Postwar History Education in Japan and the Germanys

Guilty lessons

Julian Dierkes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135193638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How did East and West Germany and Japan reconstitute national identity after World War II? Did all three experience parallel reactions to national trauma and reconstruction?

History education shaped how these nations reconceived their national identities. Because the content of history education was controlled by different actors, history education materials framed national identity in very different ways. In Japan, where the curriculum was controlled by bureaucrats bent on maintaining their purported neutrality, materials focused on the empirical building blocks of history (who? where? what?) at the expense of discussions of historical responsibility. In East Germany, where party cadres controlled the curriculum, students were taught that World War II was a capitalist aberration. In (West) Germany, where teachers controlled the curriculum, students were taught the lessons of shame and then regeneration after historians turned away from grand national narratives.

This book shows that constructions of national identity are not easily malleable on the basis of moral and political concerns only, but that they are subject to institutional constraints and opportunities. In an age when post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation has become a major focus of international policies, the analysis offers important implications for the parallel revision of portrayals of national history and the institutional reconstruction of policy-making regimes.

1
The Determinants of Portrayals of the Nation in History Education

1.1 Trajectories of National History in Germany and Japan

Germany and Japan faced complete military, political, and moral defeat in 1945. It extended to all areas of social, political and intellectual life. Due to the repressive nature of National Socialism in Germany and of militarism in Japan, any political and intellectual opposition that remained in 1945 was severely weakened and was primarily intent on survival. The Allied occupations stepped into this situation with explicit policies to extract admissions of guilt from German and Japanese leaders as well as from the general public. Allied officials saw the roots of the global catastrophe of the all-encompassing wars that had engulfed two continents in the political histories of Germany and Japan. While some one-dimensional public portrayals of the leadership of National Socialist Germany and militarist Japan located responsibility for war in the political leadership only, history and the historical genesis of fascism and militarism always played a prominent role in analyses of dictatorship and militarism.

East Germany

The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe quickly initiated steps for the establishment of state-socialist regimes throughout the region. In the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, as elsewhere, it included a political takeover that relied on Soviet officials and repatriated socialist leaders for the reconstruction of social and political life. The emerging leadership of Soviet-occupied Germany quickly voiced its understanding of the historical and material roots of dictatorship. Naturally, this leadership also emphasized that history would have a happy ending in the establishment of a socialist and, ultimately, communist society. In the aftermath of defeat, the focus on class warfare meant that the Soviet occupation and German socialist cadres emphasized the materialist basis on which fascism grew. The state-socialist leadership actively strove to expose the evil that National Socialism had perpetrated in Europe. The vision of the future of Germany that they outlined through the Soviet occupation and the German socialist cadres was explicitly an anti-fascist vision.

As the Soviet occupation and German socialist cadres began to construct the foundations for a socialist German state, educational policy was one of the areas of greatest activity. And as German socialist cadres assumed more and more responsibility for organizational decisions made in the emerging East Germany, they envisioned a complete revision of historiography to follow Marxist understandings of the material basis of historical developments. These revisions placed German history in an international framework of the history of class conflict. This framework offered criteria by which historical developments in German history were to be evaluated. From the roots of the German nation in the anti-feudal uprisings of the German Peasant War (1524–25) to the portrayal of Prussia as a feudal order dominated and exploited by the landed nobility, and on to fascism as a particularly virulent form of monopoly capitalism, this framework focused on the presumed universal truth of the relations of production determining social relations. Materialist historiography elevated the interests of classes in dominating particular societies to the fundamental dynamic of human development. For the most recent German past, this implied an East German historiography that condemned imperialism and fascism first and foremost as serving monopoly capitalism. Along with the juxtaposition of a socialist postwar Germany with prewar and wartime fascism came an emphasis on the victimization of the working class in Weimar Germany (1919–33) and under National Socialism. The victimization of the working class and of the communist resistance was the lens through which the atrocities committed under National Socialism were viewed.

By the late 1970s, public discourse about German history in the German Democratic Republic was still conducted entirely within the framework of materialist historiography. Yet, the Erbe-Debatte (heritage debate) of the 1970s brought a new national focus to historiography. The East German leadership under the second general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, Erich Honecker, had (re)discovered some particularly German elements in state-socialism. This (re)discovery came in part in response to a perception that an identification with the East German nation should be instilled in citizens to counter some of the softening of Cold War battle lines in the early 1970s. This (re)discovery of national history found its expression in academic historiography as much as in public debates, literature, the media, and education. The emphasis of German elements in world history and in the history of class relations was clearly subsidiary to the overall materialist paradigm, but it persisted until the demise of East Germany in 1989/90. Despite this re-emergence of a national perspective on historiography, the overall evaluation of pre-1945 German history was clearly negative and justified the existence of the self-avowed anti-fascism of the German Democratic Republic until its end.

