In this slim volume, Benita Blessing offers an intriguing and concise social and people's history of the educational system in the Soviet zone of occupation, documenting how it was rebuilt and restructured after the war and showing how diverse and open this phase of history really was. Educationists of the most varied stripes had a hand in formulating school policies. Key educational thinkers in the SED were former Social Democrats. The early stages were marked by a common desire to shake off the indoctrination of the Nazi era and to recover and implement more modern strains of pedagogy such as coeducation, comprehensive schools, and progressive education. As in so many areas, the SED and Soviet occupying power only gradually began to implement Soviet-style ideas, the introduction of compulsory Russian classes or Stalinist propaganda, for instance. Educational policy was therefore in line with the general cultural-political line of the Soviet occupying power, which in order to win broader acceptance among the German populace initially stressed the humanist traditions of German Classicism and was quite hesitant to discuss the prerevolutionary and socialist literature of Russia.

As Blessing points out, many fundamentals of educational life were born of the necessity of creating the most elementary preconditions of a day-to-day school system: clearing away rubble, repairing damaged school buildings, and the daily struggle for heating supplies and food. It took a number of years before any kind of normalcy could set in. Against this backdrop, school buildings symbolized the reconstitution of an organized community (although Blessing does not specify whether “national,” for her, means a German or an East German national consciousness).

The book's strongest chapter is the one in which Blessing investigates new or restored gender and family roles. She shows that the perception of contemporary schoolchildren differed considerably from the mythical image of Trümmerfrauen, the “rubble women,” who learned to “hold their own” in postwar chaos. Boys, in particular, viewed this situation as “abnormal” and hoped for a rapid restoration of “intact” families with the return of their fathers from prisoner-of-war camps. “Despite such findings and an obvious physical landscape dominated by women, the traditional family structure of a strong and stern father as head of the household and a housewife mother remained the ideal of postwar Soviet zone Germans… . Whether at home or in a POW camp, whether healthy, deceased, or disabled, Soviet zone fathers remained present in the minds of their families. Women faded into the background. Unfortunate heroes of a defeated nation, families and the state looked to men as fathers to return Germany to a position of power. The construction of antifascism was to be a male undertaking” (p. 143). Blessing's main source here is a collection of some 1,350 school essays written by (East) Berlin pupils in 1946. Regretfully, the essays are hardly mentioned otherwise, despite being touted in the introduction.

Benita Blessing has made a solid contribution to the history of everyday life in the postwar years. It's a shame she doesn't leave it at that. She proves, instead, to be a fan of bold statements. In the introduction, she posits the notion that historians have always taken for granted that the Soviet zone was headed straight for communist dictatorship from the very start and that the communists alone had a monopoly on politics in the early years. She fails to provide a shred of evidence for her claim that history-writing is dominated by such a totalitarian perspective. Surely one outsider or another may advocate such a position from time to time, but the fact is that mainstream historiography of the last forty years or so has described in quite detailed terms the contradictions, nonsynchronicities, and transformation phases that (Blessing concurs) did ultimately result in a Soviet-style communist dictatorship. It is therefore an idle claim when she attempts to play herself up as a myth-breaker. Perhaps the author was simply blinded by routine when asserting quite absurdly that “No institution stirred more passionate debates in Germany's post-World War II years than did the school system” (p. 1). There did happen to be a few other topics that were debated at least as fiercely. Her work aims at a “reperiodization of twentieth century German history” no less (p. 2). Would it not be possible to take this down a notch?

She likewise provides no proof that the antifascist phase in particular had a strong influence on East Germans. This has to do in part with her rather ambiguous definition of “antifascism.” At certain moments she comes awfully close to the emphatic understanding of official propaganda promulgated by the SED and Soviet Military Administration and does not hesitate to talk about “antifascist-democratic” developments despite the fact that the fragile beginnings of democracy in the Soviet zone were already throttled after the—in the eyes of the communists—disastrous communal and district elections of 1946, ushering in the practice of a unified list of candidates. Her claim of a “surprising East German autonomy in matters of state building and ‘national,’ antifascist, consciousness formation” (p. 2) also seems rather audacious, since the scopes of development she points out as being typical of the early years did not extend beyond those that existed in other fields of politics. At other moments, however, she comes to the conclusion that the antifascism of the Soviet zone period entailed an opportunity for the German population to cast off their own complicity in Nazi Germany (as soldiers, fellow travelers, etc.) through “repentance” or suppression, and as loyal followers of the SED regime to mutate, after the fact, into “antifascists.” The question remains unanswered, then, as to what was antifascist about the educational system in the Soviet zone of occupation. To be sure, the society she describes with a focus on everyday life and people's history would be more aptly characterized as post-fascist (with all of its attendant contradictions). Blessing herself makes the point in drawing parallels between school buildings and the general situation of educational policy: “Directly connected to the same buildings under National Socialism, and yet invested with different if related functions, school buildings represented neither rupture nor continuity, but rather, as the whole of antifascist democratic education, an uneasy mixture of each” (p. 88). This uneasy mixture of demonstrative breaks and subcutaneous continuities was indeed pivotal, as shown by more recent German research on East Germany's handling of the Nazi legacy.