In four steps I will show in which way a specifically German culture of memory is connected with a society lead by the ideas of peace, reconciliation and a democratic order. In keeping with the subject of the conference, I will elaborate on the educational concepts associated with it. I will proceed on the assumption that the manner in which history is related is a significant factor in the normative order of a given society, which in turn has a crucial effect on the educational system. For its part, education is a social process whereby a society attempts to reproduce its norms, values and guiding principles through its youth. School education offers an especially vivid illustration of central aspects of overall social change. Moreover, because a society attempts to reproduce its own norms, values and guiding principles when dealing with its youth, norms which young people are encouraged to uphold can be regarded as a mirror of general social norms.
I will focus on West Germany or the Federal Republic of Germany, referring to the GDR a few times for purposes of comparison; in the last two sections I will present the situation in reunified Germany and the politics of memory in Germany today. With the exception of a few isolated studies, the history of Germany’s post-1945 educational system has remained largely unexplored. Thus, in the following I have had to focus on specific aspects of the educational discourse and youth education.
I. The peculiarity of Germany’s situation in 1945 consisted in the fact that it was not merely a conquered country, largely ravaged and with its infrastructure destroyed, but also a nation that was to morally discredited to an extreme degree and occupied by four Allied powers.
Germany as a sovereign national state had practically ceased to exist; it had foreign troops on its territory and had a reputation of being warmongering, militaristic, and was considered to be totally unable to reconstruct a democratic society. In 1949, with the occupation powers retreating step by step from political decision-making processes, the Western state of the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in May 1949 as a functioning democratic though not yet a sovereign state. During the 4-year period of occupation, German intellectuals and politicians, men and women, had, with the support of a Military Government administration, begun not only to justify the restoration of German statehood but had also developed concepts of democratic participation. The democratization measures undertaken in the zones of Occupation, partial as they were, offered an opportunity for a democratic regime based on ideas and norms of individual responsibility and a concept of citizenship based on active participation. Initiated by the Occupation powers in the immediate post-War era, a window of opportunity had been opened to allow and support political and social reconstruction.
In 1945, the Occupation Powers and the Germans encountered each other with a mixture of mutual aversion, mistrust and the willingness to cooperate. Donna Harsh, in her study on post-war Frankfurt am Main, described the attitude Americans were confronted with when entering Germany’s ruined cities and devastated landscapes in the spring of 1945 as a combination of “desperation, defiance and desire to help rebuild their country”.
The core idea of occupational politics was the development of a programme of group-based learning experiences which were not only supposed to support the institutional development of democratic proceedings, but also to change the German national character of authoritarianism, submission and what was considered to be uncivilized behaviour. Based on this concept, prominently developed by the German exiled psychologist Kurt Lewin, - whose study from 1943 The Special Case of Germany I chose as the subtitle of this presentation - among others, a social-anthropological approach led to a programme of educational reformism connecting the individual, social and political spheres. Spurred by US progressive thinking and supported by Government officials’ managerial resources, manpower and a network of scientific expertise were invested to plan the invasion of Germany. Its foremost goal was a concept termed the re-education of the people. It linked individual behaviour with the framework of public politics, connecting family attitudes and virtues with behaviour towards the state, party politics and democratic endeavours. Internally called the “Operation on the German Mind” in the following years, the rebuilding and reconstruction of political institutions and public administration was fostered by the (re)shaping of democratic thinking. Germans had to be taught democratic behaviour through the instilling of new family values and modes of self-expression. The basic idea was to introduce a new mentality and a mindset of individual responsibility through education. This was based on the assumption that family structures, individual and public education were decisive for character building and hence immediately connected with political behaviour.
The American authorities regarded German families as the social institution forming German moral and social attitudes. German family structure was considered not only to be very traditional but also to have generated the overall authoritarianism of the German society.
The American concept for an educational system was formulated by a department set up expressly for that purpose, the Religion & Education Affairs Branch. It was geared in a first step to install a process of denazification by exchanging personnel who were actively teaching during the Nazi period, in a second step to get rid of the three-track German school system and thirdly to change the curricula with the intention to impose democratic values and self-determination. However, in the end the Allies’ initial attempts to establish a school system on the Anglo-Saxon model failed due to resistance by representatives of the German educational and cultural spheres. Especially in Bavaria the Minister of Culture reacted with a mixture of delay and inaction, defending the German Gymnasium as a palladium of humanistic values. This rhetoric which referred to German traditions prior to the arising of the Nazis was prelude of the social climate dominating the following one and a half decades. Neverthless ultimately it can be said that this occupation policy contributed toward strengthening democratic participation and promoting the establishment of state and civil society structures according to western models.
II. The following decade and a half was characterized by the desire for “normality” as an expression of a strategy of denial. In his seminal study of the political history of the FRG’s early years, the prominent German contemporary historian Norbert Frei coined the term “politics of the past “Vergangenheitspolitik”: the post-war society’s attitude toward its Nazi past shaped policy, but was not grappled with openly, or was not thematised at all. It began with a series of laws that can be seen as an expression of the mentality of “drawing a line under the past, ” “Schlußstrichmentalität” delibarately forgetting the past. As early as 1949 the German Bundestag passed a law providing immunity for 800,000 persons who had been convicted by Allied courts, followed in 1951 by the amnesty law that reinstated civil servants and professional soldiers who had been discharged in 1945 due to complicity with the Nazis.
