Subtitle: Das Beispiel der deutsch-französischen und der deutsch-polnischen Schulbuchgespräche im Vergleich, 1935-1998
[Transnational Conflict Management. Comparing the German-French and German-Polish Textbook Dialogues]
published in Das Willy-Brandt-Bild in Deutschland und Polen, Carsten Tessmer (ed.), Berlin, 2000, pp. 121-131
In the 1970s and early 1980s, when the German-Polish textbook discussions were being publicly criticised, they were compared to the German-French textbook discussions of the 1950s and 1960s. This was sometimes done with the polemical intention of pitting the German-Polish and the German-French textbook discussions against each other in order to discredit the former. By 1989, not only were the German-Polish and the German-French textbook discussions frequently compared, but also, increasingly, the youth exchanges between the two pairs of countries as well as the development of bilateral partnerships between schools, cities and army units, and the establishment of non-governmental organisations and Euroregions to Berlin’s east and west. The function of these comparisons is different today. German-French activities are no longer cited in German-Polish contexts as a way of discrediting or marginalising the latter. Nowadays there is more a sense of constructing a German-French-Polish triangle, consisting of concise communication and explicitly cordial statements by politicians.
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