Wissenschaft macht Politik: Hochschule in den politischen Systembrüchen 1933 und 1945 (review)

This volume is the product of a workshop held in 2006 within the framework of a major research program (Schwerpunktprogramm) financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): ”Science, Politics and Society: Germany in International Context, 1890–1970.” It combines studies from a number of projects supported by the program with additional contributions by other scholars. Its title suggests that the volume’s intention is to examine the relationships of science, power, and politics based on studies of higher education institutions during the regime changes that took place between 1933 and 1945. The innovative potential of such comparisons is high.

In the introduction, Sabine Schleiermacher provides a brief overview of the topic and competently summarizes the results of the volume’s individual chapters. Unfortunately, she chooses not to focus on larger theoretical issues—such as how to conceive the relationship among politics, science, and higher education in the first place—that might have served as a fruitful starting point for genuine comparative work. Instead she claims, surprisingly and wrongly, that the impact of regime change after 1945 on higher education in East and West Germany is “still little studied” (10), and adds that comparison has “until now hardly been used” (11) as a way of approaching the relationship of politics and higher education in Germany. She cites one such comparative study, a monograph by Michael Parak on the University of Leipzig after 1933 and 1945 (Hochschule und Wissenschaft in zwei deutschen Diktaturen: Elitenaustausch in sächsischen Hochschulen 1933–1952 [Cologne, 2004]), without discussing it directly, and overlooks multiple efforts to outline and encourage just such comparisons that have been published since the 1990s by the author of this review (e.g. “Scientific Changes in Germany 1933e.g. “Scientific Changes in Germany 1945 and 1990: Towards a Comparison,” Minerva 37 [1999]: 329–54; ”Wissenschaftswandlungen und politische Umbrüche im 20. Jahrhundert—was hatten sie miteinander zu tun?,” in Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, eds. Rüdiger vom Bruch, et al. [Stuttgart, 2006], 19–37).

The chapters can be sorted into three groups. Of broadest relevance are general studies by Johannes Vossen on the regime change of 1933 and its impact on higher education policy, Andreas Malycha on denazification in the four Allied occupation zones from 1945 to 1949, Udo Schagen on the politics of student admissions after 1933 and 1945, Oliver Lemüth on continuity and change at the University of Jena under the Nazi and Communist regimes, Jens Thiel on academic career patterns in the Soviet occupation zone and the early German Democratic Republic (GDR), and Bernd Grün on the role of politics in personnel selection at the University of Tübingen after 1933 and 1945. These are supplemented by studies by Sigrid Oehler-Klein on the medical faculty at the University of Gießen, as well as a summary by Ulrich Koppitz and others of previously published work on the medical academy in Düsseldorf. Most useful for comparison are the case studies from outside Germany. This includes essays by Ota Konrád on the humanities faculties at the German Charles University in Prague and the University of Vienna after 1918 and 1938, Petr Svobodný on the medical faculties and clinics in Prague from 1939 to 1945, Hans-Martin Krämer on political dismissals at Japanese universities during the dictatorship and military occupation, and Ingrid Arias on the medical faculty at the University of Vienna after 1945. A chapter by Anna Lux on the Germanist Theodor Frings, though interesting in itself, seems out of place in this volume.

The studies focusing on Germany are, for the most part, competent summaries of the extensive literature on their respective topics, with enriching detail added from the authors’ own primary research. The Czech and Austrian examples break new ground by focusing on cases that have been understudied until recently. Some of the authors try to...