Textbook Reds

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Introduction. Ideology as Core Curriculum

1945: Textbooks and German Re-Education

Nazi rule placed the entire course of German education, from nursery through university, in the service of fascist ideology, racial hatred, spiritual and physical preparation for war, chauvinistic baiting, and military drilling. . . .

—KPD-SPD Joint Declaration on Education, 11 June 1945

Even before the Russians occupied eastern Germany in May 1945, the topic of German schoolbooks was already one that occupied Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Kremlin. Like the western Allies, the Soviets wanted to avoid giving Germans the impression that their children would be stuffed with Allied propaganda. Above all, the Soviets sought not to repeat the fiasco that the British and Americans had unwittingly created during the early months of the Italian occupation in 1944: After the successful Anglo-American invasion of Italy in late 1943, schools had been reopened in 1944 under Allied administration. London and Washington had decided, on a temporary basis, to continue using the fascist schoolbooks and simply excise those pages that glorified fascism. But some families had retained old—and intact—copies of the books at home, and predictably, the excised pages had become the object of intense interest among Italian schoolchildren. Allied policy thus had achieved exactly the opposite of its main goal, political “re-education” of the vanquished fascist enemy.

Plans to implement German re-education with non-Nazi textbooks hit an immediate roadblock: The Nazis had burned all German schoolbooks before 1935. And so the Allies were forced to search outside Germany for old German textbooks. The biggest source of copies was found at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, which sent microfilms of twenty textbooks to London shortly before the war’s close. These books were republished in Germany, with some alterations made for political content, and remained in use until 1947.

But these textbooks were circulated only in the western zones. By the war’s end, political tensions between the western Allies and the Soviet Union had become so exacerbated that the two sides could not agree on how German re-education should be conducted. Both the western Allies and the Soviets concurred that re-education was a program of moral reconstruction that would entail a complete revamping of the values of the Germans. The aspiration was to foster a new Fatherland: Whereas the West sought a Germany committed to popular democracy and to the freedoms of speech, press, and religion, the Soviets wanted a Germany committed to Marxism-Leninism under the guidance of the communist Party and the Kremlin. Thus the Allies’ fight about re-education policy eventually became a battle over which “un-lessons”—the democratic or the Bolshevist—would be taught in German schools.

Of course, disagreement over textbook content was just one aspect of a larger battle—extending far beyond education policy—between the western Allies and the Soviets. The conflicts would ultimately lead to the complete end of cooperation between occupation authorities of the West and the Soviets—and, after the 1946–47 Berlin airlift and a series of other small crises, to the formation of separate Germanies: the German Federal Republic (Bundesrepublik Deustchland, West Germany) in May 1949 and the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik East Germany) in October 1949.

Unwilling to use the textbooks from the Weimar era—especially after they were revised by the western allies to show strong sympathy to capitalism and hostility to socialism—the SMAD [Soviet Military Administration of Germany] had to issue its own textbooks. Having located a few Weimar-era textbooks that could serve as models, Soviet educators worked with returning German socialist émigrés to write several textbooks for grades one through four. Verlag Volk und Wissen, the state educational publishing house, rushed out these temporarily usable books in late 1945 for the 1945/46 school year. (Given paper shortages, fiscal crises, and the quickly changing political lines in the Kremlin, the Ministry of People’s Education issued no non-science textbooks until 1951. Even in the sciences and mathematics, teachers in the upper elementary school and secondary school grades had no textbooks until the founding of the DDR in 1949.)

The Red—and the Brown?

The old Party slogan trumpeted “Stürmt die Festung Wissenschaft!” “Storm the citadel of learning.” Marshal Stalin himself had issued the call to arms, declaring educational institutions “the citadel of learning” that “we must capture at any price. This citadel must be taken by our youth, if they wish to take the place of the old guard.” The youth could be persuaded of the superiority of communism, even if their elders were a lost cause. The Soviets called their agit-prop educational campaign vospitanie [moral-social development]; the East Germans termed it weltanschauliche Erziehung [education for a world outlook]. Whatever the name, the intent was the same: creating the new socialist human being.

From the earliest days of the SMAD, textbooks were the foundation in eastern Germany that undergirded the “citadel of learning.” As we shall see, no subject—not even spelling, penmanship, inorganic chemistry, or linear algebra—escaped the Red paintbrush. Marxist-Leninist (M-L) indoctrination thus “replaced” fascist propaganda in eastern German textbooks: “the Red replaced the Brown.”

Of course, that formulation is a vulgar and misleading oversimplification. The word “replace” suggests a simple historic transfer from the Nazi regime to East German communism. There was no such easy transfer. The totalitarianism theory behind it, first propounded by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), is too reductionist to grasp the historical intricacies of the transition in German society between 1945 and the official founding of the two German states in 1949. Those four intervening years were crucial in the formation of two entirely new societies, whose complex development defies simplistic “from brown to red” theories of the East German society.

That new starting point in German history after 1945 in both German societies does not accomadate for a simple “replacement theory” of red = brown. The theory of a mere replacement of the Nazis by the Communists overlooks the liberties which the communist regime offered. It underplays the gravity of the racial hatred that the Nazis stamped in the minds of many Germans—including committed communists and political liberals. The generational change that was taking place within East German society in the late 1950s and 60s also goes unnoticed. Thus, the “red = brown” concept only serves to obscure the complexities of the East German society.

DDR society was founded upon the belief in the equality of all human beings (black, white, Jewish, Muslims, men and women) as equal—and it upheld that creed in the main (despite a degree of anti-Semitism and sexism).

I do not say that social and political reality ever matched these beliefs: in numerous cases I think they turned out to be vain beliefs. Nevertheless, as mental and social constructs, these beliefs were part of DDR reality. A “red = brown” approach thus ignores the many layers of East German social and political reality. Quoting from school textbooks and pressing the citations into an artificial framework of “Nazi ‡ DDR transition” promotes a myth rather than illuminating history.

So the “red” did not simply “replace” the “brown”—the historical transition to the DDR was complex and partly discontinuous with the immediate past. Moreover, at least in 1945/46, it was not evident that M-L would come to dominate eastern German education. Largely to satisfy the western Allies—and to preserve the possibility that a reunited Germany would one day stand in the socialist camp, the policy of the SMAD was anti-fascist rather than explicitly pro-communist—anti-Brown rather than overtly pro-Red. A directive on syllabus revision published by the Ministry of People’s Education in October 1945 makes it clear that SMAD re-education policy sought merely to assure that eastern Germans would learn to scorn Nazis and fascist Brownshirts and to appreciate socialist and Soviet culture:

In Biology, Nazi racial ideology and the teaching on which it is based—the supposed superiority of the German people over other peoples—is to be removed. Likewise to be removed is the application to human society of the teaching about the struggle for existence in the animal world. Students are only to learn about the lawfulness of nature and the development of plants and creatures, and to see how human beings learn to master nature through the recognition of these laws.

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