The “Imagined Other”

In 2014, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won the general election with the highest number of seats won by any party since 1984 and went on to win a second term victory in 2019. Since the rise of the BJP, Hindu nationalist interventions into education have increased. Their agenda has been to “indigenise, nationalise and spiritualise” education in India. To this end, textbooks were written to promote a Hindu majoritarian idea of India that sees Hindus as the primary citizens of India and categorizes Muslims as the “other”. This article outlines the political context in which Hindu nationalists have recently attempted to rewrite Indian history by focusing on the period of Muslim rule in India. It looks at textbooks published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and media reports about regional history rewriting in India.

From Temporary Migrants to National Inclusion?

This article explores ways in which textbook content can reflect national identity over time via a case study of Swedish textbooks. To this end, it analyzes and contextualizes descriptions of Finnish labor migrants in Sweden in seventy-four compulsory school textbooks. The Finnish labor group emigrated from Finland to Sweden mainly from the 1950s to the 1980s. Initially, the Swedish authorities saw them as temporary laborers, but as time went by, the authorities had to realize that they had become permanent residents. In 2000, Finns were defined as an official national minority, “Sweden-Finns,” and their status changed. This article examines representations of Finnish labor migrants in Swedish history, geography and social science textbooks published between 1954 and 2016, tracing their journey from temporary laborers to a permanent national minority.

Ein Opfernarrativ macht Schule?

Mit dem krisenhaften Übergang von der “Ersten” zur “Zweiten” Republik in den 1990er Jahren hat sich in Italien ein “Erinnerungsboom” um die vormals marginalisierten foibe-Massaker entwickelt. Aus den begrenzten, aber komplexen Gewalt-Ereignissen an der italienischen Ostgrenze am Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges wird ein nationales Opfernarrativ konstruiert, welches die faschistischen Verbrechen verblassen lässt. Das Gesetz zur Einführung des Gedenktages aus dem Jahr 2004 erhebt die foibe zum Bildungsauftrag der Schulen. Wie werden die foibe seitdem in italienischen Geschichtsschulbüchern, die keiner staatlichen Kontrolle unterliegen, gedeutet? Die Analyse der Schulbücher offenbart ein sehr breites Deutungsspektrum der foibe. Die Darstellungen oszillieren zwischen der nationalen Opfererzählung und den historischen Erkenntnissen zur italienischen Tätergeschichte im Zweiten Weltkrieg.

Web Documentary Participation as a Basis for Intercultural and Social Engagement and Second Language Acquisition

Foreign language documentary films offer limitless possibilities for language teaching and are an ideal medium for the integration of the target culture and for the promotion of serious and committed discussions about human rights, diversity, global issues, and sustainability. Language learning is based on current cultural contexts so that students become more engaged with the world. In order to integrate this world into my class, I became a documentary filmmaker and filmed everyday life while I was living in Nantes, France. In my interactive documentary (i-doc), students can explore the different opportunities that Nantes has to offer, from street art to socially engaged activities and student demonstrations. The learner watches and listens to interviews in the i-doc at their own pace and engages with the francophone community.

German Colonial Rule in Present-day Namibia

This article traces discursive shifts in the ways in which imperialism and European colonialism have been dealt with in the classroom in relation to the German history textbook Time for History (Zeit für Geschichte), which was published in 2010. It explores how the textbook’s representation of German colonial rule in present-day Namibia both raises awareness of and reproduces common colonialist-racist images of the “other” by demonstrating how its content is negotiated in year-nine history lessons, as observed over the course of an ethnographic study carried out in a German secondary school. The author assesses the complex interplay between discursive practices of negotiation, everyday educational practices and deeply rooted, colonialist-racist images of the “other” and, on the basis of this interplay, analyses how difficult it is to bring about content-based and discursive shifts in the classroom.

Empowering Critical Memory Consciousness in Education

This article addresses memory studies from an educational perspective. In order to encourage pupils and students as independent agents in memory cultures they are part of, it is not enough to (as history education prescribes) learn history as a narrative about the past based on official sources or via the analyses of different uses of history. Rather, today history should also be considered as one of many different dynamic memory acts that define and redefine the past and the societies we live in. We therefore develop the concept of critical memory consciousness and argue for a memory pedagogy that gives learners the possibility to analyze memories that arise out of collective, cultural, and dialogic processes.

“Historical Falsification” as a Master Trope in the Official Discourse on History Education in Putin’s Russia

This article explores a key claim underpinning Russian official memory politics, namely, the notion that Russia’s past (and especially the role it played in the Second World War) is the object of a campaign of “historical falsification” aimed at, among other things, undermining Russian sovereignty, especially by distorting young people’s historical consciousness. Although “historical falsification” is an important keyword in the Kremlin’s discourse, it has received little scholarly attention. Via an analysis of official rhetoric and methodological literature aimed at history teachers, I investigate the ideological functions performed by the concept of “historical falsification.” I show how it serves to reinforce a conspiratorial vision of Russia as a nation under siege, while simultaneously justifying the drive toward greater state control over history education.

Memory Makers of the Great Patriotic War

In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet museum curators began to establish a museal depiction of the war. This article analyzes these early beginnings of Soviet war commemoration and the curtailing of its surprising heterogeneity in late Stalinism. Historical research has largely ignored the impact of Soviet museum workers (muzeishchiki) on the evolution of Russian war memory. Archival material from the Red Army Museum, now renamed the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, in Moscow and the Belarus Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk documents the unfolding of locally specific war exhibitions which stand in stark contrast to the later homogenized official Soviet war narrative. Yet war memory was not created unilaterally by the curators. Visitors also participated in its making, as the museum guestbooks demonstrate. As “sites of commemoration and learning,” early Soviet war exhibitions reveal the agency of the muzeishchiki and the involvement of the visitors in the “small events” of memory creation.

“Russia My History”

This article analyzes the presentation of the Second World War in the multimedia “history parks” of the Russian educational project “Russia My History.” In these exhibition complexes, modern digital technologies offer visitors a “revolutionary” way to discover Russian history. The article first explores the history and conception of the Russia My History project, as a pedagogical tool, a digital museum, a historical narrative, and a response to current memory policies. Next, I focus on the exhibition dedicated to the Second World War (specifically, on its technical, visual, structural, lexical, and historical aspects) and assess the impact of the digitalization and commodification of history on the traditionally rigid official Russian memory of the war. I attempt to show that instead of exploiting digital technologies to develop new approaches to the history of the war, the exhibition neglects the potential of multimedia and provides a narrative close to the one used in Soviet and post-Soviet textbooks.

De-Orientalizing the Western Gaze on Eastern Europe

Comparing narratives of the Soviet occupation in 1940 in current textbooks by two leading Lithuanian publishing houses, I claim that Lithuanian textbooks offer diverging accounts, which mirror to a large extent the opposing mnemonic frames supported by two rival political camps. I also show that the same textbooks tame those differences by transcending the politically charged frames they have chosen in the first place, presenting, for example, the USSR as both villain and victim of the war. Considering the relevance of these findings for our understanding of dynamics of remembering in general and in the Lithuanian culture of memory in particular, I point out that embracing the political inherent in all acts of recalling the past does not necessarily lead to politicized, i.e. narrow-minded memories, and I reflect on what these mnemonic practices mean for reevaluating the traditional role of Eastern Europe as the backward other of Western Europe.