Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995 (review)

As the author admits in the introduction, this book is “not the straightforward, full-scale institutional history of DDR [German Democratic Republic] education that it might have been but rather an unconventional and occasionally idiosyncratic study” (p. xxx) of the process of unlearning and re-education with each political upheaval and transition in the history of eastern Germany—from the Nazi regime to the Communist state and later to the post-1989 integration into the Federal Republic of Germany. On his visits to eastern Germany in the early 1990s, John Rodden interviewed educators and students to learn first hand about the social psychology of re-education. To share these soul-searching conversations with an American audience, he originally wrote descriptive accounts of the interlocutors and their experiences before and after 1989. He turned his attention to the history of education in the German Democratic Republic later in order to contextualize and sketch the background to these personal histories. The author of an earlier work on George Orwell, Rodden was stimulated to undertake an investigation of the German Democratic Republic by his perceptions of the similarities between Orwell’s anti-utopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Communist political system that arose out of the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany after the Second World War.

Defining education broadly, Rodden discusses not only the state’s use of education in the schools and universities and the Communist party’s youth organizations but also the attraction of East Germany’s youth to Western popular culture and the manifestations of dissent among disaffected intellectuals and alienated young people. The Communists’ capture of the citadel of learning and the “Stalinization” of education are chronicled coherently up to 1959. The story thereafter is related in a more general and disjointed manner. The author contends that the leaders of the SED [Socialist Unity Party] pursued a strategy of alternating sticks with carrots in their drive to bring the schools, youth organizations, and sports into the service of the state. The restrictions and pressures to conform are well known. Rodden calls attention to two other developments that are often overlooked. He writes: “The carrots came in the form of official titles and public office.” Rapid advance was available to leaders of the youth organization, who “could gain high state offices 10 to 20 years earlier than their peers in the West.” Higher education shed the German tradition of elitism and became egalitarian. By the end of the 1950s, 65 percent of the university students were drawn from the worker and peasant class. A majority of these students were “fully aware that they owed their privileged positions to the regime” (p. 106).

Rodden spent altogether twenty months in eastern Germany after the collapse of the Communist regime and witnessed the dismantling and reconstruction of the educational institutions. Tensions between insecure East Germans and better-educated and competitive West Germans over jobs, accusations of witch-hunting and carpet-bagging, and litigation dogged this process, and reports in the daily press and news magazines, especially Der Spiegel, provide much of the material for Rodden’s account. Some Germans insisted on the dismissal of schoolteachers and university professors who were SED loyalists and/or had been informants for the secret police. However, Eastern teachers—with support from their students who staged protest demonstrations—argued for an amnesty on the grounds that they too had been victims of the system. The author contends that “school personnel changed much less than feared—or hoped” and that “the purged group amounted to a small fraction of the 165,000 teachers in eastern schools” (pp. 191–92). Many politically suspect professors were able to save their jobs by winning legal appeals or through the teamwork of the old SED comrades. Former party members stuck together and pulled for each other, and the new university administrators capitulated before this political pressure. The impression of purely cosmetic...