(West) Germany

In contrast, historiography in the parts of Germany occupied by Western allies and, subsequently, in the Federal Republic of Germany has experienced a much more dynamic trajectory from 1945 until the present day. In the immediate aftermath of defeat in 1945, the Soviet occupation and socialist cadres laid claim to any heroic narrative of resistance to National Socialism and to any anti-fascist, and thus positive, facets of the German nation. The Western Allies concurred with the Soviet Union in portraying National Socialism as rooted at least in part in a (Prussian) history of militarism and autocracy. Immediately after surrender, very few public figures engaged in discussions about responsibility for the Second World War and popular support for National Socialism. Apart from contributions like philosopher Karl Jaspers’ discussion of guilt (1947) or Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann’s speeches on his return visit to Germany in 1947 (Mann 1986), politicians and academics during the years of the Allied occupation of Germany and in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany did not champion any reflections on the(ir) recent past. The continuing emphasis on a glorious national history (that had experienced some dark times under a brutal, ideological minority government) precluded any critical discussion of the very recent past. In the late 1980s the prominent public intellectual Ralph Giordano would describe this silence as a “second guilt.”

The portrayal of German history continued largely in Weimar traditions of a grand national narrative. Since the shameful interlude of National Socialism was very recent, historians thought that public discussions of National Socialism had no bearing on historiography. Despite the Allies’ specific focus on democratization through education and their understanding of the importance of history education in this project, postwar teaching materials continued to present a grand national narrative up to the time of the First World War but ignored the recent past. Wherever such a discussion could not be avoided, it portrayed the hijacking of the nation by a clique of evil-doers misguided by the dark rhetorical arts of Adolf Hitler.

The contrast presented by public debates and history education in the late 1970s could hardly be greater. Gone was any notion of a grand national narrative. Public discourse on national history had turned almost exclusively into discussions of National Socialism. Since the 1960s these debates had included an ever-widening assessment of responsibility for the atrocities committed under it. This accounting for the rise of National Socialism concentrated on the social-structural determinants of the electoral success of the National Socialist party and of the appeal of its fascist and murderous ideology. Rather than presenting Prussia and the German Empire of the late nineteenth century as the height of the development of the German nation, historians and other public intellectuals now offered discussions on the links between Prussia and the National Socialist ideologies. From barely talking about National Socialism and the Holocaust at all, this discussion had become a substantial part of history education. Victims as well as perpetrators had come to be identified in such media events as the television series The Holocaust. Atrocities were widely discussed in politics, literature and various commemorative projects, as well as in history education. To some observers it now seemed like the 12 years of National Socialism had become national history, rather than a mere historical episode.

While recent debates about National Socialism and about national history more broadly have become more complex, the departure from grand national narratives and the shift toward an emphasis on recent history has continued into the twenty-first century. Unification has not led to a resurgence of nationalism as some commentators feared in the early 1990s. Instead, public discourse continues to be animated by debates like the one surrounding the proposals for and ultimate construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. In history education, narratives are de-emphasized as teaching materials move toward becoming thematically grouped collections of source materials. Unification has brought about an examination of some of the different emphases in portrayals of National Socialism and the Second World War, but these portrayals continue to be dominated by accounts of the victimization of various groups, especially Jews, by Germans.

Over almost 65 years of postwar history, (West) German historiography has undergone dramatic changes. From a grand national narrative that excluded discussions of the recent past, to the rapid increase in attention to the recent past in teaching materials, and on to the continued focus on National Socialism and a thematically organized historiography, these changes have come in spurts, but have led to a contemporary historiography that bears little resemblance with its predecessors of the prewar or immediate postwar periods.

Japan

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat (Dower 1999), John Dower pointed to the vibrancy of debates about the Asia PacificWar¹ as one of the surprising facets of postwar Japan. Although the Soviet Union was perceived as a threat to Japan, the lack of an immediate neighbor like East Germany initially left the Japanese postwar Left at liberty to give voice to a materialist and progressive critique of militarism and of the expansionary aims of the Asia Pacific War. Dominated by progressives, the U.S. occupation authorities initially welcomed these radical critiques of the development of recent Japanese history. While public and political debates focused on militarism, academic debates also turned to the genesis of the modern Japanese nation and its lack of revolutionary and emancipatory roots. Of course, conservative voices could also be heard in these debates, especially in relation to the emperor and his postwar position, as well as the constitution. The “Red Purge” of 1947–48 muted these debates somewhat. Nevertheless, the earliest teaching materials that were drafted by historians in response to the urging by the U.S. occupation for a more democratic historiography included a variety of perspectives on Japanese history and on the Asia Pacific War. Accounts that were heavily influenced by a materialist historiography can be found in a number of early textbooks. Even teaching materials that were less driven by a historiographical paradigm departed sharply from the nationalism of prewar and wartime materials.

