How cold the stone, how strange the names

can seem! Foreign cold, unfamiliar, even hostile if families have had bad experiences handed down from generation to generation. German names, if we do not know them like the names we own and use day in day out, are a perfect example: Kurt, Rudi, Alwin, Erich, Reich, Schamberger.

Some of these are easy for the speaker of English, others less so. I have grown to know them and use them but I hadn't heard of most of them until I emigrated. It struck me yesterday watching British and German news coverage of World War I events how little we actually know about how other countries fared in conflicts such as the Great War. That is why a balanced media and the unbiased presentation of school subjects such as history are so important. History lessons in school usually fall short and fail to give students a good understanding of what the war was actually like in other countries. We deal with causes, consequences, policy, responsibility, guilt, and then sit students down to written exams. And all this from a British point of view, or a German or Austrian one. And so on. Thankfully there are exceptions to the rule but history is an educational instrument used as much to reinforce as to enlighten. History teaching in a country such as Hungary is a good example of this. The Fidesz government there has limited textbooks to the ones they approve. This makes it easier to get teachers to teach a more satisfactory version of past events. The Orban government has also just erected a monument in Budapest which shows a German eagle attacking a Hungarian angel, designed to make clear how brutally Germany treated Hungary in the war. This portrayal fails to mention the Hungarian government's participation in the same events.We make of history what we want to make of it, or what we are taught to make of it.
My neighbour, a very helpful and friendly man, is called Schamberger, there's a Reich family still down in the village. The names on the war memorial are all still to be found in school classrooms. There are other families of course, since moved in to the village, that were not there in 1914. Turkish names, Russian, Thai, Irish, English, French, Chinese and so on and they seem strange too until you get to use them. Then, at some stage, they are not much different to an Osborne, Branson, Davies or Smith.