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MariaB -> RE: School history lessons and propaganda (8/17/2012 2:31:36 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aswad
Up here, the emphasis was on the UK and the USSR, with the US and France secondarily, and little mention of anyone else until one starts poking enough holes in it for the teachers to say "fuck it... I dunno... I'm just repeating what I learned in school myself.", and so I eventually arrived at the conclusion that Germany defeated Germany, with a lot of help from the UK, US, USSR and France (with the latter mostly being useful as a front, tying up enormous resources by actually resisting with some success).
Me, I'm more curious about what Germans are taught about it.
I googled this:
It's being done to death and it's made abundantly clear that we were the bad guys. Especially in the case of the Third Reich, it's covered multiple times over the course of a student's career, and with particular emphasis on the Holocaust. We are told in no uncertain terms that this is what happened and that it must never happen again.
Also, in German society, losing WWII is less considered to be having our asses kicked and more as a liberation from a madman and a criminal government who held the German people hostage (this is partly due to a very important speech of our president, Richard von Weizsäcker, in the mid-80s).
WWI is not as widely covered, lacking the particular atrocities of the Holocaust and the comic-like clear lines of good guys vs. bad guys. We do learn about it, but in the collective mind of the German people, 1933-1945 is by far the more defining period.
National pride is actually a major issue, in that people are constantly discussing whether you should even be allowed to be "proud" of your country, since it's nothing you achieved yourself. This changed a bit during the 2006 world cup, where we were able to celebrate our country without feeling guilty about it. Outside of major sporting events, though, you are not going to find German flags flying in the street. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=609991
quote:
Incidentally, the importance of the heavy water sabotage is not uncontroversial, as making a nuclear bomb and deploying it in a successful manner is a complicated and involved puzzle. No one thing secures success by itself, and several things can cause a failure. We did bring something else to the table, though: logistics. Put the fourth largest fleet of ships around at the time to work transporting oil and parts for the US and the UK, with some one-in-ten seamen lost in the course of the war. Material and fuel probably had a higher impact than the heavy water.
History is an interesting field. The school subject is an amusing fiction. In any nation.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
I think its pretty unanimous that all countries do the same thing. Maybe its a sort of compensation for the loss of our men.
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