After 1945, the country suffered another political, economic, social and cultural upheaval akin to that experienced in 1919. The effects of almost half a century of war, preparation for war and huge constitutional upheaval had been accompanied by a more global change in the Zeitgeist which challenged the traditional distribution of status in society. In German academic circles, however, the animosity of the National Socialists towards them had simply reinforced the professors’ perceptions of themselves as an elite. Most
maintained that they had preserved the purity of scientific knowledge undefiled by ideological distortion. Their invocation of the value-neutrality of science reflected their
85 Szöllösi-Janze, ‘National Socialism and the Sciences’, p 25 86
Ute Deichmann, ‘The Expulsion of German-Jewish chemists and Biochemists and their Correspondence with Colleagues in Germany after 1945: The Impossibility of Normalisation?’, in Szöllosi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich, pp 245 - 246
lack of self-criticism and denial of any responsibility for the rise of National Socialism. This was epitomised by the level of indignation expressed during the Allies’ attempted denazification of higher education which resulted in some 4,289 scholars and scientists being dismissed as well as the complete closure of some institutions. Otto Hahn, for example, stated, “I consider it an injustice.”88 Others, such as Pascual Jordan whose cooperation with the National Socialists was indisputable, attempted to justify their actions:
I thought the radicalism shown at the beginning would evade [sic] with time and a tolerable situation would return by steps…I hoped to be able to accelerate this evolution to a certain little extent…[opposition] would have meant for
me…certainly ruin of my existence…I had to become a member of the party89
The denazification process will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters. More bleakly for Germany as a whole, some 2,925 of the most talented chemists, physicists, aeronautics experts and rocket scientists were taken from the Allied zones and removed mainly to America or Russia as a sort of ‘intellectual reparation’. Moreover, though many who went to the Soviet Union later returned to the GDR, those who went to the USA tended to stay there because of the lack of career opportunities in Germany in their fields, though this may have been balanced to a slight extent by the return of an unknown (but considerably smaller) number of those scientists expelled by the Nazis.90
Transcending the huge political discontinuities caused by the war and the division of the country, firstly into the Allied Zones of Occupation and later into East and West Germany, there was considerable continuity in terms of research and development. In the Western zones the old Kaiser-Wilhelm Society was re-invented as the Max Planck Society, while the former Prussian Academy of Sciences was restructured to form the Akademie der
Wissenschaften (Academy of the Sciences) in the East. Name changes aside, they seem to
have maintained a very similar programme of research to that which was being followed before and during the war, albeit somewhat hampered by lack of capital, equipment and the loss of data. Although this continuity might have been expected to be beneficial to the research effort, it served, in fact, to prevent the adoption of innovative developments from
88 Otto Hahn in a letter to Otto Meyerhof in June 1946, in Deichmann, ‘German-Jewish Chemists and
Biochemists in Exile’, p 257 (Deichmann’s translation). Nobel laureate Hahn became the founding president of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science in 1948, remaining there until 1960
89 Pascual Jordan, in a letter (in English) to Niels Bohr, Copenhagen, May 1945, Appendix 5 in Dieter
Hoffman, ‘Pascual Jordan im Dritten Reich – Schlaglichter’, pp 29 – 30
within and without the Germanys for a considerable number of years, arguably another primary reason for the backwardness and lack of international relevance of the science of both East and West.91 As the French government stated to the governor of Mainz in 1949, “The backwardness of German scholars is in effect such that one can scarcely say …if their work could be of any use to us”.92 To this must obviously be added the difficulties caused by the very precarious, impecunious and unstable working conditions which prevailed in the immediate post-war years, as well as the climate of mistrust in the international scientific community towards those scientists who had prospered under National Socialism which hampered Germany’s reintegration into international organisations.93
A different sort of continuity was evident in the universities post 1945. A rejection of National Socialism and everything it stood for led to a purported reversion to the ‘cultural tradition’ of the überzeitlich (timeless) ideal of the neo-humanistic university, even if its interpretation differed considerably in each of the new German states. In the West, the Humboldtian ‘tradition’ with its emphasis on the classics and humanism was seen as representing a safeguard against the return of the practical scholarship of National Socialism; however, the fact that it also entailed the preservation of the previous
organisational structure blocked all attempts at university reform and ossified conditions in the universities for decades.94 The genuine and universal agreement in the country for the development of a politically democratic German state was not matched by a similar conviction in the majority of professors of the need for democracy within the universities including the Technische Hochschulen. As British officials noted:
The power of routine justified as efficiency, of inertia glorified as loyalty to tradition…is surprising in Germany…both in schools and universities the same dislike of change, the same unwillingness to reassess the whole situation and modify past practice to meet it is very marked.95
Eventually, the general public perception of the education system as im Kern gesund (sound at core) and the widely expressed wish to retain it influenced the occupying
91 Ash, ‘Scientific Changes in Germany 1933, 1945, 1990’, pp 341 – 343
92 Burghard Weiss, ‘The Minerva Project’ in Renneberg and Walker (eds), Science, Technology and National
Socialism, p 290
93
Ash, ‘Scientific Changes in Germany 1933, 1945, 1990’, p 343
94 Paletschek, ‘The German University Idea’, p 53
95 ‘Control Commission for Germany (British Element) Report’, Sept 1947, reprinted in Hearnden, Education
authorities to permit its preservation despite their many efforts at reform.96 Thus, the newly democratic and capitalist West was supported by one of the most undemocratic and feudal systems of higher education in Europe, one which essentially remained the preserve of the middle classes through the disparity of educational opportunity and provision existing across the states, which effectively ensured that elementary school education constituted the only prospect for the majority and which supported academia’s position as a self-replicating societal elite.97
