Le Soir - Belgium | Monday, April 14, 2008
France and Germany write their common history
Columnist Pol Mathil comments on the release of the second volume of Franco-German history, treating the period running from 1815 to 1945. "How did the Germans and the French overcome the most difficult challenge that faced them, namely to be able to offer to their youth a common view of the events - thus the memory, the emotions and the totally different visions - that have always divided them? ... What is possible in the west thanks to democracy and European unification, and what is essential for the recognition of different peoples, is still to be done in Old kidnapped Europe, where for half a century all truth was banned from classroom instruction and as a result, from historical and political debate. How can we accommodate the memory of the Polish, for whom the massacre ... of Katyn was a genocide, with the Russian version ... ? The project of a common Polish-German textbook is underway. It won't be any easier."
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