There we are, trying not to be too complaining about everything, and the Guardian gets me going again.
Having moaned – with absolute legitimacy – about the state of language learning in England, I open today’s Guardian and find Simon Jenkins pressing another button: the history curriculum’s obsession with the Nazis.
Under the header ‘Britain’s Nazi obsession betrays our insecurity – it’s time we moved on’, Jenkins asks:
What is the matter with us? We seem unable to get the Nazis out of our system.
He goes on to put his finger on a point we in the Meissen Commission have been trying to address for several years:
Small wonder Hitler is now the ruling obsession of the national curriculum. I remember my son asking me, after a punishing term of the Weimar republic, if there was a second world war when was there a first? The GCSE history website scores 417,000 mentions of Hitler against just 157,000 for Henry VIII and the Tudors.
My own son managed to study history right through school and university, but it was only at uni that he managed to find an alternative to Hitler and Stalin.
Is it a mark of Britain’s insecurity that we can’t let Hitler go? Is it simply that 1945 was the last time we ‘won’ anything? Why when we play Germany at football do tabloids still do puns on Nazi imagery or football crowds sing such inanities as “Two world wars and one world cup – na na na na na.”?
The tragedy is that post-1945 Germany is an extraordinary story of division, political brinkmanship, economic re-engineering, social and psycho-social reconstruction, conflict, re-culturisation in Europe, and so on. If I didn’t like Berlin and Berliners so much, I would suggest that every school child in Britain should be taken to Berlin for a few days. Walk 100 metres down Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Tor and you have to embrace language, history, geography, theology, economics and politics. You can’t understand German politics or culture without knowing history and how it has been shaped by theology.
The Meissen Commission is trying to address the English obsession with one exciting period of German history in two ways: (a) pressing for reform of the history curriculum in schools, and (b) embarking on what we are calling the Meissen Schools Initiative, aimed at establishing live links between schools in England and Germany.
Simon Jenkins concludes:
I must not fall foul of Godwin’s law, but the demands now being made of Germany “to show leadership” come with ghostly overtones of reparation for past guilt. Nothing is more likely to incur German resistance than to imply that rescuing Europe is somehow an obligation on a present generation of Germans for the deeds of a past one. Misreading Germany was a lethal failing of Europe’s 20th-century leaders. It is surely time to consign the Nazis not to oblivion but at least to history.
Like Jenkins, I suspect our obsession with Hitler and the Nazis is indeed a mark of our insecurity (or envy?). It is time we grew up.
September 23, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Hello. I think it’s possible that some sections of the church are contributing to the department of education’s determination that the history curriculum includes lots of material about nazism and WW2, mainly from the angle of remembering the holocaust. There is known to be a persistent myth in circulation amongst christians on the internet that the government is removing mention of the holocaust from the school curriculum, as part of what is seen as a wider trend of giving special treatment to muslims. I’ve had some pretty unpleasant chain emails on the subject myself, with dreadful irony using the same propaganda techniques against muslims as were used against jewish people in 1930s Germany. The department of education had to put out a press release a couple of years ago to deny it, and insist that they are still featuring the subject, and in fact were making more funding available to do so. So there is probably some fear that any attempt the department makes to re-balance the history curriculum will be met with further rumours and allegations from that group of christians who feel under attack.
When I was at school it was the other way round – you couldn’t get away from Henry VIII, but we never did Hitler.
September 23, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Ah, sadly true. The GCSE History curriculum – which as as far as most English schoolchildren will go, if even that – is tiresomely focused on Germany in the middle decades of 20th century Europe, or on a merry romp through the history of medicine. Few children know, for example, that many more died under Stalin than under Hitler, or the even greater number of deaths caused by Mao. Some of them have never heard of Stalin! Few know much if anything about post-1945 Europe: the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift. Adenauer, the Wall, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Reagan and Thatcher, the events of 1989. Communism gets an easy ride in English schools. In the 6th form they may learn about Russia or Spain, but not many will pursue that option.
There is too much premature emphasis on making little historians out of children (“analysing sources”) and not enough on knowing the big picture of a continent over a century as Schama calls for.
September 23, 2011 at 10:34 pm
But every primary school child has “done” Henry III and the Tudors at least twice by the time they move on the secondary school.
The real problem is that it’s all “done” from a British standpoint with scant regard, if any, to pan Europan politics at the time.
“Massacre in Turkey, 3 Britons dead…” the curriculum is pretty much still like that.
September 23, 2011 at 11:54 pm
I love reading your blog. Thank you! And for your support of Meissen.
- I broadly agree with your writing. I also think Catherine is right in pointing out the importance of remembering the holocaust.
And it’s to this that I want to add another comment, moving away somewhat from your starting point since what I am going to refer to has deeper roots than Nazism in 1930s Germany – namely that a largely unreflected theological anti-judaism can still be encountered alive and well in English church life when it comes to reading the gospels and reflecting on Jesus and his contemporaries. Another can of worms!
September 24, 2011 at 12:10 am
Erica
I really love your comment about “massacre in Turkey.. three Britons dead”…but don’t worry yourselves too much about the forty Turkish people who were simultaneously slaughtered! That is so true..
