Transcultural history education and competence: Emergence of a concept in German history education

Abstract

In most Western countries, traditional history education has been challenged by criticism of the underlying national framework, and by processes of globalization and immigration. In Germany, as a consequence, concepts of intercultural relations, (the interpersonal dynamics between people from different cultures) have been explored since the 1990s. This article outlines the development of these concepts in relation to criticism of theories of culture, the challenges of coming to terms with the specific German past, and the recent stages in the conceptualization of intercultural historical competences. Against this backdrop, multicultural profiling, which describes the characteristics of different cultures, is applied to one of the central principles of German history education, multiperspectivity.