WASHINGTON D.C. - As part of
a larger project of indicting Germany for not coming to terms with its
Nazi past, the German film The Nasty Girl offers a filmic image
of a German professor from the 1980s which is reminiscent of printed
images of the German professor around the turn of the century.
Herr professor Juckenack is the stereotypic tenured
professor in the 1930's University of Berlin. Where heads of academic
departments exercised dictatorial power over other members of the faculty
as well as over students. This Berlin professor struts with Third Reich
mannerisms across the passage of time from the 1930's to the present.
He is a racial anti-Semite and a conservative bureaucrat. he is a pillar
of State authority for whom a shameful Nazi past is something one invokes
governmental authority to conceal.
The film brings to the screen an articulate depiction
of German higher education in post-war Berlin that is remarkably revealing
of Nazi higher education in The Friedrich Wilhelms Universität
[Berlin]. That infamous academy of book-burners ironically lost more
than 50 percent of its imaculate buildings. Having served as a nazified
showplace from 1931-1945, the University's students, faculty, and professoriate
was particularly heavily implicated in Nazi war crimes.
For example, one Nazi higher education graduate student,
Karl Leonard Falk, the American with dual U.S.German citizenship, and
a 1932 Stanford University graduate, studied for a racial science
Nazi economics doctorate in the Friedrich Wilhelms Universität
between 1933-1936 under a convenient stipend provided by the Third Reich
for services he rendered to Hitler's Reichsministry for Propaganda.(A)
These images push us to re-examine the historical record
to determine how the process of denazifying and reforming German higher
education after the end of the Second World War reshaped understandings
of Germany's Nazi past that are with us today.
For example, it is astonishing to see the ways in which
the Germans under occupation, along with their American occupiers, employed
images of the German past at the Stunde Null to rehabilitate
German higher education.
The film addresses Sonya, a young Bavarian heroine's
attempt to uncover her home town's history under National Socialism.
She becomes frustrated when the town's elders refuse. Of these the Prussian
University of Berlin professor Juckenack turns out to be the most vociferous.
The verbal and intellectual conflict between professor
and student is a central tension in the film and serves as a commentary
on the state of the Nazi and Post-Nazi academy in West Germany at the
historical moment just prior to reunification between East and West.
Herr professor Juckenack denies Sonya access to archives,
threatens to destroy her if she reveals his own Nazi past, and actually
brings her to court for defamation of character when she does so. The
professor does not fears for punishment of his Nazi proclivities in
the past, but fears only the loss of his own status in post-Nazi society,
if the truth were to be told.
When threatened with legal action by the adroit professor,
Sonya seeks the assistance of another elderly man, one with detailed
knowledge of the professor's Nazi past.
The film argues that the elderly witness had been
victimized by the American occupation forces at the end of the Second
World War. While the Americans absolved the real Nazis, like Herr professor
Juckenack, they interned this hapless elderly soul for his Communist
sympathies.
The film leads one to believe that Juckenack, an ardent
young Nazi nicknamed "Brown Heinrich", is the kind of person
the Americans admired and promoted to rebuild German higher education
after the war.
Yet, the University of Berlin Nazi professor was not
a genuine heroic figure for the Americans occupying Germany at the end
of the Second World War. The General Orders of education officers in
occupied Germany were to to reform German education.
The first task which the American occupation forces
faced in reconstructing German education was denazification. The American
Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive (JCS) 1067 provided guidance for reconstructing
German education.
They were to close all Nazi educational institutions,
"...a coordinated system of control will be established designed
completely to eliminate Nazi and militaristic doctrines and to encourage
the development of democratic ideas provided the American military governors...not
only to eliminate Nazi texts, curriculum, and personnel, but also to
inculcate democratic values in the defeated German population".
There was a more immediate priority, however, to conduct
a purge of Nazi personnel still in positions of power in schools, colleges,
and city government.
