenises the diverse data from many textbook libraries around the globe and brings together widely dispersed collections of analogue and digital educational media to form a standardised and expandable reference system. GLOTREC will comprehensively integrate digitised full-texts and increasingly incorporate digital educational media. Digital technology enables global access to important source material and offers enormous potential for researchers working with educational media. In order to facilitate and expand such research the GEI has developed a ‘Research Toolbox’, which provides researchers with a digital system to which

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additional functionalities can be added and which enables them to collate digital texts related to specific projects or thematic corpora and, using a range of software components, to augment the material with elements of machine-readable information and to analyse it. The associated development of tools for linguistic pre-processing and annotation of digital texts and for quantitative, personalised corpus analysis opens brand new perspectives in educational media research. As an Institute offering many digital research tools and infrastructure services based around educational media, the GEI has therefore become increasingly involved in recent debates regarding the impact of the digital shift on the humanities and cultural studies as well as its potential. The ‘GEI-Digital’ infrastructure has served as a gateway to source material for research projects in the field of digital humanities since 2014. In 2014 and 2015 the GEI coordinated a Leibniz Association project designed to develop criteria to assess and assure the quality of digital academic infrastructures. The Institute also heads the CLARIN-D discipline-specific working group in history, which tests and evaluates the European CLARIN research infrastructure from the perspective of historical studies, using the GEI’s digital collections. GEI Researchers, in cooperation with the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, were able to examine and to improve the usability of ‘GEI-Digital’ in 2015 and 2016 through the CLARIN-D curation project ‘Sources of the New:

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Factual and scientific knowledge for amateurs and experts from the Enlightenment to Modernism’. The project was able to adapt a selected corpus to CLARIN-D standards and to integrate it into the German text archive run by the CLARIN-D centre at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Exploring the potential, and the limitations, of digital access to humanities and cultural studies issues was also the objective of the project titled ‘Welt der Kinder: Weltwissen und Weltdeutung in Schul- und Kinderbüchern zwischen 1850 und 1918’ (Children and their World: Knowledge and Interpretations of the World in Textbooks and Children’s Books between 1850 and 1918), which was coordinated by the GEI and ran from 2014 to 2017 as part of the Leibniz Competition funding programme. Through explorative research and close cooperation, histori-

ans, computer linguists and information scientists were able to develop digital tools for the analysis of large digital corpora, which would have been almost impenetrable using hermeneutic methods. These tools were able to cope with the semantics of a range of nineteenth century educational media and thus reveal ‘qualitative’ structures. A further contribution to the development and design of the digital humanities research field has been made by the project ‘WorldViews: The World in Textbooks’, which was launched in 2015 and works with multilingual source material. In order to guarantee that source material can be effectively and efficiently captured and processed using computer-assisted programmes, the project team created an integrated information system in 2017 that serves as a workflow for work with international textbook sources, from their digitisation and the capture of standard and metadata to their analysis.

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3 Publications by the Georg Eckert Institute

The enduring success of the bi- and multilateral textbook discussions was partially dependent upon the ability to make the findings available to wider academia and the public through specially tailored publications. The Institute’s publications were therefore never aimed solely at scholars, but have offered guidance to teachers and editors in textbook publishing houses as well. At the same time GEI papers in journals and publications by trade unions, foundations and associations promoted the international work on textbooks. 140

From the ‘Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichtsunterricht‘ to the ’Journal for Educational Media, Memory, and Society’ Since its foundation in spring 1951 the International Institute for Textbook Improvement published the findings from its international work on textbooks each year in the ‘Internationales Jahrbuch für Ges­ chichtsunterricht’ (International Yearbook for History Teaching), which in 1965 became the ‘Internatio­ nales Jahrbuch für Geschichts- und Geographie-­

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Unterricht’ (International Yearbook for History and Geography Teaching). This periodical was tailored to the field of international textbook revision. It published the textbook analyses that preceded the individual bi- and multilateral textbook conferences as well as the adopted recommendations and theses, in the language of the respective partner and in German. An extensive review section informed readers whether the recommendations had found their way into newly published textbooks. The Yearbook also published academic articles on subject-specific and

methodological questions related to international comparisons of history and geography teaching and informed a domestic and international circle of readers about the education systems, curricula and textbooks of numerous countries. Following the failure, at the beginning of the 1970s, of the ambitious attempt to remodel the Yearbook with the help of the Council of Europe into an official international gazette that would publish papers in the Council of Europe’s working languages, the

