The Fall and Rise of an Educational System, 1945–51
The future smells of Russian leather, blood, godlessness, and many whippings, and I should advise our grandchildren to be born with many thick skins on their backs.
Heinrich Heine,
Lutetia (1842)
Should the German people lay down arms, the Soviets . . . would occupy all eastern and southeastern Europe, together with the greater part of the Reich. Over all this territory, which with the Soviet Union included would be of enormous extent, an iron curtain [ein eiserner Vorhang] would at once descend.
Joseph Goebbels,
Das Reich, February 23, 1945
We have a saying that the sun always rises from the East. . . . I am pleased that I have been to the country from which the sun rises. May it shine bright and brighter.
Otto Grotewohl, toasting Soviet leaders
during his March 1948 visit to Moscow
October 1945. It is a testament to the determination of Soviet and German education officials that the schools and universities east of the Elbe have opened at all this fall. Just as in the western occupation zones of the Americans, French, and British, school staff in the SBZ labor under appalling conditions. Although the SBZ is better off in some ways than the western zones—it has more food, coal, newsprint—its major cities, such as Dresden and Leipzig, sustained greater physical damage during the war. And now the eastern zone is suffering massive Soviet dismantling of its factories and railroads.1 In several cities, devastated by heavy bombing, some school buildings are partially or totally destroyed. Only 20 of Leipzig’s 105 schools have been spared; 95 percent of the school buildings in Frankfurt an der Oder are in ruins. Even in the undamaged schools, central heating is impossible: there is no fuel.2
And virtually no books, no pencils, no crayons, no paper. But there are children everywhere, 100 or more per classroom in some urban school districts, huddled together on the floor for warmth. For while there are many fewer schools open, there are many more children to educate. The SBZ is overflowing with more than three million refugees who have fled before the advances of the Red Army or have been forcibly expelled from German-speaking areas of eastern Europe. Month after month for the last year the DPs (Displaced Persons) have been pouring into the SBZ. And still they come: the SBZ contains 500,0000 more children in 1945 than in 1939; an additional 319,000 will come in 1946.3 Far worse, hundreds of thousands of children are orphaned and literally starving. In Berlin alone, the emergency relief program Rescue the Children will distribute food, clothing, shoes, and other articles to 364,000 children in the coming harsh winter of 1945/ 46.4
The University of Jena is also open, and the other five universities of the SBZ—in Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, Greifswald, and Rostock—will reopen in the winter. University students take lecture notes across their knees; the desks have been burned as fuel. Due to the paper shortage, few books and journals can be purchased. And Nazi book-burnings, Anglo-American bombs, and Soviet proscriptions of fascist literature have combined to decimate libraries; the circulating library at Leipzig University fills only a single small basement room.
As the days grow colder, students wear dyed Wehrmacht overcoats to lectures, but basic articles of clothing are hard to come by; student government leaders set up makeshift shoe repair and textile workshops on university grounds.5 Chilling winds whistle through holes in bombed-out walls. Broken windows are patched over with “Hitler glass,” as students call the thin cellophane that covers the shattered panes. “Yet another glorious gift from the Führer!” a few students jeer, indulging in a bit of black humor. Outside the windows, Trümmeifrauen (rubble women) scrounge for wood and students sift through mountains of debris for scraps of laboratory equipment and other usable supplies; all able-bodied male students must volunteer several days per semester to clear away rubble. But many are not able-bodied—most male students are war veterans, some of them suffering from tuberculosis; 20 percent are disabled or amputees.6 Rows of seats up front are reserved for them. With their mothers or sweethearts carrying their notes and lunches, they limp to their places, faces contorted with pain. Given the shortage of seating, other students carry chairs from class to class. Or at least the lucky ones do; the remainder squeeze together atop window sills or crouch on the floor of the soot-and-ash-covered aisles. The cold air reeks of decay. But the students are grateful simply to be students.
It’s 1945, and both the comforts and the venerable traditions of German university student life are no more than memories. In occupied Germany, west and east, all German traditions are suspect; the dueling fraternities of earlier eras are outlawed. But this first generation of postwar students is ravenous to make up for lost opportunities, driven by a fierce Nachholbedarf to compensate for the deprivations of the Nazi era: a foretaste of the feeding frenzy that will seize their intellectually starved grandchildren 45 years later with the fall of communism.
Mass devastation, fiscal anarchy, and famine-stricken, incapacitated students face educators in all four occupied zones. The SBZ, however, has an additional, long-term problem: teachers. Most of those who taught last year have been or will be fired, relegated to manual labor jobs in factories or on farms. Soviet authorities are determined to stamp out all vestiges of fascism; the USSR has suffered far more than the combined losses of the western Allies: 28 million dead, 20 million wounded, whole regions ravaged by Nazi advances and scorched-earth retreats. To the Soviets, virtually all non-leftist Germans are suspect as Nazis.
The execution of educational policy is in the hands of the education officers of SMAD (Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, Soviet Military Administration of Germany), the occupation government in the SBZ until 1949 and the executor of Moscow’s orders in the zone. They believe that no profession is more important to cleanse of Nazi ideology than education. Seventy-two percent of the teachers in the SBZ were Nazi Party members, and the percentage of professors was even higher; all faculty in Germany were civil servants and took an oath of allegiance to the state. Like most German civil servants, faculty had traditionally opposed socialism and democracy. And whereas the western Allies are screening the political backgrounds of teachers individually and will retain or eventually rehire the majority of them, SBZ educational officials have already discharged most teachers with Nazi affiliations, keeping only those in scientific-technical subjects whose expertise is deemed indispensable.
As part of its Entnazifizierung (denazification) program, therefore, SMAD has or will dismiss on ideological grounds practically all teachers who had been hired during the Nazi era: 75 percent of SBZ teachers in 1945 (28,000 out of a total of 39,000) and an additional 5 percent in 1946. This leaves a staff largely consisting of the older Weimar- and Wilhelmine-era teachers, so that the mean age of the remaining staff is 52.5 (59 in Berlin), with 22 percent of teachers more than 60 years old. (At the universities, all Nazi Party faculty members have been fired, and politically persecuted or dismissed faculty have been reinstated, leaving the majority of remaining professors older than 70.)7 Overnight, given the increased student population, the SBZ needs 40,000 new teachers.8
To meet the crisis, SMAD is setting up slapdash three- and four-week “crash courses” for Neulehrer (new teachers) and Schulhelfer (teachers’ aides) in the summer and fall of 1945; in 1946 the course will be extended to eight months and in 1947 to one year. Sons and daughters of workers and peasants are the preferred students; they become known as the generation of Neulehrer. Selection criteria are ideological rather than pedagogical: “Their level of education is an indifferent matter,” announce education authorities. “Elementary school education is sufficient, if the applicant is a mentally alert person and has attempted to further his own education.”9 And so numerous regions wind up with elementary schools in which 90 percent of the staff are Neulehrer;10 and in the state of Mecklenburg- Vorpommern, the education minister himself has only an elementary school education.11
It’s 1945, and educators face a formidable, even overwhelming task. And yet, a feeling of expectancy, even excitement, prevails among numerous faculty and students of anti-fascist conviction, especially those supportive of or sympathetic to communism. And no wonder: Educators have already made amazing strides in the few short months since the end of the war. . . .
April 30, 1945. In another of those strange synchronicities that seem to haunt German history, the past and future turn to face each other. On the very day that
Adolf Hitler commits suicide, and as the fires still flicker after the Battle of Berlin, two transport planes touch down in Calau, east of the Oder River. Bearing the Red star, the planes also bear the select group of German exiles who are communist Germany’s future, some of them in their 30s or even 20s—an early sign of the prominent role that youth and youth policy will play in eastern Germany.
As Red Army soldiers hoist the Soviet flag atop the Reichstag on this warm spring day, Walter Ulbricht prepares with Soviet authorities to assume control of the SBZ. Like his German comrades, some of whom are returning after more than a decade in exile, Ulbricht has been waiting a long time for this day.12 Son of a tailor, Ulbricht had become a leader of the local KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, Communist Party of Germany) and a Reichstag representative during the 1920s. Known as “Genosse Zelle” (“Comrade Cell”) for his skills in political organization—the KPD’s chief activity was to establish communist cells in every factory—Ulbricht succeeded Wilhelm Pieck in 1929 to become the top official in the Berlin Party organization. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, the 40-year-old Ulbricht went underground; in 1934 he fled to Prague and then Paris. In 1938, Ulbricht was summoned to Moscow. Amid a decade of mass purges of both Russian and foreign comrades, Ulbricht assiduously worked his way up through the Moscow-based Party hierarchy, partly by following every twist and turn in Stalin’s line (including a vigorous defense of the 1936–38 Moscow show trials and the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact), and partly by outmaneuvering less adroit rivals. (More than 70 percent of KPD members in Russia during 1936–38—a total of 841—were arrested; only 8 were eventually released.)13 When many foreign comrades who had spent the war years in the USSR were later asked what they’d done, they replied with dark humor: “I survived.”
But by April 1945, Ulbricht has done far more than survive. Supported by Stalin and other Soviet officials, he has risen to become KPD deputy chairman; he and the 69-year-old Pieck, titular leader of the Party and future president of the DDR, are returning to Germany victorious. Prominently absent from the roll call of the KPD’s top echelon is Ernst Thälmann, who was murdered in Buchenwald on direct orders from Hitler in August 1944. The leading German communist for two decades, Thälmann’s arrest by the Gestapo in March 1933, imprisonment by the Nazis, and execution in Buchenwald is a story that will soon transform him into a permanent martyr of German communism.
While instructions for regulating political and cultural life in the SBZ will be issued by SMAD, German communists will administer the task of reconstruction and, at times, influence the formation of SBZ policy. The task is overwhelming: The scale of destruction that Ulbricht and the other KPD exiles witness in Berlin alone is mind-boggling: 1.1 of the 1.5 million dwellings damaged, the transportation system shattered, the food and health situation critical.14
Faint rays of hope, however, glimmer through the wreckage. The Dozen Year Reich is at an end. It is a moment that some older eastern Germans would later remember (or romanticize) as “Sonnenaufgang im Osten” (sunrise in the east), the Stunde Null (zero hour).15 Despite physical ruin and human misery unmatched in Germany since the close of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the future beckons, and with it the chance to break with Germany’s imperialist past.
The educational plans of the KPD have been a long time in the making. As early as the formation in July 1943 of the Moscow-based National Committee for a Free Germany, headed by Ulbricht and Pieck, the KPD had begun to grapple with the question of German educational reconstruction. In early 1944, the KPD Politburo set up a 20-member commission to determine “how the entire curriculum should be changed to liberate German youth from all fascist and imperialist influences.”16 With the Nazi regime furnishing an unforgettable illustration of how the schools could serve as an effective agency of social control, Stalin and the KPD made plans to cultivate the political advantages of direct regulation of the SBZ educational bureaucracy.
