On November 27, 1918, Konrad Haenisch, the newly installed education minister (Kultusminister) and Majority Social Democrat, issued arguably the most radical decree in the history of Prussian schooling. The “Appeal to Male and Female Pupils in Secondary Schools,” as the edict was titled, aimed to redress the alleged rampant “demons of morbid subservience, mistrust, and lies” in secondary schools. Its proposed solution was for every school to hold an assembly by the end of the year to introduce democratic governance. Each teacher and each pupil in the ninth grade (Obertertia) and higher would have an equal vote on whether they wanted to form a school parliament (Schulgemeinde), a pupil council (Schülerrat), or both. In the school parliament, all teachers and pupils would have equal rights to have an “entirely open discussion” about their school affairs, including matters of discipline, and equal votes to pass resolutions pertaining thereto. In addition, pupils alone would elect a teacher and pupil council that would be standing liaisons to the director and the other teaching staff. Most controversially, the school parliament or the standing pupil council could appoint a representative empowered to bypass the school director and teaching staff and hold conversations with the ministers in Berlin about how to redress inequities in their particular school and change youth policy in the new republic more generally. A last measure in the decree gave pupils the unlimited right to join any association, provided it was “not political.” This new right abrogated the requirement that pupils in secondary schools get permission from their directors to found or join associations in or outside school. Haenisch required that schools post this decree on all blackboards. There were similar decrees issued in December 1918 in Saxony, Württemberg, and Bavaria.Footnote ¹

Even though the fallout from these measures had consequences beyond secondary schools, they have all but been ignored in the historiography of the 1918 revolution and of education more generally. The measures themselves had a moderate influence on the left-leaning minority of schools, where they encouraged democratic governance. After World War II, pupil councils in fact became a model for the Allies as they sought to prepare a cohort of future democratic leaders. But the fallout from the measures in the conservative majority of schools ushered in a new era of right-wing political mobilization. They outraged most adults and led to the first mass protest in Prussian history of Protestant middle-class parents against school authorities. Moreover, the decrees were partly responsible for driving a cohort of teenagers into radical-right associations such as the German National Youth League and, later, the Nazi Party, making the latter disproportionately youthful. Finally, experiences in pupil councils induced tens of thousands of conservative nationalist teenage elites to appropriate tactics from the workers' movement to challenge the liberalizing policies of the Weimar Republic. The experiences also radicalized these teenagers' anti-Semitism because the revolution was vigorously supported by Jews, including the thousands of Jewish secondary-school boys, whose numbers were vastly disproportionate to the German population.Footnote ²

Together with the events of the 1918 revolution more generally, the decrees and the hubbub around them marked the moment of political awakening for these conservative pupils who became the elites in the war youth generation (born 1900 to 1908). Although only seven percent of the males in this birth cohort attended a secondary school and fewer than two percent graduated, they were the ones who later went to university, entered the professions, became military officers, or achieved other positions of power, including key offices in the Nazi state. A conservative estimate is that one quarter of the men in the SS in 1938 attended secondary school during the revolution, for example.Footnote ³

As regards the long-standing debate over the revolution, the narrative about pupil councils suggests that the changes in education policy were paradoxically both too radical and not radical enough to fortify the young republic. In Prussian education, the revolution was too radical because the November 27 decree, as a brazen attempt to introduce democracy, only infuriated teachers, parents, administrators, and even most pupils. It turned these groups, who might have otherwise tolerated a moderate regime change, against the new government early on. But the revolution was also not radical enough because its leaders lacked the courage to give the ministers the power to fire the intransigent teachers and administrators who had been hired before November 1918. They were also too timid to tax the middle class so that secondary schools could function without pupil fees. Such taxes would have opened the schools to talented schoolchildren of all social classes, rather than just the children of elites. Freedom from needing fee-paying pupils would have in turn allowed the government to expel the refractory, anti-republican teenagers and fill the schools with children who would grow up supporting the new regime. Instead, Prussia and other states not only continued to subsidize the education of young elites who were hostile to the new regime, but they also granted these teenagers new freedoms of speech and association that allowed them to mobilize against the republic. Taken together, the central Weimar compromise—introducing a democratic system while not purging the bureaucracy or redistributing wealth—in the end only aggravated political conflict in secondary schools.

The Origins of the November 27 Decree

To appreciate the outrageousness of the November 27 decree, one has to place it in the context of German secondary schooling in the early twentieth century. According to autobiographies, satirical novels, contemporary criticisms by Socialists and left-liberals, and observations by American and British teachers and professors, as well as scores of post-1945 scholars, imperial German teachers were mostly stiff and haughty and often mean. They terrified pupils and even many parents through their power as Beamten and their strict drill teaching methods that undermined critical thinking. They expected average pupils to digest an enormous amount of information and demanded unconditional obedience, a behavior they enforced with the cane. In several sensationalist cases, this severity led secondary-school boys to kill themselves and leave behind suicide notes that blamed their schools. Teachers treated their pupils like Untertanen (servile underlings) in part because they themselves were Untertanen to the administrators. In Prussia they were forbidden from getting involved with liberal or left-wing agitation under the 1852 law that prohibited undignified behavior “in and outside the classroom.” Secondary-school teacher candidates in Prussia were evaluated on their deference and willingness to follow orders. They were also required to sign an oath to instill in youths “fear of God, respect for the law and authority, love of the fatherland, and reverence for his majesty the Emperor and King.” Finally, they worked in an overwhelmingly male world. More than four-fifths of pupils in secondary schools were male, and unlike in the other Western nations, where by 1914 the vast majority of teachers was female, women in Germany before 1916 were prohibited from teaching male pupils. In 1918 ninety percent of secondary-school teachers and almost all upper-level education administrators in Germany were men. A good portion of these were reserve army officers. Secondary schooling accordingly bore the imprint of an upper-class patriarchal military culture and was a key institution that reproduced authoritarian relationships in imperial Germany.Footnote ⁴

