THE EAST-WEST POLITICAL EDUCATION: CHALLENGES FOR THE EAST ACADEMY OF LÜNEBURG DURING THE COLD WAR AND SINCE THE END OF THE DIVISION OF EUROPE

• Main Author: B. Schalhorn
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kemerovo State University 2015-09-01
• Series: Вестник Кемеровского государственного университета
• Subjects: рolitical/civic education, international understanding, german question, german and eastern european history
• Online Access: https://vestnik.kemsu.ru/jour/article/view/1724
• ISSN: 2078-8975; 2078-8983

The paper considers the question how the Ost-Akademie in Lüneburg, Federal Republic of Germany, tackled the problems of West-East-relations in Germany and in Europe between 1952 and 2004. As an institute for political and cultural education on basis of the carried out research, the Academy worked with adult and young participants. It dealt with problems deriving from the special position of Germany after the defeat of National Socialist Germany and from German and European partition. In the initial years it took up the challenges connected with the expulsion of millions of Germans from the Eastern Prussian provinces. Afterwards it picked up the splitting between the Western and the Eastern zone of Germany, between FRG and GDR, and investigated the socialist development of the GDR. In the last years of the German partition it succeeded in establishing immediate encounter with everyday life in the GDR. After the end of the German partition and the end of the Cold War it engaged in bringing together unified Germany and its Eastern neighbours, Poland, Russia, the Baltic states, and the new emerging republics of the CIS. In this way the Academy could make a contribution to the development of understanding between citizens in Germany and in Central and Eastern Europe. Exactly that was the intention of the victors over National Socialism and of the new founded Federal Republic of Germany.