Now, in 1945, with their plans come to fruition, education and youth affairs are regarded as so important that administrative responsibility for them is assumed solely by the KPD cadre that has spent the war years in Moscow. For instance, on entering Germany in May, Anton Ackermann, one of the three leading KPD functionaries, is made responsible for “People’s Education.” In July, Paul Wandel, who soon serves as the first DDR Minister of Education, will take over for Ackermann and oversee faculty Entnazifizierung and curriculum revision as head of the newly created Educational Administration. Wilhelm Pieck’s portfolio of responsibilities includes supervising KPD youth policy. Otto Winzer, later a DDR Foreign Minister, will also soon take a top post in the education ministry in Berlin’s City Council. And when SMAD, usually after consultation with Ulbricht’s men, appoints the education ministers for the Länder in a few months, all of them will be reliable communists, without exception. To an extent rivaled only by the police and security forces, all key positions in education will be occupied by top communist functionaries, and then their goal will be, as Anton Ackermann phrased it, to carry out “the political perestroika of the school.”17
They will create not a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but rather an “anti-fascist democratic republic”: that is the motto by which the KPD identifies its program in 1945. Or as an American historian of the DDR later put it: “To use the analogy of Russia in 1917, Germany in 1945 was experiencing its February Revolution; the October Revolution which would usher in socialism would follow later.”18
Or, to apply the Russian comparison directly to education: This brief period in the SBZ is like the halcyon decade of creative experiment in pedagogy during the 1920s, when Lenin’s wife Nadesha Krupskaya and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People’s Minister of Education, introduced sweeping educational reforms that were themselves to be swept away by the final Stalinist crackdown in 1931.
The analogy merits consideration. For the 1930s and ’40s, a period of ironhanded, tyrannical Stalinist orthodoxy in the USSR, were precisely the years that Ulbricht and the KPD exiles spent in Moscow. Toeing Stalin’s shifting lines, the exiles learned to repudiate the preceding era of intellectual ferment as merely “reformist” and anarchist, an attitude that set the stage for the Stalinization of East German education. But in the summer of 1945, the climate in the SBZ is still liberal—for tactical reasons deemed necessary by the Soviets. The “iron curtain,” about which Goebbels warned more than a year before Churchill’s use of the phrase in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, has not yet descended. The Russian bear is still hibernating: Stalin has not yet been raised to the rank of “the greatest scholar of all time”; the long winter night of terror against “cosmopolitanism” and “objectivism” has not yet fallen over the SBZ. And yet: the Orwellian chants portended that a new German dictatorship is about to replace the old one.
WHO HAS THE YOUTH, HAS THE FUTURE!
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER! / POWER IS KNOWLEDGE!
OUR NEW LIFE MUST BE DIFFERENT!
That summer and fall of 1945 witness the fall and rise of an educational system, and the fall and rise of two radically opposed ways of life in eastern Germany: the beginning of the excruciating, albeit inexorable forced march from National Socialism to German “democratic” socialism.
This is the opening scene of education’s role in that transition and in the drama of postwar German reconstruction that follows, the story of the function of the educational system in East German life—from Hitler to Ulbricht to Honecker, from the Reich in rubble to “sunrise in the East” to ultimate disillusion with communism. As we shall see, the making and unmaking of the German communist bore notable similarities to the making and unmaking of the German Nazi.
And in both cases, education—the “citadel of learning”—was of paramount importance. “Let the children come unto me,” declaimed Hitler, “for they are mine unto death!” Declared Stalin: “Education is a weapon, and its effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”
Given its abrupt metamorphosis from Nazism to Stalinism, no nation furnishes the historian with a better opportunity to study the interaction between ideological politics and educational policy than the former East Germany. For nowhere was the trench campaign to win minds more fierce than in divided Germany—particularly in East Germany, with the west’s so-called Isle of Freedom, West Berlin, encamped at its very heart. Until 1961, educators and propagandists of both Germanies were constantly confronted with the success or failure of their efforts: Germans east and west could vote with their feet and easily resettle drüben. Even after the borders were closed, DDR citizens were deluged by western TV, music and ideas. East German education necessarily, therefore, became more overtly ideological than elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It needed to wipe out tendencies toward both capitalism and Nazism—while implying, meanwhile, that nobody left in “das bessere Deutschland” (“the better Germany”) had a Nazi past. It also had to distinguish itself in extreme form from West Germany: aside from ideological differences—the DDR’s claim to be the better, “socialist” Germany—there was simply no compelling reason for the tiny DDR to exist at all. Unlike other Eastern European countries, the five states of the DDR had never previously been an administrative unit. Without a common history or common traditions, their linkage was purely a creation of World War II and Stalin himself. No other communist state faced a comparable problem of legitimacy and identity—and risked losing millions of its citizens to a rival neighbor. So East German educators needed to promote Marxism-Leninism more aggressively than communists elsewhere—and they did so by mid-century, after the Soviets largely abandoned their democratic tactics (and their hopes of a neutral reunited Germany) and began to sovietize the SBZ relentlessly.
Today we know the disastrous denouement of the DDR’s failed campaign. But few Americans know this dramatic, complicated history and its relevance to us. The repeated ballyhoos over “anti-fascist democratic” reforms in the 1940s, the Stalinization and militarization of the system in the late 1940s and 1950s, the shift to polytechnical education in the 1960s, the emergence of an educational elite in the 1970s, the losing race in the 1980s to adapt education to the economic realities posed by the “technical-scientific revolution”: education occupied the front lines of East Germany’s vain struggle to keep pace with capitalism. As we shall see, a sketch of its vicissitudes offers a sharply focused history—from the communist side—of the role of state cultural policy in education and of the postwar propaganda battle between East and West.
In Germany you cannot have a revolution because you would have to step on the lawns.
Lenin
The communist phoenix ascended from the Nazi ashes. But was its own pitiful end 44 years later inevitable from its beginning? It is clear alone that the postwar course of development of the region that became the SBZ, and then the DDR, would have taken an entirely different course if administered by the western Allies or occupied in common by all four countries.
And indeed it began quite differently: much of the area that became the SBZ had been occupied by the American and British armies in the spring of 1945. But because the Yalta Conference of February 1945 had specified that the Soviet Union would administer the German Länder east of the Elbe, Anglo-American troops departed once the Red Army arrived. That wartime agreement determined the fate of Germans along the Elbe for decades: “eastern” Germany—which most Germans continued to call Mitteldeutschland (middle Germany), even though the furthermost eastern territory of Greater Germany had been parceled out to Poland and the USSR in 1945—became the SBZ.19
But “eastern” Germany might not have remained the SBZ—after all, the Allied powers had also occupied, and split up, Austria, nevertheless agreeing to its reunification on the condition that it remain politically neutral. But Yalta was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July/August 1945, at which the Allied consensus emerged that the special case of Germany warranted special treatment. Germany was different: Not only the aggressor in the war, it was also the key nation on the continent. As Lenin once said, “Who controls Germany, controls Europe.” And so the four Allies formulated their postwar aims of German occupation as the 4 Ds: demilitarization, deindustrialization, denazification, and de- mocratization.20
Umerziehung or “re-education” was chosen as the means for achieving the latter pair, a psychopolitical strategy aimed at altering the authoritarian, militaristic foundations on which earlier German regimes had been based.21 Germans would be re-educated to embrace liberalism and the rule of law rather than Hegelian statism and the ideology of power politics.
To all four Allies, re-education meant inculcating the principles of “democratic” thought and practice according to their own national ideals. And so it was, in each of the four Allied zones, that occupation authorities attempted to reform German institutions—through Leninist “democratic centralism,” in SMAD’s version.22
Nor were the Soviets the only occupying power to focus upon the educational system. The western Allies had high hopes for their own programs of democratic re-education, believing that the schools were the key to re-education. “In no field,” one American report concluded, “is complete denazification so important.”23 Or as one British wartime policymaker bluntly put it, education was the crucial institution for “stamp[ing] out the whole tradition on which the German nation has been built.”24
By late 1946, however, the western Allies had all but forsaken any systematic attempt to achieve such ambitions, abandoning the original grandiose plans of Potsdam, whereby re-education would revolutionize and democratize the allegedly “authoritarian personality” of the Germans.25 In the western zones, reeducation efforts were largely thwarted by the local population, by “a clear majority who, while they accepted the desirability of sweeping away Nazi innovations, were inclined to regard the approach to education enshrined in pre- 1933 institutions as essentially sound.”26 In contrast to the western disinclination toward rigorous Umerziehung, the Soviets executed the policy ruthlessly, from teacher denazification to curricular and syllabus reform. Aside from their determination to extirpate anti-fascism, however, this is not to say that Soviet reeducation policymakers executed a carefully worked-out vision for the SBZ’s future. Indeed, it is fair to say that “SBZ re-education was characterized by the unplanned destruction of everything nonconformist.”27
Reasoning that the 19 million Germans of the Soviet zone were, aside from a small minority, Nazis who had forfeited the right to voice any opinion about their future, Soviet officials did not seek the close cooperation of the SBZ populace, though they often consulted with Ulbricht’s men on execution of policy. Thus, for instance, in its very first week, SMAD simply ordered the permanent closure of all religious schools, reopening them as public institutions in which religious instruction was permitted, provisionally, on a voluntary basis. Even more so than in the case of the western Allies, the Soviet relationship to Germans was more that of victor to vanquished.
And yet anti-democratic tendencies would survive both approaches to education. In the western zones, because of the increasing western concern with combating communism rather than Nazism, serious educational reform was stymied; it did not begin in West Germany until the late 1960s. “No experiments” in education was the rule, since experimentation evoked fears of left-wing schemes. As a result, the West German school system remained essentially in its nineteenth-century condition, largely untouched by the reforms that had occurred throughout the remainder of postwar Europe, until the worldwide student unrest of 1968. Well into the 1970s, the BRD was among the most educationally backward of northern European countries, an unreconstructed exception among the increasingly egalitarian school systems of Europe. Meanwhile, East-West tensions also made SMAD anti-fascist education policy, and indeed the entire DDR educational system, all the more rigid and imperious, so that much of the Prussian tradition that had inspired and nurtured National Socialism survived in the east too. Thus the Cold War cut short Entnazifizierung in western education, and by combining it with Stalinist indoctrination, transformed and intensified it in eastern education. Indeed, some historians argue that re-education failed in the west because occupation authorities heeded the Germans too much—and in the east because they consulted them too little.28
But that wasn’t how the majority of the million rank-and-file members of the German Left in the SBZ felt in 1945. Their sense of promise was celebrated in the East German national anthem, written by the regime’s leading writer Johannes Becher and set to melody by national award-winning composer Hanns Eisler when the SBZ became the DDR in 1949:
Arisen from ruins
and gazing on the future,
let us serve the Good,
Germany, united Fatherland.
Ancient hopes impel us,
and united we urge the prospect on.
It will yet pass
that the sun, more beautiful than ever,
shines over Germany,
shines over Germany.
The national anthem gave pride of place to the forthcoming generation of German youth. As the final stanza declared:
Let us plow, let us farm,
learn and create as never before,
and if we trust to our capacities,
a free race will arise.
German youth! The best hope
of our people is embodied in you.
You will become Germany’s new life
and the sun, more beautiful than ever,
will shine over Germany,
will shine over Germany.
