Ambivalence and the Illusion of Hegemony: Remembering the Cold War in Germany and Switzerland

Abstract

Christophe’s chapter explores how cultural memory interacts with the teaching of the Cold War and the place of the political in history teaching. Christophe draws on her own research, interviews with teachers from Germany (divided into East and West) and Switzerland, who were presented with a quotation from a textbook on the Cold War, to examine the variations between the teacher’s responses and the role of ambivalence in teaching. The chapter questions whether ambivalence in modern textbooks actually conceals competing accounts of the Cold War given that each teacher, and indeed writer, brings to textbooks the hegemonic narrative they themselves have been taught, a narrative predominantly dependent upon the shared, accepted cultural memory of a nation.