I don’t know why I should be so pleased, but the exit of both France and Italy from the World Cup is strangely cheering. No idea why – I like the French and the Italians. Maybe it is just the confounding of expectations or hubris that warms the English heart. Unless we are next, of course.
But, with a quarter-final battle with Germany ahead on Sunday, we can look ahead with depression to the singing by the English of such poetic epics as “Two World Wars and one World Cup, na na na na na…” There is something weird about the British obsession with the Second World War – as if it was the last ‘competition’ we won. A selective Hollywood-backed romantic remembering doesn’t help, but the problem goes deeper than that.
My younger son has just graduated (I hope…) in History and Politics at the University of Liverpool. Before he got there he seemed to exploit the preoccupation of every History syllabus at every school level with options to study Hitler and Stalin. Ask any reasonably educated kid in England about German history or culture and most will know little or nothing before 1933 (plus, maybe, the origins of fascism from 1918) – and certainly little or nothing after 1945.
OK, it isn’t hard to see the attraction of focusing on the dramatic, the catastrophic and the uniquely enormous human cost of Hitler’s adventures, but it has its dangers. Germany’s post-war history has been equally interesting and evokes admiration at the overcoming of cataclysmic defeat and humiliation. Yes, there are people who will never forgive the Germans and who will resent their reconstruction and reunification; but, Germany’s post-war division and subsequent reunification present important and instructive material for understanding the modern world (which is, I suppose, partly the point of studying history in the first place). Not least, the reconciliation in Europe led by French moves towards Germany is a story rarely told and little appreciated.
Helmut Schmidt addresses from a German perspective the problem of focusing too much on 1933-1945. In his wonderful book Ausser Dienst: Eine Bilanz, he gives specific attention to the problem of modern German history in a chapter headed Die schwerste Hypothek (in a section on the lessons of history titled Es gab nicht nur die Nazi-Zeit). Having briefly and lucidly described what it was like to be German in the post-war years (individually and collectively trying to understand and cope with both individual and collective guilt), he writes about the paralysis and fear of change that characterised the German psyche:
The more we limit our historical consciousness to the Nazi period, the failure of the Weimar experiment in democracy, Hitler’s instigation of the Second World War (with its catastrophic consequences), and the more we concentrate on the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazi era, the more strongly we Germans react with nervousness and even fear to changes.
He goes on to illustrate his point, observing that post-war Germans always feared ‘the return of fascism’. He then goes on to say:
I doubt that it is right or sensible to focus school and university teaching on the Nazi era; on the contrary, I think this sort of education is actually harmful. Concentration on the twelve year Nazi dictatorship leads to neglect of other periods of German history. Above all, however, it conveys the impression – however unintended – to our young people that prior to and subsequent to the Nazis everything was relatively unproblematic here. In fact, the ideological ground was laid a long time before 1933. For generations education had messed up: particularly education about the value and freedom of the individual person, about humanity and about democracy.
Schmidt is not saying that the horrors of the Nazi era shouldn’t be taught, but that they shouldn’t be taught in isolation from other parts of German history. If we are to understand the Germany of today and tomorrow, we must do so with reference to more than just Hitler.
What this really says, therefore, is that any History syllabus must be rigorously tested in order to demonstrate that it is truly about helping students understand and not simply reinforcing some convenient stereotype or prejudice about other people. For this reason the Meissen English Committee of the Church of England (which I chair in conjunction with the German Committee chaired by the Bishop of Braunschweig, Dr Friedrich Weber) is looking at doing some research into the teaching of German history in English schools.
Our concern is not, however, simply about history – it is about the desperate drop in language learning in England, especially German. How is it possible that in today’s world the learning of foreign languages is so dismissed and undervalued in Britain? The only conclusion I can come to is twofold: (a) that we are so arrogant as to assume that everyone else will speak English, and (b) that we do not understand Schmidt’s point that we cannot know our own culture unless we see it through the eyes of a different culture… which means knowing something of the other language.
It’s a bit like our football: we keep hoping that England is the best team in the world… and are always disappointed to find that our pride actually lies in a romanticised past which we are unable to surrender to contemporary reality.
I filmed an interview today for the German TV channel ARD. As usual, the Germans spoke perfect English. Most German fans watching tomorrow’s game will understand everything the English sing. The same will not be true of English supporters. And that is not a cause of pride – whoever wins.
June 26, 2010 at 5:51 pm
“Concentration on the twelve year Nazi dictatorship leads to neglect of other periods of German history.”
Schmidt is right. Konrad Adenauer was the greatest German (for good) in the 20th century but who in England has heard of him? He gave West Germany the moral steel it needed to resist Soviet expansionism and ‘neutralism’ and thus prepared the ground for belated reunification when the Societ Union collapsed. Of course the left hated this Christian statesman and his legacy – much easier to obsess on Hitler with nary a glance cast on the genocidal evils of Soviet and Chinese communism that cost 100 million lives in the 20th century.
As for the demise of modern langauges in English schools – actually the dumbing down is found across the board, in maths, science, Latin etc. Yet Spanish is growing in popularity, and unlike German, that is a world language.
June 26, 2010 at 8:55 pm
It’s not just neglect, ignorance and stereotyping of all things German, though, I think. But pretty much everyone who isn’t English in the first place.
Our treatment of French history isn’t much better. Apart from a sketchy knowledge of the French revolution (and that more often not a focus on liberte, egalite, fraternite but rather a ridiculing of Robespierre and guillotine excesses, isn’t he history we’re taught about France limited to 1,000 years of war with them and how we usually beat them, or graciously won victory for them.
Then there’s India, Africa, America…?
I agree that our knowledge is woeful and our attitude worrying, just not sure it’s a German/ English thing. Just an English thing
June 26, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Growing up in a provincial hellhole, I came up with a hypothesis (c): “If we teach them modern languages, they’ll see what’s wrong with our culture and leave or, worse still, try to change it.”
June 27, 2010 at 6:13 am
I grew up learning History in the Apartheid era in SA, in a white school and had to learn Afrikaans as a second language. The History syllabus was divided into half the year studying SA history (the sanitised version of events, though the good history teachers I had in a progressive school were able to inject reality between the cracks so well that an essay I wrote about the ANC was marked as ‘excellent’ but don’t write like that for your matric final exam) and the other half of the year was ‘rest of the world history’ in which we learned a lot of 18th, 19th and 20th century history in a roughly chronological order, looking at the reasons for things taking place. This way I was able to assimilate cause and effect in both SA and European history – we learned a lot about British, Italian, French and German history and ultimate causes of the 20th Century wars from way back, unlike what you describe of the current syllabus in England. From this I gained a real love of the subject, a healthy disdain for Apartheid (partly influenced by worshipping at St George’s Cathedral during my childhoold) and later studied some history courses for my Open University degree.
My daughter has chosen German as one of her GCSE subjects, she has been studying it along with French for 2 years, prefers German, and loves visiting the country. She has reluctantly dropped history as she wanted to do Art and Music as well and the school will only allow 3 of 4 choices, however she can pick up history from her own reading, and later may even do A level history without having done GCSE history. She may even do some OU history courses in the future or at a face to face university. Both she and I are determined that she grows up with an appreciation of the world, the causes of events, and an understanding of the flaws and contradictions of human nature despite the limitations and restrictions of the school curriculum.
October 17, 2010 at 11:45 am
[...] problem for Germans is that very soon ‘memory’ will become ‘history‘. The generation of those involved in Germany up to 1945 will begin to die out. That is why [...]