German-Polish history textbook finally approved in Poland

The jointly written history textbook "Europe – Our History" is a flagship project of German-Polish cooperation. Dozens of academics from Poland and Germany have been working on the project since 2008.

It is also only the second bilateral history textbook in the world to be produced by two neighboring countries.

The final volume in the series — volume 4 in Germany, and volumes 7 and 8 in Poland — was finished in 2020. However, unlike in Germany, teachers in Poland have so far been unable to use the book in class because of objections from Poland's former national-conservative government.

This all changed with the election victory of Donald Tusk's center-left coalition last December. Last week, the Education Ministry led by left-wing liberal politician Barbara Nowacka finally gave its approval for the entire series to be used in classes V to VIII in Polish schools.

Multi-perspectivity and critical thinking

Andrzej Dusiewicz, who has worked on the series at Polish publisher WSiP, said that Europe – Our History has been "the project of my life," adding that he is "overjoyed that the entire series is now signed, sealed and delivered."

"This is only the second bilateral history textbook in the world," said Polish historian Robert Traba, former co-chair of the German-Polish Textbook Commission, who has been working on the project right from the word go. "Two countries — one of which (Poland) was invaded and destroyed by the other (Germany) — have shown themselves capable of writing a shared account of the past."

Experts say that "multi-perspectivity" is the word that best defines the series. "For us, it was important to show why a specific event in Poland or in Germany plays a very different role," Marcin Wiatr of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media (GEI) told Polish Radio.

Inspired by Franco-German cooperation

The project was modeled on the Franco-German history textbook, which focuses on the past two centuries alone. The German-Polish series, on the other hand, covers a much longer period ranging from antiquity to the present day.

Violetta Julkowska of Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozen, Traba's successor on the commission, had warm words of praise for the German-Polish history book series: "Modernity is the defining feature of this schoolbook," she told DW.

"It does not impose any way of thinking on students, but acts more like a laboratory, a workshop that — with the help of a good teacher — teaches students to think historically. And historical thinking is critical thinking."

A long, winding, bumpy road to approval

It was German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier who got the ball rolling in fall 2006. At the time, Steinmeier was Germany's foreign minister. During a speech at the Viadrina University in the eastern German city of Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border, he raised the idea of a jointly produced German-Polish history book that would help Poles and Germans "understand each other better."

"With this project, we Germans could make it clear that we are open to Polish perspectives on history," said Steinmeier at the time, adding that many Germans would find it enriching to learn more about both these perspectives and Polish history.

Two years later, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski — who currently holds the post again — picked up on Steinmeier's idea.

The governments of the neighboring countries tasked the German-Polish Textbook Commission, which was founded in 1972, with drawing up a list of recommendations, which were then used as the basis for work, which began in 2011.

Five years later, volume 1 in the series was presented in Berlin at a ceremony attended by the foreign ministers of both countries: Steinmeier and Sikorski's successor, Witold Waszczykowski of the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. Two more volumes were published without any noteworthy difficulties in the years that followed.

Too little Catholic Church, too much Berlin Wall

The project ran into difficulty with the fourth volume in the series, which dealt with World War II and the post-war period. The content of the book proved incompatible with the nationalistic history policy of the ruling PiS.

The reasons given for the government's objections to the book were that it contained too little about the Catholic Church, too much about the Berlin Wall at the expense of the Polish Solidarity trade union and an excessively critical assessment of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

Unsurprisingly, the resulting report, which is a precondition for approval by the Education Ministry, was negative. Before the book could be formally rejected — which would have meant the end of the project — the publisher withdrew it. "We wanted to wait for better days," said WSiP's Dusiewicz.

Patience and grassroots work

But many of the dedicated people who had worked on the project did not want to just sit back and wait for a transfer of power that might never happen.

"We organized numerous conferences and meetings to familiarize teachers with the history textbook," said Julkowska. "Thanks to this grassroots work, there is now a large pool of teachers that will be able to work with the book immediately after approval," she said .

International interest

Although the first three volumes in the series have been approved for several years, few Polish teachers work with it in the classroom because the final volume had not been approved.

Now that the entire series is on the Education Ministry's official list of approved books, the authors expect interest in Poland to grow. The decision as to whether the textbooks are actually used is, however, up to the teachers.

There is still much to do on the German side, too, although about 30,000 copies had been sold by the end of last year. The series is not used in the state of Bavaria, for example, due to a lack of regional focus.

Nevertheless, it doesn't look like the joint history book series will remain an exclusively German-Polish success story. Ukraine, Lithuania and the Western Balkans are already interested in the project.

This article was originally written in German.