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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

James C. Albisetti
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Extract

All historians must grapple with the complexities of continuity and change. Yet those who study twentieth-century German history face greater difficulties than most, given the variety of political regimes Germany experienced in that era and their major differences in ideology, degree of stability, and relations with their neighbors. Some Germans, such as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, born in 1913, and former East German leader Erich Honecker, born in 1912, experienced all the changes, from childhood under the Kaiser through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis' “Twelve-Year Reich” (in exile and prison, respectively), the occupation regimes, forty years of what Brandt called “two states in one nation,” and the (re)unification of 1990.

Information

Type
Symposium: German Education after 1945
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , Winter 2005, pp. 593 - 596
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Ruge-Schatz, Angelika Umerziehung und Schulpolitik in der französichen Besatzungszone (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1977); Pakschies, Günter Umerziehung in der britischen Zone, 1945–1949 (Weinheim: Beitz, 1979); and Tent, James F. Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).Google Scholar

2 Rodden, John Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945–1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 36; Picht, Georg Die deutsche Bildungskatastrophe: Analyse und Dokumentation (Olten und Freiburg: Walter-Verlag, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For the use of Goethe as a cultural icon in the Soviet zone, see Nothnagle, Alan L. Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), esp. pp. 63–69.Google Scholar

4 Ringer, Fritz K. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); review by Jürgen Habermas in Minerva 9 (July 1971), p. 423; review by Geoffrey Sammons in Yale Review 58 (Summer 1969), p. 613.Google Scholar

5 West Berlin tracked students after six years, not four as in most of the Federal Republic. For a broader look at the effect of occupiers’ policies beyond structural reforms, see Füssl, Karl-Heinz Die Umerziehung der Deutschen: Jugend und Schule unter den Siegermächten des Zweiten Weltkrieges, 1945–1955 (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1994).Google Scholar

6 Rodden, Repainting, passim.Google Scholar

7 See the excellent survey by Ross, Corey The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), as well as the essays by Jürgen Kocka, Detlef Pollack, and Konrad Jarausch in Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York: Bergahn Books, 1999).Google Scholar

8 Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 28 and passim. For the most radical statement with regard to Soviet intentions, see Loth, Wilfried Stalin's Unwanted Child: The Soviet Union, the German Question, and the Founding of the GDR, trans. Hogg, Robert F. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998).Google Scholar

9 For more on how the GDR government attempted to popularize such heroes, see Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth, 93–142.Google Scholar