In describing the American occupation of Germany, historians
have described some measure of success in the American program of "re-education"and
"reorientation," particularly in the sense that this program
pertained to the process of democratizing Germany. These historians
point out that the Americans wanted defeated Germany to rebuild its
own educational structure, with a minimum of American guidance. By giving
the Germans substantial control over their own educational system early
on in the occupation, the American Military Government gave Germany
practical experience in the process of democratic self-determination.
"(7)
The fundamental role in educational reconstruction
in German higher education was to examine particular opinions and attitudes
about educational practices under the Nazi regime. Institutional histories
of the American Government of Occupation have addressed the role of
historical consciousness in educational reconstruction. James Tent has
pointed out that several of the Army civil affairs officers charged
with reconstructing German education were university professors or administrators
who had themselves written on Nazi education.(8)
Nazi higher education reform and the reform of elementary
and secondary education are generally treated as two distinct areas
by most historians. General Lucius Clay later wrote in his memoirs,
'...the reconstruction of German education meant that the Germans had
to overcome both physical and spiritual devastation. Many German school
buildings had been destroyed, others badly damaged, and still others
were occupied either by troops or by displaced persons. Teaching staffs
contained many ardent Nazis; in one city more than 60 percent of the
teaching staff had belonged to the party. Textbooks were so impregnated
with Nazi ideology that even mathematics problems were expressed in
military terms and logistics. German youth learned to add and subtract
guns and bullets rather than apples and oranges. (10)
The priority for Nazi higher education reconstruction
was for restoring the orderly functioning of German society. All of
the German universities had been closed in May of 1945 with the capitulation
of the Third Reich. The reconstruction of German higher education began
with the reopening of the universities in the French and British sectors.
The Americans reopened the medical faculty at Heidelberg
University. On August 15, 1945, the newly appointed rector, Dr. Karl
Jaspers, gave the keynote address. He began his speech with an interpretation
of the recent German past. "The German universities would reopen
because secretly, the core of the university of Berlin remained in tact.
There were teachers and students whose minds preserved their freedom.
Something had been salvaged, in spite of dismissals on the largest scale,
in spite of interference in teaching and research, in spite of the destruction
of our ancient constitution and self-government . . . The fact that
the spirit of science could not actually be destroyed makes it possible
today for the university to start anew, though on a limited scale only.".(11)
Post-war German education would thus draw on a professionalism,
grounded in the "spirit of science," which Jaspers claimed
had not been corrupted by the Nazi years.
At the risk of historical anachronism, one must ask
if Jaspers was correct in this estimate. It is extremely significant
that the rehabilitation of German higher education in the American zone
began with the reopening of medical facilities. Recent historical scholarship
has shown us that the "Final Solution" was itself the product
of a biomedical vision of society, a vision which flourished in the
Nazi universities. The Nazi state was a biocracy in which racialized
images of inferior and superior human beings enabled eugenics and ultimately
genocide.(12)
Beginning with the medical faculties, one could not
end there. Narrow specialization, and not racialized science, was the
reason for the nazification of education according to Jaspers. The best
defense would be a liberal education for all who attended the university.
This was a vision which the American university officers shared with
German academicians. There was no indictment of German science by the
Americans in the occupation government.
A common understanding among occupiers and occupied
of the history of German education allowed for their reconstruction
according to a model perceived as "ancient," but having in
actuality first received legal codification at the founding of the University
of Berlin in 1810. Wilhelm von Humbolt's model of higher education,
steeped in Enlightenment precepts, placed the university at the disposal
of the Prussian state.
As counterbalance to state control, Humbolt stressed
the conception of the university as the site of "free scientific
inquiry." In the view of those who would reconstruct the universities
under American occupation, it was not until the Nazi years that the
balance between state control and academic freedom became untenable.