Indeed, much of the widespread hope about the SBZ in those early postwar years had to do with educational reconstruction and progressive youth programs. Whereas the Länder in the western zones were returning to versions of the elitist Weimar educational system, educators in the SBZ rhapsodized about their introduction of die neue schule (the new school).
“die neue schule.”
With the noun deliberately dethroned to the lower case to symbolize the populist character of the democratic school, communist educators announced their program in a phrase that resounded in Party meetings and schoolrooms throughout the late 1940s. Arisen from ruins, proclaimed the politicians, eastern Germany was launching one of the most far-reaching experiments in educational history: the radical transformation of an advanced nation’s view of the world, its history, and reality itself. To most lower-echelon left-wing politicians and educators, die neue schule promised an egalitarian future. It would enable German youth to “learn and create as never before.” “Der neue sozialistische Mensch” (“the new socialist human being”) of democratic Germany would be its handiwork: “German youth! The best hope / of our people is embodied in you.”
In this spirit, the Tägliche Rundschau, the official organ of SMAD, greeted children on the opening day of school:
The young people that are streaming on this day into school will not—from the outside—exactly see an ideal state of affairs. And yet, one must emphasize that this school year is the happiest ever for German youth.29
But anyone who could see—and hear—beyond the rhetoric might have discerned that communist machinations were already under way in the SBZ to transform the new school into an institution not so different from its immediate predecessor.
OUR NEW LIFE MUST BE DIFFERENT!
SMAD and the KPD did not show their true colors all at once. The progress from brown to red was a camouflaged process, the meanings of the shifting tints and tones of KPD proclamations and SMAD policies obscure to the uninitiated. Indeed, despite the extraordinary hardships of postwar rebuilding, the outlook for the SBZ educational system did seem auspicious during its first stage of development (1945–47). To unsuspecting eyes, a democratic spring appeared ready to bloom. Pace Lenin, eastern Germany’s trampled lawn had been replanted as a botanical garden.
Or so it seemed.
Only Ulbricht’s inner circle knew that his operative strategy was what some German historians subsequently termed Scheindemokratie (seeming-democracy).30 “It must look democratic,” Ulbricht told his lieutenants. “But we must keep everything in our hands.”31 Following Stalinist practice and guided by SMAD’s aims, he opposed all individual initiative on political matters. The multitude of tiny anti-Nazi groups that had sprung up spontaneously in the last months of the war were forced to disband, their members told to work for SMAD or retire from politics. The “anti-fascist democratic revolution” was to be administered from above.
Thus, even as KPD politicians were heralding the birth of a democratic age in German history, the KPD was maneuvering to gain control of key institutions through the subterfuge of Scheindemokratie, which made a policy out of Lenin’s famous slogan, “One step backwards—two steps forwards”: First pursue the class struggle via liberal bourgeois policies, counseled Lenin; then, striking from within, vitiate the policies and subvert their reformist supporters; finally, execute the revolutionary communist program. In education, the strategy ensured the safe passage from “the new democratic school” to the little Red schoolhouse.
And so the fate of eastern Germany and its schools was decided in those early months in 1945 after all, even if the precise direction of SBZ/DDR policy may have remained unclear to Stalin himself. With the accident of Soviet occupation came the inevitability of Soviet domination, though the extent of the control was at first concealed, especially within the educational system. Whatever their official pronouncements, however, genuine “pedagogical reform never entered the calculations of communist education” policymakers.32
Still, it wasn’t yet obvious in 1945, as apparently democratic institutions sprouted in the SBZ, that SMAD would operate in a rigidly authoritarian manner or that the Soviets were little committed to notions such as forming “the socialist human being,” but rather to advancing their own geopolitical interests. In hindsight, however, it is clear that SMAD’s central goal was always to further Moscow’s two long-term strategic options: first, to transform the SBZ into a Marxist-Leninist state; or second—and even better if possible—cloak its development as democratic in order ultimately to win over a reunited Germany to Marxism-Leninism (or, at minimum, to political neutrality). In the early postwar years, Moscow pursued the latter option; when its prospects for success darkened in the Cold War climate of the late 1940s and early 1950s, it settled for the former.
Understandably, after the trauma of Nazi tyranny, it was, at first, easy for even the East German bourgeoisie to identify with the progressive SMAD/KPD program; the SBZ would very likely have voted socialist or social democratic in 1945 had SMAD permitted free elections. Moreover, SMAD and the KPD took pains to allay widespread (and, in hindsight, thoroughly justified) German fears that the USSR’s ambition in the SBZ was merely to replace a right-wing dictatorship with a leftwing one: to substitute Soviet rule for Nazi rule. Because most Germans harbored a strong antipathy toward the Russians, KPD leaders publicly dissociated the KPD from the USSR to dispel the (correct) impression that the KPD was “the Russians’ party.” In its opening proclamation of June 11, 1945—delivered just two days after SMAD itself was formally instituted—the KPD assured Germans that it considered the Soviet Union an inappropriate model for the future of the SBZ:
We believe that to coerce Germany to adopt the Soviet system is a false course. For such a course does not correspond to the present conditions of development in Germany. Rather, we believe that the interests of the German people necessitate another course: the construction of an anti-fascist, democratic republic, with full democratic rights and freedoms for the people.33
This statement was immediately applied to educational reconstruction; it anticipated perfectly the spirit of Point 7 of the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945: “German education shall be so controlled as to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas.”34 In addition to the “new democratic school,” the KPD publicly supported free trade, private business initiative on the basis of respect for private property, and the formation of a parliamentary, democratic republic.
And there seemed to be free public argument about the nature of the socialist future for the SBZ—indeed, a number of prominent German non-communist radicals and Social Democrats disagreed vocally with Ulbricht’s hard-line, pro-Soviet policy. There even seemed to be opposing public viewpoints within the KPD. Arguing that communism could not ignore particular national developments, some German communists supported instead a separate “German road to socialism,” the phrase of Anton Ackermann’s much-discussed February 1946 article in Einheit, the KPD’s theoretical journal. Titled “Is There a Special German Road to Socialism?” the article is now considered by most historians to have been part of Scheindemokratie, designed in particular to allay widespread fears among noncommunist leftists that the KPD aimed to abandon the German socialist tradition, thus consigning the SBZ to the fate of becoming Stalin’s puppet.35
That, of course, is precisely what did happen, in line with the SMAD/KPD blueprint. And whatever Ackermann’s own intentions, Scheindemokratie served to deceive the East German public about their leaders’ long-range plans.
Scheindemokratie thus operated as an attractive, if clandestine, policy choice for SMAD and the KPD, the ideological outcome of which was that the KPD revived the Communist International’s prewar Popular Front policy. This strategy was designed, as in the 1930s, to broaden the communists’ base of support among social democrats and centrists. The word Scheindemokratie sums up the complicated strategy well: the use of apparently democratic (albeit undemocratic in fact) means to secure “democratic”—i.e., democratic centralist, a.k.a. Marxist-Leninist—ends. Dictatorial methods would be used to achieve the dictatorship of the “proletariat”—i.e., of the Party leadership.
Once again: the Russians and the German communists did not conduct these political maneuvers openly. Rather, Ulbricht and his circle worked to create the appearance of commitment to building a bourgeois, anti-fascist order, reasoning it was more to their long-term benefit to make it seem as if the Germans’ embrace of communism arose as a popular initiative from below.
This approach applied especially to education. The declarations of Ulbricht’s cadre during 1945–47 made no explicit mention of “socialist education” or “Marxist” approaches to school reform. The bywords were “anti-fascism,” “antimilitarism,” “peace,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “humanism.” Speaking the language of the Weimar educational reformers, the Ulbricht circle limited public discussion to those liberal and radical proposals that had won broad support on the Left during the Weimar era: the abolition of educational privilege, the firm separation of church and school, and the creation of the uniform, comprehensive school.
And yet: though SMAD and the KPD moved quickly to capture “the citadel of learning,” their careful campaign might never have succeeded without crucial support from another socialist ally: the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Social Democratic Party of Germany).
Historically, the KPD and SPD had vied with each other for leadership on the Left since the founding of the KPD in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the failed November Revolution of 1918/19 in Germany. As the older party, however, the SPD had remained the larger of the two, always committed to a gradualist reform program and parliamentary methods. In the 1930s, attempting to win workers away from its more moderate rival, the KPD castigated the SPD, arguing that the Social Democrats, by undermining the revolutionary workers’ movement led by the communists, were—“objectively,” in Marxist-Leninist jargon—“social fascists.” The mutual hostility arising from that struggle had split the Left and eventually facilitated Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler soon declared both parties illegal; their leaders were jailed, went underground, or fled the country.
In June 1945, mindful of this history, the renascent SPD proposed that the two parties reunite and thereby ensure that socialist forces would dominate political life in the SBZ. Still the bigger party (SPD: 680,000; KPD: 620,000), the SPD reasoned that it would be the senior partner in any union. But, adhering to his strategy of Scheindemokratie and seeking with SMAD’s help to build up the KPD, Ulbricht opposed what he termed “premature” fusion, claiming that the parties were not yet “ready” to merge. Less than a year later, however, worried because communists in Austria and Hungary had fared poorly in recent elections there, and hoping to avoid a competitive election campaign that would expose his party’s own weaknesses, Ulbricht reversed his position and advocated immediate union.36 But by then the SPD was reluctant, suspecting the KPD’s Scheindemokratie strategy.
After enormous pressure from SMAD and the KPD, who worked together to license other political parties and then coopt them, the SPD hesitantly agreed to form a left-wing “unity party” with the KPD.37 The result was the founding of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, Socialist Unity Party).
That step of April 22, 1946—significantly, the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday—constituted a major triumph for Soviet policy, determining the course of East German politics for the next four decades. It followed by several months an equally important step, the formation of an “anti-fascist democratic bloc” party system, into which the CDU (Christlich-Demokratische Union, Christian Democratic Union) and the LDP (Liberaldemokratische Partei, the Liberal Democratic Party) entered. These parties, versions of which had also been outlawed under Hitler, were beginning to reconstitute themselves even before this political bloc system developed. The new bloc, however, proved with time to be little more than a front for the SED, which in turn was ruled by the KPD old guard. The inexorable rise of the SED, as one western Sovietologist observed, showed that Stalin had learned from Hitler the “technique of the ‘legal’ seizure of the state machine.”38
Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1945 the KPD and SPD were still operating independently, cooperating especially closely in the area in which they shared much common ground: education. Above all, the KPD and SPD could agree here on what they opposed: fascism.
In their first major joint declaration that October, the KPD/SPD gave priority to education and youth policy. A broad coalition of left, center, and even conservative SBZ Germans found little to dispute in their democratic rhetoric:
With an inhumanity that is hardly comparable in all of history, [the Nazis] extinguished the moral and physical energies of our youth and subverted their education. Our youth’s course of development was undermined by forced par ticipation in hollow organizations; they were sacrificed in a criminal war just as they were on the brink of their mature years, before they could realize the potential of their lives. . . . It was also part of the evil heritage of the German school that children were educated to be passive subjects rather than independent thinkers. Nazi rule deformed the school into a drilling institution, in order to prepare youth for its predatory war. The result was that our own children were ultimately fed to the canons too.39
Today that statement, in the historical aftermath of decades of the SED dictatorship, rings ironically. The KPD, with the unwitting support of the SPD, renewed rather than overcame the “evil heritage of the German school” through Scheindemokratie, which it pursued single-mindedly during 1945–47. A significant example was the reorganization of extracurricular youth activities, which were declared “liberated” from the influence of the political parties.
