Everything can change, except the farm

What school textbooks don't know about agriculture: Alfred Oberlack caused a sensation in 1964 with his book ‘Schulbücher unter dem Dreschflegel’ (Textbooks under the flail)

Textbooks spread nonsense about agriculture or depict an idyllic farm that never existed - this is the core message of a book that was published in 1964 and caused a furore. The news magazine ‘Der Spiegel’ even ran a detailed report on it.

The sixty-year-old book is entitled ‘Schoolbooks under the flail’. It is one of the original collector's items in the ‘Westphalian Library of Agriculture’ in Münster-Hiltrup.

Where are the tractor and combine harvester?

‘We are concerned citizens who no longer want to watch our young learners being taken for fools by unrealistic textbooks’, railed the author of the book, lawyer and agricultural technology expert Alfred Oberlack. Born in Westphalia, he examined more than 140 textbooks at the time and searched in vain for contemporary agricultural technology. No milking machine, no tractor, no combine harvester. Oberlack didn't even find a steam-powered threshing machine, but instead flail-wielding farmhands. Even back then, in 1964, they had long since fallen out of time, just like the maids who carried fresh cow's milk in a bucket on their heads, or the grandfather sitting in front of the barn and unhinging the scythe.

‘Don't steal our romance’

At the time, the news magazine ‘Der Spiegel’ spoke of a ‘German textbook clod’ when it published Oberlack's shocking findings. The Hamburg-based publication stated: ‘School wisdom still portrays the farmer as a model of loyal German simplicity, or even glorifies him as a romantic, muscular monument.’

Oberlack's book ‘Schulbücher unter dem Dreschflegel’ (Textbooks under the flail) tells the story of structural change in agriculture in an unusual way. Above all, however, it tells of how this upheaval was overlooked in the young Federal Republic of Germany. The farm was and remained a place of idyll - just like the primary school teacher who replied to the author Alfred Oberlack sixty years ago: ‘Don't steal the last romanticism that the farm still offers us! We can't do without it, certainly not in the first classes.’

Information about the library

The Westphalian Agricultural Library (WBL) in Münster-Hiltrup contains around 6500 volumes of practice-orientated agricultural literature from five centuries. A regional focus is on titles from Westphalia-Lippe and north-west Germany. The collection is owned by the Stiftung Landwirtschaftsverlag in Münster and is organised as a reference library. Those interested in agricultural history can research the collection digitally (WBL collection) and use the books on site by prior appointment.