There were, of course, notable exceptions to this general climate in secondary schools, and the severity of the authoritarianism differed greatly from school to school. Berlin, Frankfurt, Breslau, and other large cities had many secondary schools whose teachers and administrators embraced progressive ideas. Furthermore, the authoritarianism came increasingly under attack. The criticism came not from within the profession of secondary-school teachers but from the outside: professional pedagogues who held positions in philosophy at the universities and researchers who ran the twenty-five or so institutes that were pioneering adolescent psychology. Financial and political support for these so-called reform pedagogues was in particular strong from the professional organizations of elementary-school teachers. But elementary-school teachers' poor pay, restricted educations, lowly charge to educate the masses, and ambiguous status as quasi civil servants with limited rights and privileges earned them the title of “step-siblings” of the university-educated secondary-school teachers. Most secondary-school teachers repulsed the suggestions of the reform pedagogues and the progressive elementary-school teachers.Footnote ⁵

Nevertheless, a small minority of secondary-school teachers was receptive to the new approach to education and began to make minor changes after reading about reform pedagogy, in particular the suggestions of Munich professor Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster. Foerster became an advocate of pupil self-government after he visited the United States and observed the “School City,” an institution set up by the principal, Wilson Gill, that aimed to supplement instruction in civics with real practice in democratic governance. Gill wanted to instill loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and create responsible, free-thinking citizens who cheerfully obeyed laws they themselves wrote. In a New York City elementary school of 1,100 pupils, and with support from then governor Theodore Roosevelt and former U.S. Presidents Cleveland and Harrison, Gill set up the first system of pupil self-government. The pupils created by-laws; held referendums; passed out petitions; elected peers for various offices such as president, treasurer, librarian, and health inspector; and introduced disciplinary courts, complete with formal procedures, pleas, counsels, juries, and judges empowered to determine the punishment of violators of school regulations. Foerster informed a German audience about this “School City” system in his popular book School and Character, published in its first edition in 1908 and twelfth in 1914. He argued that in contrast to German teachers, American teachers did not have an authoritarian relationship with their pupils. Instead, they treated their pupils like “gentlemen” and kept order in the classroom by shaping the “public opinion” of their pupils and getting them to censure their peers. In his own words, Foerster was no “fanatic of democratic thinking” as Gill allegedly was. Foerster thought self-government would raise pupils to respect, not challenge, the authority of both teachers and the constitutional monarchy. He favored self-government because he doubted that teachers who adhered to a pedagogical “autocracy” raised youths who respected authority later in life.Footnote ⁶

Foerster's vision of pupil self-government was thus far from the type of radical democratic governance that the November 27 decree aimed to create. Even so, most secondary-school directors rejected the “School City” system—just forty-seven schools in Prussia, about five percent, had introduced it by 1911, and mostly in a watered-down form. The audience for School and Character was largely elementary-school teachers. Most of the few secondary-school directors persuaded by Foerster implemented a form of self-governance that mirrored the authoritarian structures of the German-Prussian monarchy. At a 1911 conference devoted to pupil self-government, Prussian secondary-school directors agreed that too many teachers were “learning police” who favored “too much drill and too little education in self-reliance.” But they nonetheless insisted that the goal of self-governance was not to practice democracy but rather to reduce teachers' workload and instill obedience in the pupils. Instead of having elections for school parliaments that made laws and creating pupil-run courts that enforced them, self-government in German secondary schools mostly consisted of having officers. Older pupils monitored the halls and the yard and reported on pupils who littered, came late to school, or threw snowballs. At some schools, these officers also announced the start of classes with a whistle, led the younger ones into the classrooms, and oversaw that they took off their caps. Some pupil officers were responsible for tidiness and supplies in the bicycle room, the cafeteria, the map room, the class cabinets and bookshelves, and the toilet. Others administered the school library and chaperoned festivals, concerts, and field trips. Still others cleaned the blackboards and took out the garbage. According to one director, all this “helped self-discipline, fostered the spirit of responsibility for order and good morality, and prepared for state and societal duties.” He mentioned nothing about rights. Typical was the view of a director who introduced self-governance but derided the American “School City” and its democratic institutions: “It is hoped that our boys keep far away from such a democratic ‘majority.’ In matters of discipline there is more reliability with the benevolent and enlightened absolutism of the teachers, whose authority relies on the three million bayonets of the Prussian state.” Despite the optimism at the conference, almost no new schools in Prussia introduced pupil self-governance after 1911 under the conservative tenure of the education minister August von Trott zu Solz.Footnote ⁷

The radicalism of the November 27 decree stemmed largely from the experiments in pupil self-government at the private boarding schools run by Hermann Lietz, Paul Geheeb, and, above all, the iconoclastic pacifist Gustav Wyneken. At his rural boarding school, Lietz was the first in Germany to introduce a Schulgemeinde, a general meeting of pupils and teachers that determined more formal self-government institutions based on the prefect system in Christian abbeys. In Geheeb's Oldenwald School, the Schulgemeinde approached being a functioning parliament. Pupils, teachers, and parents openly discussed issues such as collaboration in courses, work in gardens, and even politics and international affairs, despite the customary prohibitions on these last subjects. Pupils learned how to argue for their point of view and how to respect the opinions of others. Wyneken had the most radical conception of a Schulgemeinde. He named his school Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf because the school parliament was the center of school life. Pupils and teachers had strictly equal rights in voting and speaking in the parliament, which established all the regulations at the boarding school, including scheduling and curriculum. Wyneken himself understood the parliament as not so much as an administrative institution but as a spiritual gathering that would rejuvenate Germany by promoting youth culture. Appointed by Haenisch as an advisor in mid-November 1918, Wyneken was, in fact, the ghost author of the November 27 decree. Wyneken also served simultaneously as an advisor in Bavaria after the education minister Johannes Hoffmann heard his lecture on pupil self-government in mid-November 1918.Footnote ⁸

