Human rights activists and politicians in South Africa, for instance, closely studied German trials, public commemoration and schoolbooks; and the Chinese admonished Japan that, in dealing with the second world war, it should adopt the "German model".
If so, trundle over to your old schoolbooks and pick up Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure again.
At the flats, rescuers efforts quicken whenever a succession of warm smells and objects signifies life, schoolbooks, bedding, toys.
The education ministry has been striking many publishers' schoolbooks off its list of approved texts, including some that used Western cartoon characters to illustrate maths problems.
"I have to sneak through the back door with my schoolbooks hidden under magazines and salsa records," she says.
She remembers a teacher weeping at what she knew about the war years the destruction, the camps which German schoolbooks made no mention of at the time.
Thai kings, mandarins, politicians and schoolbooks have long nurtured the narrative of Thailand as a nation that has lost territories to foreign powers and mischievous neighbours.
From the contents of schoolbooks to the names of civil organisations, there is a growing movement for more Taiwan and less China.
At the same time, some of the more fanatical interpretations of Muslim scripture have been expunged from Saudi schoolbooks.
It is an irony, though, that his adopted country is the one place in the developed world where the neoDarwinian explanations that he and his colleagues created are not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, and where many people prefer to cling to the campfire tales of Genesis, rather than face the awesome thesis that Mr Mayr helped to elucidate.
ARMISTICE DAY, November 11th is not what it used to be in France or in French schoolbooks.
