Wars waged on maps

Spiegel Online has an interesting article today (in German) discussing the geo-political aspect of maps in school textbooks. Besides obvious examples of the disputed territorial boundaries of Ukraine and Kashmir, there is a great excerpt from a German school atlas from 1925, depicting Germany in its pre-WWI boundaries. This defiant ignoring of the Versailles Treaty had been forced on the publisher by the school administration in (SPD-dominated) Prussia.

The Crisis of Reform Schools

In the late 1920s, a collection of auto-biographical texts by occupants of a children’s home, so called ‘Fürsorgezöglinge’, caused an outrage and fuelled a debate about the future of German reform schools.

The texts have now been republished in a critical edition for the first time, making these unique source available again for Weimar research.

Werkstatt Alltagsgeschichte (ed.): ‘Du Mörder meiner Jugend’. Edition von Aufsätzen männlicher Fürsorgezöglinge aus der Weimarer Republik

Journal Review: Journal of Contemporary History (1/2011)

The new issue of the Journal of Contemporary History features an article on ‘Germany’s Postwar Re-education and Its Weimar Intellectual Roots‘ by Udi E. Greenberg: ‘Historians have often observed the intrusion by the USA into German intellectual and institutional life as part of the USA’s overall plan to “re-educate” Germany and to tie it to its own political traditions and Cold War goals. Through examination of the political theories and academic educational reforms of Carl J. Friedrich, one of the most important intellectuals of the Cold War, this article argues that US policies were simultaneously shaped and determined by intellectual traditions from the Weimar period.’