In 1945 they sought to return to the pre-1933 university, and thereby
elided the entire issue of Nazi racism which we now understand lay at
the very foundations of the Nazi academy.(13)
History, as Wissenschaft, was one among the
sciences to which Jaspers referred. The integrity of historical science,
as perceived by the German historical profession, rested upon the perseverance
of German historicism as an objective method of inquiry despite the
"politicization" of history under the Third Reich. Amidst
those historians who had maintained the historicist tradition during
the Third Reich and thereby "preserved their freedom" during
the Nazi years, the historian Gerhard Ritter was perhaps the most vocal
in the immediate post-war period. As early as December 24, 1945, Ritter
published an article in Die Gegenwart, a fortnightly German review
operating under French occupation in Freiburg, in which he explained
how he was able to "publish such independent views on historical-political
questions" even under National Socialism.
He noted that Nazi party functionaries who supervised
university education from 1931-1938 in the Third Reich had been too
poorly-educated to understand the subtleties of the lessons on contemporary
politics which Ritter had drawn in discussing earlier periods in European
history. More importantly, the guild of professors and administrators
who continued to run the universities in the Nazi years had also protected
him - as a senior member of the profession - from persecution by Nazi
cadres. Ritter argued that for younger professors, resisting Nazification
had not been possible.
The younger men, those who constituted "the succession"
in the learned world, found it much harder to ignore the demands of
the [Nazi] Party for active participation in its ranks. . . without
membership in the [Nazi] Party or, at least, in the SA, a young teacher
had hardly any chance of appointment. I know of few exceptions to this
rule.(14)
For Ritter, there was a key generational aspect to
the task of reconstructing German education in the post-war period.
Because the younger generation had abandoned the scientific tradition
of historicism by becoming Nazified, it was up to the older generation
of scholars who had persevered to reorient German scholarship.
Americans owed a great debt to the German historicist
tradition. There was a sense in which the Americans were repaying an
intellectual debt to the German universities by working for their rapid
reconstruction, a debt which was at once intellectual and personal.
Eminent Harvard historian Sidney B. Fay, having himself
studied at a university in Wilhelmine Germany, wrote in early 1946 of
"our responsibility for German universities." As occupiers,
the Americans had the responsibility to restore the German university
system as one of the institutions "which have survived the Nazi
shipwreck."
Pointing to the debt which the American academy owed
to German universities, Fay lamented the destruction of the physical
plant of the universities and pointed to the most difficult task of
recreating the faculties.
He too feared the Nazifaction of the younger generation
and noted that "the number of men left who are genuine scholars
and who managed to keep their hands clean of Nazi pollution is a small
fraction of what will be needed to run the universities."
He saw the task of reconstructing German scholarship,
in much the same way as Ritter, as a task for the older generation of
scholars. Among others, Fay mentioned Friedrich Meinecke, Max Plank,
and Karl Jaspers as exemplars of the "unpolluted" few who,
though advanced in age, would rebuild the German academy in the name
of true science. Given the Nazi discourse on race "pollution,"
this use of terminology by Sydney Fay is at best insensitive and at
worse betrays a total ignorance of the role of racism in the German
academy.(15)
The Americans were also using the Germans to make a
good science/Nazi science dichotomy which helped smooth-over the highly
politicized nature of American Cold War science, now financed by the
American government for military research primarily on atomic weapons.
Clearly, the Cold War conflict with Soviet Russia made
the German Ordinarius a far more palatable image than he had
been under the de-Prussianization regime. Now we had Russia to deal
with, and America needed German technology. With American war heroes
like General Patton hoping for a march on Moscow, the readily available
image of the Prussian defenders of Western Civilization against the
Slavs of the East was perhaps too much to resist.(16)
Sidney Fay was in a unique position to understand the
situation of the German universities in the post-war period, and he
was also in a position to resuscitate the Prussian professor as moral
exemplar for a new Germany. His son-in-law, profesor, Edward Hartshorne,
had studied under Meinecke in the mid-1930s and was at this time an
Army civil affairs captain working to reopen the German universities
in the American zone as quickly as possible.