And Nick, I really like your comment about loving Berlin too much not to encourage the British to go there too often. When I am on holiday abroad I do my very best to avoid the British wherever possible. In fact it is one of the best things about being abroad..there aren’t that many British people around!
I remember going to Kos about 12 years ago and there was one street in Kos Town that was famously known as “Brit Street”. I accidentally came across it one day and as soon as I stePped onto it I knew where I was…IT WAS tacky, dirty and full of souvenir shops, bars and clubs (not that I am against bars and clubs..I have frequented a few myself)..but culturally there was nothing else whatsoever…
I sought refuge in the other side of town where the Scandinavians were staying..cool, cultured, stylish, contemporary etc..a really good feel to it. Later in the holiday I made the mistake of getting an hour bus ride to the other side of the island to Kardamena, the resort where many British stay and it was just dire!!
It may therefore come as no surprise for you to hear that whenever the England football team play, I secretly and silently am rooting for the opposition. Sorry, but I just can’t help it!
I also think that Simon Jenkins has not been watching his television much this week, Am I the only one who is very uneasy about the manner in which Basildon Council are treating the travelling community on Dale Farm. I wouldn’t go as far to say it is akin to Nazi treatment, but the Romany people were, amongst others those that were targetted very early on
I love the Steve Turner poem which simply states;
“History repeats itself..It has to.No-one ever listens!”
.
September 24, 2011 at 6:30 am
“British” history (English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish – all different, with a long history of mutual antagonism) *ought to be “done” from a British standpoint, just as mutatis mutandis you would expect in France, Germany, Italy etc. The “island story” of Britian is something that every British child should learn, from Boudicca to the present. They should learn the true erstwhile greatness of this country, how a small country in NW Europe lost America but gained India and spread Anglophone Christian culture across the globe – in other words, everything that the secular left despises. I agree part of the problem lies in primary schools: Henry VIII, the Constitution and the Reformation are too serious to be treated as a costume drama.
It would be lovely if British scholchildren learnt something about the Volkerwanderungen, Clovis and the Franks, Conversion of the Germans by Boniface, Carolingian Renaissance, Investiturstreit, Crusades (oh no, what will they say in Bradford???), Holy Roman Empire,the Reconquista, the Reformation in France and the Huguenots, the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, and the Thirty Years War – and this takes us only up to 1648! – but even if the deteriorating literacy of the Englsih could be reversed, I suspect there wouldn’t be time for Useful Things bequeathed by David Blunkett like Citizenship and PSHE.
September 24, 2011 at 6:46 am
What Michael Gove said last year:
“One of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past. Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of our United Kingdom. Our history has moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully understand the struggles of the past we will not properly value the liberties of the present.
“The current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry the Eighth and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. This trashing of our past has to stop.
“We are delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum.”
‘Our Island Story’ is an allusion to a famous history of Britain for children written in 1905 and republished ever since – it’s on the web.
September 24, 2011 at 9:08 am
Another more valid explanation for the concentration on the Nazis is surely the fact that many of the acute moral problems of the twentieth century – war, racism, nationalism, the use and abuse of power, empire – are seen in their sharpest focus in Germany 1933-1945. True, similar issues are evident in the Soviet Union, but are a) not as well documented and b) somehow more distant – Germany is at the heart of our European home – Russia is not.
September 24, 2011 at 9:34 am
Hi Erika,
Your comment re the Turks reminds me of the supposed headline in the Aberdeen daily paper the “Press & Journal” the day after the sinking of the Titanic-”North-east men lost at sea”!
September 24, 2011 at 4:02 pm
Kevin,
the thing is that history didn’t happen in isolated Britain but that British history was influenced by what happened in Europe as much as British politics influenced what happened abroad. History is not one dimensional. How can you possibly understand the various wars, religious battles, the Reformation in Britain, without knowing what intervowen European economic and political situations they arose from?
I have never learned “German” history at school, but a particular period of time analysed through the lense of the political situation in the major European countries.
You might just be able to study “American” history on its own because, leaving the original inhabitants aside (!) that started with the Europan settlers. Even then, it was influenced by what the powers back in Europe wanted and fought for.
You certainly cannot do it with Europe, not if you want to end up with any credible understanding of your own country’s history.
September 24, 2011 at 7:29 pm
Kevin?
” ….the thing is that history didn’t happen in isolated Britain but that British history was influenced by what happened in Europe as much as British politics influenced what happened abroad.”
Neither Kevin nor I suggested any such thing. Quite the opposite. But you can’t advance on all fronts at all times, any more than you can be friends with all the world in any real sense. Children can only absorb so much. Simon Schama, David Starkey, Andrew Roberts and Neil Ferguson have all done a good job in presenting the history of these islands **as a continuous narrative** from the Roman period (the dawn of British history proper) to the present – which has been missing in the fragmented PC mess of recent history teaching.
September 25, 2011 at 6:44 am
I have to agree with Nick – the loss of deeper historical perspective is very worrying in the West.
