"In a survey of Berlin high school students, only half agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship. Two-thirds didn't know who built the Berlin Wall."

Could be some idea of not crticising their parents, or something similar to the laws against displaying NAZI symbols (carrying a copy of Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" may be illegal as the cover includes a swastika).

Or badly worded questions and/or multi-choice answers. Technically, the DDR was not a dictatorship it just had no expiration date for its leader's term (unlike the Republic of Rome's dictatorships)... As to the Wall, built by the DDR - at CCCP/USSR request/order, so who actually "built" it?

As I recall a similar situation exists regarding the knowledge of the Hitler/Nazi past in Germany. There is relatively little interest in in the record of the Nazis on the part of the students in German schools and a superficial teaching of that past by the schools themselves. However, my own experience is that much the same is true of America's schools, and the astoundingly shocking state of education in our country about the world or ourselves remains our shame. Some horrid percentage of American High School students reported when asked that the language spoken in Latin America was Latin. At a time when it is not politically correct to teach or understand the history of this nation, when the icons of our past and their accomplishments become an extra day off from work, we certainly not stand in judgement over another nation's same lack of interest in the past.

Well, the principal language of Latin America could be described as a *dialect* of Latin. I don't think that's really any less "correct" than saying that Cantonese and Mandarin are two different dialects of Chinese (though I think that the Chinese "dialect" designation is way more political than linguistic).