Peripheries at the Centre

Reveals how Prussia, and later the German Empire, used educational policy to promote national identity along its geographical margins. It shows how policymakers sought to cultivate ideal German students who, it was hoped, would help to usher in a new, peaceful era in European history while reinforcing their status as German citizens.

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Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.