Stefan Zauner. Erziehung und Kulturmission: Frankreichs Bildungs- politik in Deutschland 1945-1949. Studien zur Zeitgeschichte, Bd. 43. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994. Pp. 351. Paper DM 78. ISBN 3-486- 56056-5.
Reviewed by Bertram M. Gordon (Mills College)
In Erziehung und Kulturmission, Stefan Zauner argues that "Stunde
Null" -- the concept that the end of World War II in 1945 marked a
"zero hour" in German history -- makes no sense in terms of education
from 1945 through 1949 in France's occupation zone in the southwest. Originally
a dissertation written for the history faculty of the University of Tuebingen,
the book makes exhaustive use of both German and French sources. It addresses
France's cultural policy in its occupation zone and shows how the competing
French bureaucracies often impeded the expressed goal of denazifying and
democratizing Germany. Focusing on French attempts to reform the educational
system, Zauner also discusses efforts to spread French culture throughout
all of Germany and touches upon the impact of French-sponsored tourism
as well.
Zauner's account revolves around Raymond Schmittlein, an early Gaullist
who, as France's director of public instruction, was put in charge of the
effort to reform education in the French zone. A product of what Zauner
calls the generation of 1905, Schmittlein was himself educated during the
ascendancy of the secularist Third Republic and the separation of Church
and state in France. In French-occupied Germany, he oversaw efforts to
undo the effects not only of National Socialism but also of Prussian state
centralism in German education. French efforts concentrated on purging
the teaching corps of Nazis, changing textbooks, and reforming the structure
and content of the educational programs.
As Zauner notes, French endeavors to influence German culture under military
threat after World War II were not new; they paralleled similar efforts
of Jacobinism a century and a half earlier. The French had also tried to
shape German cultural development during their occupation of the Rhineland
after the First World War. Committed to a democratization of French society
in 1944 and 1945 that included the extension of Popular Front reforms for
popular leisure and mass tourism, the new French Provisional Government
also planned educational reforms toward this end at home. Their policy
toward occupied Germany at first aimed, insofar as possible, to exploit
the occupation zone economically and to detach it from the rest of the
country, linking it administratively and culturally to France.
French culture and history, for example, were taught in French, as were
teacher-training courses. Not only was German culture de- emphasized, but
American textbooks were kept out of the French zone as well. To get the
German clergy to accept French cultural penetration, the occupation authorities
threatened the introduction of France's own secular educational laws. Not
surprisingly, Schmittlein encountered resistance on the part of local officials
and secular teachers, as well as from clerical circles in the French zone.
In the summer of 1947, with the Cold War intensifying and the Communists
having left the French government, there was growing pressure from the
Americans to amalgamate the French zone with their own and with that of
the British. By late 1947, preferring a reconstructed Germany anchored
in the West to the threat of one tied to the East, the French began to
shift away from the economic exploitation of their zone. Still, they kept
working to influence the educational system there, as well as to bring
French culture to the other zones of Germany, including the Soviet zone,
where they were notably unsuccessful.
Ultimately, French education reforms were undermined not only by German
resistance but also by rivalries between French agencies in Germany. In
the primary education system, little would remain of Schmittlein's reforms,
apart from a more unified system of Gymnasien and a modified Zentralabitur
in Baden-Wuerttemberg. French attempts to secularize denominational schools
either failed or were reversed after 1949. The French did better in higher
education, leaving behind new universities in Mainz and Saarbruecken, an
administrative training school in Speyer, and an interpreters' institute
in Germersheim; all were subsequently integrated into the Federal Republic's
educational system. Zauner concludes that the degree to which the reforms
contributed to a "new beginning" in moving away from Nazism to
a more democratic society cannot be determined without a study of the long-term
formation of political consciousness. He adds, however, that enhanced Franco-
German cultural and tourist exchanges during the occupation years were
a necessary first step toward a previously unknown linkage of the German
and French states and peoples.
Zauner's analysis of French educational policies in occupied Germany is
excellent as far as it goes. In reality, the opportunity for reform in
1945 was limited by the elitist structures of both the German and French
educational systems, each characterized by state examinations which winnowed
out the majority of poorer students and served as entrees to specialty
university programs. The French system of lycee and baccalaureate resembled
that of the Germans in the 1930s. Curricula in France and Germany were
similar, notably in physics, mathematics, and the medical sciences, and
both countries were quite vocal about the need for patriotic public educational
organization in the interwar years. After World War II, the French system
became slightly more open because of the social justice arguments of the
Communists and the Socialists.
Even today, however, the French system is largely unchanged from the nineteenth
century, containing a series of state examinations and a limited library
system which favor the affluent; the common division into technical and
fine arts, polytechniques, and ultimately the Grandes Ecoles for the elites;
and layers of centralized specialty institutes, notably the Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
sociales-- a maze of elitist units on a base that is called democratic.
In 1945 the French entered Germany with two specific educational goals:
first, to rewrite German texts slightly to justify the return of Alsace-
Lorraine and second, to denazify the system. The French really wanted to
restore the German school system to what it might have been in 1935 had
Hitler had not come to power, as the French had essentially the same model.
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