Jumping forward to the late 1970s, we find a Japanese public where discussions about responsibility for the Asia Pacific War specifically and about Japanese history more generally have all but disappeared. Even though historical themes are clearly prevalent in Japanese public discourse, historiographical debates had very little prominence in the 1970s. Academic historiography was no longer as fervently materialist and Marxist as it was through the 1960s, but it was marginal to public discourse. Academic debates had no discernible impact on historiography in teaching materials. History teaching materials provided a very fact-oriented historiography that continued to place a lot of emphasis on pre-modern history. With its focus on places, events, and dates this empiricist historiography did not offer any analysis of the causes or teleology of historical developments. Portrayals of the Asia Pacific War employed euphemistic language that presented the path to war and its course as a seemingly natural occurrence devoid of discussions of individual or collective responsibility.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, this picture had changed significantly again. A succession of crises in Sino-Japanese and Korean–Japanese relations especially had brought history politics to the public’s attention. From questions relating to an acknowledgment of overall responsibility for the Asia Pacific War to the more specific disputes surrounding the military’s system of enslaving Asian women to serve as prostitutes, the Nanjing Massacre, forced labor, and the treatment of prisoners of war, history politics flare up with some regularity in Japan. Recently, this dynamic of history politics has also emerged as an issue around which domestic social movements have crystallized. Yet, broader themes of historiographical questions remain practically invisible in public discourse. Teaching materials have undergone a similar transformation in that euphemistic language has been revised for many of the most controversial episodes of the Asia Pacific War, but textbook historiography remains very much wedded to the empiricist paradigm that continues to focus on historical facts and chronology in introducing students to history. Like (West) German historiography, Japanese portrayals of the nation have changed significantly over the postwar period. From the vibrant debates of the immediate postwar years to the relative silence of the 1970s and the controversy-fueled focus in the twenty-first century on the Asia Pacific War, Japanese scholars’ and public intellectuals’ understanding of national development has moved from prewar and wartime nationalism to a more muted focus on specific historical developments. Textbook historiography has remained remarkably constant over this period. Portrayals of historical episodes before the Asia Pacific War have also changed little. However, the terminology in discussions of the Asia Pacific War itself has shifted from a variety of perspectives in the early postwar period to euphemistic obfuscation in the 1970s and, further, to clearer terms and a more extensive discussion of wartime atrocities in the twenty-first century.

When we place these three national trajectories side by side, we see very different paths from a seemingly common point of departure, namely defeat in the Second World War and in the Asia Pacific War. While East German accounts were materialist throughout the existence of the German Democratic Republic, (West) German debates initially remained true to a grand national narrative and excluded discussions of the recent past, and Japanese debates started from the active representation of different perspectives on history, but developed into much narrower discussions in the 1970s before becoming very focused on controversies in the course of the 1990s and into the new millennium. While teaching materials have followed a somewhat separate trajectory in the case of Japan, comparing the paths in the three different countries reveals very significant differences in starting points, trajectories and current emphases.

Portrayals of National History as an Element in Identity Formation

In recent years, politicians, academics, and the public have attached great importance to portrayals of national history. Television events copying the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons and the accompanying discussions about the role of individuals in shaping a nation’s path are only a recent and very popular sign of such debates about the importance of national history. Generally, national history and its portrayals are understood to form one element of national identities. As such, portrayals of the nation are often extolled or criticized by politicians for contributing to too strong or too weak a national identity.

Politicians and the public have increasingly become engaged in various forms of history politics in the 1990s that make portrayals of the nation in history a contested field. Debates in North America about reparations for interned Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians, slavery, and workers enslaved by German corporations during the Second World War, as well as discussions of the legacy of Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have kept questions about portrayals of the nation in history in the media and, thus, on the public’s agenda (Torpey 2003). The awareness of the potential i...

Table of contents

• Routledge Contemporary Japan Series
• Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Determinants of Portrayals of the Nation in History Education
• 2 The Re-Nationalization of History in East German Education
• 3 Rationalizing Portrayals of the Nation in (West) German History Education
• 4 Japanese Bureaucrats and Empiricist Textbook Historiography
• 5 Portrayals of the Nation in Japanese and German History Education Explained
• Appendix A Curricula
• Appendix B Textbooks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index