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question of a new profile for the Institute’s periodical, which now published findings from international textbook research in addition to textbook revision, gained in urgency. The academic committee and the board of trustees of the newly founded Georg Eckert Institute favoured a format that would inform a circle of readers in the scientific and education communities about findings from research and work on international textbooks at more regular intervals than

had previously been the case. The subsequent new journal ‘Internationale Schulbuch­forschung’ (International Textbook Research) therefore attempted to react more promptly to current trends and to reflect and stimulate scientific and education policy debates. Contentious and problematic issues were summarised in the ‘forum’ section and opened to discussion. Thirty volumes of the journal were published between 1979 and 2008. In 1996 the journal’s focus became more conspicuously international and a special issue on ‘Europa/Europe’ relaunched the journal under its new title, ‘Inter­nationale Schulbuch­ forschung/International Textbook Research‘. This featured contributions from German, British, Polish and Moroccan colleagues as well as the Council of Europe’s director of education, Maitland Stobart. The journal regularly published papers in German, English and French and included multi­lingual summaries. It became an internationally recog­nised periodical in the field of textbook research. After its admission into the Leibniz Association the Institute decided that the journal should be published only in English in future and by an international academic publisher in order to better meet the demands of a renowned academic periodical. It became the ‘Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society’ and a peer-review process for articles was introduced. It has been published since 2009 by Berghahn Books, an independent academic publisher based in New York. One of the Journal’s core aims is for its articles to more firmly embed educational media in its social, political, cultural and academic contexts.

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The International Textbook Institute Book Series In its first few decades the Institute enjoyed the support of the Braunschweig-based publisher Hans Eckens­berger, which published the findings from international textbook research. The Yearbook and Book Series released by the ISBI were published by the independent and technologically advanced Albert Limbach publishing house.

tional research reports, bibliographies and studies on textbook research, the didactics of history teaching and history culture that were prepared with organisations such as the Council of Europe, the Konferenz für Geschichtsdidaktik (Conference for Didactics of History) or the International Society for History Didactics. The Book Series was initially published by Westermann and Moritz Diesterweg, companies well-established within the scholarly community, from 1979 until 2008, when publication shifted to the academic publisher V&R unipress.

The same company had published the Institute’s ‘Schriftenreihe des internationalen Schulbuchinsti­ tuts‘ (International Textbook Institute Book Series) since 1956, which publicised the findings from the bi- and multilateral textbook discussions organised by the Institute. The editors also supported authors who were establishing new thematic or methodological approaches to textbook analysis and implementing these using a comparative European perspective. The ‘Schriftenreihe’ editors published the first analyses on the depiction of Jewish history in German textbooks by Saul B. Robinsohn and Chaim Schatzker, and through inviting ‘outside’ views of German history, such as that of the Polish historian Maria Wawrykowa, they made an early contribution to the dialogue between Polish and German historians. The ‘Studien zur internationalen Schulbuchfor­ schung’ (Studies in International Textbook Research) continued this tradition when it was launched in 1978. The series featured findings from the bi- and multilateral textbook discussions as well as interna-

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Since 2016 ‘Eckert. Die Schriftenreihe’ has been released in print and electronic form concurrently, and is therefore an important component of the Georg Eckert Institute’s electronic publications portfolio. A new English-language series, ‘Palgrave Studies in Educational Media’ was launched in 2017 to complement the GEI’s published output. This publication addresses textbooks and other educational media as sites of cultural contestation and socio-political forces.

New publication formats for textbook revision and teaching in practice The social transformations started by the events of 1989 and the changing character of (textbook) conflicts in numerous regions of the world considerably increased the need for handbooks and other advisory material addressing international textbook revision and school teaching in practice. Falk Pingel, deputy director of the Georg Eckert Institute at that time, published the ‘UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision’ in 1999. He was able to incorporate his experiences as Director of Education for the OSCE mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina into the revised second edition in 2010. The ‘Eckert. Expertise’ format was launched in 2006 and responded to the need for a publication that 144

concentrated on how the Institute’s research findings on current issues related to practical application in social studies teaching. This new series focussed on the documentation, presentation and discussion of studies on current social topics and its profile was described as ‘topical – research-oriented – practically relevant’. Since 2020 the Expertise has been replaced by a new format, the Policy Briefs.

Information for civic society Since its foundation the Georg Eckert Institute has been able to build upon broad political and public support and the newly-formed Institute resolved to keep this support base informed about its work on international textbook revision and research. In 1982, therefore, it began to publish ‘Informa­ tionen des Georg-Eckert-Instituts’ (Information from the Georg Eckert Institute), which reported in regular intervals on the recent work of the Institute and its public reception. Simone Lässig, appointed director of the Institute in 2006, advocated a stronger focus on social exchange and dialogue, beyond the remit of the ‘Information’ publication. She consequently oversaw the publication of the ‘Eckert. Bulletin‘ between 2007 and 2016, which, in addition to research, presented the work of the library to a wider audience; it also introduced readers to the work of visiting fellows and grant recipients and discussed the Institute’s development with stakeholders from politics and education. Since 2010 the Institute has also released an annual report.