Here too a democratic ray of hope seemed to shine. Behind the scenes, however, SMAD and the KPD pursued their mutual agenda. After SMAD licensed the formation of youth committees in June 1945, Ulbricht announced, in an apparent show of tolerance, that the KPD did not seek to organize a specifically communist youth committee. Rather, it supported the creation of a nonpartisan, anti-fascist, common “free youth movement.”
The affiliation of youth organizations with major political parties had long been a German tradition. In the Weimar era, each party had its youth organization. One of the Nazis’ first political moves in 1933 had been to disband all non-Nazi youth organizations; in 1938, the Third Reich required that all Aryan boys and girls, at the age of 10, join the junior affiliates of the HJ (Hitler Jugend, Hitler Youth) and BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen, German Girls League), where they were told that their lives were to be dedicated to the state. In the HJ, young boys donned uniforms and received daggers to wear in their belts; chanting marching tunes, they carried flags as they paraded down the street to the “hurra!” of their neighbors, “just like big soldiers.” In the BDM, young girls were taught to dream of mothering golden-haired, blue-eyed Aryan children, perhaps even becoming “Hitler brides.” Some girls signed papers avowing their willingness to bear children for the state from “Germany’s noblest manhood”—an SS soldier. In strong pro-Nazi circles, such an illegitimate pregnancy usually brought no shame upon them; to the contrary, if a girl were “carrying the Führer’s baby,” she was a heroine.40
At first glance, the KPD’s break with such exploitative practices, which had turned German youth organizations into blatant instruments of Nazi ideology, seemed consistent with its rejection of fascism and call for a fresh start. In time, however, the real reason became clear: the KPD wanted an unaffiliated, unified movement that it could, in turn, then dominate. It agreed with SMAD about the abolition of all denominational schools and the establishment of a single, compulsory school system for the same tactical reason: to prevent sectarianism and to work instead on delivering control of one organization into communist hands.
The strategy soon proved successful. In March 1946, SMAD recognized the founding of the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, Free German Youth). “The new or ganization may on no account support military or fascist tendencies,” said SMAD. “It must serve the friendship of peoples.”41 Not a word about support for socialism or communism. Indeed, to avoid any appearance of its being communistdominated, the KPD urged that the FDJ flag not be red. To give the impression of a politically and spiritually ecumenical youth organization, the KPD welcomed the FDJ’s choice of blue,42 traditionally associated with innocence and purity—“the color of youth,” as KPD leaders put it. In the flag’s center, against a sky blue background, blazed a bright yellow, rising sun.43
In December 1946, 34-year-old Erich Honecker was elected chairman of the Central Council of the FDJ. Following his father, who was a miner, a trade union activist, and a KPD activist, young Erich had already, by the age of 10, joined the KJVD (Kommunistische Jugendverband Deutschlands, Communist Youth League of Germany, a.k.a. the Young Spartacists). At 17, working as an apprentice roofer, Erich became a full KPD member. The next year, he was chosen to attend a special cadre school of the Communist Youth International in Moscow. After 1933, he operated as the underground agitprop leader of the KJVD in his native Saar, headed the Berlin KJVD, and was elected a member of the KJVD Central Committee. In December 1935, he was arrested for high treason and sentenced to 10 years’ hard labor in Brandenburg-Görlitz prison. There he befriended many elder communist inmates and established contacts that would later prove useful to his Party career. During the closing weeks of the war, he escaped from prison, but secretly returned amid the chaos of the Battle of Berlin, fearful that roving bands of Allied troops might mistake him for a Nazi. Finally liberated from prison by the Red Army, he returned to KPD activism in May 1945, becoming the youth secretary of the KPD Central Committee; given his experience with the KJVD, he was regarded as wellqualified to head the FDJ. As FDJ president, a position invested with considerable patronage powers, Honecker worked with his superiors to choose the members of what would become the FDJ Central Committee. Eighty of its 100 seats were given to members of the SED; within a year, all non-SED members were expelled.
WHO HAS THE YOUTH, HAS THE FUTURE!
FDJ “Blueshirts,” appearances notwithstanding, were to be good Reds. Parallels with the Hitler Youth and the Brownshirts went unremarked in the SBZ—at least publicly.
The evolution of the FDJ exemplifies the lightning pace of events in early postwar SBZ education. Such developments in youth and education policy mirrored the rapidly changing political situation in the SBZ during its first two years, as tensions between the Soviets and western Allies mounted. The four Allies remained uneasily united by virtue of their anti-fascism, but a period of pre–Cold War shadow-boxing ensued, with the West and the USSR each competing to win German public opinion in and outside their occupation zones.
Nevertheless, still laboring under the guise of Scheindemokratie, SMAD took no chances when it came to education, especially with the landmark legislative event of the early postwar era in education: the 1946 “Law on the Democratization of the Schools.” SMAD simply decreed the law on June 12, 1946—the date was celebrated from 1951 on as Teachers’ Day—and the provisional administrations of the Länder ratified it before the local and Land elections in October 1946. These were the first and last elections in eastern Germany in which a political choice was open to voters; from that time forward in the SBZ and DDR, there were only single lists of candidates. Thus, in sharp contrast to the western zones, where educational policy was endlessly debated and changes were strongly resisted by the local population, education in the SBZ did not become an issue on which public opinion in the SBZ was directly consulted: SMAD and the KPD/SED judged the risk of opposition too great. As a DDR historian later explained:
To renounce public discussion of the crafting of the Education Act aimed to hinder the reactionaries, who by pseudo-democratic methods would have frustrated a true democratization of the education system. The approach corresponded fully to the task of the revolutionary workers and peasants. It was in the interest of the overwhelming majority of the people to apply dictatorial methods toward the imperialistic bourgeoisie and their political followers.44
The Education Act was—on paper—a model of democratic legislation. It established that
1.all children were to have equal rights to education regardless of property, religion, or ethnic heritage;
2.education was the responsibility of the state;
3.private schools were forbidden;45 and
4.the former hierarchical, undemocratic system of primary and secondary schools was to be replaced by a uniform, compulsory eight-year school.
State-administered common schooling, the SED held, guaranteed social justice: upper-class children would lose their traditional advantages afforded by the Gymnasium; working-class children would have a fair chance of gaining entry to secondary and higher education. The Act thus eliminated two long-standing features of German education: decentralized administration and elite schooling. Although the populace was not consulted, most of the changes—with the exception of the abolition of religious schools and of the traditional Gymnasium—were widely welcomed as a return to pre-Nazi educational values and the enactment of the best features of the Weimar-era Reformpädagogik (pedagogical reform) movement—support for which had, by chance, been strongest in the region of the SBZ.46
The 1946 Act did not mention socialism or communism. Instead it simply hailed die neue schule as a break with imperialism and the fulfillment of the German humanistic tradition:
The new democratic school must be free from all tendencies toward militarism, imperialism, popular agitation, and racial hatred. It must be developed so that all youths, boys and girls, urban and rural children, without distinction according to the wealth of their parents, are guaranteed the same right to education and the realization of their abilities and potentials. . . .
As the transmitter of culture, the school has the task of liberating the youth from nazi and militaristic ideas and educating them toward a belief in the peaceful and friendly communion of peoples and the spirit of true democracy and genuine humanity. Without regard for their possessions, religious beliefs, or ethnic heritage, the school must provide, according to social need, full training of their abilities. . . . 47
“It wasn’t a school reform,” wrote a DDR historian of that first year. “It was a revolution.”48
And the revolutionary fervor swept the universities too.
Here too, from the outside, everything seemed democratic. “Erziehung zum wahrhaft fortschrittlichen Humanismus!” was the slogan proclaimed by SED education officials: “Education toward truly progressive humanism!” The revival of the hallowed German tradition of Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit (professorial and student freedom) was announced, along with the principle of nonpolitical criteria for student admissions, the free choice of academic courses, and the independence of university administrators from state interference. SMAD “summoned the Herren Professoren to execute the work of Umerziehung toward democracy of the German Volk.”49 In addition to the dismissal of all Nazi faculty, the work included rehabilitation and reinstatement of all politically persecuted or dismissed professors and the development of special admissions criteria for students disadvantaged or disqualified from study by the Third Reich. Anti-fascist professors like Eduard Spranger in Berlin and Hans Georg Gadamer in Leipzig assumed leading administrative positions; refugee scholars flocked back to the SBZ to occupy the vacant academic chairs, joining scores of prominent anti-fascist German artists and writers—among them Alexander Abusch, Bertolt Brecht, Willi Bredel, Stephan Hermlin, Stefan Heym, Theodor Plievier, Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Erich Weinert, Friedrich Wolf, and Arnold Zweig—who were coming to the SBZ because they identified strongly with the German progressive tradition and wanted to place their talents at the service of the reconstruction effort. Many of the returning professors and artists were “bourgeois humanists” rather than Marxist-Leninists; roughly half of the aforementioned figures were long-standing KPD (and later SED) members. Surely the universities would lead the SBZ in its quest to become the first stable, enduring democracy on German soil.50
And yet, an observer with an eye for detail might have caught a hint of magenta in the FDJ’s blue shirts even at the start. The future could already be glimpsed in December 1945 when the University of Jena was closed, just two months after it opened, because SMAD discovered “fascist elements.” A SMAD representative had delivered a lecture in which he had stressed the extraordinarily high living standard of Russian workers. His claim had met with skepticism on the part of many Jena students. Such freethinking rendered the entire student body suspect as fascists, and all students had to undergo yet another political screening. The incident was not reported in the SMAD-licensed press; the German public remained largely unaware of it.51
And indeed the universities proved difficult for the SED to bring under control. Although 90 percent of the faculty had been fired as “Nazi-compromised” at some universities, and 54 percent of newly hired faculty belonged to the SED by late 1946, most professors and students still did not toe a party line. For this brief moment, faculty hiring and student admissions criteria still focused on merit rather than political orthodoxy. And in the student government elections of spring 1946, SED candidates did not dominate the newly formed “anti-fascist student boards,” receiving no more than 10 to 45 percent of the vote. All this would change, but it would take more than a decade to bring the universities to heel.52
In 1946/47, however, the SED still hoped that strong-arm tactics wouldn’t be necessary to transform their ideals into reality. Committed both to social justice and to developing every individual’s capacities fully, educators swung open the doors of the university to all student applicants, even former military officers and members of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist German Workers’ Party; the Nazis). Only SS members or high NSDAP officials were excluded.