Among the pupils themselves, self-government had the greatest support among those in the youth movement. It accorded well with the central principle in the Wandervogel that youth should lead youth. Wyneken himself had helped to organize the celebrated Meißner Festival in 1913, in which 2,000 members of the youth movement took an oath that “the Free German Youth,” as they called themselves, promised “to shape their lives on their own terms, taking their own responsibility, according to their own concept of truthfulness.” In letters to newspapers, petitions to the education ministry, and broadsides distributed to schools, members of the Free German Youth became the most vocal supporters among pupils of the November 27 decree. They gave speeches in favor of pupil self-government at rallies that they organized and were sometimes attended by hundreds of teenagers. They believed that the decree would redress the hollowness of modernity and help to overcome, according to Knut Ahlborn, the leader of the Free German Youth, our “inconsiderate selfish lives.”Footnote ⁹

A final origin of the November 27 decree was the more general council movement during the revolution. As Hans-Joachim Bieber showed in his classic study, the council movement was a phenomenon not only for soldiers and workers but also for middle-class professionals, businessmen, shopkeepers, and civil servants who defended their interests through various Bürgerräte. Councils of elementary-school teachers convened a few days after the revolution's outbreak, and the worker and soldier councils ceded authority to them. Parents of secondary-school children formed committees as well, building on the October 1918 decree by Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, the last Prussian education minister appointed by the Kaiser, that stipulated that parents serve on advisory boards at every secondary school by the end of the year. Not allowed to sit in on the meetings of these boards without permission from the parents, and fearful that these parent boards would morph into councils that challenged their authority, secondary-school teachers began to mobilize against these parent boards, making plans for their own state-wide council (it never came to fruition).Footnote ¹⁰

The Creation of School Parliaments and Pupil Councils and Committees

Even before the ministers in Bavaria, Saxony, and Prussia issued decrees creating pupil councils, teenagers at dozens of schools had already founded them spontaneously. The boundary between soldier and pupil councils was fluid; many demobilized teenage soldiers active in the youth movement returned to their secondary schools and began to organize their peers into councils to shape policy before the issuing of the decrees. For example, according to documents collected by Hugo Freitag, a Munich professor who conducted a survey of the pupil councils, teenagers spontaneously formed a council at a Realgymnasium in Bavaria, uttering “the most unbelievable things in the most excited and spiteful” language, on November 22, 1918 (the Bavarian Education Ministry issued the decree on Schülerräte on December 1, 1918). They then resolved to eliminate religious instruction and procure toilet paper for the bathroom. They also began printing broadsides calling for youths to participate in the revolution. According to a teacher at another school, pupils passed out a broadside to peers at other schools that said, “Fellow pupils, wake up! Our hour has also arrived. Freedom from the arrogant mindlessness of school! Get ready for the school strike!”Footnote ¹¹

After the decrees were issued in Bavaria and Prussia, but before the elections were held in late December 1918 and early January 1919 on whether to form councils and parliaments, pupils mobilized on their own, sent petitions to the Education Ministries, and asked for clarifications about their new rights. Pupils organized a general meeting of councils in Munich in mid-December 1918 and formed a “Central Pupil Board.” In late March 1919, it resolved to introduce controversial topics into the curriculum: sex education, cultural and religious history, and political science, including the theory of socialism. It also demanded eliminating cumulative leaving-examinations (das Absolutorium) and allowing complete freedom of speech for pupils older than seventeen. Although such radical leftist politics were less prominent in Prussia, secondary-school boys in Pankow (Berlin) nonetheless voted for a provisory “representative committee of the pupil council” to begin work with the “middle-class parties” to prepare for the national election—all before they themselves held elections on whether to form parliaments and pupil councils at their individual schools.Footnote ¹²

Most teachers, parents, and middle-class notables were incensed that the ministries seemed to be plunging teenagers into the melee of the council movement. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of angry parents gathered at scores of meetings and signed petitions. This kind of mass action by middle-class Protestant parents was unheard of. Catholic parents had protested the discrimination against their children during the Kulturkampf; working-class parents had demonstrated against inequitable elementary schooling; and an 1888 petition for school reform got 22,000 signatures. But middle-class Protestant parents had never challenged secondary-school teachers or the policies of the education minister so raucously en masse. In Prussia these conservative parents were angry that the revolution had not only overthrown the monarchy but attacked their basic authority over their children, particularly through the new right of teenagers to go to the halls of the Berlin ministries to give counsel on youth policy. Parents sympathized with teachers, who felt insulted that the November 27 decree asked the pupils to create “a new relationship of camaraderie between you and your teachers,” a phrase that implied there was not camaraderie between pupils and teachers. Teachers argued that the war had, in fact, mitigated the authoritarian relationship and brought the two closer together. In letters to the editor and petitions to the ministry, dozens of conservative teenagers confirmed this change in pupil-teacher relationships. They also maintained that their relationship with teachers should be paternalistic, not equal. Most teachers, pupils, and parents agreed that hierarchy was natural and necessary for learning.Footnote ¹³

Unseasoned, the new education ministers did not expect such a backlash. Konrad Haenisch and Johannes Hoffmann had been delegates in the state legislatures that had jurisdiction over education, but they had had no experience in the education bureaucracies. The Social Democratic Party offered them little guidance in how to manage the ministries their party had just seized. The party's platform on education, spelled out in a few sentences in the Erfurt Program (the party line after 1891), focused wholly on equity: an end to confessional schooling; free instruction, textbooks, and lunches for secondary- as well as elementary-school children; and advancement in schooling based on merit, not ability to pay. Even Karl Kautsky, the author of the Erfurt Progam, admitted these policies were superficial. Because membership or participation in the Social Democratic Party was in practice forbidden for secondary-school teachers and administrators, the party had few members to turn to for practical advice on pedagogical or even basic administrative questions. Haenisch in Prussia and Hoffmann in Bavaria hence called in Wyneken. Though he was not a ranking member, Wyneken was a quiet sympathizer of the Social Democratic Party and famous for his radically democratic ideas.Footnote ¹⁴

