"Don't Mention the War!"

There was an article in the paper yesterday about how the German government is bribing—yes, bribing—British schoolteachers to come to Germany and consider maybe teaching *some* history that doesn’t involve the word “Nazi.”

This is a sore point with me, because I absolutely love history. I think it gives us a real sense of who we are, it guides us through our past mistakes… it’s just really funky, like. And yet… every single thing I know about Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, South American, Australian… hell, anything except British, American and German history, I had to teach myself after I left school.

This is A Bad Thing culturally. It’s somehow still acceptable for people to make blanket assumptions about Germany and the Germans. My brother’s potential father-in-law told him he was stupid for ever working in the country, “because they’re all Nazis.” Who is the ignorant one there?

Hell, how many people in Britain thought that Take Me Out was sung by some Europop guy called Franz Ferdinand? I kid you not.

When I was ten, we did a semester’s project on wartime Britain. Then when I entered secondary school at eleven, that year’s curriculum was—the war. Second year? Second world war. Second year English? World War II poetry. Third year? Hitler’s Germany. Then along came Options. This is a system whereby in English schools you can choose to drop some lessons and keep others on for your GCSE exams to get into college.

I kept history, because I liked it. Or because I hated Geography and didn’t want to take up Spanish. Whatever. Anyway, we were told that our studies for the exams would be on European history. Guess— go on, I challenge you—guess which period of history and what country we studied? For two whole years. Argh.

College came up and I kept history along with language and literature. We had two options for study: American history from the 1700s to present day, or European history. Now, think about this. European history—can I even give a reasonable guess on how many cultures and countries and millenniums and revolutions and movements passed since man first settled throughout Europe? Of course not.

Guess which one period of history and which country was predominantly up for study. Wait, I lie. The First World War was on the syllabus, too.

Hence, there was no way in hell I was choosing to hear the same old lessons when OMFG! There were like revolutions and civil wars and Anglophiles and shootings and tea parties and all kinds of stuff in the American history lessons. I think, through the module on the European settlers, I learned more about England, France, Spain and Italy’s history than I did in the previous decade of history lessons. Bleh.

Which brings me back around to the second world war. Yes, it was a terrible thing. Yes—every educated child in every country should know about it—but please. Are there not lessons to be learned from the divisions in Italy? Was Franco’s Spain not a huge warning to Europe and a lesson about international solidarity? Was the French revolution not an example of the people making history, as well as a lesson on human nature? Does Britain not have a whole slew of different cultures (well, invading Vikings and Romans and Celts) that should be looked at?

Wasn’t it the British who invented the concentration camp? Was the word terrorist not invented during the madness of France’s Reign of Terror? Why do so many English place names have Scandinavian roots? Why was the hat tax one of the stupidities inflicted upon the settlers of America?

These are questions that schoolchildren should be asking. They’re part of our culture, for God’s sake. And yet I guarantee that the only things most children in Britain remember from their history lessons are “Germans BAD” and “divorced, beheaded, died…”