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VII The Institute and its Regional Significance

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Over the years Georg Eckert and the International Textbook Institute, and later the Georg Eckert Institute, managed to establish extensive and wide-­ ranging connections within the city of Braunschweig. In this last chapter we will take you on a short tour of Braunschweig, introducing you to the locations and the buildings that symbolise the close cooperation between the Institute and its hometown.

Teacher Training College/ Haus der Wissenschaft The first home of the International Textbook Institute was the building that is now the Haus der Wissen­ schaft (House of Science). The building was constructed in 1937 as the National Socialist teacher training college, the Bernhard-­Rust-Hochschule. After the Second World War it was relaunched as the Päda­ gogische Hochschule/Kant-Hochschule (Kant Teacher Training College), which was to follow the new scientific approach to teacher training in the democratic society forged post-1945. Georg Eckert, who was appointed as a lecturer in 1946, was instrumental in steering the teacher training college in this new direction. Siegfried Bachmann, the former dean of the college who also became acting director of the Georg Eckert Institute after Eckert’s death, recalled in 1974 that the International Textbook Institute had ‘literally been born in Eckert’s office’.1 The building complex had been erected on a former parade ground known as Kleiner Exerzierplatz in the immediate vicinity of the Technical Univer148

sity and comprised six elements: the lecture theatre (tower), the Natural History Museum, the gymnasium and three ground floor connecting tracts. There were also adjacent sports grounds. The architect designed a ‘hall of honour’ (Ehrenhalle) on the upper floor of the tower as well as a public observatory. The brick facing covering the façade of the building was an attempt to reference the style of the wider north German region, despite brick being a completely atypical building material in the immediate area. This exterior design as well as the formal arrangement of the buildings in the complex with the tower rising far above its neighbours ensured that it was a prominent structure from the very beginning, and not one that quietly fit into its surroundings.

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In contrast to other buildings on the university campus, the Bernhard-Rust-Hochschule only suffered minor damage during the air raids of the Second World War. The Natural History Museum, the tower building and the connecting tract between them remained more or less intact, although the observatory and its cupola were destroyed. The remaining parts of the complex were more badly damaged. The roofs of the other two connecting tracts were devastated by fire and the gymnasium suffered major bomb damage leaving only the ground floor useable. The roofs were rapidly reconstructed after the war, and the renamed ‘Kant Teacher Training College’ was able to resume teaching in the least damaged parts of the complex as early as November 1945. Working conditions for the stu-

dents were, however, very modest during this difficult time. Georg Eckert noted in his diary in 1947 that he relocated to local pubs or the SPD party office when he had large amounts of paperwork to attend to – his office was apparently almost impossible to heat. A major reconstruction programme for the teacher training college began in 1956 and included new premises for the International Textbook Institute. However, due to disagreements between the state building department and the town planning committee, specifically the municipal building authority, work did not start in earnest until 1963. The new gymnasium building included a completely new wing running parallel to part of the city ring

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road known as Rebenring, and not only included the International Textbook Institute with its own library but also training rooms, offices for lecturers and assistants and a large conference room. The complex was completed in 1965 and its inauguration coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the teacher training college. Despite the new buildings, working conditions for the staff of the International Textbook Institute remained far from ideal, however, as space in the college buildings remained at a premium and conditions were cramped. Eight offices on one section of a floor that had been promised to the Institute, as well as several basement rooms, were assigned to other uses by the college management. The senate of the teacher training college stated in 1965, the year the Institute first moved into the premises on 150

Rebenring, that ‘… the facilities and working conditions are totally inadequate and … further expansion is urgently [required]’.2 Additional rooms were rented in a residential block in 1972. The Institute remained in the premises on Rebenring until 1981 when it was able to move into the newly renovated Villa von Bülow. From 1956 to 1965, during the renovations at the teacher training college, the International Textbook Institute rented premises in Okerstraße 8b from the City of Braunschweig. The Institute occupied the top floor of the building during this time and continued to store sections of the textbook collection there even after it moved back to the college, as those premises there were not large enough to contain the entire collection.3

