:dubious: Are you my friend Christian? He says this exactly. And I actually don’t blame him for feeling that way - as he said, it was his grandfather that was there, not him.
Ve have vays of teaching zee kinder about zee Vars!
It’s just my personal experience, but our history class in the Oberstufe (11th-13th grade) covered the whole period of the German Reich from 1871-1945, with a special focus on WWI and the Weimar Republic, as my history teacher considered it important to expound the development and historical causal chain that led to the Third Reich. Today, I’m thankful for that, because to avoid something like that to ever happen again, it’s important to know which flaws the first German republic had, and why. The authors of our constitution (Grundgesetz) knew this flaws very well, and did a decent job to avoid them for the new republic.
To be fair, beer halls are where tiresome drunks of all stripes are found and made. It’s a rare man who can remain cogent, witty and thought-provoking after 15 days of non-stop Oktoberfesting 
We had a wonderful young German exchange student visit us in the early '80s and took her to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. I apologized afterwards that the Nazis were the villains, but she said she didn’t mind, and had enjoyed the film. I knew her well enough, I don’t think she was just being polite. But I understand your point.
Previous threads that may be of interest:
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I’ve never experienced that myself; and anyway, American tourists tend to react far more cordially towards me when they realize I’m German and not French or Spanish (we are an international and therefore multi-lingual family and it’s more likely that we quarrel or horse around in those languages publicly than in my mother tongue).
Actually, the one time that an American tourist mentioned something that showed a connection toward the Nazis, I am not sure what he meant to say and didn’t bother to ask; he said, he should have known I wasn’t French because I looked so Aryan.
Hm…
When I was younger, I did mind that someone I didn’t even know could lump me together with those shit-shirts (as my grandfather used to call them, in German, of course (“Kackhemden”), because of their brown shirts), but, really, why care?
So did we; we were encouraged to read Craig’s “Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1945. Vom Norddeutschen Bund bis zum Ende des Dritten Reiches” as a prep for the Abitur and Hagen Schulze’s books about the Weimar Republic were on the list too - and the establishment of the republic turned out to be a focus of the examination.
WRT to WWI, I’d be curious to know what they’re taught about the Treaty of Versailles.
Mine was about the causes for the outbreak of WWI (and you know what a complicated mess that was - I couldn’t explain it now). I’ve often heard WWI referred to as "Urkatastrophe des 20. Jahrhunderts " (“original catastrophe of the 20th century”), or in other words, the whole shit began in 1914.
Interestingly, when I went to the Wikipedia link for Ann Rosmus, the real person on whom it was based, I found this:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Anna Rosmus, also known as Anja Rosmus-Wenninger, is a German author and researcher born in 1960 in Passau, Bavaria.
…
As a child and adolescent she started developing an interest in contemporary history, especially that of the Third Reich. The subject was barely mentioned at school.
…
Nevertheless, at age 20, she started digging into the past. Upon further questioning of some of Passau’s elders, Rosmus came across a widespread silence and refusal to provide specific information
[/QUOTE]
.
She would have been 20 in 1980. That seems to contradict what some have said in this thread. Example (not picking on anyone specifically):
Maybe it was taught differently in different jurisdictions? Rosmus’s story seems to be about a particularly problematic community; maybe her experience doesn’t match that of others.
As an American, my only relevant experience was with a German exchange student we fostered. I posted about that in the “Baffling gaps in knowledge” thread.
I am glad that you said “unavoidable chest thumping” becuase that wasn’t my intent. The point I was trying to make is that it is realatively easy for schools in the United States to talk about military events of our past because for the most part we were victorious. It is not hard to teach that you were on the winning side.
With that said I have the utmost respect for Germany and its citizens and soldiers. I read a lot about the World Wars and I can find mountains of books written about the Allied soldier, but very few about the German soldier (from their point of views, life as a soldier). I find the Germans not much different from us, meaning that during the war they were fighting for something that wasn’t their doing and they did the best job they could. I was just curious how the wars were taught to today’s children. The fact is Germany suffered terribly by the defeats of two World Wars and it is interesting to understand how that is taught.
My apologies to our German friends if I came off as trying to rub salt in wounds, that was not my intent.
Oh, that was a big deal. We were basically taught that the liabilities and morally humiliation of the Germans caused by the treaty were the main reason that the Weimar republic failed and always kept the right wing political forces from 1918-33 strong, because it gave them a perfect handle to appeal to the nationalist feelings of the people.
The prologue of John Keegan’s The Second World War, “Every Man a Soldier,” does a spectacular job of clarifying the trends that led to the First World War, which of course caused the Second.
