Cold War geography

In my seventh grade geography class, we had a lengthy unit on Western Europe. I remember really enjoying it. We learned about the customs and achievements of many countries, and it was some of the first exposure I’d had to the serious study of foreign places. One thing always puzzled me, though: aside from Scandinavia and Greece, we didn’t study any countries east of Germany and Austria. In our textbook political maps, the western countries would be filled in with their own colors, while Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and all the other eastern countries would be in the same shade of gray. Often they wouldn’t even be labeled. 

We were learning about Western Europe and Western Europe only. It seemed odd to some of us. Why would Greece make it into our curriculum, but not any of those funny-named countries just north of it? The answer we got was that Greece was more a part of Western culture, and that we were only going to look at countries with this cultural link. We got the impression that somehow everybody east of Germany had just been left out of the party.

It may sound funny, but these implicit lessons colored my thinking for years afterward. I thought all of Central and Eastern Europe must be hopelessly backward and impoverished. I figured they lived in wooden villages and powered their economies with horses. I was shocked when I started learning that these places were actual civilizations—with history, art, cities, and everything. 

A friend of mine made a trip with his dad to Poland when he and I were about 15. It surprised me—to begin with—that anyone would go there voluntarily, and it surprised me even more when they showed me photos of cities as modern as anything I’d seen in the States. When I first heard people talking about Prague as a desirable place to visit (around age 15 or 16), I thought they must be joking. I mean, it was right next to Germany. If it was such hot shit, why had it never even been mentioned in our study of the greatness of Western culture?

In retrospect, it’s obvious why so many European countries weren’t introduced to us in seventh grade: it was 1999, and these countries had only recently ceased to be our enemies. Our study of Europe ended geographically where the Warsaw Pact began. The curriculum hadn’t fully caught up with the end of the Cold War. 

As far as politically influenced miseducation goes, this was pretty effective. For a long time it was hard for me not to picture some imaginary line east of Germany past which everything was qualitatively different—like a European Mason-Dixon Line. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, this line was sort of real. But it existed only because of political ideologies that had taken root relatively recently. I was made to not fully trust Eastern Europe as if Communism was the only thing that had ever defined it.

In that seventh grade class, we were never indoctrinated against any other country. Our teacher never said, “Poland is bad because they were communist only 10 years ago.” But the omission of so many historically important countries definitely influenced my understanding of my supposed cultural heritage. Had the Cold War still been on, it would have been in the government’s interest to have people like me seeing themselves as distinctly apart from Eastern Europeans. 

Why we were still learning Cold War geography almost ten years after it ended can be explained, I guess, party by educational inefficiency and partly by lingering chauvinism. I think a lot of Americans in the late ‘90s were still a bit skeptical about the newly free Eastern Europe.

It’s not news that state education distorts truth to suit political motives. But it’s the little omissions like the ones I’ve just described that are probably the toughest distortions to spot. Bald lies are easy to pick out. As soon as you find a contradiction, the lie is exposed. When something is just ignored, though, there’s nothing to contradict.   There may be other things happily left out of my schoolbooks that still color my thinking today.