Eastern Europe in Western Civilization Textbooks: The Example of Poland*

Abstract

OVER A DECADE AGO the newsletter of the American Historical Association Perspectives carried a long lead article entitled "Teaching 'Eastern Europe' without the Iron Curtain."' Referring to the challenge posed by the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe to the teaching of European history, the author, Larry Wolff, saw it as "an opportunity to think critically about the ways in which the Cold War has shaped the way we teach the history of Eastern Europe."2 He argued that the very notion of Eastern Europe was historically dubious, invented in the age of the Enlightenment "as a politically charged, cultural construction."3 The Cold War and the Iron Curtain gave this division of Europe "an air of geopolitical inevitability, encouraging historians to interpret earlier periods in terms of the same distinction between Western and Eastern Europe."4 "The idea of Eastern Europe...has become a pedagogical convenience in our history curriculum, creating a category for quick generalizations to serve as a fig leaf for our scant attention to that historical terrain."5