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University library

Okerstraße 8b

Carolo-Wilhelmina Technical University Braunschweig The Haus der Wissenschaft building is only a few metres from the Technical University’s main campus containing the main building, the principal lecture hall and the university library. The history of the Technical University can be traced back to the ‘Colle­ gium Carolinum’, Germany’s oldest polytechnic, which was founded in 1745. The architect Constantin Uhde designed the main building in the style of a baroque palace. The original building was designed as a four-sided complex, two storeys high with a tall inner courtyard surrounded by windows. Due to extensive bomb damage sustained late in the war, in 1944, only a few sections of the original building remain.4

Main building

Opposite the main building is the university forum, which contains the university library, the main lecture hall, the rector’s office and the Carl Friedrich Gauß faculty (formerly faculty I). The library was badly damaged in the war and despite 60 to 70 percent of the books having been moved to alternative locations, a considerable portion of its inventory was lost. A complete assessment was difficult immediately after 1945, but rough estimates put the collection at approximately 120,000 volumes at that

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time. Not until the move to the newly constructed building in 1965 could the collection, which by then numbered around 600,000 books, be properly arranged and used.5 The relationship between the Georg Eckert Institute and the Technical University is relatively new. During the time of the International Textbook Institute, the Technical University and the Teacher Training College were separate institutions. It was not until 1978 that the Teacher Training College was incorporated into the Technical University as the Department of Educational Science – three years after the Georg Eckert Institute was officially founded as a public institution. The Institute’s founding charter from 1975 included provisions for the Lower Saxony Teacher Training College to be represented on the Georg Eckert Institute’s board of trustees. This right to representation was then transferred to the Technical University which is still represented on the Institute’s board of trustees in accordance with Section 6, paragraph 1 of the Institute’s charter. A cooperation agreement between the Institute and the university was signed in 2005: this stipulates, among other things, that the Institute director be appointed jointly by the Institute and the Technical University.

Leibniz­ScienceCampus ‘Postdigital Participation – Braunschweig’, which focuses on the development of digitally supported forms of participation and on the public discourse regarding (post)digitality and social participation in the fields of education and urban life.

The headquarters of the ForschungRegion Braun­ schweig e.V (Research Region Braunschweig) are in the immediate vicinity of the university main campus. The Georg Eckert Institute has been a member of this academic network for technology, life and culture since 2008. In 2019 the GEI, in cooperation with five partner organisations, established the 152

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The New Town Hall Moving across the city we find the Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall), which symbolises the close relationship between the Institute and the local government. Braunschweig once had five town halls but the Neues Rathaus and the Altstadtrathaus (Old Town Hall) are the only two remaining. Designed by the city planning director Ludwig Winter, the Neues Rathaus was built between 1885 and 1900. The neo-gothic building replaced a chapter house on the site, which had latterly been used for municipal purposes. The most striking parts of the building are the tower, which is a dominant feature in the city skyline, and the main façade with its three imposing entrance porticoes supporting a balcony that was used for speeches and for announcements.6

The close cooperation between the Institute and the local government dates back to the early postwar period and has its roots in the close friendship between Georg Eckert and Martha Fuchs, the former Minister of Culture who was Lord Mayor of Braunschweig from 1959 to 1964. This personal connection developed into official contacts: the town twinning between Bandung and Braunschweig, for example, stemmed from the German-­ Indonesian history conferences in the 1950s that were initiated by the International Textbook Institute. The partnership between the cities was formalised in 1960 and initially took the form of museum exhibitions, correspondence between school children, themed Indonesian days in Braunschweig and partnership projects between the technical universities and teacher training colleges in the two cities.7

Martha Fuchs (2nd left) and Georg Eckert (4th left) with participants in the German-American textbook discussions

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The ‘Verein der Freunde und Förderer’ (Association of Friends and Supporters) has provided financial and conceptional support to the Institute since 1973, for example by furnishing and maintaining the guest rooms for visiting scholarship holders. The association’s work has significantly contributed to the GEI’s international activities and its ability to create networks within international textbook research.

The personal relationship between Georg Eckert and Otto Bennemann, Lord Mayor of Braunschweig from 1948 to 1952 and again from 1954 to 1959, also strengthened the connection between the Institute and the local government. Bennemann lent his political support, for example, to the first conference of German and British historians and the English he had learnt during his time in exile in Britain and Australia meant that he was able to lend more practical support as well. In 1972 Bennemann agreed to become a member of the ‘Friends and Supporters of the International Textbook Institute’, which was officially established a year later. Its members, such as Hans-Peter Harstick and Rainer Zirbeck, have advised and supported the Institute over several decades. Bennemann also advocated the work of the Institute during his term as a member of the Lower Saxony parliament from 1947 to 1974, in particular when he was appointed interior minister in 1959. In 1994 the ‘Otto Bennemann Foundation, Braunschweig’ was founded, which endows the Otto Bennemann Grant awarded annually by the Georg Eckert Institute to researchers carrying out methodologically innovative textbook research. The relationship between the Textbook Institute and the City of Braunschweig was not, however, limited to these two connections. The local government has provided financial support to the Institute through154