Hartshorne's view of the recent history of German universities
was very similar to that of his father-in-law (and not surprisingly
to that of his mentor Meinecke). He too saw the task of reconstruction
as an exercise in restoration.
In 1937 he had written that under National Socialism
"...the German university has lost in essentials the signs of a
free institution. The privileges which had helped preserve it from the
interference of the State Power have melted away.
Its semiautonomous administration and the traditional
independence have collapsed before the impact of a powerful new ethic
which demands undivided loyalty to the demands of the social community."
Hartshorne went on to trace the freedom of inquiry
which marked the German universities to Martin Luther's "freedom
of a Christian man."
This was the American equivalent of Jaspers's formulation
of an ancient constitution of the German university which occupiers
and occupied should work to restore. For Hartshorne and Fay, the National
Socialist period had been a deviation from German tradition in higher
education, a tradition which was basically sound. Here one finds that
the pronouncements of the Germans and the Americans correspond quite
closely.(17)
Yet the impulse for Americans to restore the German
universities to their pre-Nazi glory was not unalloyed. Other Americans
were not so sanguine as Hartshorne and Fay about the benefits to be
reaped in returning Germany to its traditional system of university
education through the good offices of an aging professoriate. Indeed,
some Military Government officers and influential American observers
of Germany in the immediate post-war years reacted very negatively to
what they referred to as the Prussian influence on German education.
The Prussian model of education, which in their view continued to dominate
both the schools and the universities in Germany, needed reform.
At the opening of the theological faculty of Wuerzburg
University on October 19, 1945, 1LT Russell H. McIntosh warned the assembled
faculty of the dangers of those antidemocratic values which German education
had.
It would be up to the educators of a new Germany to
choose the democratic way of life and inculcate this into their students.
Education in the new Germany would have to proceed from an entirely
new basis, since it never had the marks of "a free institution"
as Hartshorne had indicated.
German educational tradition, antidemocratic and tied
over the past century to the interests of the Prussian Junker class,
was no basis on which to build the new Germany.(18)
This hard line toward German educational reconstruction
corresponded quite well with the approach of the first chief of the
military government's Education and Religious Affairs Branch, the organization
charged with the reconstruction of education in the American Zone.
Dr. Thomas Alexander, a student of Weimar education,
took a harsh view of traditional German education. According to the
man who succeeded him as General Clay's cultural affairs advisor, he
had a "troublesome" view of the Germans, for he thought that
the educational structure that existed "had been responsible in
no small part for the fact that the Germans had been the aggressor in
two world wars."(19)
Even during Alexander's tenure, restorative tendencies
predominated in higher education reconstruction. Despite the critical
view of Prussian hegemony in education, which was also voiced by Germans
in the Rhineland and numerous German exile historians living in the
United States, the former celebrants of Prussia-Germany provided the
greatest sense of legitimacy to the cause of German educational reconstruction.
Bent by age, living on the verge of starvation, and with their self-confidence
shaken by the Nazi experience, the older generation of German academicians
still retained moral authority.(20)
The Americans of the military government were personally
involved in this process of lending legitimacy to the scholarship and
academic leadership of this older generation. It was Edward Y. Hartshore
who found a publisher for The German Catastrophe in 1946.
In this work Friedrich Meinecke set the tone for the
approach to National Socialism in Germany under American occupation.
In this work, Meinecke portrayed the appointment of Hitler as chancellor
as one of the tragic accidents (Zufälle) of history.
Though he was willing to attempt some insight into
the roots of National Socialism, the Nazi state itself lay outside the
stream of German history. As Robert Pois observed in his study of Meinecke's
involvement in twentieth Century politics, The German Catastrophe
demonstrated Meinecke's "tendency to view the Nazi period as
a nihilistic aberration and thus relatively opaque to historical investigation."