Wyneken maintained influence in Munich under Education Minister Johannes Hoffmann and Minister President Kurt Eisner until the destruction of the Bavarian Soviet in May 1919, but he fell quickly out of favor in Prussia in late December 1918. Haenisch, a Majority Social Democrat whom Rosa Luxemburg called a “German-National chauvinist” for supporting the Burgfrieden, saw how much acrimony the revolutionary measures caused among the old education bureaucracy. Many regional administrators and countless teachers and school directors under his authority balked at carrying out his orders. Without the power to fire personnel, he had no real power to make them comply. Under the fundamental agreement struck by Friedrich Ebert with General Wilhelm Groener, the personnel in the Prussian bureaucracies, which included secondary-school directors and teachers, were to remain in office in the new republic. This personnel had been appointed by the Kaiser and his ministers, however. Hence, except for Haenisch and a few of his advisers, the conservative elites in Prussia controlled the secondary-school system during the months of the revolution and beyond. Facing the outrage of parents and teachers who threatened the legitimacy of his office, Haenisch realized that Wyneken's radicalism was a liability to any reform strategy. Administrators, teachers, and school directors simply would not brook taking orders from an official listening to Wyneken, the iconoclast who wanted “the school revolution” and was responsible for inciting the schoolboys in Munich to convene the mass council meetings.Footnote ¹⁵

Overwhelmed by the outcry over the sensationalist language in the decree and sensing that only moderation would win the cooperation of teachers and administrators, Haenisch issued a revision of the November 27 decree on December 14, 1918. Backtracking, he told schools that they could reject school parliaments and pupil councils and instead introduce a moderate form of pupil self-government permitted by a directive of von Trott zu Solz from 1910. In this form of self-government, which school directors advocated at the 1911 conference, pupils elected peers to serve on a pupil committee (Ausschuß) that had limited advisory powers. The revision was part of a larger maneuver by Haenisch to undermine Adolf Hoffman, the Independent Social Democrat who served as co-minister of education until his illness in December 1918 and like Wyneken wanted to use the interim government to introduce revolutionary measures before the elections for a national assembly and the ratification of a new constitution. Even though his party represented the working class that lacked the privilege of higher education, Haenisch did not want to fight the upper-middle-class teachers, directors, and parents who opposed the November 27 decree. He appeased them.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite the retreat, the fracas only intensified in late December and early January as schools held the meetings to decide on the new forms of self-governance. At more than half of the schools, the pupils and teachers unanimously or near unanimously rejected school parliaments (Schulgemeinde) and pupil councils (Schülerräte) and introduced the less controversial pupil committees (Schülerausschüsse) permissible under the December 14 revision. At other schools, the elections unleashed a generational revolt. Because the tuition and opportunity costs of full-time schooling into the late teens was too expensive for most families, there were usually twice to three times as many pupils in the ninth grade as in the thirteenth (Oberprima). Furthermore, many in the highest grades were still serving as soldiers and waiting to be demobilized. Consequently, the youngest pupils commanded super majorities that they parlayed into dominance in the elections for the school parliaments and pupil councils. Charismatic teenagers inclined to mischief swayed factions to malign teachers and challenge basic order. Their actions infuriated teachers, parents, and older pupils. By mid-January, under pressure from parents and teachers, these younger pupils cowered at most schools, and the parliaments and councils were dissolved. But according to one director, the seeds of “suspicion and slander” had nonetheless been sowed, and many fourteen-year-olds did not forget the taste of a topsy-turvy world in which they overwhelmed adults with their votes and new rights.Footnote ¹⁷

The world turned upside down in the pupil councils and school parliaments only heightened the consternation of parents, teachers, and administrators who were already furious with the attempts to reform schools in the first weeks of the revolution. In Prussia the indignation began immediately after Haenisch issued his first decree in November that removed history textbooks that incited counterrevolution or glorified war. Books in the last category constituted almost all of the new ones purchased in the previous four years and had figured centrally in the culture of secondary schools under war pedagogy. At a conference, the directors of secondary schools in Berlin and Brandenburg resolved that this decree was “in the spirit of intolerance against people who think differently.” Most controversially, two days after the November 27 decree, the Prussian education ministry issued an edict that banned prayer in school, freed teachers from having to give religious instruction and pupils from attending it, and forbade teachers in religion class to give homework, such as memorization of Bible passages or the catechisms. Most parents and teachers saw this separation of church and state as an attack on not only their beliefs but also their rights. Many turned to the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who represented educational policy for the Democratic Party and argued that the removal of religion from schools constituted an “unfreedom” for those who thought religion was a necessary part of education. The Catholic Center Party also vigorously protested. Under pressure from demonstrations by hundreds and sometimes thousands of parents, as well as from Majority Social Democratic Party leaders who knew that the Center and Democratic Parties were necessary coalition partners, Haenisch rescinded the decree on religion on December 20, 1918, and left the matter to the future National Assembly. But in the following months, parents still feared that pupils might use their councils and parliaments to reintroduce restrictions on religion and history curricula. Furthermore, in spring 1919 the National Assembly struck a key compromise in what became Article 144 of the Weimar Constitution: the state would support confessional as well as secular schooling but exclude clergy from making educational policy. The churches, conservative parties, and religious organizations were accordingly not happy that some German children would not have religion as part of their education. These conservative groups continued to distrust school parliaments and pupil councils, which had their most vigorous supporters on the far left who wanted to take religion out of schools altogether.Footnote ¹⁸

The most troubling consequence of the November 27 decree was that it exacerbated anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitic outbursts had origins in the disproportionate number of Jews in secondary schools: whereas about eight percent of all male children in Germany had some secondary education, the figure for Jews was an extraordinary fifty-nine percent. The conflict also had to do with the spirited support for the republic in Jewish families and the growing disgust with it in families of most of the non-Jewish pupils. At one school in Berlin, all the Jewish pupils voted for the council and parliaments, angering the conservative Protestant pupils who wanted to maintain the old imperial order. At another school, Kurt Eggers, who became a durable and grotesquely chauvinist novelist in the Nazi era, served on a pupil council chaired by a Jewish boy named Rothstein. According to Egger's account, at the first meeting of the school parliament, Rothstein gave a speech that insulted the army, its officers, and “in general every German sensibility.” The Jewish students applauded loudly, while Eggers and his friends whistled in disapproval. After Eggers stood up, threatened Rothstein, and demanded an apology, Rothstein dismissed him “smiling scornfully,” and the school parliament moved to draw up charges against Eggers as a counterrevolutionary. At that point Eggers slugged Rothstein. (Eggers managed to get away with a minor sentence: one hour detention for disturbing the peace.)

