Premier Symposium « Histoire et Mémoire ». Les manuels d’histoire dans les pays du Triangle de Weimar

The Polish Academy of Sciences Scientific Center in Paris is honoured to invite you to the first international symposium devoted to the analysis of history textbooks in the countries of the Weimar Triangle (Poland, France, Germany). The event will take place on September 3–4, 2026 at the Polish Academy of Sciences Scientific Center in Paris (74 rue Lauriston, 75116 Paris).

The symposium will bring together researchers from Poland, France and Germany, who will take up in a linguistic reflection on the role of history textbooks in constructing collective memory of the Second World War. The focus will be on the question of how school narratives – seemingly objective and factual – actually shape national cultures of memory, creating different interpretative frameworks for the same historical events. During the two days of deliberations, analyses in the fields of French linguistic discourse analysis, praxematics, iconography and anthropological analyses will be presented. Participants will examine, among other things, the dialogic nature of textbook discourse, authorial authority, glossaries of key concepts, anaphoric memory, war’s iconography, as well as quantitative methods in the analysis of diachronic corpora.

The symposium is organised under the scientific supervision of Prof. Elżbieta Biardzka (University of Wrocław) and Prof. Patricia von Münchow (University Paris Cité). Speakers will include, among others:

• Patricia von Münchow (Université Paris Cité),
• Steffen Sammler (Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig),
• Franziska Flucke (Paris Nanterre),
• Aleksandra Nowakowska (Université de Montpellier III, Laboratoire PRAXILING),
• Sascha Diwersy (Université de Montpellier III, Laboratoire PRAXILING),
• and a team of researchers from the University of Wrocław (Elżbieta Biardzka, Piotr Chruszczewski, Agata Rębkowska, Aline Viviand-Slawik and Karolina Wojtczak).

The event provides an important platform for the exchange of experiences between different research traditions and opens up a space for discussion on the future of European history education and ways of overcoming memory’s asymmetries within the Weimar Triangle.

We’re happy to invite you!