Teachers’ Memories and the Cold War: Introduction to Part II

Robert Thorp,Barbara Christophe

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-11999-7_12

Abstract

AbstractIn their introduction to this second section of the volume, Robert Thorp and Barbara Christophe address the complex and interesting question of how history teachers’ personal memories and experiences of the past interact with their perceptions of historical events and a broader historical culture. They introduce the following chapters, revealing how different elements provide a rich and challenging field for research into memory practices and history education. History, they show, thus becomes a complex enterprise between serious academic study, personal memories, and broader cultural and ideological aspects of the past.

Highlights

You could argue that a kind of cultural self-awareness becomes central to how we approach and make sense of history, rather than whether we apply a critical methodology to the sources from the past that we have at hand. This is rather crucial, much of what we know about history may be implicit and more or less taken for granted and difficult to scrutinize critically, an aspect highlighted by the notion of memory practices
The tensions and contradictions between these four narrative patterns are managed by a narrative and argumentative style which creates ambivalence and avoids the assignment of responsibility for certain actions. Fischer concludes that this teacher, who tries to narrate the story of her life in the GDR in accordance with what she perceives to be the dominant Western narrative as a sad story of separation and victimisation, enacts a kind of tacit resistance to the same Western narrative of the Cold War in class by pointing, for example, to the moral superiority the political East enjoyed – in her eyes – over the political West
The three contributions stress the importance of broader cultural, societal and situational aspects as key to understanding the complexities and challenges that go along with history education as one field where we can observe the unfolding of memory practices

Summary

Robert Thorp and Barbara Christophe

You could argue that a kind of cultural self-awareness becomes central to how we approach and make sense of history, rather than whether we apply a critical methodology to the sources from the past that we have at hand This is rather crucial, much of what we know about history may be implicit and more or less taken for granted and difficult to scrutinize critically, an aspect highlighted by the notion of memory practices. In this sense, history could be perceived as entangled between serious academic study, personal memories, and broader cultural and ideological aspects of the past (Thorp 2016). The three texts should be regarded as a further exploration of this field

Three Case Studies

Concluding Comments