Even in higher education, insisted SED officials, the SBZ could become an equal opportunity educator; they dreamed not just of building a true, egalitarian Volksschule (people’s school) but of creating a Volksuniversität (people’s university). Traditionally, only about 4 percent of German university students had been from working-class and peasant families, whose children commonly left school at the age of 14. To diversify the student body and provide future access to lower-class children, education authorities introduced special preparatory courses to accelerate their progress toward the Abitur (high school diploma) and university—an idea anticipating American remedial and affirmative action programs. This new initiative took root. Soon officials formalized it into a pedagogical division of the universities, the ABF (Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Fakultät, Worker and Peasant Faculty). All universities also founded institutes of teacher training, reflecting the new priority in the arts and humanities of teaching over research. Such measures boosted the proportion of students from worker and peasant families attending secondary schools (from 19 percent in 1946 to 36.2 percent in 1949) and improved the quality of teaching in the schools.53
For years afterward, leaders of the self-proclaimed “First German Workers’ and Peasants’ State” would proclaim the educational revolution of 1945–47 as one of East Germany’s greatest achievements, the realization of Marx’s hopes voiced in The Communist Manifesto. SED officials exalted its centerpiece, die neue schule,as the culmination of a distinguished line of progressive educational experiments, and the fulfillment of the egalitarian dreams of political leaders and educational reformers on the Left—hallowed names stretching from the Renaissance to the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, from Comenius to Marx, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and Georg Kerschensteiner.54 “A struggle that has persisted for a century,” proclaimed the mayor of Leipzig about the Education Act, “has finally reached its successful end.”55
Not quite yet it hadn’t.
Nor, we now know, would it ever.
Wherever Stalin walks, the grass grows no more.
German proverb
And what do I tell the people now? That we fought against one tyranny, only to replace it with another?
Stefan Heym,
The Papers of Andreas Lenz (1964)
Had the SED actually followed through on the 1946 Education Act, had its vaunted reforms been more than merely the facade of Scheindemokratie, the speech of the mayor of Leipzig would have been merely hyperbolic: SBZ education would have led the next generation, if not to a conclusive success story, at least to a promising new beginning. Even education officers in the American occupation zone expressed grudging admiration for the radical reforms begun in the SBZ.56 Moreover, though SMAD did not seek public approval for its educational policy, many eastern Germans—at least until 1947—apparently believed and supported the SED statutes and proclamations. They believed, that is, that blue meant blue: that their leaders’ democratic aspirations were genuine.
And indeed, the opening phase of East German education appeared democratic in design and execution. The uniform school, the abolition of educational privilege, the guarantee of a free elementary schooling: these were democratic reforms. In July 1947, continuing in the spirit of Reformpädagogik, the KPD and SPD issued a joint declaration as one of their final acts as distinctive parties within the SED. Titled “The Educational Principles of the Democratic School,” the declaration proclaimed five essential precepts: equal educational opportunity for all, a uniform school system, the development of civic responsibility in students, the inculcation of a democratic Weltanschauung, and respect for all nations and races.57 But in the next two decades, the SED would betray every one of these principles: children of SED members would receive numerous educational advantages, special schools for the gifted would be introduced, mass youth organizations run by the state (e.g., the FDJ) would wrest all personal initiative from the youth, Leninist bureaucratic centralism would be enshrined as official doctrine, and ideological intolerance and even hatred would be inculcated toward non-communists. Indeed, already by the end of the second phase of its educational history (1947–51), the SBZ/DDR had effectively abandoned all attempts to live up to “The Educational Principles of the Democratic School.” Or as one scholar of DDR education has noted, by midcentury “the transformation from a pedagogy without a people to a pedagogy against the People was nearing its end.”58
In fact, as early as 1947, Stalin’s boot prints were becoming visible across the landscape of Soviet zone education: the unmistakable sign that the transplanted garden of democracy would never take root in the SBZ. That year the SED began selectively excluding from the so-called People’s Universities qualified applicants who had bourgeois backgrounds or whose families had any Nazi connections whatsoever.59 Educational opportunity became the explicit instrument for radically restructuring the social system. Now class background, rather than academic achievement or family income, served as the sole criterion for financial aid; 75 percent of scholarship assistance was reserved for workers and peasants. Where once it had been hard for a worker’s child to go to university, now it became difficult in the self-proclaimed First German Workers’ and Peasants’ State for a bourgeois son or daughter to do so.60
SMAD’s original concerns during 1945/46 about the narcotic of fascist ideology surviving in the schools had been legitimate.61 But now, once enrolled in the People’s University, the SBZ student received large doses of SMAD’s own opiate: Marxist-Leninist ideology. By 1947, universities began to require courses such as Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Political Economy, Introduction to Social Studies, and the History of the Soviet Union. The fields of political science, economics, and history became Marxist-Leninist training centers: 95 percent of students pursuing degrees in the social sciences were SED members. In 1948/49, the universities instituted additional requirements in the History of the Labor Movement, Political and Social Problems of Today, and German History.62 The transformation of the SBZ into the DDR in October 1949 had little effect on educational policy; the SED’s ideological campaign proceeded apace. In 1949/50, the schools officially adopted the new curricula too: Gegenwartskunde (Marxist-Leninist current events) laid down the Party line on topical issues and featured weekly themes such as “Stalin, leader of the world peace front.”63
“Communism,” Stalin had told the wartime Polish leader Stanislav Mikolajczyk, “fits the Germans as well as a saddle fits a cow.” By mid-century, Ulbricht appeared to have saddled the cow. Now came the time to milk it.64
So now the real horror stories of Stalinist terror commenced—or, for some unfortunates who had also suffered under the Third Reich, resumed once again. The economics student at Halle who admitted in an interview that he had read several pages by Adam Smith; the English teacher in Leipzig who had used an old copy of National Geographic: both were forced to engage in public self-criticism, guilty of the sins of “cosmopolitanism” and “objectivism,” i.e., maintaining openness toward or sympathy for “western” ideas.65
But they were lucky. In 1950, 19 high school students from Zwickau were arrested for protesting against the election to the People’s Parliament that October, the first election in the infant DDR. “Vote ‘No’ Against Stalin’s Pathetic Toadies!” they chanted. “Vote Against the SED-Bigwigs and for Freedom from Fear and Need!” “Rise Up Against the Soviet Dictatorship!” The bill of particulars against them read:
•incitement to boycott against democratic institutions and organizations;
•hatred of the People;
•incitement to war;
•propaganda for National Socialism;
•the invention and spreading of tendentious rumors that endanger the freedom of the German people and the peace of the world.66
The pupils were sentenced to an aggregate of 130 years in prison. The DDR election ended with a result of 99.71 percent “yes” votes, exceeding even Hitler’s record of 98.81 percent in 1936. By all accounts, DDR pedagogues had heeded the Party’s slogan of the season: “Every teacher and educator an agitator for the elections!”67
An even more sobering story about the October 1950 election charade concerned Hermann Josef Flade, a 17-year-old high school student.68 One evening before the election, Flade was attacked by dogs from the Vopos (People’s Police) while pasting his homemade protest leaflets on neighbors’ doors. He resisted arrest and gashed a Vopo with his penknife during the ensuing scuffle. (The policeman was not seriously injured.) But his real offense was the leaflets, which allegedly contained seditious statements: “The fight of the Americans in Korea is a righteous war”; SED control of East Germany “is inhuman.”
Four months later, the election safely “won,” Flade stood before the Dresden Criminal Court. Intent on making a public example of Flade and confident that he would admit his guilt and beg forgiveness as a repentant traitor, prosecutors arranged for the trial to be conducted on the floodlit stage of a Dresden ballroom, carried by loudspeakers, and broadcast throughout the DDR. The accusations were read aloud: Flade was guilty of endangering the peace, reviving Nazism, engaging in Anglo-American espionage, and attempting first-degree murder.
“What have you got to say in your defense?” the judge demanded. Everyone expected that the boy would pour out a woebegone admission of his villainy, plead for mercy, and denounce the adults who had corrupted him. Instead, with a clear, firm voice, he declared:
“Marxism-Leninism is not the truth. God is the truth.”
The loudspeakers fell silent; the transmission was broken. The rest of the trial was held behind closed doors. But a transcription of the trial was smuggled out of the DDR and publicized in the West. And so we know how it continued. Quietly and deliberately, the young man explained why he distributed his leaflets:
“I took the decision by myself. I was aware that it might lead to a very heavy punishment. I was convinced that it was right and just to resist the acts of the Soviet government. It took me five years to arrive at the decision that we have to resist the communists actively and passively.”
The judge pronounced the sentence: death by guillotine. As Flade was led away, he cried out in the courtroom:
“Die Freiheit ist mir mehr wert als das Leben!” (“Freedom is worth more to me than life itself!”).
That sentence echoed in living rooms throughout Germany, turning Flade into a national hero among anti-communists in both the DDR and BRD—and even among many SED sympathizers, especially given that beheading had been officially outlawed in the DDR. Many Germans compared Flade to Hans and Sophie Scholl, the anti-Nazi student martyrs who had led the tiny, doomed White Rose protest circle at Munich University, and had been executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets. The public outcry against Flade’s imminent execution—which included two weeks of student rallies and mass meetings in West Berlin, telegrams from international peace organizations, and official protests lodged by the Allied occupation authorities—eventually induced his judges to commute the sentence to 15 years’ imprisonment.69 But neither Flade’s heroism nor the storm of protest slowed the progress of the ideological crackdowns.
Nor were the cases of the Zwickau students and Hermann Josef Flade isolated examples. During 1948–51, some 300 high school and university students were arrested for political reasons and sentenced to hard labor, with terms averaging 25 years. In Jena, 68 young boys were sentenced to 10-year terms at hard labor for throwing stink bombs at officials during their school festival celebrating the birthday of President Wilhelm Pieck. In Mecklenburg, eight teenagers caught by the People’s Police with “traitorous” handbills—“We want free elections in Germany!”—received prison terms ranging from 10 to 15 years. In Rostock and Berlin each, two students received death sentences for distributing western magazines; just for passing on a western newspaper, the minimum punishment was five years of hard labor.70 In 1950/51, near the height of what Wolfgang Harich later termed “the terror,” the “worst” period in DDR history, 6,000 youths under 18 received jail terms for political causes. Indeed, DDR concentration camps at mid-century held 800 boys and girls under 17 who had distributed allegedly seditious leaflets, secretly scrawled “F” (for Freiheit, Freedom) on city walls at night, or “grimaced” during a paean to Stalin.71
TRUST IS GOOD, BUT CONTROL IS BETTER!
YOU NEED ONLY TO SCHOOL PEOPLE PROPERLY—THEN THEY’LL LIVE RIGHT!
OUR NEW LIFE MUST BE DIFFERENT!
How different? Revealingly and chillingly, in his speech at the conference of regional FDJ chairmen in November 1948, Erich Honecker declared, without apparent concern (or awareness) about his use of a notorious Nazi concept: “The moment of Gleichschaltung [coordinating the gears] has not yet arrived. Our development is not yet sufficiently and widely advanced for that.”72
But the nakedly public moment was fast approaching.
Meanwhile, the flight of the teachers—an exodus that continued until the 1960s—accelerated. Teacher turnover rates skyrocketed. Aggravated by the inexperience (and incompetence) of the Neulehrer, classes often became a shambles of disorganization.73 In 1949/50, 7,000 of the approximately 65,000 teachers quit. In 1950/51, 10,000 more.74 In December 1950, the Ministry of People’s Education estimated that fully 20 percent of the teaching staff had resigned that year, leading one West German educator to dub 1950 “the year of the great teacher emigration” in the DDR. Many departing teachers were Neulehrer, who decided that they were unsuitable for teaching and went back to their old jobs in factories or on farms.75 Other Neulehrer sought better-paying positions: they headed West. Still others, along with many experienced teachers, writhed within the ideological straitjacket, ambivalent about the SED’s “call to carry the class struggle into the villages.”76 They acquiesced in the Party’s program to turn the little Red schoolhouse into the chief means for producing generations of young “socialist personalities.”
