WorldViews. The World in Textbooks

The textbook authors summarize the expeditions and their consequences along with the effects of the Crusades under the generic term Broadening of Horizons. The consequences for Europe of the discovery of new sea routes as well as of America are emphasised. Specific attention is paid to basic economic and cultural revolutions that accompanied this development: the change from barter economy to a monetary economy, the import of precious metals to Europe, the export of goods to the colonies, the exploitation of human labour via the slave trade and colonialism as well as the influences of the so-called colonial commodities and the imported plants and animals on the European lifestyle. Benefits to the development of the sciences in Europe as a result of the findings gained as a result of colonisation are also noted. The negative results of colonisation in the early modern period are also named in reference to such things as slave hunting, conquerors and plunderers or with respect to the extermination of partially highly developed cultures and peoples.

In the textbook Bismarck is ultimately stylised to the ancestor of National Socialist ideas: He was against sentimentality and world citizenship of the Germans. Peacemaking and world peace are characterised as anti-national and sentimentally misguided ideas and rejected by the textbook author.

Hohmann, Walter

Schiefer, Wilhelm

The second edition of the textbook, published by Otto Salle, addresses seventh grade students in secondary schools and high schools. The selected passage comes from the second part ("The dawn of a new era") of the largest thematic complex of the book "The First German Revolution and the Counterattack," in which Reformation and Counter Reformation are treated.

Walter Hohmann was co-author of two history textbook series. He was consistent involved in both the eight-volume series "People and the Reich of the Germans" (up to four editions until 1942) and the three-volume series "Textbook for History for Higher Schools" (until the mid-thirties in up to eleven editions appeared). Thus he became one of the leading textbook authors of National Socialism.

Otto Salle Verlag