What was the normative foundation of this post-Nazi society? What social values were aspired to?
As made clear by the school controversy, this was a social conflict between the assertions of tradition and reorientation. A consensus prevailed on the social goal of “building peace”. One can speak of a peace consensus among the German elites that was shared by a large part of the population. This came up against a so-called “young war generation” characterized by disorientation and a collective identity crisis due to the abrupt change in systems and a personal shift in roles in a collapsing society. This crisis of orientation opened up the possibility for large parts of the population to share one basic mental attitude: “War never again”. However, this peace consensus also had its price. This first reconstruction period was characterized by the refusal to confront the crimes of the Holocaust. The social climate of “drawing a line under the past”, coupled with a striving for normality, blocked the opportunities that a lively confrontation would have offered.
This striving for normality chiefly focused on a certain functional level of orderly conduct as well as a rigid sexual morality; at the same time. This tendency was reinforced by conservative notions of the family promulgated by the Adenauer government. Simultaneously, the Christian churches, especially Catholicism, became an influential social authority. The Christian religion was regarded as a normative force, while National Socialism was interpreted as a “falling away from God”. At the same time, 1950s German society was a dynamic one: economic prosperity and opportunities for advancement for all layers of society ensured broad support for the political system.
Notions of youth education over the following years displayed contradictory tendencies. A minority of educators attempted to revive the tradition of progressive education with its notion of the free development of the personality; the so-called Reformpädagogik with deriving from the Weimar Republic. It nevertheless was and stayed a minority movement. The majority, however, saw themselves in the tradition of disciplining a younger generation that was believed to be in danger of being barbarized by the war and the disorder of the post-war period.
One indication of educational views was the attitude toward disciplinary measures and corporal punishment. While corporal punishment found majority support in society as a whole, in 1954 and 1957 court decisions against teachers who used corporal punishment sent a different signal.
III. Toward the end of the decade and at the beginning of the 60s the social climate gradually began to change: a youth protest culture had formed, taking its orientation from American models. Much has been written in recent years about the significance of this social transformation. It has been clearly established that West German society was confronted with a youth protest movement that came out of the schools. It was shaped by two impetuses: the revolt against the rigid sexual morality, and against the denial of Nazi crimes, that is, confronting the guilt of the fathers. One crucial influence was the East-West conflict: the GDR had adopted the avowal of anti-Fascism as part of its state doctrine, while its propaganda attempted to discredit the FRG both politically and morally as the land of the perpetrators. The campaigns against such figures as Hans Globke, who had helped draft the Nuremburg Laws, the legal instrument for Nazis anti-Semitism and racism, who went on to become State Secretary in the Chancellery, were based on documentary evidence and what was even more important made an impact on West German youth. In addition, at the start of the decade the West German public was confronted with calls for a renewed examination of its Nazi past; the Auschwitz Trial was held in Frankfurt in 1963, and intellectuals such as the returned émigré Theodor W. Adorno and the philosopher Karl Jaspers, a close friend of Hannah Arendt, demanded that schools increase their efforts to educate students about the Nazi past.
At the same time, the overall social climate was changing; West Germany entered a phase of inner democratization. In the early 1960s, various institutions, groups, movements and milieus simultaneously began opening themselves to social reform processes. The hallmarks of this increased social openness were participation, emancipation, equal opportunity and social justice.
At the same time, discipline problems were no longer dealt with primarily using sanction measures. However, the search for new political answers posed new challenges for educators: the students’ movement in the schools and subsequently at the universities was heavily influenced by socialist and Marxist ideas. Students identified with antiauthoritarianism and grassroots democracy and accused the older generation of viewing democracy as nothing more than an empty formula. Educators responded with an increasingly psychological and sociological approach, along with a greater openness toward democratic reforms.
At the same time, on the level of society as a whole this process furthered what was initially defined as peace culture. This process of transformation drew a connection between peace, social democracy and the culture of memory, propagating an open discourse. Ultimately, the effects on the educational system were limited: the curricula were changed, the students’ rights of co-determination were expanded, new participatory committees were established, criticism and co-determination were institutionalized and corporal punishment was abolished for good, but overall the school structures were retained. The educational offensive had markedly improved university access for children and young people from non-academic homes, as well as for women, but the three-track school system in which a student’s course was set early on and the elite university remained unchanged. They remain disputed until the present.
Although the “68ers’” confrontation with World War II and the crimes the Germans had committed was characterized by a more abstract, highly normative discourse, this period can be regarded as a prelude to the German confrontation with the Holocaust that emerged in the 70s and 80s as a dominant core identity common to all political elites: responsibility tied to the imperative of memory not only inspired a growing number of professional historians to explore the subject; in society as a whole more and more people seized the initiative to seek traces of the Nazi past. The curricula were expanded, conveying an increasingly vivid picture of Germany’s crimes. At the same time, the “memorial movement” became important as a supplementary mode of working with young people. Former sites of Nazi atrocities had been turned into memorials sites providing authentic impressions. So, almost all young people of this generation experienced class trips to Auschwitz or Dachau.