These incidents mirrored the adult world, where Jews were the leaders in the revolution in numbers disproportionate to their population and faced increasing anti-Semitism. The development embarrassed and worried even many prominent Jews themselves and fed hatred against them among the right-wing conservatives who hated the revolution, particularly after the new government signed the Versailles Peace Treaty and allegedly stabbed Germany in the back. Among the cohort of right-wing elites who were in secondary schools during the revolution, the belief that Jews were traitors originated not in some distant observation gleaned from newspapers or second-hand accounts. Rather, it grew out of real political experiences in the pupil councils in the winter and spring of 1919.Footnote ¹⁹

The Democratization of Schools

By summer 1919, the brouhaha over the school parliaments and pupil councils subsided. By then only one quarter of the secondary schools in Berlin and Brandenburg had functioning school parliaments or pupil councils. Three-quarters of these schools wrote that the self-government bodies were a positive development; the other quarter cited the problem was a growing lack of enthusiasm.Footnote ²⁰ Almost all the other secondary schools in Prussia instituted the less controversial pupil committees and set up self-government modeled on the structures discussed at the 1911 director's conference. A detailed report summarizing the work suggests that, while the November 27 decree almost nowhere introduced the radical democratic governance originally hoped for, it led many schools to host freer discussions on pedagogical matters, introduce minor curricular changes, and sponsor myriad extracurricular activities and organizations. In assemblies, councils, committees, and often in class, pupils and teachers discussed the value of instruction in ancient languages, the selection of reading material, the experience of extensive memorization, the fatigue from long hours of schooling and heavy homework, the place of hierarchy and religion in education, the requirement to wear the Gymnasium caps outside school, the right of teachers to discipline and punish (Schulzucht and Strafrecht), and the politics of the proposed educational reforms (Einheitsschule). At the urging of pupils, administrators introduced new curricula in modern languages, art history, psychology, and geography. Pupils used their committees to organize plays, decorate buildings, and erect memorials to teachers and pupils who died in the war. They also sponsored lectures on citizenship rights, sexuality, and alcohol and organized visits to museums, theaters, and concerts. Most widespread were new programs in career counseling and new clubs for gymnastics, tennis, boating, hiking, drama, music, and literature.Footnote ²¹

The November 27 decree had a far more democratizing effect on the schools that trained future elementary-school teachers (Seminare and Präparandenanstalten) and were notorious in Prussia for reproducing the strictness and rigid class differences that pervaded education. Mostly boarding schools in rural areas, these institutions sheltered the teenagers from cosmopolitan life and working youth who enjoyed financial independence and freedom from further schooling. The staff in the teacher-training schools emphasized the discipline needed to control large classrooms of working-class schoolchildren. They usually favored memorization and drill teaching methods and rejected the reform pedagogical movement. Unlike the secondary schools, which gave pupils credentials to enter the upper-middle-class world in which their teachers and directors traveled, these teacher-training schools were run by directors and upper-level instructors (about one-third of the staff) who did not share the social class of their pupils. The directors and upper-level instructors had attended university but rarely taught elementary school. Furthermore, they often disrespected the lower-level instructors who had not attended university. All of them in turn looked down upon their teenage charges, the future elementary-school teachers soon to be the “step-siblings” of the university-educated secondary-school teachers.Footnote ²²

The pupils in the teacher-training schools welcomed the November 27 decree because it promised to break this humiliating power differential based on social class. By contrast, pupils in the secondary schools were comrades in arms with their teachers and directors against the revolution that threatened to take away the privileges of the upper-middle class. They accordingly rejected the revolutionary measures in the November 27 decree, while the pupils in teacher-training schools saw the changes as an opportunity to improve their lowly status. More than half of the teacher-training schools had functioning school parliaments or pupil councils in summer 1919.Footnote ²³ In schools whose staff stymied democratic governance, the pupils were nonetheless empowered. For example, at the Angersberg Seminar in East Prussia, pupils complained about the intransigence of the staff in petitions that they sent directly to the Education Ministry in Berlin, which intervened on their behalf and forced the staff to accept pupil self-government.Footnote ²⁴ The teacher-training seminars continued to have active school parliaments and pupil councils in the 1920s, long after most had deteriorated in the secondary schools.Footnote ²⁵

Furthermore, detailed minutes on the assemblies that created school parliaments and pupil councils indicate that the discussions about democratization were far more intense in the teacher-training schools than in the secondary schools. At the Neuhaldensleben teacher-training school in February 1919, pupils and teachers debated the “right to codetermination” for pupils and argued about the effect that possible self-government structures would have on democratization. The teenagers sometimes countered skeptical teachers that only school parliaments could foster understanding for political affairs. One pupil emphasized their extraordinary right to petition the Education Ministry directly. Another derided his peers in secondary schools for their obstruction of self-government and spoke out against the prohibitions on involvement in the Social Democratic Party, such as reading its newspapers or joining its youth organizations.Footnote ²⁶ At the Leobschutz school in rural Silesia, the pupils wrote to the ministry directly about how they were involved in establishing and enforcing regulations on financial aid, dormitory life, and visits to the cinema and coffee houses.Footnote ²⁷ These experiences were part of a larger institutional change that relaxed the authoritarianism and allowed elementary-school teachers in Prussia to institute widespread child-centered pedagogical reforms.Footnote ²⁸

