More than twenty years after the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), historians continue to broaden their research into how people experienced the twentieth century's second German dictatorship. Building on the growing body of work that locates GDR history within lines of continuity running across a 1945 divide, Charles Lansing offers a history of the GDR's founding by looking at provincial schoolteachers from the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 to the violent uprising against East German rule in June 1953. In spite of the relative importance that both regimes placed on cultivating a corps of ideologically committed pedagogues, most teachers in Lansing's account remained half-hearted Nazis and communists, even as they proved remarkably adept at navigating shifting political sands in an effort to protect their jobs and status. Lansing grants his teachers significant room for maneuver under both regimes, but the story he tells operates largely in top-down terms of nazification, which failed, and sovietization, which succeeded.

Lansing's account of schoolteachers in the city of Brandenburg an der Havel begins and ends with references to the life of Johannes S., a teacher who entered the classroom in 1912 and continued to work in a variety of pedagogical and administrative roles during the interwar Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and even after the establishment of Communist East Germany. For Lansing, this man's professional survival across such dramatic political shifts serves to highlight the inability of dictatorial states to mold teachers to fit new political and ideological visions. Lansing seems to count that fact as a point in the teachers’ favor. While Johannes S. never joined the Nazis or Socialist Unity Party (SED), he did join their respective teacher organizations, and Lansing sees these choices as part of his professional and material survival strategies and thus largely outside politics. At the same time, on the basis of his Weimar-era membership in the German People's Party, Johannes S. is identified as a “committed Democrat” (p. 2), but political identities seemed to matter little for the choices he or other teachers made as they navigated dictatorial rule.

The book roughly splits its attention between the Nazi and post-World War II periods. It offers parallel accounts of efforts, first by the Nazi state and then by the Soviet occupiers and German communists after 1945, to purge undesirable teachers and to create political and ideologically reliable teaching staffs. Lansing questions the reach of political purges, indicating that the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service forced no more than five percent of Brandenburg's teachers from their positions. He remains even more skeptical of claims that Soviet Occupation Zone officials carried out resolute denazifications of German teachers after 1945. He describes initial firings in summer 1945 as largely an “administrative accounting of the status quo” (p. 140) and argues that even after denazification panels began their work in earnest in fall 1947, teachers and their representatives used these hearings to delay and constrain the impact of efforts to force out educators compromised by a Nazi past.

Nazi and later communist attempts to create teacher unions and the ways that Brandenburg teachers navigated those efforts anchor the book's narrative. The first of these efforts, the National Socialist Teachers’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, or NSLB), sought to remake teachers in accordance with a Nazi worldview. The second, the Union of Teachers and Educators (Gewerkschaft Lehrer und Erzieher, or GLE), was founded in July 1945 and, in the period of postwar scarcity at least, focused on defending teachers’ material interests.

Teachers proved much more amenable to the postwar union, and for Lansing this positive attitude reflected teachers’ negative memories of the NSLB's ideological fervor and contributed to the relative stability of the early GDR. Even after the SED forced out noncommunist union leaders in early 1951, teachers continued to see the union as operating at least partly on their behalf. Brandenburg was wracked by particularly violent protests on June 17, 1953, but its teachers remained in the classrooms proctoring exams. While the SED subsequently criticized their failure actively to oppose the demonstrators, the teachers’ union commended their “energetically correct, loyal attitude” (p. 212). In the end, Lansing explains their stance in terms that parallel their behavior under the Third Reich: they neither supported nor actively resisted the sovietization of East German institutions.

Lansing acknowledges that Brandenburg's teachers helped to stabilize both dictatorships, but the causal action remained elsewhere. When in 1951 the SED forced out the union's elected leader, Johannes S., it marked the ability of the SED regime to transform teachers’ institutions, even if it allowed teachers to act as if their union still served their material interests. The fact that NSLB made indoctrinating teachers its primary goal made its politics harder to conceal behind a veneer of professional respectability. Teachers may have turned up their noses at the NSLB's holiday training camps, but even after the teacher's league was disbanded as part of the shift to “total war” in 1943, these teachers nonetheless worked diligently to keep the schools running despite growing wartime personnel shortages.

For many teachers war and its chaotic aftermath seemed to produce greater disruptions to their professional lives than did shifts from one dictatorship to another. For the teachers in this book, Germany's twentieth-century dictatorships remained at arm's length. Johannes S. may have signed on to the NSLB, but as Lansing describes his experiences, he was never nazified. That a sovietized teacher's union finally forced him to the professional sidelines raises questions of where, precisely, the politics of dictatorship happened.