The Americans were not about to force on the Germans any other interpretation.(21)
As an American state department official observed,
the American occupation forces were, by the Fall of 1946, ceding the
intellectual high ground to the German "gerontocracy."(22)
It was with the assent of the Americans that the older
generation of German scholars reassumed positions of leadership in the
German universities after the war. In the 1960s, scholars would discover
that an understanding of National Socialism as "a ship wreck"
or a "catastrophe" did not allow for coming to terms with
the broader implications of recent German history.
Yet it was apparent to critics of reconstruction policy
after the war that the elitism of German universities had contributed
to the rise of National Socialism. These critics were quick to point
out that in an academic-political sense this included the provision
that the "freedom of science" guaranteed the same complete
authority to senior tenured faculty as heads of institutes at German
universities in the post-war period as they had exercised in the nineteenth
century.
Yet there were few alternatives, as few exiles wanted
to return to a Germany which had once persecuted them. Furthermore,
a visiting professorship in Germany of the late 1940s was very unappealing
to most non-German academicians in the United States.
Few American academicians responded to invitations
to come to Germany and help reconstruct German education, despite the
fact that Germany was quickly becoming the ideological front line in
the Cold War.(23)
This mixture of shortages of professors and destruction
of the physical plant of the university was particularly acute in Berlin,
capital of the defeated nation and for many the symbol of Prussian militarism.
Again, Berlin had been the scene of highly destructive
combat at the end of the war. The University of Berlin, known as
the Friedrich Wilhelm Universität, was located easterly from Unter den
Linden and in the Soviet Zone. The war had seen the destruction of 50
percent of its buildings. Having served as a nazified showplace during
the war the Berlin University's professoriate was particularly heavily
implicated in the crimes of National Socialism, and many had simply
fled at the approach of the Red Army.(24)
The Soviet vision of university reconstruction, as
its vision of reconstruction in general, favored revolution over evolution.
Where the Americans were "shocked by data that revealed the small
number of working class youth in university enrollments," the Soviets
expected to find this.(25)
They sought to break down the barriers to higher education
by immediately establishing the Einheitsschule, or Soviet version
of the single elementary and secondary school for all German youth.
In addition, the Soviets gave preference to the children of workers
and farmers in admissions decisions. So convinced were they that the
class nature of German education had led to militarism, imperialism,
and ultimately fascism that they established an entirely new system
of university education called the Arbeiter and Bauern Fakultaeten
(Workers and Peasants Faculties), where people could study who had not
come from the privileged background necessary for education in the Gymnasium,
or university preparatory program.(26)
Conflict over the role of Marxism-Leninism at the Berlin
University was based in large part in differing approaches to the relationship
between politics and academic inquiry. Where the leading intellectual
lights in West Germany stressed the "value free" nature of
academic inquiry, the Germans in the Soviet zone freely admitted that
the university professor was a propagandist. To Karl Jaspers, while
"thought and research depend on the political situation...the political
events of the day are not a topic for lectures at the university".
In stark contrast to this stood the view of Juergen Kuczynski, a prominent
Marxist social scientist in the Soviet Zone. According to Kuczynski,
the university professor should propagandize. As he explained in an
article for the journal Forum, it was much more interesting (and
useful) to students if a professor explained that nineteenth century
economic history was driven by class interests than simply to cite trends
in international trade. This, argued Kuczynski, was also part of anti-fascist
propaganda.(27)
In a much publicized case, a group of students at the
Berlin University ran afoul of the Ministry for Popular Education (Ministerium
fuer Volksbildung) and were expelled from the Berlin University.
Curiously enough, the students Otto Hess, Otto Stolz, and Joachim Schwartz
were accused of being politicians and not scholars. Quite clearly, they
were conducting the wrong type of propaganda in their publication Colloquium.
Since Berlin was located deep within the Soviet Zone, the American
military government had an interest, both political and ideological,
in the request of these students to found a new university in the American
sector of Berlin. It was with General Clay's blessing that a the Free
University of Berlin opened in Berlin-Dahlem in November 1948.(28)
The situation in Berlin was in many ways exceptional,
but the role of students in the founding of the Free University is significant.