The founding of the new Free University of Berlin in 1948 in response to a very specific situation in the divided city was, nevertheless, envisaged as providing a positive influence for change on the universities of the West. This was a much more democratic institution with a more egalitarian population and strong student representation in its governance, including a say in the appointment of professors. The university also incorporated a much more flexible attitude to study, with evening, part-time and distance learning courses (via the radio) being offered and large cohorts of mature students and students from the East being admitted. Within a few years, however, rather than encouraging reform in other West German higher education institutions, it began instead to conform to existing trends. The fading of idealism, evident in changing student attitudes and the desire of its
professors for the same status as traditional academics, was accompanied by the loss of the Eastern bloc students after the building of the Berlin Wall and the eventual atrophy of most of the reform features of the university until in 1969 its original constitution was revoked and it became indistinguishable from its sister institutions in the West.98
In the Soviet Zone, later East Germany, the rhetoric of a return to the Humboldtian tradition was used to justify the politicisation of higher education policy to allow the diffusion of basic ‘democratic’ principles, the removal of the educational privileges of the bourgeoisie in favour of the proletariat99 and higher education’s ultimate transformation into a relatively compliant commodity industry. The Humboldtian ethic of the pursuit of pure scientific knowledge also, by some alchemy, became reconciled with that of Lenin which dictated that the study of pure science was only valid insofar as it could be applied
96
Geoffrey Bird, ‘The Universities’ in Arthur Hearnden (ed.), The British in Germany: Educational Reconstruction after 1945, (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1978), p 150
97 Hearnden, Education, Culture and Politics in West Germany, (Oxford, Pergamon, 1976), pp 47 - 57 98 James F. Tent, ‘The Free University of Berlin: A German Experiment in Higher Education, 1948 – 1961’,
in Jeffry M. Diefendorf, Axel Frohn and Hermann-Josef Rupieper (eds), American Policy and the
Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945 – 1955, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp 244 – 256
to technology. The aim was the pursuit of the ‘Scientific and Technological Revolution’ which would continually force upward the need for more and better qualifications in a virtuous cycle with continual technical progress, as well as demonstrating the superiority of a socialist system over capitalism.100 Thus, somewhat ironically, the foundation of a totalitarian regime with a very different conception of democracy to that of the West was associated with what could be regarded as a more liberal and egalitarian framework for higher education.
Conclusion
For much of the nineteenth century, Germany’s higher education system was held in extremely high esteem internationally because of the excellence of its scientists and the wealth of scientific breakthroughs produced. Nevertheless, the institutionally rigid and bureaucratic nature of the organisation of the universities and the elitist disposition of its professoriate hindered its coming to terms with the industrialisation of the country, consequent societal change and the necessary modernisation of higher education and research. Much of the country’s scientific reputation and economic strength, particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, was arguably due rather to the rise of extra-academic establishments. These concentrated on applied science and technological development as opposed to the ‘pure’ or basic research carried on in the universities. Both applied and basic research in Germany, however, lost ground to the more entrepreneurial and progressive research programmes of the American universities which opened up serious technological gaps between the two countries.
Academia struggled to come to terms with the threat to its social status and influence created by an increasingly democratic political system following World War One, the effects of hyperinflation, the development of a larger and more egalitarian student body, the introduction of newer and more practically-oriented disciplines and a wider variety of institutions which did not conform to what it regarded as the true purpose of higher education. However, in its tacit support for National Socialism as a means of rejecting democratic pluralism and restoring a strong society, academia became complicit in the further destruction of its own values and a vastly increased emphasis on technology in higher education in order to promote Nazi ideology and feed the war machine. Moreover,
100 Margrete Siebert-Klein, The Challenge of Communist Education, (New York, Columbia Univeristy Press,
the expulsion of large numbers of the nation’s best scientists and researchers on ideological and political grounds exacerbated the damage to science and technology wrought by growing isolation from the international scientific community, leaving Germany far behind in what would prove to be some of the most important areas of research for the future.
The end of the Second World War heralded the advent of more radical political change in society. However, in the academic field, the effects of National Socialist policy prompted the ostensible reversion to the safety blanket of the pre-war Humboldtian neo-humanist tradition. In the West, this involved the return of the traditional undemocratic stranglehold of university governance by the academic corporations, which even before WWII had proved unequal to the challenges of a modernising society. The implications for
egalitarianism, scientific and technological progress and economic growth were, therefore, less than auspicious. The East, meanwhile, swapped one authoritarian regime for another. A heavy emphasis on applied science and technology and the stress on the universities as the drivers of economic growth would fail for many reasons, among them the imposition of a repressive and totalitarian culture which militated against the effective pursuit of learning and a centralised planning system which was too cumbersome and unwieldy to be able to respond effectively to the challenges facing the new state.
In the years following the war both countries experienced a period of spectacular economic growth and reconstruction. West Germany especially became a dynamic economic force and assumed a crucial geopolitical role in the developing European Economic Community. East Germany similarly reinvented itself and became one of the best-performing socialist countries of East Central Europe with a flourishing GDP growth rate. It has been argued, however, that the type of practical skills and labour required for the post-war reconstruction of both countries were those taught at lower scholastic levels. The state of the higher education system was thus of less relevance to immediate post-war growth. Its significance for long-term economic prosperity, however, would prove to be much greater. Firstly, the gaps in technology which had developed between both
Germanys and the USA highlighted the need for a much more innovative and
entrepreneurial approach to fundamental research in the universities in order to support the institutes of applied technological research. Secondly, deficiencies in highly trained manpower drew attention to the inadequacy of the existing graduate population to cope with the demands of rapid technological advance and to sustain competitiveness
The following chapter will explore the development of the higher education system in West Germany until 1969.