Germany gives history lesson to British teachers

• Published in: Daily telegraph (London, England : 1969)
• Main Author: Kate Connolly in Berlin
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Daily Telegraph 26.10.2004
• ISSN: 0307-1235

The pounds 30,000 trip includes visits to the Reichstag, the seat of the Bundestag in Berlin, the Church of Our Lady in Dresden - bombed by the RAF and now slowly being restored to its pre-war glory - and the Bonn birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven. The "enlightenment" trip comes after comments in London last week by the foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, who accused Britons of holding outdated and [Adolf Hitler]-obsessed views of the Germans. He said: "If you want to learn how the traditional Prussian goose-step works, you have to watch British TV, because in Germany nobody knows how to perform it." The historian Antony Beevor, author of Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, recently bemoaned to an audience in Berlin a lack of teaching on the war. "This gets us into the dangerous position where all the views of the war are filtered through the media, rather than being discussed in the classroom," he said.