Controversial Chapters: Polish-German history texbook

The history of German-Polish relations is full of suffering and mutual recriminations. Experts from both countries have been developing a history textbook meant to teach high-school students on both sides of the border a common narrative. But critics view the effort as destined to fail.

spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,759740,00.html

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Fighting about words!
A sure sign that such a book is to early....it will need some more decades of reconciliation to write such a joint history, agreed on both sides.

Germans and France are able to now, with Germany and Poland it will take awhile longer.

Too early, Germans still feel Poles are inferior and Poles still find Germans a bunch of Nazis, it'll take another 50 years for such a book to come out.


Aye but Paris is still standing no? The rift is too deep, it'll take at least two centuries to heal completely.

Good initiative. It should have been done long time ago.


I once met a German teenager interested in WWII who mistook Warsaw Uprising with the defence of Polish post office in Gdańsk.

you name it. with whom germany doesn't have a 'rift'?

nice try, but who knows which generation will actually have a benefit from this.

Gerhard Schröder came to Poland in the 90ties and he confused Warsaw uprising and the uprising in Warsaw ghetto in some official apologizing speech.

atleast he talked about it...
and he went to Warsaw! :)

Spiegel would say that.

If they can manage to do it, it'll be huge. It should be taught as common history, which it is - and the book should pull no punches.

The problem, of course, is that there is no common narrative. Germans would never admit that Frankfurt (Oder) was a nasty place to be a Pole in the early 1990's (many, many cases of Polish people being beaten up there) - nor would Poles admit that they actually enjoyed the "sealed" border with Germany.