When the Germans students looked for a rector for their new university,
they found a symbolic figure in the person of Friedrich Meinecke. His
very presence would be a powerful symbol of continuities with the pre-1933
academy. With a little coaxing from the Americans, the aging Meinecke
accept the position as the students' choice for rector.(29)
When Friedrich Meinecke spoke at the opening of the
Free University of Berlin, he referred to "the voice of youth"
which had demanded a new university and a "true locus of science
and its teachings". In this address, he described his relationship
with the youth who had given the initiative for the founding of the
Free University as that of a grandfather, as he was indeed the oldest
faculty member of the new university community.
He attempted to normalize the university's existence
by likening the intellectual relationship of these young scholars to
their immediate Nazi forbearers as that of father and son, a relationship
which is often marked by rebellion.
It was only natural, argued Meinecke, that the relationship
of the academic youth would be much more harmonious with their intellectual
grandfathers. As the older generation had resisted the propaganda of
national socialism, now their intellectual grandchildren would carry
forward the struggle against the politicization of scholarship taking
place at the Berlin University.(30)
Though the student participation in university government
at the Free University, from its founding onward, was progressive by
the standards of the times there were other signs of continuity in the
Free University which were more traditional. As the American education
officer for Berlin noted, "like the West German universities it
was to a large extent a restoration of the pre-Hitler institution with
its elitist character, its rather authoritarian professoriate, and its
old-fashioned curricula."(31)
If this was the case for the most "progressive"
of German Universities, what can be said of the rest of West Germany?
At the Free University, as elsewhere in West Germany,
the discourse on "apolitical" scholarship, carried out at
first to differentiate the reeducated and reoriented Germans from the
Nazis, now served to institutionalize a hierarchy of power in the Cold
War. In this new discourse on the nature of academic inquiry, traditionally-oriented
academicians justified their further preeminence in society through
a mastery of "apolitical" scholarship.
Especially since the youth were co-opted at the Free
University, the appeals to objectivity were all the more useful. German
youth, threatened by concerns over their nazification, could redeem
themselves by becoming objective scholars. In this way, the next generation
of scholars aped the manners of their grandfathers. This provides at
least a partial explanation of why, as the Nasty Girl implies,
German education in 1980s resembled German education in the late nineteenth
century.
The price of rehabilitating German scholarship after
the Nazi dictatorship was the institutionalization of academic conservatism
and the return of the Prussian professor. When the Federal Republic
was founded in 1949, the political party which assumed control of the
new nation was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CDU's campaign
slogan was "Keine Experimente," or no experiments. This would
be the slogan of the rehabilitated German academy as well.
References & Notes
A. It is interesting to note there
was no German economics scholarship produced during the Third Reich
of any scholastic value by German economists in the Nazi years. For
one example that has been preserved, see: Falk, Karl Leonard . Virtschaftfliche
grundsätze und probleme der amerikanischen taggespresse. doctoral
dissertation, Friedrich Wilhelm Universität, Berlin(1937).
1. Michael Verhoeven, prod. The
Nasty Girl (Miramax Films, 1990).
2. Ordinarius is the title
given to a senior tenured professor in the German university. As heads
of an academic departments, they exercised virtual dictatorial control
over other members of the faculty as well as over students.
3. Recent scholarship has demonstrated
the problematic nature of concepts of "free scientific inquiry."
On the development of archival research and scientific history in the
nineteenth century see Bonnie G. Smith "Gender and the Practice
of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth
Century," unpublished paper presented to the Modern European History
Seminar, Rutgers University (November 1994).
4. Pollock, James K., James H. Meisel,
and Harry L. Bretton, eds. Germany Under Occupation: Illustrative
Materials and Documents (Ann Arbor, Michigan: George Wahr Publishing
Co., 1949. p. 82). Nazi schools included the Adolf Hitler Schulen, Napolas
and Ordensburgen, as well as Nazi organizations within other organizations.
