Johanna Bethge: Beyond Textbooks. Amerikanische Schulbucharbeit in Deutschland 1944–1952

Democracy has always been a challenging topic for societies to teach and learn about, and that remains the case. Johanna Bethge explores the role played by textbooks in the practice of democratic thinking and behaviour after the Second World War in the American zone of occupied Germany and West Berlin, where history books were seen as particularly significant by the American powers. This volume not only explores the printed textbook, but also the transnational process of production, in some instances using previously unexplored source material from Germany and abroad. This method provides unusual insights into the individual and collective practices of textbook production and reception and allows common assessments of re-education research to be refuted.

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