Concerning curriculum making, it is impossible to integrate the different meanings of "curriculum" into a single formula. Read as social constructions, different conceptions reflect varying educational, social-political, and historical contexts. This paper explores how these contexts, or multiple realities, evolved historically and how they shape current curriculum-making practices. The first part sketches three basic features (compartmentalization, licensing, and segmentation) of curriculum making's social process as they have emerged in Prussia and in most other Central and Northern European countries since 1800. Part 2 shows how these features have shaped the current system of curriculum and education policy making in Germany, stressing the present conditions of curriculum design within administration, some aspects of curriculum committees' working routine, the related system of organized public deliberation, and the status of syllabi at the classroom level. Because of a compartmentalized system, any nationwide subject matter is laid down in at least as many syllabi as there are states in the Federal Republic of Germany. Segmented deliberation grants personal access to curriculum commissions to education professionals only, confining the general public to generalized debate. Also, classroom syllabi lag behind everyday experience. (58 references) (MLH)