Unequal Re-education Schooling and Democracy in West Germany, 1945-1955

Unequal Re-education Schooling and Democracy in West Germany, 1945-1955

May 2, 2023

On March 6th,  the Institute for European Studies was pleased to host historian Phillip Wagner, a visiting scholar from the University of Halle who studies modern German and European history. He presented his new book “Unequal Re-education Schooling and Democracy in West Germany, 1945-1955” to a crowded room of 30. 

His work focuses on the project of education and citizenship in the Federal Republic of Germany in the decade post-World War II and sheds light on gaps in opportunity and outcomes. He observed the contemporary link between education and participatory inequality: low-educated and low-income individuals have limited participation in democracy and may support right-wing populist movements, while the well-educated middle and upper classes dominate political life in Germany. He revealed the roots of this phenomenon by studying the difficulty in trying to mold young people with different socio-economic backgrounds and gender identities into democratic citizens against the backdrop of mass violence and the legacy of the Nazi regime, though looking at curriculum, student councils, and student newspapers. 

He argues that while schools played a crucial role in the democratization of West Germany, educational programs did not evolve attitudes across the entire society.  Citizenship education schemes reaffirmed traditional pre-war hierarchies. Conflicts over democracy and education developed along local, regional, and class lines.

In his presentation, Wagner discussed competing conceptions of democracy, second social democracy, and egalitarian democracy. Continuing, Wagner explored the ideas of Christian democracy, meritocracy, and social exclusion. Finally, he concluded by challenging the often-told story of the uniform expansion of democratic attitudes across all social strata in Western Germany in the post-war decade. While it was universally believed that all young people needed an introduction to democratic citizenship, these initiatives marginalized young people from different social spaces. The middle and upper classes developed more participatory citizenship than the others, while the working class and women were confined to limited citizenship. Schooling in the 1950s thus contributed to the consolidation of West Germany's stratified democracy, with students from different backgrounds being exposed to liberal society in very different ways, with repercussions to this day. All in all, governmentality has historically controlled how young people engage with society, through the internalization of state-funded messages.