This is a tiny excerpt, but anyone interested should read the original:
[Emphasis mine]
This. The story happened in Passau, a provincial town in the then still very conservative Bavaria. I don’t want to pick on Passau or Bavaria specially, it could have happened in hundreds of other municipalities in West Germany (I can’t speak for the DDR) at the time, but the fact that it was a conservative, provincial town is a crucial point to the story.
I’ve read your story the second time now, and I can only assert that this was no typical German born post-1960. There are always people who just don’t give a shit about history, or are lazy and skip classes, but I’m sure there were teachers in his life who *tried *to teach him WWII history. Btw., when did this incident happen, and how old was the exchange student?
I wanted to adress this a bit more: Wars are generally not taught as series of battles, but rather, the whole context and surrounding issues. A few decisive battles may be mentioned - the Battle of Stalingrad, for example - but we rather look at the big picture. *
Another point: as has been adressed in the previous threads, it’s difficult today to seperate out what we were taught in school and what we learned through reading books on our own, or from history specials on TV. In the last decades, Guido Knopp (professor of history!) has made a larger number of history documentaries for the public ZDF channel. This is not comparable to how the US History (Hitler) channel sounds like; there is no dramatization of secrets, exaggeration or similar.
Instead, they start with the big picture overview, and then interview some witnesses who lived back then; often from both sides, German and Allies, soldiers and civilians. So we hear from a German civilian how terrible it was to sit in the bomb shelter, and then an UK civilian tells the same thing about the London Blitz (and in both cases, children were evacuated to the countryside). Hearing about personal experiences makes dry facts more alive and moving. The BBC also has some well-made specials.
As for books, I read for example “Der Junge der seinen Geburtstag vergass” (The boy who forgot his birthday) about WWI; “Tante Linas Kriegskochbuch” (Aunt Linas war cook book) with not only recipes, but stories of the people in one house in the city of Gelsenkirchen; Gersdorff memories (an officer on the Eastern Front who tried to blow up Hitler in 1943).
And of course I have heard the stories of war and postwar from my relatives.
- Another problem is that battles are known under different names in different countries! When I was in the US, and the history teacher talked about the “Battle of the Bulge”, I had no idea what he was referring to, I heard that name for the first time. Today, wikipedia is my friend and tells me that this means the “Ardennenoffensive”, which we know as last-ditch effort to stop the western advance. It’s much debated because it would have been a far better use of resources - from a tactical standpoint - to put those soldiers at the Eastern front to delay the Russians while evacuating the civilians, instead of pulling soldiers from the East and waste them against the Yanks.
An extremly conservative city - Passau is infamous even in Bavaria for being ultra-conservative and black (CSU-party).
For comparision, I went to school in Munich in the 80s, and my experience is that of EinsteinsHund, spending almost the whole 11th grade history on the 3rd Reich.
I wish they would have taught this is regard to WWI, it would have made history class feel much more alive:
Seconded, ahem, thirded, Passau has been - to use a German word - erzkonservativ for a long time, which also means that it is a stronghold of directly opposed political cabaret. Those places make history a present day experience; regrettably, this isn’t always fun.
Sailboat, I hope three data points with similar experiences in history class but from different federal states give you some reason to not call your exchange student typical. Sure, you will meet the totally clueless with certainty time and again but they made an effort to not learn a thing about history: not in school, not in the mass media (Constanze has already mentioned Guido Knopp’s work for tv and there are many more), not by reading books or walking through an exhibition. That can’t be helped.
No apology necessary, no salt present. World War I is a complicated affair, I doubt that you will find many Germans (or historians) who will accept a “black hat - white hat” point of view, but in contrast to a wide-spread belief during the Weimar Republic, most modern Germans accept that we lost the war without ifs and buts. That fact is not a wound.
World War II is not complicated at all in one aspect: Germany started it and lost it. Not a wound either. The crimes related to the war and to the political system of the time are a different matter because of the horrifying momentousness of it all. But it’s our heritage just like every other bit of our history.You can’t push the horrible away and embrace the glorious - it’s all ours. But I wouldn’t call it a wound either, not any longer. We were born decades after those events and the society that made those crimes possible does not exist any more. It’s not an original sin that has turned us guilty for eternity - but it has changed us, without a doubt. The present is the way it is because of those events and every prior one and the lessons that we learned and the lessons that we failed to learn. The Third Reich is one lesson that we tried hard to learn well.
And if it’s any help ;), you are going to lose wars too. Our ancestors had their time of dominance, so did the French and the British, the Romans prior to us all, the Chinese far in the East and many more.