Clueless about the past

If any nation knows how to rebuild from the ground up, it's Germany. After starting two world wars, it has had plenty of practice. Following reunification in 1990, the task of transforming the antiquated east was enormous.

But the engineers of reunification did a masterful job on many fronts - except, it seems, in the education department.

"Our students really don't know much," said Andrea Mehrländer, director of the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation, which promotes German-American relations through teachers' exchange programs. "We kind of mish-mashed both systems together, and it seems that it's not working."

As a historian, Mehrländer is frustrated that high school students aren't learning much about the differences between East and West Germany.

"I see that when we have discussions here at the foundation," she said. "A colleague of mine was born the same year I was. She grew up in East Berlin, and I grew up in West Berlin. We both think that we had a very good school education, and we both cannot believe what kind of - I'm sorry - crap comes out of a German school nowadays."

Clueless students

To be fair, the younger generation in eastern Germany is not the only one clueless about what took place before they were born. For today's teens, "Big Brother" is the name of a reality show, not the surveillance typical of the Stasi, the East German security police.

Yet students at the Wittstock high school in the eastern state of Brandenburg don't have much to say about what they learned about East Germany in school.

"I can't tell you anything off the top of my head," one teenage girl said - and neither could anyone else.

Did anyone know the reason Germany was divided in the first place?

"Well, after the war, the British, Americans and French took the western part," one student said. "The Russians took the eastern part, and in the middle was the Wall. It ran right through Berlin."

But he didn't know who put it there in the first place.

None of the students DW met at the school had heard about the country's censorship, travel restrictions or the shoot-to-kill policy for anyone who tried to escape across the border to the west.

Honesty can help

Holger Rupprecht, Brandenburg's education minister and a former teacher in East Germany, said he wants to encourage more class discussion about the GDR.

"Many East German families simply don't talk about the communist past, because kids put their parents on the spot when they ask, why did you go along with it?" Rupprecht said.

Many children born after World War II had asked their parents the same thing, but were simply told: "I didn't know about everything that happened; I had no idea."

"No one is going to believe that coming from a teacher who worked in the East German system," Rupprecht said. "That's why we have to be honest with our students."

That's too tall an order for many teachers, at least right now. But the school's acting principal, Bernd Frühauf, who taught physics in the old days, said he has no regrets about his career during the communist rule.

"I don't have a guilty conscience," Frühauf said. "None of my old students I run into criticize me today about what we did in school or out. After class, we did recycling; we helped the elderly, kids tutored each other. We took part in very humane activities."

Frühauf has no reason to feel guilty, he says.

"If I'd revolted against the system, I couldn't have kept my job, and that would have meant I couldn't support my family," he said.

An innocent player?

The less students learn about East Germany in history class, the more they're likely to see it as something bordering on a year-round socialist summer camp. That's what researchers at Berlin's Free University concluded from their study, which was co-authored by Monika Schroeder-Deutz.

"Many students we surveyed didn't know the difference between democracy and dictatorship," Schroeder-Deutz said. "And most of them in the east thought the Wall was built by the Soviet Union, or even West Germans."

She said they considered East Germany "an innocent player" in the background with no responsibility for what happened.

"But I think you can't appreciate today's Germany without understanding the past, because the so-called reunification of East and West isn't yet complete," Schroeder-Deutz said. "There are still conflicting views of recent history, and the discontent is high on both sides."

Author: Alexa Dvorson (sac)
Editor: Andreas Illmer