Intercultural constellations in adult education: observations on the state of Anglo‐German relations before and after the First World War

Under today's conditions of rapid social modernization, adults concerned to keep their balance while striving for authentic identity are constantly confronted by the need to redefine where they stand with respect to the familiar and the strange. Here the task of adult education, as an institutionalized presence, is to explore links and to offer mediation, to interpret and to decipher. Indeed, one of its central leading paradigms today is interculturality. How, then, can adult education, as a vocational group and as a specialized field, attain and increase its proficiency in matters connected with intercultural and international communication and co‐operation? The following study attempts to trace out the background historical conditions against which such endeavours are likely to succeed. A large number of documents are reviewed in order to reveal relevant patterns of reciprocal perception, understanding and misunderstanding. The advantage of this research perspective is that it brings out the intricate way in which transnational endeavours of a cultural or pedagogic nature are bound up with the wider field of international relationships, such as these developed in the course of recent British‐German history.