German teacher education traditionally centers on the provision of domain-specific content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge at the expense of plain pedagogical knowledge. At the same time however, a lot of classes in secondary schools are taught by teachers who did not study the subject of these classes. The German educational sector keeps living with this obvious contradiction because this type of out-of-area teaching primarily takes place in school types of Germany’s segregated system that traditionally attract little attention from the academic discourse. How do out-of-area teachers cope with this paradox task? I have conducted interviews with both teachers with and without a degree in history. For these interviews, I asked them to bring along material they ‘successfully’ applied in class. I asked for a piece of material on the French Revolution and one on a topic of their choice. In explaining their materials, the teachers provided insight into their system of beliefs pertaining to history and to the teaching of history. Preliminary results show that both out-of-area teachers and in-area teachers conceive the French Revolution along remarkably similar lines often presenting similar material for similar learning routines. Obviously both the curriculum and available textbooks help to level the influence of different domain traditions. At the same time, the significance of interaction among teachers in their respective schools should not be overlooked. All this helps to make for a remarkably similar concept of history and history teaching.