Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, and Journal of Contemporary History.
Weiner applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book discusses some tactics that East German school history textbooks in the early 1960s used to deflect complicity and how those tactics mirrored or diverged from those employed by West German schoolbooks.Learn more about Teaching a Dark Chapter at the Cornell University Press website.
Page 99 is an important part of my analysis. It points to one of the main thrusts of my book’s argument— that I isolate the early 1960s as a critical moment in the development of educational narratives about the Nazi/Fascist past and the Holocaust. However, if a reader were to open to the book to page 99 and read only it, the reader might come away with the erroneous impression that my book is first and foremost about East German textbooks (perhaps in relation to West German textbooks). Page 99 fails to reflect the transnational comparison between Italy, East Germany, and West German textbooks that is at the heart of my study and that differentiates my book from much previous historical work.
Indeed, the inclusion of Italy is fundamental to my book’s premise. As I explain in the introduction to my book, while there are some other comparative studies that address East German and West German methods of coming to terms with the past using educational materials, Italy is usually left out of this analysis. But including Italy is quite important; Italy serves as an essential comparative partner to the Germanys when understanding the post-fascist educational experience. Italy had a history of fascism a decade before Hitler ever came to governmental power in Germany. Furthermore, Allied occupying forces saw the textbook revision process in Italy (deFascistization) and in Germany (deNazification) as closely interconnected. So, it’s a shame that a browser’s test that opened to only page 99 would fail to include Italy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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