CAVE MAN CRAZE

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 October 1933, Page 8

CAVE MAN CRAZE

REWRITING GERMAN HISTORY

The Reich Minister of the Interior. Dr. Finck, has issued instructions for the teaching of history in German schools which are to serve as a. provisional guide for teachers while new history books are in preparation.

Pre-history is to play a much larger part than hitherto, so as to impress pupils with the high level of culture already achieved by the pagan Germans, according to the views now held by German archaeologists. The national idea is to be emphasised instead of the international, and German history is to include the best of those fragments of the German nation outside the Reich in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic States and elsewhere.

The achievement of Germany in the Middle Ages in recovering the provinces east of the Elbe, relinquished to the Slavs at the time of the Bulgarian invasion during the Roman Empire, are to be emphasised. In modern history the tendencies toward the formation of a national State are to be praised, in contrast to the lamentable estrangement from German blood, speech, law and concepts of the State in certain provinces and periods. This will presumably include severe criticism of Frederick the Great for.

preferring the French language and literature to German.

The last 20 years of German history are to be brought into the foreground, “the tremendous experience of the war, the humiliation of the German nation by the dictates of Versailles, the Ruhr struggle, and the ensuing developments, down to the restoration of a German national commonwealth on the day of Potsdam.” The teaching of history is to be conducted with emphasis on the heroic idea as understood by the Germans. The modern equivalent of the heroic age is considered to be one in which there is general submission to a leader.