Wolfgang Klafki (1927 – 2016) has been the dominant figure in general didactics in Germany. But while in the past, his publications were virtually unknown in France, in the UK, in the United States and many other countries, this has changed recently. Parallel to this process, talking and writing about Bildung has become more and more accepted outside the German didacticians (Moos and Wubbels in preparation). I take this development as example for international and intercultural knowledge transfer and transformation and formulate my research question as follows: What kind of critique and reconstruction do Wolfgang Klafki’s two didactical models, categorical didactics and critical-constructive didactics, need in order to be good for didactical research? I start with a description of Klafki’s two didactical models and then try an answer to the question on when knowledge transfer may be successful. Obviously the most important point is the behaviour and the actions of the receiving research community (Coburn, 2003). Coborn’s most interesting criterion is “ownership” of transfer, and by that she means transfer with transformation of what is transferred. As I see it, the ownership level of transfer has not yet been reached in most of Europe, maybe with the exclusion of the Denmark, but we should strive for it, because what holds for international transfer also holds for national development. We should try to establish international comparative “ownership” of Klakfi’s works and engage in improving a number of points among them the following: (1) The phenomenological framing of Klafki’s categorical didactics is outdated. (2) His key problem approach in his critical-constructive didactics cannot suffice for all subjects in general education. And (3) the way in which Klafki arranges student participation cannot compete with dialectical models of teacher-student interaction. We thus come to an interesting result. While in Germany the interest in Bildung as transformation has pushed back the interest in Klafki’s categorical and critical-constructive Bildung (Peukert 2015, Koller 2012), the interest in categorical and critical-constructive Bildung is increasing in Europe and beyond Europe, e.g. in China (M. Meyer, H. Meyer and P. Ren, forthcoming). This transfer however leaves Klafki’s didactical works untransformed and thus has not yet reached the level of “ownership” that can give his works the place they deserve in Europeanising didactics (Lawn and Grek 2012).

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