From GDR Homeland Studies to Social Studies. Primary school before and after 1989

Subproject in the research network "Dictatorship Experience and Transformation". The average age of teachers at Thuringian schools is around 50. A large number of the primary school teachers working in Thuringia today were educated in the GDR and personally experienced the social upheaval of 1989/1990. They witnessed the change in educational policy and the transformation of the subject of local history from an ethos to a subject, which is now called local history in Thuringian primary schools. This change has hardly been researched in the history of education. Taking the subject of local history as an example, the study examines how elementary school teachers, who were obliged to educate children politically and ideologically in the GDR, experienced, helped to shape and remembered the fundamental reorientation of their subject after 1989.