Should German schools stop teaching classics like Goethe? – DW – 09/11/2025

The new school year has started in Germany and senior students can expect to read classics by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist – but not everyone is happy.

“To be honest, it was not the most exciting book,” said the student of the Lycée de Berlin, orçun ilter RBB.

During his free time, Ilter appreciated a Tahsim Durgun book, who became a Tiktok star with videos on his life in Germany as the Kurds Yézidi who immigrated here from Turkey – a voice ilter says that he is missing in school literature.

A single fifth of the books on the country required reading lists for the German secondary school diploma, the Abitur, was written by women. The authors with roots outside of Germany and people of color are rare.

It is despite the fact that more than 25% of the German population of more than 80 million has immigrant history. This percentage is much higher among young people, especially in major cities.

In Berlin, for example, 55% of all children and adolescents have family roots outside Germany, according to the Berlin Statistics Bureau. In the Neukölln district, this applies to more than 70% of children.

The education policy is determined not at the national level, but rather at the level of the state in Germany. And although schools have significant autonomy when it comes to choosing texts, most secondary schools respect the examination framework set by the Institute for Development of Quality in Education (IQB).

Flexibility is hampered by time and money constraints: teachers wishing to deviate from classics as “Faust” of Goethe will have trouble and the cost of obtaining both the required educational material and the texts outside the literary canon. This means that the same old books dominated by white male authors are taught the year, year.

The Berlin educational authorities and the surrounding state of Brandenburg have taken measures to contact the imbalance including at least one contemporary text written by authors.

In Brandenburg, trainers specializing in children’s and young adult literature also meet teachers and make recommendations to provide a more modern selection of books in classrooms.

Students want to read books relevant to their lives

“I think the big problem is that literature lessons cannot reach out to young people and young people are not interested in the way we teach literature in schools,” explains Quentin Gärtner, 18.

He has just graduated from secondary school in the southwest state of Baden-Wurtemberg and ends his mandate as secretary general of the Conference of Federal Students, a body of students from representatives from all over the country.

Gärtner recently made the headlines with calls for the reform of the German education system, saying that schools “need less false and burn, more IA skills and education on democracy”.

For his ABITUR, Gärtner studied “Woyzeck”, a play written by the German playwright Georg Büchner in 1836, and “The Sandman”, a news from the German romantic author Eta Hoffmann published for the first time in 1817, as well as the female writer Juli Zeh, the 2009 Dystopian novel “.

Gärtner did not particularly appreciate Zeh’s novel, but says that he wants the class to have read more modern and diverse books that would offer something “interesting and really relevant for their life”.

At the same time, he is convinced that many more students would really like to read Goethe’s works if they received more interesting approaches to equipment – but this would require a large -scale reform of the German Patchwork education system.

“For me, the analysis is quite clear: we do not get a change in the education system at all because too many people in power want to keep things as they are, they are not open to the reform,” he told DW.

More than 40% of the German electorate are aged 60 and over and tend to prove to be in high numbers to vote. On the other hand, only 13% of eligible voters about 59 million people are under 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 retirees,” said Gärtner.

‘Booktok’ generates the new generation of library rats

The results of progress in the international literature in reading literacy (PIRLS) Directed in 2021 and published in 2023 showed one of the fourth -year -old students in Germany did not reach the minimum level of skills in reading comprehension.

Fifteen years in Germany have also obtained a lower score than ever for reading skills in the study of the program for the assessment of international students (PISA) in 2023.

But the story is not so dark. The 2024 Youth, Information, Media (JIM) study revealed that if a quarter of young people said they don’t like the books recommended by teachers and parents, they are not less read than before: social media communities like #Bobotok and English-star Pop Star Dua Lipa 95 Book Club have helped create a new generation of passionate readers.

Susanne Lin -Klitzing, former German professor and president of the Association of German Philologists representing 90,000 teachers, applies that appetite for books is there – young people just need more words to say when it comes to setting reading requirements in schools.

“I think it is good to have a more representative corpus of texts and not just so-called” old white men “,” she told DW. “This 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 is also important to choose a diversity of high -quality literary genres and relevance, whatever the author.”

Students should read at least classic work and contemporary work chosen in consultation with the students themselves in class, according to Lin-Klitzing.

She also underlines the importance of reading classic works of literature like “Faust” or “Antigone” as a means of understanding the past as much as the future. It is not a question of strengthening the existing power structures, she explains, but of being able to see them with a critical eye.

“We have to learn to understand and differentiate, that the way I think about things is not necessarily the way people have always thought of them,” she added.

Edited by Rina Goldenberg

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