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Nearly all teachers in the eastern Laender received their academic education and training and their professional socialisation and work-place experiences in the former GDR. The author is interested in how they coped with the fundamental changes in the school system, be it the restructuring of the educational establishments, the change of working conditions, retraining requirements or the renewal of content, didactics and teaching methods. His study is based on comparison of developments of teacher training and teaching and of empirical findings on teachers in the western and eastern Laender. His results provide no indications that teachers, apart from individual cases and in certain subjects (e.g. civic education), experienced an identity threatening process of upheaval during the transformation of the East German school system. His findings speak clearly in favour of a relatively quick adaption to the changed conditions. Most East German teachers achieved a rather professional performance of adaption for which the deliberately vocational and practical teacher education and in-service training in the GDR seemingly prepared them to a great extent. (DIPF/Orig.).

How do three generations of families live today with the family and the collective past during the Nazi period? What influences does this past of the first generation, and their own ways of dealing with it, have upon the lives of their offspring and on the ways in which the latter come to terms with their family history? These are the general empirical questions put forward by our current researchi. The specific focus of our study lies in comparing different family constellations based on whether the first generation can be categorized as victims, perpetrators, or Nazifollowers during the Nazi period. Particulary form a sociological perspective we also investigate how biographically different family histories after 1945 - in Israel, in West Germany (FRG) and in the one-time East Germany (GDR) - affect the process of transmission from one generation to the next. In three generations of Jewish and non-Jewish German and Israeli families we examine the process by which the famliy history is passed down through the generations. The aim is to reconstruct constellations in life-stories which may facilitate the psychological and social integration of people burdened with a threatening collective and family past.

This contribution is part of a publication on the TEMPUS symposium to the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) held in Edinburgh in September 2000. It was intended as a reflective, post- project evaluation of the development programme to prepare teachers to meet special educational needs (SEN) in Perm (a city of one million inhabitants 2000 km north-east from Moscow), and its continuation, extension, dissemination and effects on new related international work, including a follow-on TEMPUS-TACIS project.... The article is part of the second part of the publication, which relates the TEMPUS project to wider conditions for change in schools. It is too often assumed that such development projects involve partners in stable situations, offering possible models for a target beneficiary in transitional need and search of new anchorage.... East Germany, [ however], brings to the project its own dramatic experience of collapse and reconstruction. This chapter ... itself a collaboration between academics drawn from two formerly confronting German societies, explores key elements of teacher experience before and after the German "Wende", and illustrates the importance of teacher commitment to new approaches." What interested the authors was, "to discover how those teachers already in service in the GDR times dealt with the "Wende" and, in that context, with the transition to a new school system with changed ideological foundations; what were the effects of the "Wende" on their concepts, or more specifically, on their models of interpretation and action; and what, in the new circumstances, has been their readiness to participate in school development?" The authors took two methodological approaches: they "used the teachers' observations when confronted with their own video- recorded lessons, together with descriptive career biography interviews". (DIPF/Orig./Kr.).