Sitting on a stool in one of Berlin’s most expensive Italian restaurants, Peter Liddell recalled the moment when he had been asked whether he would like an all-expenses paid trip to Germany. Liddell, a comprehensive schoolteacher in Burgess Hill, west Sussex, gave the offer a brief thought. ”You don’t get many freebies in teaching,” he explained. ”And so I thought: ‘Why not? Quite frankly who wouldn’t?”
On Monday Liddell was one of 20 English history teachers taking part in an unprecedented exercise in re-education, paid for by the German government.
Fed up with Britain’s continuing obsession with Hitler, the Germany embassy in London came up last month with a novel plan. Why not invite a group of English history teachers to Germany, put them up in a five-star hotel, throw in an opera, and hope that their positive experience of modern Germany rubs off on what they teach?
And so on Monday Liddell and his colleagues found themselves wandering in front of the Reichstag, Germany’s imposing Parliament building, courtesy of the German taxpayer. Over the weekend they visited the Berlin state opera ”It wasn’t a great experience,” Liddell said. ”The woman next to me fell asleep.” He had a tour of the Brandenburg Gate; and met top officials at Germany’s foreign ministry.
The unusual invitation followed an attack last week by Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who accused the British media of perpetuating a ”goose-stepping” image of Germany that was three generations out of date. Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Thomas Mattusek, had complained that English history teaching focuses excessively on the Nazi period. The history curriculum was ”unbalanced”. It said little about the successes of post-war Germany, ignored German reunification, and glossed over other crucial chunks of German history.
Speaking after a three-course Italian lunch, Liddell on Monday said he did teach his students about Hitler and the Third Reich. But keeping the attention of 14-year-old GCSE pupils was no mean feat. ”Kids find the Nazi period interesting. A lot of things happen. There is plenty of violence. You have to bear in mind that at 14 kids can drop history altogether.”
He added: ”Post-war German history is more sophisticated and convoluted and is therefore harder to teach.”
What about Germany’s great post-war chancellor Willy Brandt, who ushered in a historic period of detente between east and west Germany? Could he teach that? ”It’s a bit dry isn’t it,” Liddell said.
Other teachers invited on the six-day trip, which includes visits to Berlin, Dresden and Bonn, admitted that Germany’s image in the UK could be better. ”British children can be bigoted and uninterested. The general impression is that Germans are all Nazis who steal sun loungers,” Stephen Daughton, who teaches history at a Newcastle comprehensive and spent teenage holidays in Germany, said. ”This is obviously a cartoon-style view. The problem is that if you ask them seriously they have no view of Germany at all.”
Other teachers blamed England’s prescriptive curriculum, which left huge chunks of history out. ”Europe disappears entirely after the Norman invasion and only reappears in the 20th century,” Gerald Clarke, a teacher at Torquay Boys Grammar School, said. ”I think the problem with the Nazis is that they are sexy. Evil is fascinating.”
On Monday German officials defended their decision to pay for British teachers to come to Germany — and said that Fischer had a point. ”We didn’t know that he would say what he said. But for sometime we have had the feeling that we have to do something about this misperception,” one official said.
”The problem is that on British TV you get endless movies that show goose-stepping SS soldiers. The level of ignorance is stunning. We’ve even met postgraduates at Oxford who didn’t know about [communist] east Germany.” The trip cost the German government â,¬52 000 and it might be repeated if the money was well spent, the official said. Last year the education secretary Charles Clarke said he sympathised with German complaints about English history teaching but refused to downgrade the role of Hitler.
”Do I think there is a systematic distortion through the national curriculum of German history designed to misrepresent modern Germany? No, I don’t,” he said, during a visit to Bonn. On Monday night one British official said there was an ongoing debate about teaching history in Britain and that no firm conclusions had been reached. ”This isn’t just confined to Germany. Should children learn about the potato famine in Ireland, the American Constitution or about feminism in Victorian England? There is a wide debate in the UK.”
Before setting off to Dresden on Monday night, meanwhile, some of the teachers said they were astonished at the lavish hospitality provided by the German government.
”I found myself in the penthouse suite of a five-star hotel,” Daughton said, before a German government tour bus whisked him off to the Reichstag. ”We discovered later that even the mini-bar was free. We would never have been able to stay anywhere like that normally as teachers.”
Had the trip worked? Would he teach Germany differently now? ”I’m doubtful,” Daughton said. – Guardian Unlimited Â