out its history, by hosting receptions, for example. In 1984 Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Institute director from 1978 to 1984, described the cooperation with the local government as follows: “It is important to emphasise the extraordinary friendship and support, important for creating a good working atmosphere at conferences, that the Institute has always received from the City of Braunschweig, the Lord Mayor’s office, the council and the secretary of culture. The spontaneous warmth of local government representatives and authorities does so much more than just provide a pleasant supporting programme; it helps to create a basis of mutual trust, without which it would be very difficult to work productively and cooperatively, especially when difficult discussions are involved.” Source: Karl-Ernst Jeismann, Das Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung 1978–1984. Bericht des Direktors zur 20. Kuratoriumssitzung (Braunschweig 1984), p. 25.

Alfred Kubel and Karl-Ernst Jeismann

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Hotel Deutsches Haus Opposite the town hall is the hotel ‘Deutsches Haus’, which more informally symbolises the connection between the city and the Institute. The hotel was erected in 1896 and 1897 on the corner of Burgplatz and Ruhfäutchenplatz and occupies a site where two manor houses once stood. Due to its corner location the building was designed with two different façades facing the two respective squares. The side of the building facing Burgplatz was designed by the architect Otto Rasche to be sympathetic to the architecture of the city’s main square by having a solid construction for the bottom two floors

and a half-timbered construction for the upper storey. In contrast, the side facing Ruhfäutchen­platz was designed in the German renaissance style and accordingly has an ornate and strictly symmetrical façade.8 Countless guests of the Institute from all around the world have stayed at the hotel and the board of trustees held their meetings in the hotel from 1977 to 2010. Moving from the hotel through the centre of town we come to the Altstadtmarkt (Old Town Square) and the Altstadtrathaus (Old Town Hall).

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Altstadtrathaus (Old Town Hall) Construction on the gothic-style Altstadtrathaus was started in 1250. The west wing was constructed first and in the late fourteenth century the north wing was added, perpendicular to the existing building. The building was completed in 1450 when nine sculptures of rulers and their wives were added to the pillars bordering the gothic alcoves. Three years earlier the first-floor state parlour, known as the ‘Dornse’, had been redesigned. The Altstadtrathaus has had a varied history, having been used as an armoury and a jail, a warehouse and cellar room for the council and as a storehouse. It was renovated in several phases after the Second World War, in which it suffered light damage.9 The ‘Dornse’ has been a significant venue in the Institute’s history: The city council has frequently allowed the Institute to use the space for various conferences and events, such as the German-­Polish textbook conferences in the 1970s. The Georg Eckert Institute continues to use the ‘Dornse’ for special events today, including the presentation of the Georg Eckert Research Award every two years. 156

The Georg Eckert Institute has awarded the Georg Eckert Research Award every two years since 2010. The award, sponsored by the Braunschweig-based publisher Westermann, honours academic work that relates to cultural, social, political or pedagogical aspects of textbooks and other educational media used in schools.

Presentation ceremony for the Georg Eckert Research Award, (left to right) Director Eckhardt Fuchs, Mayor Annegret Ihbe and State Premier Stephan Weil

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Villa von Bülow The death of Georg Eckert marked the end of an era in textbook research in Braunschweig. Alfred Kubel, state premier of Lower Saxony at that time and a long-term friend and party colleague of Eckert, suggested the Institute be separated from the Teacher Training College and become a public institution. This induced the long-overdue relocation to new premises – the Institute had completely outgrown the space rented from the Teacher Training College in Rebenring 53, which was also considered rather too spartan for a renowned, internationally active research insti-

tute. The library collection should also finally be appropriately arranged and displayed in a space large enough to enable expansion and workspaces for users. When the City of Braunschweig offered the Institute the use of the Villa von Bülow in Celler Straße it solved two problems at once: on the one hand the GEI would have appropriate premises and on the other hand the future of this listed neo-­ classical villa would be assured. The villa had had a colourful history since its construction in 1839 but had been empty since the 1950s and had fallen into disrepair.

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The building had originally been designed in 1839 by the architect Carl-Theodor Ottmer as a summer residence for Heinrich Georg Christian Friedrich von Bülow, who was president of the chamber at the Duke of Braunschweig’s court. Ottmer was a native of Braunschweig and had studied at the Berlin Building Academy in the circle of the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. His most famous building in Braunschweig was the New Residence Palace.10

Celler Straße with a curved ramp leading up to it. The side of the villa facing the garden has a terrace, which was presumably a later addition, from which a wide flight of steps leads down to the garden. The building has a rectangular floor plan apart from the apse on the side facing the river. It originally had two residential floors and a moderately high-ceilinged cellar, as well as a mezzanine level not apparent from the outside.

