Bernhard / Grindel / Hinz / Kühberger (eds.) Dossier 4 2019 Myths in German-language Textbooks Eckert. Dossiers 4 (2019) Roland Bernhard / Susanne Grindel / Felix Hinz / Christoph Kühberger (eds.) Myths in German-language Textbooks: Their Influence on Historical Accounts from the Battle of Marathon to the Élysée Treaty This publication was published under the creative commons licence:Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, with the exception of the illustrations (see p. 317). Eckert. Dossiers Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research ISSN 2191-0790 Volume 4 (2019) Editor Wibke Westermeyer Translator Katherine Ebisch-Burton Cite as: Roland Bernhard, Susanne Grindel, Felix Hinz and Christoph Kühberger (eds.). Myths in German-language Textbooks: Their Influence on Historical Accounts from the Battle of Marathon to the Élysée Treaty. Eckert. Dossiers 4 (2019). urn:nbn:de:0220- 2019-0040. Contents Roland Bernhard / Susanne Grindel / Felix Hinz / Christoph Kühberger Editors’ preface – Myths and sense-making in history textbooks: a window on cultures of history, knowledge and communication ................................................................. 6 Roland Bernhard / Susanne Grindel / Felix Hinz / Johannes Meyer-Hamme Historical myth: a definition from the perspective of history education research .......... 12 Felix Hinz White dwarves in the firmament of historical consciousness? Marathon/Salamis and Tours/Poitiers as European myths of deliverance ........................ 35 Björn Onken The myth of Arminius (Hermann) in German textbooks between 1800 and 2000 ........ 61 Roland Bernhard Martin Behaim of Nuremberg: the 'real discoverer of America'? German textbooks of the 18th to 21st centuries and the myth of the flat Earth .............. 94 Susanne Grindel The myth of colonialism: European expansion in Africa .................................................... 119 Roland Bernhard / Jutta Wimmler Invisible Africans? The triangular trade myth in German and Austrian history textbooks .......................................................................................................................................... 139 Hansjörg Biener The ‘myth’ of the First Crusade ................................................................................................. 165 Julia Thyroff Switzerland’s role in the world wars: how current history textbooks reproduce, supersede and deconstruct the neutrality myth ................................................. 187 Christoph Kühberger The problem of personalising history: myths around Hitler in Austrian history textbooks – exploring the issue via qualitative and quantitative methods ...................... 211 Tobias Kuster The myth of the Reichsautobahn: historical learning and the challenge of entrenched historical concepts .................................................................................................... 239 Markus Furrer Myths in the Cold War: the Swiss case .................................................................................... 269 Christiane Pflüger The Élysée Treaty of 1963: the foundational myth of Franco-German friendship? ....................................................................................................................................... 287 Textbooks cited and analysed, by country of origin ............................................................. 307 Illustrations ...................................................................................................................................... 318 Index of historical persons and mythical figures ................................................................... 319 Index of place names ..................................................................................................................... 321 urn:nbn:de:0220-2019-0040 Eckert. Dossiers 4 (2019) Myths and sense-making in history textbooks 6 Roland Bernhard / Susanne Grindel / Felix Hinz / Christoph Kühberger Editors’ preface Myths and sense-making in history textbooks: a window on cultures of history, knowledge and communication Across the globe, historical myths exert a decisive influence on the processes by which we make sense of our past and present. This volume, the result of a joint international research effort, represents an attempt to comprehensively explore and identify the pres- ence of myths in history textbooks from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The find- ings it presents are indicative of the substantial relevance of this issue, neglected hither- to in research into educational media. Our intent is for the volume to serve as initial inspiration for systematic, critical analysis of textbooks and educational media with re- gard to the potential presence of myths and for the purpose of those myths’ interroga- tion, a process which we hope this English translation will help initiate worldwide. The current lively interest in research into myth has yet to extend into the field of interna- tional history education research; yet in our age of ubiquitous ‘fake news’, teachers need now more than ever to be able to equip their pupils with tools for recognising and de- constructing myths. The capacity to critically analyse culture in general, and historical culture in particular, is part of the mature historical consciousness which all involved in history teaching seek to develop in learners, and an integral component of the politically aware citizen’s skill set. True to its practical aim of inspiring and supporting work with myths in history text- books and the history classroom which will ultimately enable learners to advance skills for independent, reflective thinking and judgement, this volume provides, for the first time, a definition of the concept of ‘historical myth’ from the point of view of history education research. The Battle of Marathon, Arminius, the medieval ‘flat earth’, the Crusades, the triangular slave trade, Hitler as ‘Führer’, the motorways of the ‘Third Reich’, and the Élysée Treaty are just some of the topics around which myths loom large in our collective historical consciousness. As stories that forge identities and en- dow events and communities with meaning, myths of the past, ancient and modern alike, supply interpretations of the world and points of orientation in the present. Which stories condense into myth, and how they change in the course of their careers, are is- sues whose relevance stretches beyond academic research into myth and reaches into urn:nbn:de:0220-2019-0040 Eckert. Dossiers 4 (2019) Myths and sense-making in history textbooks 7 the history classroom, affecting how we do history and how we teach and learn about it. Accordingly, this volume’s focus is how myths in textbooks guide, direct and impact our interpretations of historical events, and how textbooks ‘work on myth’.1 Aware that ‘myth’ is a complex, multi-layered concept, we set out in the volume’s introductory chapter, ‘Historical myth: a definition from the perspective of history education re- search’, a comprehensive theoretical exploration of the issue, whose considerations un- derlie the individual chapters. Textbooks are at the heart of the volume due to their role in passing on to new genera- tions the cultural content of myths and because more recent editions in particular have begun to engage with mythic narratives and how best to handle them. Since their golden age in the final third of the nineteenth century2, history textbooks have been subject to suspicions of acting as generators of myth, perpetuating ‘untrue’ stories or serving as nationalistic ‘mythomotors.’3 In part, this mistrust stems from the fact that, ever since the genre came into being, textbooks’ remit has included not only the communication of knowledge, but also the inculcation of community, identity and a sense of meaning. In the course of the nineteenth century, history textbooks for schools advanced to become an effectively ideal medium both for the popularisation of the findings generated by academic historians who were increasingly professionalising their field, and for under- girding the emergent European nation states with apposite master narratives. Within the institutional framework of the state school systems in development at that time, history textbooks gained authority, and technological advances in printing endowed them with reproducibility and helped them to spread. In rural areas, they often served whole fami- lies as shared reading matter. All this made history textbooks ideal media for the gen- eration of narratives that bestowed meaning on circumstances and events, and, above all, for the establishment of national myths.4 Today’s textbooks have yet to throw off all the vestiges of this tradition, in part due to the unbroken role of the nation state as the key giver of direction and orientation even in societies with high levels of immigration. Established expectations of how we interact with the past can lead individuals or socie- 1 Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009 (1979). 2 Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Das deutsche Schulgeschichtsbuch 1700–1945, 3 vols., Berlin: LIT, 2011. 3 Jan Assmann, ‘Mythomotorik der Erinnerung. Fundierende und kontrapräsentische Erinnerung’, Wilfried Barner, Anke Detken und Jörg Wesche (eds.), Texte zur modernen Mythentheorie, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003, 280–286. 4 On France, cf. Suzanne Citron, Le Mythe national. L’histoire de France revisitée, Ivry-sur-Seine: Éditi- ons de l’atelier,