Secondary schools by contrast did not apparently take detailed minutes of the debates over the founding of self-governance structures. Few pupils petitioned the Education Ministry directly, and there is no evidence that any ever exercised their right to enter the halls of the ministry and advise education officials. The vast majority of secondary schools set up the weaker pupil committees that undertook noncontroversial work such as decorating classrooms; monitoring school halls and yards; and organizing hikes, concerts, and clubs. Many originally incredulous directors were surprised at how these pupil committees enlivened school spirit and enriched education. Many more of these converted skeptics complained that apathy among the pupils quickly set in when they realized they were not empowered to reduce homework or censure individual teachers. At schools that did introduce school parliaments and pupil councils, the teachers were with few exceptions already progressive and embraced involving their pupils in school affairs. Together with the parent advisory boards, pupil self-governance ensured that teachers and the director at these schools no longer wielded dictatorial powers. Of course, as spirited republicans and advocates of reform, none of these teachers and directors wanted to comport like the tyrannical schoolmasters of the imperial era anyway.Footnote ²⁹

The Radicalization of Right-Wing Pupils

Although the turmoil over the school parliaments and pupil councils all but disappeared by summer 1919, the memory of the tumult in schools during the months of the revolution persisted. Conservative directors regularly wrote how the decree had awakened pupils' political consciousness, inspired their self-confidence, and opened the floodgates of right-wing politicization.

The potential for this politicization had built up in the last years of the war. In 1917 and 1918, flaunting customary prohibitions on discussing politics in schools, teachers had embroiled secondary-school boys in charged issues such as unrestricted submarine warfare and the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Moreover, middle-class teenage schoolboys continued to train in the voluntary military youth companies when almost all others in their cohort had rejected them. Teachers and pupils alike romanticized the war in most secondary schools well into the summer of 1918. Autobiographies and oral histories attested that most boys in secondary schools longed to prove their manhood on the front. The war's end in defeat and revolution frustrated these pupils loyal to the imperial regime and its conquests. Seventeen- and eighteen-year-old schoolboys who did no or highly limited military service subsequently streamed into Freikorps units after the outbreak of the revolution and fought Bolsheviks and Polish insurgents in the Baltic. They also lashed out at those who had frustrated their wish to fight in the war, condemning the officials of the republic for signing the armistice and, later, the Versailles Treaty. The attempt by the Social Democrat Haenisch and the pacifist Wyneken to reform schools in November 1918 by bringing the revolution into the classroom only fed their anger against those who had overthrown the Empire.Footnote ³⁰

Developments at the Helmholtz Realgymnasium in Schöneberg offer a good example of this politicization. In October 1918 its director was shocked that some of his pupils presented him with a petition calling for an armed insurrection among sixteen- and seventeen-year-old males to repel the advancing Allied armies. In summer 1919, he complained to the ministry that the November 27 decree had exacerbated this kind of indiscipline, as boys threatened their teachers with lawsuits, displayed the banned black-white-red flag of the toppled Empire, and fought with the Jewish pupils who opposed them. These conservative pupils no longer condemned the November 27 decree as they had earlier in countless self-authored petitions and letters to the editor and rallies that they organized themselves. But they remained politicized. Furthermore, they now took advantage of their new liberties to mobilize against the republic.Footnote ³¹

The pupil committees established in the conservative secondary schools became one outlet to organize this movement to challenge the republic. Another outlet was the youth associations that flourished during and following the revolution. The provision in the November 27 decree that gave pupils the unlimited right to join nonpolitical associations aroused little debate during the initial uproar. But nine months later it became one of the most controversial new policies for secondary schools. Before 1918 the Education Ministry had given teachers and directors the right to prohibit pupils in secondary schools from joining associations, particularly autonomous ones such as the Wandervogel, because they feared an overactive club life would be a distraction to studying and a motivation to disrespect the authority of teachers. They also feared that a lack of controls over membership in associations could potentially expose pupils to politics prematurely. Paragraph 17 of the 1908 Reich Law of Association prohibited minors from joining political associations, and the custom was to keep politics out of the schools. Of course, what teachers and school directors understood by political (parteipolitisch) was malleable. During the war, for example, they did not think it was political to distribute propaganda of the Fatherland Party or discuss German plans to establish colonies in occupied areas of Russia. Yet despite some misguided claims otherwise, secondary schools did not introduce excessively nationalist content into history and German curricula before 1914. They certainly never discussed the Navy Bills, the Hottentot elections, or the Morocco Crises. Haenisch agreed with almost all teachers and directors that the new republic should continue to keep politics out of school. Unlike experienced secondary-school teachers and directors, however, he did not understand that the line between political and nonpolitical associations was slippery at best.Footnote ³²

The popularity among secondary-school pupils of one new association in particular, the German National Youth League, presented the minister with the quandary about whether to brook the democratization of schools when the new freedoms led teenagers to organize strikes and other protests that challenged the legitimacy of the republic. Founded in October 1918 by the blind lieutenant Kurt Viebig, the German National League aimed to “plant into the hearts of youths ideas and thoughts about a national rebirth.” It favored the monarchy and the constitution of “old Prussia” and was founded as a counterpart to the German National Freikorps composed of armed university students. The German National Youth League was technically a nonpolitical association. Its bylaws asserted so, claiming only to support sports, hikes, and lectures. It also claimed that it had no affiliation with any political party, not even the German National People's Party, of which most of its leaders were members. Still, it is not a stretch to claim that pupils in the German National Youth League were active in the counterrevolution. For example, in mid-December 1918 a few male members of the League at the Königstadt Gymnasium in Berlin distributed to their classmates a broadside that warned that “the corrosive poisoning of internationalism is creeping in on you from all sides.” As in the war, when nationalist rhetoric was permitted in schools, these boys did not consider this activity to be political. Many secondary-school directors agreed. Accordingly, in summer 1919 complaints poured into the education ministry that secondary-school directors were banning pupils from joining the associations of the Democratic and Social Democratic Parties but permitting them to join the politically charged German National Youth League.Footnote ³³

