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The German-Polish Textbook Commission

The aim was to avoid controversial topics and the dissemination of prejudices and propaganda about Poland and Germany. The contents of history and geography textbooks in the past often reflected the state of relations between the two countries. In 1972, under the auspices of UNESCO, the German-Polish Textbook Commission, consisting of historians, geographers and educationalists from both countries, was established in order to replace distorted ideas with historical truth. In 2008 the Commission began work on the "Joint German-Polish History Book". The first volume of the textbook was published in 2016.

Polish and German members of the Schoolbook Commission at the award ceremony for the Viadrina Prize in June 2017.

Photo: Emmanuelle Hébert. Archiwum Georg-Eckert-Institut

The political upheavals in 1989 opened up a new dimension to academic work. The upshot was that the activities of the Textbook Commission in the 1990s now focused on the development of teaching materials. During this time the Commission also published a series of thematic volumes addressed to teachers in both countries. In 2006, the then Federal Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmaier, proposed the development of a joint German-Polish history book. A project group of academics and politicians from both countries was then convened in May 2008. In 2012, the publishing houses Eduversum from Wiesbaden and Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne (WSiP) from Warsaw agreed to join the project.

Finally, in June 2016, the first volume of the joint German-Polish history book was presented in Berlin at the Robert Jung High School in the presence of the foreign ministers of both countries, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Witold Waszczykowski. "Europe - Our History" ("Europe - nasza historia"), covers the period from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Following the Franco-German History Book (2007), this was yet another two-country publication that enabled each country to document similar historical experiences from their different viewpoints and styles.

All four volumes of the textbook are to be completed by 2020. The project work is being carried out by a bilateral panel of experts chaired by Professor Michael G. Müller from Halle and Professor Robert Traba, Director of the Berlin Centre for Historical Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences. The project is being funded equally by the governments of both countries.

Since 1972 the German-Polish Textbook Commission has been supported by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig. Institutional links on the Polish side are decided by the respective chairperson of the Commission. Since 2007, the Polish side of the Textbook Commission has been integrated into the Berlin Centre for Historical Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In June 2017 the work of the German-Polish Textbook Commission was honoured with the Viadrina Prize. The prize is awarded by the Board of Trustees of the Association for the Promotion of the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt an der Oder, to persons and organisations who have rendered outstanding services to German-Polish understanding.

Monika Stefanek, December 2017