The Villa von Bülow was built in the style of an Italian castle with the façade fixed by four corner towers. The original main entrance is central and faces

The owner of the building, Heinrich von Bülow, died just one year after it was completed and ownership of the villa passed to his heirs. It was sold to

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the merchant Ferdinand Ebeling in 1873 and then sold again in 1891 to the financier Arthur Löbbecke who added his family crest above the original main entrance, where it remains today. In 1934 Rudolf Löbbecke suffered financial losses which forced him to sell the villa and grounds to the City of Braunschweig. They then offered the building to the ‘Reichshandwerksführer’ (Leader of the German Reich’s Trade) Wilhelm Georg Schmidt to use as a leadership school for the German skilled crafts organisation and courses commenced in October of the same year.11 Renovations during this period were predominantly limited to the exterior: in 1937 the annexe designed by Ottmer was demolished and replaced by an administrative and residential building with two garages. During the war years from 1939 to 1945 the villa was used as offices for the armed forces. It was spared any damage during the war even though the centre of the city was almost completely destroyed (up to 90 per cent of buildings suffered damage). After the war the villa was used for several years as a temporary residential home for nurses working at the neighbouring hospital in Holwedestraße. However, this was no longer necessary after the construction of a new residential home at the bottom of the grounds. The Villa von Bülow then stood empty for many years and fell victim to dry rot, looting of the natural stonework and the theft of the front door. It gradually fell into ruin. In 1964 the City of Braunschweig added the Villa von Bülow to its list of buildings worthy of preserva160

tion in the appendix to the statute for the preservation of historical monuments. It was transferred to the cultural monuments catalogue in 1978 according to section 4 of the Lower Saxony heritage protection law. Financial constraints, however, prevented any restoration of the building being undertaken during this period. The idea of selling the building to private investors was rejected on the grounds that the building and garden should be kept available for use by the neighbouring hospital if necessary. This, however, never transpired and in 1975 the councillor Friedrich Theodor Kohl, who as a trained architect was particularly committed to building design and the preservation of historical monuments, proposed that the building be rented to the newly founded Georg Eckert Institute.12 As

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verting the cellar and attic into useable spaces and constructing a gallery between the ground and first floors to be used by the library. The main entrance was moved to Freisestraße on the north side and a new staircase was added. As the villa was a listed building the plans retained the longitudinal and transverse axis and included provisions to restore much of the stucco work to its original state, as well as the parquet flooring in the former garden room.15 By 1981 the Georg Eckert Institute was able to move into the villa and to convert rooms in the neighbouring annexe into guest rooms for visiting stipend recipients.

the board of trustees had not at that point been appointed, agreement over the use of the villa for the GEI was not reached until 1978. A solution for ownership and use was finalised in 1979 and resulted in the City of Braunschweig transferring ownership of the property to the state of Lower Saxony, who in turn leased it to the GEI.13 As the design and approval process for necessary renovations had been carried out in the intervening years from 1975 to 1979, building work could begin straight away.14 The estimated space required by the Institute was twice that available in the villa and the existing wooden beams were also not strong enough to carry the weight of the library’s book collection. The building was therefore completely gutted, and the interior totally redesigned. This involved con-

Since 2007 the number of people working for the Institute has expanded rapidly, beyond the capacity of the Villa von Bülow. As a result, office space has been rented in various buildings owned by the city: in Inselwall, for example, in the neighbouring hospital buildings and, more recently, in a building belonging to the employment agency on Cyriaksring. Our city tour concludes at the information panel in front of the villa commemorating Georg Eckert, which was erected in 2012. These panels, erected by the city and the Braunschweig civic trust (Bürger­ stiftung Braunschweig), commemorate individuals who have significantly contributed to the history of the city. They are people who were either born in the city or spent a significant part of their life there. In the same way that Georg Eckert’s work increased Braunschweig’s visibility on the national and international stage, the GEI will continue to make signif-

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icant contributions in the future to the city and its development. This contribution will also be reflected in the city’s physical landscape. In 2011 the Institute began to plan an extension to the villa and ten years later, in 2021, a new library building connects the Villa von Bülow with a renovated office building on the opposite side of the garden to create an enclosed GEI campus. All the pieces are in place to enable the Georg Eckert Institute to continue to shine its light as an ‘academic lighthouse’ within the city of Braunschweig.