The democratic “blue period” of the SBZ was fading. The “moment” of Gleichschaltung seemed near. Power had passed from the Third Reich to the apparently democratic SMAD; now it would be transferred to Ulbricht and the openly Stalinist SED. The swastika would be supplanted by the hammer and sickle, the Heil Hitler! by the clenched fist. Now the pendulum was swinging left, far left: the vengeful turn of “dialectical”-historical materialism. And with it goose-stepped a jackboot across the color spectrum of coercion: beyond blue and magenta and even red. As the SBZ became the DDR, magenta gave way to maroon: the dawn of Red Fascism.
Red Fascism: the Orwellian nightmare of Stalinism and Nazism rolled into one. In the western (and especially the American) imagination, nowhere did this model of totalitarianism seem more horrifyingly realized than in East Germany.77 Surrounded by barbed wire by the early 1950s, the DDR was, to mainstream western policy-makers, a police state combining Prussian technical efficiency and Russian brute manpower. Red Fascism: a new form of bureaucratic state collectivism. Its method was a pro-Soviet, anti-western, anti-American campaign branding “bourgeois democracy” reactionary, and it aimed through national appeals to build domestic unity and “real democracy” across class divisions. The mixture was wellexpressed by a DDR youth leader who, in a slip of the tongue, exhorted his listeners to fight the imperialists “according to the principles of Nazism-Leninism- Stalinism.”78
Red Fascism: The phrase is often taken as a McCarthyite smear of Communism. And indeed it was often used as an American “Red scare” headline around midcentury. “Commies Brainwash John Q. Public into Backing Fluoridation!” “Reds Plot to Conquer Solar System by Year 2000!” Such far-fetched headlines represented hysterical American anti-communist propaganda; those pertaining to the “Red Reich” of the DDR often made sweeping (and false) claims of equivalence between the Third Reich and the DDR.
But the more moderate claim that the early, prewar years of the Third Reich and the Stalinist era of the DDR bore striking resemblance is reasonable. It is beyond the scope of this book to compare the regimes of the Third Reich and the DDR, except to note that simplistic equations of Nazism and Stalinism (or communism)—especially given that the latter changed significantly over time—are untenable. Still, while stressing this fact, it also bears emphasis that the parallels between the DDR’s so-called “democratic” socialism of the 1950s and German National Socialism of the 1930s extended beyond punishment for public protest: Almost every sphere of DDR life, from industrial production to art and culture, once again came under tight state control.79
None of this means equating Hitler with Ulbricht (let alone with Honecker). Rather, it entails the recognition of notable continuities between these two German dictatorships, despite their significant differences. In education and youth policy, as one scholar has written, DDR children “already had the experience of nationalist socialist mass meetings, which gave them a fascination with the totalitarian state and made the indoctrination of communist ideology something that they experienced as an everyday normality.”80 Indeed, although the DDR youth organ izations were obviously modeled on the Soviet Komsomol, DDR youth policy eerily began to mirror that of the early Nazi era: Soviet-derived or not, the organizational structure, the uniforms, the sloganeering and marching, and the militant songs of the DDR youth organizations immediately evoked the Hitler era. (Even the FDJ emblem—the rising sun, blazing against the blue sky—evoked, however inadvertently, memories of the Nazi warrior’s symbols of the fire and sun, whose control by him exemplified his heroic command over Nature.) Moreover, just as the Nazis had built a school system within the Party, so too now did the SED begin to do the same. The Third Reich concepts of Ordensburgen and Party schools were resurrected in the organization of SED leadership schools throughout the DDR. Just as the Nazis had set up the elite Adolf Hitler Schools and required courses in Nazi history and biology, the SED instituted in 1946 the Karl Marx Party School in Teltow (near Berlin), which gave intensive university-level courses to leading SED functionaries, and systematically established Marxist-Leninist curricula in the schools and universities.81
“Education must be so arranged,” Hitler had declared in Mein Kampf, “that the young person leaving school is not half pacifist, democrat, or what you will, but a complete German.” Substitute “communist” as the last word of that sentence: by mid-century, the statement applied to the DDR. “The task of our century,” wrote Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ leading philosopher, “is to create the new human type. . . .” Like the Nazis, DDR youth policymakers proceeded to ban Hollywood films, “hot” American jazz, “poisonous” western dances like the samba and rhumba,82 “decadent” snack items like Coca-Cola and chewing gum—not to mention anti-communist or subversive books such as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Orwell’s 1984. “A democracy of higher rank,” the DDR propaganda chief characterized the East German political order in 1950: inadvertently the same phrase that Goebbels had once used in 1934 to describe National Socialist rule. Indeed the title of one DDR anti-western magazine would have made Goebbels smile: Der Neue Stürmer.83
These developments in East German education and youth policy played themselves out against the background of negotiations for German reunification and the rise of the Cold War. Nineteen forty-seven began with the American and British decision in January to create the Bi-zone, a development widely interpreted as signaling diminishing expectations of future cooperation with the USSR. Allied foreign ministers meeting in Moscow in April then failed to reach any consensus on a timetable for German reunification; without Soviet cooperation, the Americans, British, and French began the enormous reconstruction project of the Marshall Plan in the western zones that summer. In January 1948 all three western zones merged; in March, trade was cut off between east and west; on June 20, the western Allies introduced a currency reform, which left the western and Soviet zones with different currencies, effectively turning them into separate countries.
The Soviets were outraged by the currency reform, which the western Allies extended to West Berlin; on June 24, 1948, SMAD blockaded the land routes used by the western Allies to reach Berlin. Two days later, an Anglo-American airlift began, carrying crucial foodstuffs and medical supplies to the more than two million West Berliners suddenly cut off from the West. (The Berlin Airlift—which was code-named “Operation Vittles” by the Americans—would continue for almost a year until Stalin called off the blockade.) By the end of that June, the western Allies had announced the planned formation of a West German republic. Little more than a year later, in the fall of 1949, the BRD and the DDR became separate, independent states. The Cold War was fully under way.
By now, partitioned Germany occupied the front line of the bipolar Cold War and mirrored in heightened form the opposing ideologies of the two postwar superpowers; it became a microcosm of the world struggle between capitalism and communism. The Soviet-sponsored communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, Mao Zedong’s communist victory in China in February 1949, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949, the wave of show trials of purported spies throughout Eastern Europe in 1949/50, the invasion of South Korea in June 1950, the Soviet “Hate America” campaign of January 1951, and the rising anti-Communist hysteria in the U.S. provoked by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy: escalating American-Soviet hostilities resulting from these events also exacerbated tensions between East and West Germany. With the outbreak of the Korean War, both Germanies began to rearm. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that, during this second period of educational history in Soviet Germany, the Schein fell from the Demokratie. Alas, that did not herald the advent of “real” democracy: the Schein proved to be all there had ever been.
June 1948 turned out to be the watershed moment in postwar East German affairs. On June 29, only days into the Berlin crisis, Tito defied Stalin, adopted a conciliatory stance toward the West, and took Yugoslavia on its own “special road” to socialism. “I will shake my little finger—and there will be no more Tito!” Stalin had thundered in the spring of 1948.84 But Tito prevailed and launched an independent course outside Stalin’s orbit.
And so the questions loomed: Which way would the SBZ go? West or East? And if to the east, toward the model of Yugoslavia or the USSR? Given that Stalin had 500,000 troops in the SBZ, the answer was never really in doubt. Nevertheless, envisioning dangers to the SBZ’s development in both directions—West German cosmopolitanism and Yugoslavian separatism—the Soviets were panicked into restricting political freedom in the SBZ, tolerating little deviation.
The economic blockade of Berlin and the Stalin-Tito split were the triggering events for a policy shift by the SED, crises that set the Party on a course it would follow for the next four decades. No longer hopeful, by 1948, about a reunified socialist Germany or about winning over the western zones to communism, the SED dropped its democratic mask. Proclaiming itself (after Lenin’s phrase) a “Partei neuen typus” (“party of the new type”)—a so-called Marxist-Leninist vanguard party—the SED jettisoned its Popular Front rhetoric and became outspokenly Stalinist. It discarded the pretense of “a special German road” to socialism and instead embraced an “internationalist” course under the aegis of the USSR.
In reality, the “new type” SED was simply the old KPD reverting to type. Restyling itself a cadre party committed to ideological purity, the SED now sought orthodox believers, abandoned its guise of being a “socialist unity” party interested in building a mass membership, and openly practiced one-party “democ racy.” A severe purge beginning in 1948/49—officially termed “the investigation and exchange of party membership cards” in SED Newspeak—sliced Party rolls by a third; only active, unquestioningly loyal comrades survived, and they were required to participate more fully in Party activities and enroll in special schools for political indoctrination.85 “Separatists” who continued to push for a “special German road” toward socialism were condemned.
The SED justified its policy shifts as part of an historical transition. Socialism in the SBZ had to develop in two phases, explained Party spokesmen. The first task had been to finish the failed “bourgeois revolution of 1848”; now, a century later, that stage was deemed complete. So the need for liberal methods—a.k.a. Scheindemokratie—had ended. Having achieved “socialism,” the SED announced, it could now move on to the second, communist phase of its revolutionary program. Speaking of the climate of events in 1948, Wolfgang Leonhard, a member of Ulbricht’s inner circle at this time and formerly a department head for educational materials, revealed after escaping to Yugoslavia and then to the West how Scheindemokratie had paved the way for a more aggressive SED strategy:
Ulbricht spoke of things that, six months later, did become official. The most important statements were the following: in the period from 1945–47 many questions wouldn’t be openly stated. The SED had to proceed step by step, both on account of the backwardness of the Party and on foreign policy grounds. Until 1947 we had to establish the foundation of an anti-fascist democratic order. [According to Ulbricht], now that 40 percent of industry is in state hands—in the spring of 1948—and that capitalism has become decisively weaker, we can regard this period as over. Now we have the possibility to realize our demands with the help of the Soviet state apparatus.86
The chief values that had dominated debate in 1945/46 were democracy and antifascism. Now the talk was of socialism and internationalism (i.e., the USSR line). As time passed, the basic negative value—anti-fascism—faded into a misty abstraction linked to the receding Nazi period and was romanticized by SED propaganda implying that heroic communists had fought Hitler single-handedly in the 1920s and ’30s. The positive goal of a democratic order was redefined in terms of Leninist democratic centralism.
