Rationalizing Portrayals of the Nation in (West) German History Education

Based on claims to their legitimate authority over educational content as academics, teachers were able to resist Allied reform efforts for education in postwar western Germany. This (re)assertion of professional control over educational content institutionalized an educational policy-making regime in the Federal Republic of Germany that harkened back to the Weimar and pre-Weimar years and treated secondary school teachers as experts legitimately determining educational content. Successful intervention in policy-making based on claims to their academic and expert status reinforced teachers’ identity as professionals and focused the attention of history teachers further on academic historical research as the source of their legitimate claims to academic authority. As teachers remained in control of the educational policy-making regime at

the state-level for the duration of the postwar era, they exercised this power following the model of their earlier success in reasserting professional authority. When academic historiography underwent a paradigm shift from Historismus to social history in the early 1960s, history teachers replicated this shift in secondary education. Teaching materials were increasingly organized around social-scientific and analytic approaches to historical developments. This paradigm shift preceded wider public and academic attention to the Holocaust and to issues of responsibility for the crimes committed under the National Socialist regime. But this attention reinforced the paradigm shift and hastened its implementation in education. Textbooks thus saw a turn toward socialscientific historiography in narratives of all historical episodes and an increasing rationalization of the nation’s status in history. Below I will first develop my argument and examine alternative explanations

that have been suggested for portrayals of the nation in (West) Germany. I will then describe the educational policy-making regime and its genesis in more detail and show why and how teachers used their power in policy-making to include rationalized portrayals of the nation in historical narratives. Next, I will turn to an analysis of the portrayal of the nation in textbook narratives. I find that textbooks were dominated by a “grand national narrative” through

the early 1960s but then rapidly adopted social history as a new historiographical paradigm. I explain this shift through the close attention teachers paid to academic historiography as the institutionalized source of their professional authority over the content of education.