1 Speech by Prof. Siegfried Bachmann at the memorial service held by academics to honour Professor Georg Eckert on 14 January 1974, in In Memoriam Georg Eckert (1912–1974) (Braunschweig: Pädagogische Hochschule, 1974). 2 Ausbau der Pädagogischen Hochschulen, Recommendations of the senate of the Lower Saxony Teacher Training College (n.p., 1965), p. 17. 3 Braunschweiger Zeitung, 28 May 1965. 4 Niedersächsisches Landesverwaltungsamt Hannover, Institut für Denk­malpflege, ed., Denkmaltopographie Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Baudenkmale in Niedersachsen, vol 1.2 (Hameln: Verlag CW Niemeyer, 1996). 5 Fritz Meyen, Die Bibliothek, in Senat der Carolo-Wilhelmina, ed., Die Technische Hochschule Braunschweig (Berlin-West/Basel: Länderdienst-Verlag, 1963). 6 Niedersächsisches Landesverwaltungsamt Hannover, Institut für Denk­malpflege, ed., Denkmaltopographie Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Baudenkmale in Niedersachsen, vol. 1.1 (Hameln: Verlag CW Niemeyer, 1993). 7 Braunschweiger Zeitung, 22 October 1959, E_15_178_0010, Braunschweig city archive. 8 Niedersächsisches Landesverwaltungsamt Hannover, Institut für Denkmalpflege, Denkmaltopographie Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 1.1. 9 Ibid. 10 Braunschweiger Zeitung, 5 May 1984. 11 Letter to the magistrate of the City of Braunschweig 5 Juli 1934, E_23_301.1_301.100018, Braunschweig city archive. 12 Braunschweiger Zeitung, 27 August 1975, E_65_60100008, Braunschweig city archive. 13 Decision by the City of the Braunschweig management committee, 18 April 1978, E_15_359_0011, Braunschweig city archive.

Unveiling the information panel dedicated to Georg Eckert. Left to right: Mayor Cornelia Rose-Paul, GEI Director Simone Lässig and Karin Heinemann-Thien from the Bürgerstiftung Braunschweig

14 Gerd Biegel and Angela Klein, eds, Carl Theodor Ottmer. 1800– 1843. Braunschweigischer Hofbaumeister – europäischer Architekt, Exhibition catalogue (Braunschweig: Braunschweigisches Landes­ museum, 2000). 15 Ibid.

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VIII Appendix

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1 Directors of the Georg Eckert Institute and the International Textbook Institute

Prof. Dr Eckhardt Fuchs: since October 2015

Prof. Dr Simone Lässig: October 2006 – September 2015

Dr Falk Pingel: October 2005 – September 2006

Prof. Dr Wolfgang Höpken: October 2000 – September 2005

Prof. Dr Ursula A. J. Becher: October 1992 – September 2000

Prof. Dr Ernst Hinrichs: October 1984 – September 1992

Prof. Dr Karl-Ernst Jeismann: October 1978 – September 1984

Dr Wolfgang Jacobmeyer: May 1978 – September 1978

Prof. Dr Siegfried Bachmann: (August 1974) September 1977 – April 1978

Prof. Dr Georg Eckert: March 1951 – January 1974

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2 List of Abbreviations

CDU CIS CLARIN CSCE CˇSSR DFG DIPF DUK FDP FRG GDR GEI GLOTREC ICIC ISBI KMK

OSCE SPD UNESCO USA WGL

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Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) Commonwealth of Independent States Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Czechoslovak Socialist Republic Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) DIPF | Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation (DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education) Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission (German UNESCO commission) Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party) Federal Republic of Germany German Democratic Republic Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research Global Textbook Resource Centre The International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation Internationales Schulbuchinstitut (International Textbook Institute) Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Kultusministerkonferenz: Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United States of America Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (now the Leibniz Association)

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3 Further Reading

Becher, Ursula A. J. (in discussion) with Karl-Ernst Jeismann,

Ge­schich­te des Georg-Eckert-Instituts (Braunschweig:

Perspektiven der internationalen Schulbuchforschung,

Georg-Eckert-Institut – Leibniz-Institut für internationale

in Internationale Schulbuchforschung 17, no. 1 (1995),

Schulbuchforschung, 2015). Hinrichs, Ernst, Internationale Schulbuchforschung – mehr

pp. 61–76. Becher, Ursula A. J. and Rainer Riemenschneider, eds, Internationale Verständigung. 25 Jahre Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung (Hanover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2000). Bode, Matthias, Corine Defrance, Eckhardt Fuchs, Ulrich

als eine Sisyphusarbeit?, in Internationale Schulbuch­ forschung 14, no. 3 (1992), pp. 295–312. Hinrichs, Ernst and Falk Pingel, Georg Eckert (1912–1974) und die internationale Schulbuchforschung, in Verband der Geschichtslehrer Deutschlands, eds, Geschichts­