What were the consequences for education? “Anti-fascist democratic” reforms gave way to hard-line SED commands to politicize (i.e., “sovietize”) the curriculum and youth organizations: shades of the Prussian and Nazi pasts. Educational policy turned from building the democratic “new school” to fortifying a Marxist- Leninist ideological bulwark.87
That was the crucial change during 1947–51: Democratization metastasized into “sovietization.” Sloganeering for “progressive humanism” gave way to militant calls. “Für eine kämpferische Demokratie!” (“For a fighting democracy!”). And, of course, Stalin’s famous summons: “Stürmt die Festung Wissenschaft!” (“Storm the citadel of learning!”). In other words, East German education was now to become, in Lenin’s phrase, a “transmission belt” for conveying communist policies.88
The first official sign of the shift was inconspicuous. The SED merely legislated an element of its surreptitious policy. The traditional German ideal of classical humanist education, enshrined in the constitution, was quietly replaced in early 1947 by a paragraph in the bylaws referring to “socialist humanism.”89
But this small change was a portent of further “revisions” soon to come.90 Now politicians spoke less about “education toward anti-fascism” than “education toward socialist humanism.” SED educators made it clear that the “individualistic” humanism of the past was to be replaced by a collectivist ethic in which each person served society, i.e., the State. To the SED, this meant injecting humanism with a strong dose of socialist activism.91 “The school must stimulate youthful enthusiasm for such an idea, so that our youth is always ready to defend the State, which stands for these ideals,” announced one SED politician. “Schools should implant in the heart of every human being how great a task it is to serve the State and humanity.”92 Other SED officials declaimed about “education for democratic patriotism.”
In pedagogical practice this change meant the rejection of German pedagogy and the acceptance of Soviet dogma in all things. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had revived classical education in Germany and virtually created the modern Gymnasium, was condemned as elitist; Georg Kerschensteiner, who pioneered field work in nature study, counterbalancing what he termed the over-intellectualized German Buchschule (book school) by introducing vocational education into his Arbeitsschule (activity school), was attacked as reformist; Friedrich Froebel, the advocate of student self-expression and champion of humanistic pre-school and primary education, was dismissed as unscientific. Thus did the great German tradition of educational philosophy represented by these thinkers, as well as by Herder, Fichte, and Johann Friedrich Herbart—a tradition that had inspired socialists such as Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and August Bebel—give way, along with the Weimar tradition of Reformpädagogik, to the wholesale importation of Marxist-Leninist formulae and methods.
What followed was a pathetic cult of Soviet worship, ranging from the required teaching of Russian, to the highlighting of the October Revolution in history courses,93 to rote memorization of the theories of behaviorist Ivan Pavlov and the charlatan geneticist T. D. Lysenko. Above all, teacher trainers practiced slavish reverence toward the pedagogical theories of Anton Makarenko. Indeed the period of East German pedagogy at mid-century, one West German historian has written, was “probably the most miserable in the history of any perverted teacher training.”94
It was just at this moment in the late 1940s that the DDR began recapitulating the USSR’s retreat from innovation toward orthodoxy almost two decades earlier.95 Whereas 1945–47 was an era of experimentation in light of German traditions, the next period was characterized by Party-determined conformity according to the Soviet model. The slogan became: “Study, Study, Study—and Once Again, Study!” The year 1948 in the DDR mirrored the year 1931 in the USSR—the advents of the DDR’s first Two-Year Plan and the USSR’s first Five-Year Plan, respectively—and set the DDR on Big Brother’s path. In education, it began to copy slavishly the big Red schoolhouse.
It is at this point that we might pause to examine the experience of Soviet educators under Stalin, a tragedy that sheds much light on the course of events that DDR educational history will soon take. The DDR’s drive to revolutionize education cannot be understood apart from the context of the Two-Year Plan. What applied to industry, Soviet leaders held, applied for education. What worked in the factory worked also in the classroom. Learning was production; the student was a product. The aim, as western critics put it, was to manufacture Planmenschen (planned human beings),96 a vitriolic term yet not at all far-fetched, since SED cultural functionaries did, in fact, speak of the “cultural two-year plan” for 1949–50.97
Stalin’s own “production targets” in education and culture entailed rejecting the USSR’s experience in the 1920s. Influenced heavily by Tolstoy and John Dewey, Soviet pedagogy under Krupskaya and Lunacharsky had embarked on a heady, romantic period of free experimentation in which it sought to reconcile the individual and the collective, to unite high respect for the single personality with an ideological doctrine glorifying the revolutionary, historic mission of the proletarian mass.
With Stalin’s defeat of Trotsky in 1928, however, a new epoch began, characterized by hostility toward novelty and originality and a return to more rigid, formal, even pre-revolutionary practices. Even before this, a Soviet law had decreed that “difficult personalities” (i.e., critics of the regime) and children of Gulag inmates would be excluded from higher education, and that children of Party members would receive educational privileges. In 1931, when Andrei Bubnov replaced Lunarcharsky as People’s Commissar for Education, the discriminatory, exclusivist trends accelerated. Bubnov, a former general, used the model of military discipline to expedite education toward his goals of raising the level of technical proficiency and contribution to the industrial economy. The Russian miner Alexei Stakhanov, who on one shift in 1933 had overfulfilled his work norm by 1450 percent, was elevated into an example of the heroic worker.
In 1936 a new movement for worker productivity, the Stakhanovite Movement, was created, and it soon spread to education. Stalin’s new slogan became the reigning gospel: “Cadres decide everything!” As the USSR turned to more systematized teaching, emphasizing ever more the idea that the individual labored for the common good, small work cadres became the model for learning—precisely the method that Makarenko, toiling away in obscurity, had already worked out in the 1920s.98
Now Makarenko became Stalin’s favorite. In effect, Makarenko’s practices represented Stakhanovism applied to education. As director of the Gorky Colony and the Dzerzhinsky Commune, two labor reformatories for juvenile criminals, Makarenko had supervised abandoned and delinquent youths. In The Road to Life, he explained how he organized them into work cadres and achieved remarkable results, producing obedient, model citizens. Makarenko promoted what he termed “communist morality,” which emphasized the social importance of honesty, trust, and purity of moral character. The child’s first lesson was to learn to accept the traditions of the collective—first the family, then the school, and finally the commune—as his or her own.99
Makarenko’s educational “commune” was a controlled environment. It operated under a daily routine, precise rules of conduct, and military customs, e.g., reveille at 6 a.m. Personal hygiene, table manners, tidiness, and punctuality became the essence of the individual’s and the collective’s own sense of worth. A follower of Pavlov, Makarenko spoke metaphorically of molding human behavior through dies, as if he were cutting and engraving designs upon soft material as does a stamp or coin machinist; such analogies led critics to accuse him of indoctrinating children into blind obedience through a system of conditioning. Indeed Makarenko’s language did echo Stalin’s phrase that writers were to be “the engineers of human souls” and Makarenko himself noted ruefully that he had produced no artists among his students.
Makarenko limited the freedom of his pupils and oriented them strictly toward work, winning few admirers among the experimentalists. But he achieved exactly what the innovators hadn’t: higher worker productivity. Having accomplished this exclusively through the socialization of problem children and orphans, Makarenko expected that his methods would succeed even better in mainstream Soviet society. His commune slogan became “All Energies for the Buildup of Socialism!” By the time he died in 1939 at the age of 51, his name rang through Soviet teachers’ meetings. Already, however, his doctrines were serving Stalin not as a child’s road to life but as yet another road to Stalin’s own power. However fruitful Makarenko’s experiments in moral cultivation, the harvest under Stalin was merely a militaristic, collectivist husk.100
Nearly two decades later, East Germany inexorably followed this Soviet road. Keen to ape Moscow, SED educators bypassed the enlightened era of Soviet pedagogical experiment and eagerly adopted a simplified Stalinist view of Makarenko. To them, his writings confirmed the status of education as the key institution in identity formation. His work seemed a model of Umerziehung, an example of reeducation under the most difficult circumstances. Just as Makarenko had confessed “an infinite, reckless and unhesitating belief in the power of educational work,” SED educators professed a similar faith in the messianic potential of Soviet Umerziehung.101
“The new socialist human being,” declared Ulbricht, “should think like Lenin, act like Stalin, and work like Stakhanov”—all three names by now intimately (if not nauseatingly) familiar to East Germans. And soon the DDR had a Stakhanov of its own. His name was Adolf Hennecke. On October 13, 1948, Hennecke, also a miner, performed a special shift in which he topped his daily quota by 287 percent—no match for the great Stakhanov, ran the joke, but Alexei was, after all, a Russian. (October 13 was preserved for several years in the DDR as a commemoration day of Hennecke’s pioneering feat.) The Zwickau miner’s performance was turned into a springboard for a general call for increased efficiency at work.102 A Hennecke movement was engineered, accompanied by a surge of rallies, placards, speeches, and even poems.103
Special appeals went out to young people and students. Become a “Hero of Labor” or “Distinguished Worker”! Exceed the work norm on your next “Hennecke shift”! Be a “Hennecke Activist”! Inspired by Hennecke, schoolchildren mastered exercises with lightning speed in Hennecke academic competitions. Honored “Best Students” completed their programs of university study in record time. “Distinguished Teachers of the People” covered material brilliantly and far ahead of their lesson plan schedules. Old and young workers imitated the master and even launched their own movements; by 1949, there were an estimated 60,000 Hennecke activists.104 For example, a 17-year-old girl sorted 20,000 cigarettes in a single day, surpassing the previous record of 14,000. A 16-year-old boy installed 20 radio tubes per hour.105 A Leipzig train conductor spearheaded the “500 Movement,” whereby every locomotive had to be driven 500 kilometers per day. A truck supervisor outdid that: he launched the “100,000 Movement,” whereby his truck drivers would travel 100,000 kilometers without repair. Not to be left out, a “4,000 Liter Movement” enlisted Hero of Labor cows to contribute 4,000 liters of milk annually.106
Ulbricht had not just saddled the cow but was milking it for all it was worth—despite, at times, the protests of leading educators.107
OUR NEW LIFE MUST BE DIFFERENT!
A chief aim of the Hennecke movement was to revolutionize education for the planned economy. The goal was to increase economic productivity and salvage the fledgling Two-Year Plan, which was floundering under the constraints of the western Allies’ trade cutoff.