III. The year 1989 not only brought the end of the second German state and the Unification – and thus completion – of the nation, it also marked a rift in the narrative of post-war Germany. The peaceful unravelling of East Germany can be seen as an affirmation and a litmus test of the consensus of non-violence that had become established throughout Germany. At the same time, the public, and hence the educational system, was confronted with a new challenge: when describing the GDR as “the second German dictatorship”. In the 1990s, keeping in mind the failings following the Nazi period, enormous efforts were made to confront the history and legacy of the GDR dictatorship. The Bundestag passed a law for the investigation of the Stasi (East German secret police), a commission of experts was convened and a federal agency was founded to preserve the Stasi archives and make them publicly available.
This state process was accompanied by a lively public debate regarding the character of the GDR. While the rhetoric of victims’ advocacy groups at least implicitly equated the GDR with Nazi Germany, on the opposite side individual initiatives and the Party of Democratic Socialism (which had emerged from the former GDR ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party) harboured voices demanding more appropriate comparisons. For instance, Gregor Gysi, chairman of the PDS and still one of the leading figures in its successor party, Die Linke, declared in a Bundestag debate in the early 1990s that it makes a difference whether a state leaves behind mountains of files or mountains of corpses.
Nevertheless the developed West Germany’s culture of memory, its modes and practices were applied to deal with the GDR past. Places of persecution such as the prison in Bautzen and the Stasi headquarters in Berlin and landmarks of Germany’s division (refugee camps, remnants of the Wall, watch towers and checkpoints) were made into memorials suited to the didactic concept of youth education. Today, school classes visit Buchenwald or hold seminars in Ravensbrück, former Nazi concentration camps just as they tour the complex on Normannenstraße in Berlin, the former Stasi headquarters.
This development signifies that there is a consensus within German society that dealing with its past as a prerequisite of a liberal democracy. At the same time it is declared a state responsibility. The construction of the Holocaust Memorial in the immediate vicinity of the Reichstag in the centre of Berlin, the state subsidizing of memorials, the establishment of a foundation for the documenting of the SED-Dictatorship – all these are indicators that the state views itself as responsible for this history. This interpretation of a negative remembrance, i.e., the avowal of responsibility for the Shoah as the core identity of German democracy, is shared by the elites and is now regarded as a world-wide role model for confrontations with the past and modes of reconciliation.
IV. Since the turn of the millennium, education that aims at raising historical consciousness has faced two challenges. One is the fact that the generation of the victims and persecutors is fading away. Over the past several decades, interviews with contemporary witnesses have become an integral part of teaching practice both in schools and in education at memorial sites. The transition into the third post-war generation has to find other means and ways to keep up the moral stance conveyed by the testimonies of the survivors. The second challenge is that German society is becoming more pluralistic due to immigration from other cultures.
Teaching of history in Germany now is codified, it is part of the civic education
With the establishment of a specific culture of memory, the school and the university have taken centre stage as the place in which history is taught. Nonetheless, two tendencies can be observed. Evidently – and this is especially emphasized by educators working in memorials – Germany’s third post-war generation also suffers from certain defensive attitudes, even though they tend to take different forms than direct denial, acted out by their grandparents. This is associated with a development that could be referred to as the familiarization of memory. Beginning in the 1990s, questions regarding involvement in the Holocaust have increasingly shifted into the family sphere. An exhibition about the crimes committed by the German Wehrmacht during World War II prompted a broad public discussion marked by controversy and consternation. This has led educators to demand that an increased focus be placed on the perpetrators, rather than empathically commemorating the victims: i.e., that one ask how “ordinary men” became perpetrators and by-standers as well as exploring behaviour such as resistance, refusal to participate, and helping behaviour. This means looking at a broader context, inquiring into individual character, the conditions for social action and the conditions for humanization. The German response to the film “Schindler’s List” continues to raise the uncomfortable question as to why there were so few Schindlers. Even for young Germans in the third generation, this means asking what their grandparents did or failed to do.
The third generation of Germans has not yet escaped the dilemma of confrontation, repression and denial of guilt.
At the same time a transformation toward a global perspective on genocide prevention and the formation of a type of Holocaust education that is no longer tied to a national discourse is developing in other countries. Neither tendency has yet taken hold in Germany’s educational system. The task of the current generation of educators is to spread information in order to continue promoting the humanization that German society has undergone as a result of its painful confrontation with the past. This could also be the key to familiarizing young people from different ethnic backgrounds with German history – not by treating them as complicit, but by confronting them with the inherent dangers and consequences of racism, dehumanization, and the glorification of violence. Concepts of crossover history, dealing with a multi-perspective view of cultural heritages enable young people to identify with society. Migrant intellectuals play a decisive role in help integrating their histories into the narrative of the new multi-cultural Germany. Schools and other educational institutions are still up to follow suit.
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