Pfeil, Steffen Sammler, Thomas Strobel, Georg Eckert:

unterricht und Geschichtsdidaktik vom Kaiser­reich bis zur

A Driving Force in International Textbook Revi-

Gegenwart. Festschrift des Verbandes der Geschichts­

sion and Cultural Policy. Eckert. Dossiers 2 (2021).

lehrer Deutschlands zum 75jährigen Bestehen (Stuttgart:

urn:nbn:de:0220-2021-0064

Klett, 1988), pp. 320–340.

Dowe, Dieter, Eckhardt Fuchs, Heike Christina Mätzing and Steffen Sammler, eds, Georg Eckert. Grenzgänger zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik, Eckert. Die Schriftenreihe, vol. 146 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017). Faure, Romain, Netzwerke der Kulturdiplomatie. Die internationale Schulbuchrevision in Europa 1949–1989 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).

Hirsch, Helmut, Lehrer machen Geschichte. Das Institut für Erziehungswissenschaften und das internationale Schulbuchinstitut (Ratingen: Henn, 1971). Jacobmeyer, Wolfgang, Das Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung, in Schulverwaltungsblatt für Niedersachsen 37, no. 11 (1985), pp. 319–322. Jeismann, Karl-Ernst, Internationale Schulbuchforschung

Fuchs, Eckhardt and Kathrin Henne, Wissensaustausch inter-

oder nationale Staatsräson? Gedanken zum 10jähri-

national – Schulbuchrevision und das Internationale

gen Bestehen des Georg-Eckert-Instituts (Braun­schweig:

Schulbuchinstitut in Braunschweig nach dem Zweiten

Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuch­

Weltkrieg, in Sabine Reh, Edith Glaser, Britta Behm and Tilman Drope, eds, Wissen machen. Beiträge zu einer

forschung, 1985). Mätzing, Heike Christina, Georg Eckert 1912–1974, Von

Geschichte erziehungswissenschaftlichen Wissens in

Anpassung, Widerstand und Völkerverständigung (Bonn:

Deutschland zwischen 1945 und 1990, Zeitschrift für

Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 2018).

Pädagogik, Supplement 63 (Weinheim: Beltz 2017),

Schüddekopf, Otto Ernst (with Edouard Bruley, E. H. Dance, Haakon Vigander), History Teaching and History

pp. 108–123. Fuchs, Eckhardt and Steffen Sammler, Schulbücher zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Ein Streifzug durch die

Textbook Revision (Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe, 1967).

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4 Picture Credits

Ammerpohl, Thomas: p. 39 Architects: SEHW Architektur GmbH/Visualisierung: THIRD: p. 164 Ausserhofer, David: p. 131, 132, 134, 157 Bierwagen, Christian: p. 7, 165 (Eckhardt Fuchs) Braunschweig city archive: p. 46 right (G IX_78_0360_0063001), 51 (G IX_78_0360_0065009), 53 (G IX_78_0360_0062004), 62 (H_XXX_1_15350005), 63 (H_XXX_1_15350007), 67 (G IX_78_0360_0065013), 102 (H_XXX_1_15350001), 110 (G_IX_108_Nr.16100005 gross), 153 (Amerikanische Vertreter 0001), 154 (G IX_78_0360_0029001), 158 (H_XVI_C_VII_4_F10001), 160 (H_XVI_C_VII_4_F_10002), 161 (H_XVI_C_VII_4_F_10006) GEI archive: p. 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 21, 23, 27, 29 bottom, 31, 33, 34, 36, 46 left, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 66, 70, 72 top, 76, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88,

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89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 151, 152, 155, 156, 159, 162, 163, 165 Heike Mätzing collection: p. 54 Kruszewski, Marek: p. 9, 28, 55, 61, 65, 68, 69, 72 bottom, 74, 79, 81, 128, 133, 137, 139, 165 (Simone Lässig) stem.T4L on Unsplash: p. 126 right TU Braunschweig archive: p. 29 top, 148 (CII:11:10), 149 (CII:11:10), 150 (CII:11:10) UN Photo/Emmanuel Hungrecker: p. 17 UNESCO/Dominique Roger: p. 44 UNESCO/Michel Claude: p. 45 United Nations archive, Geneva: p. 19 Van Tay Media on Unsplash: p. 126 left

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders. Please contact the publisher with any enquiries regarding image copyright.

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