September 25, 2011 at 12:57 pm
Kieran (!),
Then I must have misunderstood your sentence ““British” history (English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish – all different, with a long history of mutual antagonism) *ought to be “done” from a British standpoint, just as mutatis mutandis you would expect in France, Germany, Italy etc.”
I learned as much about Henry VII at my school in Germany as my children did in their English school. But they know pretty close to nothing about the times of Marie Antoinette, Louis XIV or Mussolini or the politics in Spain at the time of Columbus.
I don’t expect them to read Goethe or Schiller, although we read them as well as Shakespeare and Steinbeck – on the other hand, wouldn’t it be lovely if they were also introduced to Candide?
Children can only absorb so much, but I do think that we severely underestimate what they can absorb. I’d rather have a little less PHSE in place of a little more of what helps them to understand their own place in the world a little better.
September 25, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Erika, do you mean Henry VIII? I don’t doubt that German education is generally better than English. French and Austro-German politics were always impacting each other throughout the 18th and 19th century – as you would expect with a long shared border between France and the German states and wars in 1792, Napoleon’s adventures across Europe to Moscow, and German unification culminating in the war in 1870. Whereas, after Britain and Prussia defeated Napoleon, times were peaceful in these islands for 99 years, while the Empire spread across the globe. That’s the distinctive British story that British children need to know: North America, W. Indies, India, huge swathes of Africa, SE Asia, Australasia; railways across Argentina, ships around the world, British banking and commerce, industry, parliamentary democracy, the abolition of slavery, Opium Wars, the spread of Christianity across Africa – a thrilling story.
PSHE is a waste of time. These are things children should have learnt from their parents.
September 25, 2011 at 6:47 pm
….’Candide’ is an amusing but rather repetitive divertissement. Samuel Johnson from the same era has much more depth and humanity. Goethe is certainly worth comparing with Marlowe – and Thomas Mann.
But Pascal is deeper still, and Dante is inexhaustible.
Personally, I would add The Odyssey and The Aeneid, and The Confessions of St Augustine to the required reading list of any educated European – along with Dostoyevsky and the Bible.
September 25, 2011 at 10:01 pm
Kieran,
yes, I did mean Henry VIII, excuse the typo.
I mentioned Candide rather than Johnson because I was trying to think of a French author. My point being that unless you have a broader outlook you do miss out. I should have mentioned Dante, I suppose!
I agree with the rest of your reading list, but now it’s me who’s not so sure that that’s not expecting too much of standard secondary school education. The whole of the Bible? And Dostoyevsky isn’t that short and simple either. But a Russian – yes!
I don’t know that German education is necessarily better than British education. There are many examples where my girls are better placed here than their German cousins over there.
But a true understanding that European history and literature (and languages!) are important, not to understand “them” but to understand ourselves, that is indeed missing.
September 26, 2011 at 9:15 am
It wouldn’t be so bad if the Second World War period was studied with greater nuance and texture.
A couple of years ago I was at a French D Day commemoration when the Mayor told us that the war had been one against “racism”. Of course we learnt from the holocaust – but many the men crossing the beaches knew little of it (the Americans fought in segregated units) and comprised a complete mixture including Imperialists, Socialists, republicans, homophobes, Christians etc – few of whom would meet current standards of political correctness. Equally the defenders would have included good men whose patriotism or cultural attachment to an oath of loyalty once sworn, kept them fighting for the 3rd Reich
Eamon De Valera signed the book of condolence for Hitler’s death whilst Irishmen fought in the armies liberating the concentration camps. Mussolini sent troops across the French borders to protect Jews from the French Fascist Millice saying that he might be called to account for many crimes but would not be complicit in that one.
I worry about the monochrome narrative that seems to be repeated when a proper study of history whether in breadth or depth, regularly bring us back to the conclusion that few political narratives properly engage with moral complexity or human vulnerability to do evil things.
September 27, 2011 at 11:15 pm
The GCSE History curriculum when I took it wasn’t so much about “German” history as the history of EUROPE in the Twentieth Century: the reasons for the outbreak of the First World War, the rise of Fascism across Europe (including Germany and Italy) in the interwar period, Stalin in Russia, and also a study of the war.
We also studied the Arab-Israeli crisis and the role that Britain played in the origins of it.
As others have pointed out here, children learn lots about the Tudors, Stuarts, Romans, etc in Junior school and then again at A’Level, so I think the curriculum is quite balanced.
Germany and its political regimes happened to play a large part in what happened in Europe throughout the Twentienth Century and rightfully earn a place in the History curriculum of British schools.
September 28, 2011 at 12:13 am
Jennie, that’s helpful. But Germany has also been vital to post-war Europe and that period doesn’t figure – which gives students a warped picture of Germany and Germans. Hence the puerile relation of any footie game with Germany to the war.
September 29, 2011 at 7:32 pm
That’s true. I suppose I’m lucky in knowing the “true” picture, having taken European Studies at university including languages (French, German) and Contemporary History – the latter at postgraduate as well as undergraduate level.
October 1, 2011 at 4:37 pm
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