Wolfgang Pauels: The Yellow Devil and the American Dream. Materials on the USA in East and East-Central European Textbooks

It is widely recognised that political information in totalitarian states is so closely screened that their populations only have access to knowledge the serves the political goals and interests of the state. One can therefore assume that prior to 1989, teaching materials approved for use in schools and other educational institutions in Eastern Bloc countries fulfilled a function as instruments of policy – albeit to varying degrees

English language teaching was a particularly thorny field as it related to the English-speaking western, and therefore capitalist, world and through learning the language students were also being familiarised with the wider culture and societies in those countries. By examining English language textbooks from selected countries in the former Eastern bloc this book is able to analyse how the USA was depicted and which themes and subjects were selected. The analysis is based on books from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The focus is on how the selected topics are described, in order to illustrate the level of information available and the estimation of the USA from the perspective of those Eastern bloc countries at the time.

Textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language issued after the political shift in Russia, the Czech Republic and Hungary were also analysed, with the same intention; to highlight some of the ongoing changes in the depiction of the USA and thus contribute to expanding political and historical knowledge.

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