From Nazism to Communism: German Schoolteachers under Two Dictatorships by Charles Lansing (review)

Common as it is to refer to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as the “second German dictatorship” of the twentieth century, few scholars have compared the Communist and Nazi regimes. This is likely because of the discomfort many feel about comparing a regime that undertook the Holocaust with one that, whatever its flaws, did not plunge the world into war or commit genocide. Although a few German scholars insist that to compare (vergleichen) is not necessarily to treat as equivalent (gleichsetzen), many have been loath to compare the two dictatorships for fear of being seen to equate them. As a case in point, the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism at the Technical University of Dresden has not been at the forefront of historical discourse on the GDR, in part because the mandate suggested in its name seems to apply more closely to the regimes of Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin than to those of Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker.

Charles Lansing’s book, an examination of teachers in the East German town of Brandenburg from 1933 to 1953, is the first English-language study to compare directly the Nazi and Communist regimes. He demonstrates that the experience of fascism and war was intimately tied to the manner in which pedagogues responded to the East German state. As scholars have known for some time now, the “Stunde Null” was a myth fostered by the East German Communists. The continuities across the 1945 divide were many and significant.

Some of these continuities are surprising: The city’s teaching staff remained largely intact after the Nazi ascension to power as well as during the war and beyond. At any one time, there were about 200 pedagogues in Brandenburg, most of them men who were, on average, 40 years old. According to Lansing’s findings, roughly 95 percent of the teachers remained at their posts in the years following Hitler’s takeover. Only one Jewish teacher was fired outright, but it must be remembered that Brandenburg’s population was only about 0.28 percent Jewish to begin with. During the war, even some of those teachers who had been purged at the outset were restored to their positions.

The ideological training provided by the National Socialist Teachers’ League (NSLB) was, for the most part, a flop. By 1939 very few pedagogues had attended one of the NSLB indoctrination camps to receive the Nazi message, a situation that deteriorated further once the war began. Although not at the heart of the book, Lansing’s findings reveal once again—as scholars have shown for Nazi policies on the environment and on female employment—how war preparation and the war itself undermined the very national community (Volksgemeinschaft) the Nazis espoused.

Not that the Communists were much better at creating a body of pedagogues loyal to the state. In no small part because of the shortage of qualified instructors, the widespread denazification programs and the stopgap measure of employing underqualified Neulehrer were a dismal failure. Like the Nazis, the Communists were forced to hire back many teachers who had been purged. One important difference from the Nazi period was the support of the Communist teachers’ union by Brandenburg pedagogues, who, after the negative experience of the NSLB and its emphasis on indoctrination, welcomed a union that paid less attention to ideology and more attention to representing the interests of its members.

Lansing concludes that Brandenburg teachers insulated themselves somewhat from both regimes, going about their jobs as required but not lending overt political support. They were not fanatical devotees, but neither were they principled resisters. It may be tempting to view this conduct as, on some level, laudable, but as Ian Kershaw reminds us in his work on Nazi Germany, this type of “don’t disturb me” (p. 214) individual is precisely what permitted the regime to undertake the crimes that it did.

The book would have profited from a more robust justification of its central question. The...