Thus, economic priorities also supported the pedagogical turn away from the German intellectual tradition and toward Makarenko and Soviet dogma. Russified “scientific cadres” and “collectives” replaced bourgeois individual scholarship. Feeling pressure to raise industrial output and ingratiate themselves with the USSR after Tito’s insubordination, SED officials ordered that the newly founded Pedagogical Faculties at the universities institute centralized, strictly “scientific” (i.e., Marxist-Leninist) teaching training. Reformpädagogik, they decreed, which focused on humanism and general knowledge rather than specialized and technical training, was ideologically flaccid and did not contribute sufficiently to building an industrial economy. “Students of the new type,” proclaimed the SED, did not require comprehensive general knowledge, but rather needed specialized skills. A broad liberal education was replaced by a foundation in Marxist- Leninism.108
Until 1948/49, many teachers had resisted the Russian revolution in pedagogy. Many German communists and Social Democrats returning to the SBZ believed that the German progressive educational tradition was retrievable. Liberated from the legal and spiritual chains of the Nazis, they imagined that they were free to build on the tradition that they themselves had developed. With its emphasis on independent activity and personal initiative, Reformpädagogik seemed to many teachers an effective antidote to the authoritarian legacy of the Third Reich. In the 1946 Weimar Manifesto, SBZ teachers had agreed to combine practical school experience and traditional perspectives with new progressive innovations. The manifesto urged the promotion of respect for the child’s autonomy and individual character. Teachers embraced Clara Zetkin’s “Mannheim Principles” on humanistic education, Otto Ruhle’s insistence on the uniqueness of each individual child, and Kerschensteiner’s experimental, open-ended Arbeitsschule.109 Indeed the very first Neulehrer of 1945/46 were trained in this German tradition, using whatever progressive pre-1933 German pedagogical literature could be found (which was the only anti-fascist literature available); Soviet translations did not as yet even exist. But by 1948/49, translations of Soviet pedagogy books were fast supplanting the German texts; SED educators, demanding didacticism and opposed to “western” pedagogy, learned their lessons and branded the Weimar Manifesto a reactionary bourgeois document. Indeed, especially after the purge of SED membership rolls began in 1948/49, antagonism toward the West became a key litmus test for teachers. As one high education official told delegates at the Fourth Pedagogical Conference in 1949:
The Anglo-American generals and their [West] German subordinates believe that, just because American and English education has been made fascist according to the model of Schirach [former head of the HJ], Goebbels, and Himmler, that the same model can be transferred to Germany once again. They behave arrogantly, already according to the motto: As the lords are, so will be the slaves. . . . How completely different behaves the Soviet Union, that socialist land of peace, toward the German Volk, toward its children and its youth! . . . The Soviet Union is an example of the generosity and readiness to help socialist human beings, for which we should constantly be thankful.110
To be in the Party meant to be an Aktivist, a “good functionary of the democratic parties or mass organizations.” Now teachers would head the revolutionary avant garde; the call went out to fulfill Lenin’s summons from 1918: “The People’s Teacher should have a leading role in society such as he never before has occupied, a role that he does not at present yet have, that in bourgeois society he can never have.”111
And with Party discipline of teachers increasing, formal administrative control also tightened. Central administration of education from Berlin raised still another maroon flag for independent-minded teachers, eerily evoking Nazi policy. For no central educational authority had ever existed in Germany until after World War I, when in 1919 an educational office was set up in the Ministry of the Interior. Not until the Third Reich did a full-fledged Ministry of Education exist, with Berlin rather than the Länder determining educational policy. Nazi educators created a central ministry to impose uniformity, politicize the curriculum, and pressure recalcitrant teachers to adopt or acquiesce to Party ideology.
Now, to numerous social democratic teachers, SED educators seemed to be doing the same: in 1951 the Länder parliaments were formally dissolved, marking the final stage of school policy centralization in Berlin. Not the least of the tragic ironies of these years was how many courageous anti-Nazi teachers in the SBZ—fired from their teaching positions during the Third Reich, imprisoned, beaten, tortured—were now dismissed or jailed by the SED because they were not good Stalinists. Some even found themselves reliving the nightmares of their recent pasts, sent back for their defiance of Stalinism to concentration camps in which they had spent the Nazi years.112
Step by step, the SPD’s declining influence during 1947–51 within the SED tolled the death knell of social democratic ideas in education. Through it all, however, the official pretense of “socialist unity” remained. Even through the 1980s, the SED trademark, the brotherly handshake, adorned the pages of all East
German schoolbooks in the DDR. It commemorated that fabled day of March 21, 1946, when the KPD’s Wilhelm Pieck and the SPD’s Otto Grotewohl shook hands in the Admiralspalast in East Berlin—the former coming, symbolically, from the left and the latter from the right side of the stage, dramatizing their mutual willingness to compromise in the new SED. And yet, within two years, the real story was clear: the “unity” handshake had actually been a death grip that would crush the SPD forever. In education, the “sovietization” of the schools was near-complete by mid-century.
The universities were a different story—temporarily. “The university must be sovietized,” a SMAD education officer decreed in 1947.113 But that decree was hard to execute. The prestige of the German university, the traditions of Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit, the public commitment in 1945 to nonpolitical admissions criteria and to the independence of the academic administration: all of this made the SED hesitant to interfere in academic affairs and empowered the university community. The citadel of higher learning continued to elude capture—for a while.
Indeed, at first, many of the 22,000 students boycotted the newly introduced “M-L” (Marxist-Leninist) courses, also known as DIAMAT (dialectical materialism). When philosophy and history courses finally returned to universities in 1946/47, large numbers of students skipped M-L lectures. They mocked the Soviet worshippers who espoused Lysenko’s biology, Ivan Pavlov’s psychology, N. Marr’s linguistics, A. Mitchurin’s materialist genetics, or Russian “dialectical-historical” physics. Contemptuous of crude Umerziehung, they criticized Party-line professors in student government open forums.114 They put up posters castigating restrictive SED policies. They even protested examination materials. For instance, at Rostock University, law students refused to write an exam on the topic, “The Justified Basis of the People’s Ownership of Property”—branding it a “lie”—and marched out of the auditorium en masse.115
Professors resisted the new ideological turn too. Most of the 1,500 faculty in the SBZ’s twenty institutions of higher education initially refused to join the SED.116 They also defied, or sought to circumvent, new policies aimed at controlling them politically. For instance, beginning in 1946/47, every professor had to write lesson plans accounting for every classroom hour and explaining the topic’s “reeducation value.” SMAD devoted most attention to philosophy and history, which it regarded as the key subjects for Umerziehung.117 Faculty in philosophy had to write 100-page essays on “My Weltanschauung.” The results of these initial attempts at intellectual intimidation were sometimes comically Kafkaesque. Although many professors submitted, others sought to outwit their examiners through stealth and cunning. To frustrate the Thought Police—many of whom were half-educated Party ideologues and SMAD education officers who spoke little German—these professors “summarized” their lectures in 500-page treatises, pontificating exhaustively on arcane issues. Or they explicated their Weltanschauungen in hopelessly technical jargon that only fellow experts could hope to decipher.118
Nevertheless, the documents gave SMAD officials a useful list of suspect names and themes. SMAD forbade professors to diverge from their approved lesson plans; SMAD representatives would, unexpectedly, audit classes or assign students to take and hand over careful notes. These notes would be quoted, sometimes years later, if accusations arose against a professor’s political stance.119
Despite, or perhaps because of, faculty recalcitrance, ideological screening procedures tightened—and penalties increased. In 1947, SMAD sought to finish off Entnazifizierung at Greifswald University by firing en masse faculty with former NSDAP affiliations. The Greifswald rector refused, demanding individual evaluations instead. He received 25 years at hard labor. The institution of mandatory Marxist-Leninist curricula throughout the SBZ/DDR followed in the next two years. In 1950, the SED stepped up its offensive further, launching two campaigns promoting “the most advanced science” of Marxist-Leninism: “The Battle Against Objectivism and Cosmopolitanism” and “Partisanship in Scholarship.”120 Given its traditionally central role in the German curriculum, philosophy received especially close scrutiny. SMAD distributed a detailed questionnaire on ideological stance to every philosophy professor, which each professor was required to answer, point by point. Recalling the interrogation of suspected heretics during the Inquisition, this procedure allowed for no tricks or evasions.121 Indeed, the Institute for Dialectical Materialism at Jena—whose director had recently received his doctorate through SED machinations122—became the Vatican of the DDR by midcentury. It was explicitly authorized to “answer” all “theoretical issues that cannot be resolved.”123
“Philosophy,” wrote one professor in 1950 who had escaped to the West, “is dying out in the DDR.” The choice finally exercised by most independent-minded faculty of world renown was a secret Republikflucht (flight from the Republic)—a crime whose attempt was punishable by a long prison sentence. Often at the cost of leaving behind his or her books, manuscripts, furniture, and even family—anything more than the clothes on one’s back might attract the notice of authorities—a professor would disappear, without telling a soul, and re-emerge days later across the border.124
Nor did the students’ defiance of the SED long endure. The first wave of student arrests on political grounds began in 1947 with the dissident Henschel group at the University of Jena, a cluster of independent anti-fascist students who had refused FDJ membership.125 That year also witnessed the first round of political kidnappings, when several dozen outspoken student critics of the SED at the University of Berlin disappeared—vaporized, Orwellian-style.126 The SED now moved to ensure that only “students of the new type” would matriculate. In 1948, political courses became university requirements regardless of one’s area of study. To assure attendance in political courses, two unexcused absences were made grounds for dismissal from university; to guarantee attention, universities introduced comprehensive examinations every other semester.127 Students who did well in these examinations received the FDJ medal “For Good Knowledge,” coined in gold, silver, and bronze. Those who received scholarships saw their funding calculated on an ideological scale, “like Stakhanovite wages, according to their political enthusiasm.”128
But the changes did not stop with the new required curriculum. It was not enough to command the citadel from the inside; now the SED began to exert pres sures on youth outside the school—or to turn all youth activity into “educational” activity.
The main vehicles were the FDJ and its junior branch, the JP, which was founded in 1948 for children under the age of 14. Now students were pressured to join the “new type” FDJ and JP.129 And with their full-scale transformation into an arm of the Party, we enter the inner chamber of the so-called Red Reich at mid-century. Indeed the “new type” FDJ and JP became very much like the Child Spies of 1984. (In fact, a Party-promoted bestseller in the early DDR days was Alexander Fadayev’s Young Guard, which features an heroic little Lenin Pioneer in Moscow who informs on his parents to the NKVD.)
Today, five decades later, this Orwellian world is incomprehensible to most Americans. How can present-day Americans even begin to conceive the climate of these East German schools at mid-century?
Imagine that the Cub Scouts and Brownies literally trained preschoolers to spot suspicious aliens and build miniature watchtowers, that the Boy and Girl Scouts were dominated and completely politicized by the hard Left or the extreme Right, that membership in the Scouts was the prime criterion of university acceptance, that Scout leaders interviewed you for admission, that in every class Scout members monitored your attendance and informed FBI and CIA authorities about your personal behavior and offhand comments, that 40-year-old “Scouts” sat on university examination committees, that young and middle-aged Scouts participated in faculty meetings, that. . . . 130
And that only begins to suggest the power and the terror of the “new type” FDJ.
Nineteen forty-nine—the publication date of 1984—proved, all too fittingly, the decisive date of no return. Operating under a freshly drafted constitution that subordinated it directly to the SED and ended all heterodoxy among members, including toleration of Christian youth members, the “new type” FDJ received its appointed tasks: screening university applicants, taking attendance at lectures, and so forth.131 In 1949 the FDJ also ceased to be merely extracurricular; its activities were coordinated with school plans and it became the only legal organized expression of student interests. That year witnessed too the abolition of secret FDJ elections and secret student government elections in school and university. The Party leadership made all selections. Now there was a simple list of candidates determined from on high; a year later, FDJ membership was declared mandatory for all DDR university students in vocational and professional programs, and the FDJ slogan for 1950 trumpeted: “Der beste FDJler—der beste Student!”132
Now the blue shirts were stained dark maroon.
The dawn of Red Fascism: shades of brown shirts past.
The democratic experiment was over. The age of the “new type” of German, the Planmensch, was indeed at hand.
And now the hour had come to unveil and parade this creation before the world.