The new school year has begun in Germany and senior students can expect to be reading classics by the likes of and Heinrich von Kleist — but not everyone is happy about it.
“To be honest, it wasn’t the most exciting book,” Berlin high school student Orçun Ilter said of Kleist’s “The Broken Jug,” speaking to local public broadcaster RBB.
In his free time, Ilter has been enjoying a book by Tahsim Durgun, who became a star with videos about his life in Germany as the child of who immigrated here from Turkey — a voice Ilter says he misses in school literature.
Only one-fifth of the books on the nationwide required reading lists for the German high school diploma, the Abitur, were written by women. Authors with roots outside Germany and people of color are scarce.
That is despite the fact that over 25% of the German population of more than 80 million have an . That percentage is much higher among young people, especially in big cities.
In Berlin for example, 55% of all children and teenagers have familial roots outside of Germany, according to Berlin’s statistics office. In the district of Neukölln, that applies to more than 70% of kids.
Education policy is determined not at the national, but rather at the state level in Germany. And while schools have a significant amount of autonomy when it comes to choosing texts, most high schools stick to the exam framework set by the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB).
Flexibility is hampered by time and money constraints: Teachers wanting to deviate from the classics like Goethe’s “Faust” will find it difficult and costly to source both the required teaching materials and texts outside of the literary canon. That means that the same old books dominated by white male authors are taught year in, year out.
The education authorities in and the surrounding state of have made moves to address to the imbalance by including at least one contemporary set text written by female authors.
In Brandenburg, trainers specializing in children’s and young adult literature also meet with teachers and make recommendations to bring a more modern selection of books into classrooms.
Students want to read books relevant to their lives
“I think the big issue is that literature lessons are failing to reach out to young people and young people are not interested in the way that we are teaching literature in schools,” says 18-year-old Quentin Gärtner.
He has just graduated from high school in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg and is finishing up his term as general secretary of the Federal Student Conference, a body of school student representatives from across the country.
Gärtner has made headlines recently with calls for reform of Germany’s education system, saying schools “need less Faust and witch burning, more AI skills and education about democracy.”
For his Abitur, Gärtner studied “Woyzeck,” a stage play written by German dramatist Georg Büchner in 1836, and “The Sandman,” a short story by German Romantic author E. T. A. Hoffmann first published in 1817, as well as female writer Juli Zeh’s 2009 dystopian novel “.”
Gärtner did not particular enjoy Zeh’s novel but says he wishes the class had read more modern and diverse books that would offer something “interesting and actually relevant to their lives.”
At the same time, he’s convinced that many more students would actually like to read works by Goethe if they were given more interesting approaches to the material — but that would require wide-reaching reform of Germany’s patchwork education system.
“For me the analysis is pretty clear: we’re failing to get change in the educational system at all because too many people in power want to keep things as they are, they aren’t open to reform,” he told DW.
Over and tend to turn out in high numbers to vote. On the flip side, only 13% of roughly 59 million eligible voters are under the age of 30, according to the Federal Statistics Office.
“We are the generation that is ignored by politicians, because if you want to win elections you have to focus on pensioners,” Gärtner says.
‘BookTok’ spawns new generation of bookworms
The results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) conducted in 2021 and published in 2023 showed one in four fourth graders in Germany did not achieve the minimum level of reading comprehension skills.
for reading skills in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Study in 2023.
But the story isn’t all that bleak. The 2024 Youth, Information, Media (JIM) study found that while a quarter of young people said they did not like the books recommended by teachers and parents, they aren’t reading less than they used to: social media communities like #BookTok and English-Albanian pop star Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club have helped create a new generation of avid readers.
Susanne Lin-Klitzing, former German teacher and chairwoman of the German Philologists’ Association representing 90,000 teachers, agrees that the appetite for books is there — young people just need more of a say when it comes to setting reading requirements in schools.
“I think it’s good to have a more representative body of texts and not just works by so-called ‘old white men,’” she told DW. “It would certainly help to make the experiences, perspectives, and voices of women or people with roots outside of Germany more visible and valued, but it’s also important to choose a diversity of literary genres with high quality and relevance regardless of the author.”
Students should be reading at least one classic and one contemporary work chosen in consultation with the students themselves in class, according to Lin-Klitzing.
She also stresses the importance of reading classic works of literature like “Faust” or “Antigone” as a means to understand the past as much as the future. It’s not about reinforcing existing power structures, she explains, but about being able to view them with a critical eye.
“We need to learn to understand and differentiate, that the way I think about things isn’t necessarily how people have always thought about them,” she added.
Edited by Rina Goldenberg
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