Empowered through their experience in self-governance and infused with the ideology of the League, secondary-school pupils challenged the republic in a conflict that reached explosive proportions in the days leading up to and following September 2, 1919. The date marked Sedan Day, Imperial Germany's national holiday abrogated by the revolution, and for the first time since the founding of the German Empire, schools did not sponsor celebrations. Furthermore, over the summer vacation, Haenisch had ordered that all schools remove pictures of the Kaiser and other royalty. (He nonetheless allowed scores of secondary schools to keep their royal names.) Subsequently, when the new school year began in August 1919, boys in the Gymnasium in Greifswald, all members of the German National League, hung their own pictures of the Kaiser while singing patriotic songs. They then met in their pupil committee, which authorized a strike to last until the ministers in Berlin gave them permission to keep the pictures on the wall. The strike continued as the boys celebrated the banned Sedan Day. They led a march through the city wearing the black-white-red sashes of Imperial Germany. They continued to strike for six days thereafter.Footnote ³⁴

The protest spread first to other Pomeranian cities and then throughout Prussia. On September 11, 1919, an alleged one thousand boys and girls met in the city square in Stettin for a mass rally to protest the removal of the Kaiser's picture. They paraded through the streets, sang nationalist songs, and paid homage to memorials of past Kaisers as well as to a statue of Wilhelm II. In a telegram to Haenisch, the secondary-school boys among them announced their intention to strike. Strikes by pupils over the Kaiser's picture and Sedan Day also broke out in Stolp, Anklam, and Swinemünde. In Köslin on September 15, pupils at the Gymnasium and Oberrealschule sent a petition to the radical right Deutsche Tageszeitung, claiming that a majority in their school opposed the ban on the Kaiser's picture. Not lacking a sense of humor, they hung in its place the notorious photograph from the cover of the August Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung of Defense Minister Gustav Noske and President Friedrich Ebert. The pupils aimed to undermine the charismatic authority of the new regime: in the photograph, Ebert appeared shirtless in a rumpled bathing suit, revealing his sartorial sloppiness and dumpy physique, the very opposite of dignified royalty in military regalia. The situation got so out of hand that Haenisch traveled to Pomerania in October and personally met with the striking boys and girls to quell their uproar. He promised not to punish them if they ended the strikes. He also discussed pupil self-governance with them. According to a newspaper report, the pupils greeted him with “bellicose intentions” and wore black-white-red sachets and cockades of the overthrown Empire. Haenisch reported that the striking girls were more temperamental than the boys.Footnote ³⁵

Haenisch's visit temporarily quieted Pomerania, but he did nothing to stem the strikes against the ban on the Kaiser's picture in other parts of Prussia. On September 16, 1919, more than two thousand secondary-school boys and girls met in Kassel to protest the removal of the Kaiser's picture. A riot broke out after workers ambushed them with stones, and the city had to call in garrisoned soldiers. Pupils in secondary schools in Berlin, Brandenburg, Westphalia, Silesia, and Saxon-Anhalt also struck or held other illegal protests in favor of Sedan Day and against the ban on the Kaiser's picture. As in Köslin, many also hung the photograph of Ebert and Noske in their swim trunks. In Breslau, the pupils claimed that the revolution had granted “codetermination in school affairs” and the right to engage in these protests.Footnote ³⁶

These strikes and protests constituted a quantum leap in the politicization of middle-class youths and show how rapidly their political culture had transformed in the months following the revolution. These political actions not only had no precedents among secondary-school pupils before 1918, but they also broke new ground in involving thousands of female youths, particularly because boys outnumbered girls in the secondary schools by ten to one. Furthermore, the protesting schoolgirls presumably came from conservative families, most of whom had opposed granting women political equality and believed that the political arena was unfeminine. The sources nonetheless suggest that girls marched and demonstrated side by side with the boys as comrades in arms. Sources do not indicate that their motivations were any different from those of the boys. But the novelty of middle-class girls in strikes and protests does show that the new freedoms—in particular, the right to form pupil councils—emboldened young conservative women, yet another group with which the republican government now had to reckon.

The strikes and protests were not a generational revolt per se. The protesting pupils had support from conservative newspapers, politicians in the German National People's Party, right-wing parents and school directors, and leaders of the German National Youth League, who through more than a dozen conferences incited and organized the pupils. These adults did not think it was a contradiction—as it surely was—to stand behind the pupils while blaming the ministry for the disorder. They claimed that the pupils' intentions were good but that their indiscipline was a result of the November 27 decree on self-governance, which had filled them with precocious self-confidence. Gottfried Traub, a German National People's Party delegate in the National Assembly and later short-lived education minister during the abortive Kapp Putsch, spoke for most conservatives when he wrote that the strikers' boldness originated in pupil councils that “had turned the relationship between teachers and pupils upside down . . . The empty words about the right to codetermination has gone to these kids' heads because of the revolution.” But he also spoke for most conservatives in nonetheless giving support to the pupils and German National Youth League. He warned that expelling the young strikers would only make them martyrs and agreed with the pupils that the pictures of the Kaiser should be allowed in schools.Footnote ³⁷

With support from numerous secondary-school directors, the German National Youth League led pupils into more actions to discredit the republic in November 1919, when it called upon pupils in Berlin to join the sympathy protests for General Paul von Hindenburg. The general had been subpoenaed by the Investigative Committee of the National Assembly for questioning about his responsibility in the war. Released illegally from school by their directors, hundreds of teenage boys and girls followed the League's call and attended an “homage” to the general. They chanted, “Down with Erzberger! Down with the Investigative Committee! Down with the Jewish flag! Down with the republic! Long live the Geman Empire!” Haenisch fired one director for releasing the pupils but subsequently reinstated him, fearing negative political fallout. He did not revoke the nonpolitical political status of the German National Youth League. Because the November 27 decree rescinded the right to forbid secondary-school pupils from joining nonpolitical associations, moderate and left-liberal parents, politicians, and teachers were exasperated that they were powerless to contain the soaring membership in the League among pupils and the growing radicalism of right-wing pupils.Footnote ³⁸

Other right-wing political actions by pupils further led moderates to call into question the wisdom of the decree. In November 1919 pupil councils at schools in Pankow and Neukölln resolved to condemn the investigations of Hindenburg. Five conservative Gymnasiaten also published a letter in various newspapers that declared they were officers of the “Supreme Pupil Council” in Berlin and that threatened to call a strike if the arrested Freikorps officer Hans von Lützow was not pardoned. In February 1920 boys from the German National Youth League allegedly stalled a meeting of a pupil organization that supported pedagogical reform by heckling and brandishing bludgeons until they were dispersed by the police. Other pupils wore the swastika (a radical right-wing, though not yet Nazi, emblem) and the insignias of political parties, a practice that Haenisch officially banned in a decree from November 14, 1919. In debates in the Prussian House, conservatives voiced their condemnation for the strikes, political protests, and bad behavior of right-wing pupils. Nevertheless, they blamed the use of these radical methods on Haenisch and his November 27 decree. They also claimed that, however inappropriate the methods of the pupils were, the teenagers' criticisms against the republic were reasonable.Footnote ³⁹

By March 1920 the menace of the German National Youth League was enough to move Haenisch to roll back some freedoms granted under the November 27 decree. He reinstated the right of teachers to forbid their pupils from joining nonpolitical associations not linked directly to their school. The new regulation had little effect on the growth of the League, however. Because so many secondary-school teachers were sympathetic with the League, few banned their pupils from joining. Furthermore, critics pointed out that it was difficult to police pupils outside school in any case. Progressives and moderates also argued that the new regulation contradicted the spirit of the November 27 decree. Above all, because working youths were not subject to these restrictions (they in fact had full freedom of association under Article 123 of the Constitution and could participate in strikes and political rallies), politicians and parents argued that a Socialist ministry was discriminating against non-Socialist, middle-class secondary-school pupils. It was no surprise, they suggested, that these pupils opposed the republic. Although the revision limiting pupil membership in associations did not slow the growth of the German National Youth League, it placated conservative newspapers and school directors. Furthermore, the losses of the SPD in the February 1921 Prussian elections forced Haenisch to step down. His replacement, Otto Boelitz, a moderate in the middle-class German People's Party, refrained from introducing further reforms or challenging right-wing school directors.Footnote ⁴⁰

Boelitz nonetheless required that schools maintain pupil committees, and the press occasionally reported how they inspired precocious self-confidence of pupils and their involvement in politics. A mass expulsion of pupils from the Lichterfelde School in 1922 brought this problem to light in dozens of sensationalist articles in the press. The Lichterfelde School was on the campus of the former Central Cadet Academy (today the Bundesarchiv), Prussia's most elite military school, which had produced a third of the officers in the army and graduated many right-wing radicals, such as Ernst von Salomon. The academy closed in March 1920 because Article 176 of the Versailles Treaty forbade military academies for secondary-school pupils. In its place Haenisch hoped to create an alternative boarding school that would socialize pupils to embrace democracy and the republic. To accomplish this goal he appointed Fritz Karsen, a Jewish-born teacher and a member of both the Social Democratic Party and the left-radical League of Decisive School Reformers (Bund entschiedener Schulreformer). Karsen introduced a democratically oriented curriculum, a vegetable garden, summer instruction in the open air, a theater program, and “housemothers” to break the homosocial male military culture. He also allowed the older pupils to participate in shaping the content of history instruction and set up a pupil-administered “free lecture and workshop” series. Above all, he implemented a system of pupil self-governance. An idealist, Karsen did not anticipate the tremendous challenge of getting the pupils, seven hundred of whom were former cadets, to accept these reforms. Resistance to his plans forced him out after three months.Footnote ⁴¹

Nevertheless, many of the reform structures remained after his departure, and they played a role in radicalizing the pupils. The conflict in 1922 began on January 18, the anniversary of Bismarck's announcement of the German Empire in 1871 in Versailles. Allegedly empowered by the pedagogical experiments such as the free lecture and workshop series, the pupils rallied in the cafeteria to celebrate the German Empire in patriotic song. One of the housemothers on duty refused to stand during the celebration, infuriating the boys. The following week the boys celebrated the deposed Kaiser's birthday with another housemother, an action that led officials to fire her. The chairman of the pupil committee then wrote a petition protesting the firing of this conservative housemother. A large number of boys also signed it. It was then sent directly to the Education Ministry. The boys blamed the firing on the other housemother who had refused to celebrate the German Empire on January 18 and had allegedly denounced the fired conservative housemother. On February 16, the pupils abused this moderate housemother in the cafeteria, using “threats and curse words that cannot be said here,” according to the Prussian Press Service. They crowded her so violently that she was able to exit only through the escort of two gallant dissenters. Two days later these pupils belted a “rude and abusive song” against this housemother at the school concert they had organized. The teaching staff gave reprimands to nineteen pupils and moved to expel three. In solidarity, close to fifty pupils requested they, too, be expelled with their comrades. Angry about the sensationalist bad press, Boelitz complied with these fifty pupils' perverse wishes. In April 1922 the Prussian Assembly spent five hours arguing about the incident. Socialist politicians and newspapers blamed the remnants of imperial Prussian militarism for the pupils' violent outbursts. Conservatives almost universally blamed Karsen for introducing the pupil committee that was central in organizing the malice.Footnote ⁴²