5. James F. Tent, "Denazification
of Higher Education in U.S. Occupied Germany, 1945-1949," In Manfred
Heinemann, ed. Hochschuloffiziere und Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens
in Westdeutschland 1945-1952. (Universität Hannover: Forschungsstelle
EDV, 19900. 9-15.
6. Ingo Mueller, Hitler's Justice:
The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1991). For works on the failure of denazification see John H. Herz,
"The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany," Political Science
Quarterly 63 (1948), pp. 569-594; William E. Griffith "Denazification
in the United States Zone of Germany," Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Sciences (January 1950), pp. 68-76;
John D. Montgomery, Forced to be Free: The Artificial Revolution
in Germany and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957);
Constantine FitzGibbon, Denazification (London: Michael Joseph,
1969); Tom Bower, The Pledge Betrayed: America and Britain and the
Denazification of Postwar Germany (Garden City, New York: Doubleday
& Company, 1982); and Lutz Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik:
Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns ( Berlin: Verlag J.H.W.
Dietz GmbH, 1982).
7. Edward N. Peterson, The American Occupation
of Germany: Retreat to Victory (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1977). James F. Tent notes his substantial agreement with Peterson
in his Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied
Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
8. James F. Tent. Mission on the Rhine. The
two most prominent examples of American military governors who were
also prominent historians of German education are Edward Yarnall Hartshorne,
Jr. and Thomas Alexander. For examples of their work see Edward Yarnall
Hartshorne, Jr. The German Universities and National Socialism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), Thomas Alexander and Beryl
Parker, The New Education in the German Republic (New York: John
Day Company, 1929).
9. See Dennis L. Bark and David
R. Gress, A History of West Germany, Vol. I: From Shadow to Substance
1945-1963 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993).
10. Lucius D. Clay, Decision
in Germany. reprint ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), p.
299.
11. The German word for science,
Wissenshaft, encompassing both the natural and social sciences
includes the humanistic disciplines such as literature and history.
Karl Jaspers, "The Rededication of German Scholarship," The
American Scholar 15 (1946): 180-188. James F. Tent points to the
importance of this speech in starting a wave of the German university
reopenings. See Mission on the Rhine, pp. 58-60.
12. For example, see Robert N.
Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988).
13. On the Humboltean model of
the university see Daniel Fallon, The German University: A Heroic
Ideal in Conflict With the Modern World (Boulder, CO: University
of Colorado Press, 1980).
14. Gerhard Ritter, "The German Professor in
the Third Reich." Review of Politics (April 1946). It is
interesting to contrast this favorable view of the accomplishments of
German historical scholarship during the Third Reich with those of Felix
Gilbert, who served as an intelligence officer in the occupation. According
to Gilbert, very little of value was produced by German historians in
the Nazi years. See Felix Gilbert, "German Historiography during
the Second World War: A Bibliographical Survey." The American
Historical Review 53 (October 1947): 50-58.
15. Sidney B. Fay, "Our Responsibility for
German Universities" Forum (January 1946): 396-402. It is
of more than passing interest that Fay would soon translate Friedrich
Meinecke's Die Deutsche Katastrophe into English. See also Fay's
introduction as translator of the English version of Friedrich Meinecke,
The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1950). On the American debt to German historicism
see Fritz Stern, "German History in America", Central European
History 19 (2): 131-163.
16. On the American programmatic exploitation of
German technology in the Cold War see John Gimbel, Science, Technology
and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Post-war Germany (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). On the role of racial ideologies
on the Eastern Front during W.W.II, see Omer Bartov Hitler's Army
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
17. Hartshorne, The German Universities
and National Socialism, p. 153.
18. 1LT Russell H. McIntosh, "Address
to the Theological Faculty of the University of Wuerzburg in the Ceremony
of the Re-opening of that Institution," Fiche no. 3-A-193 in The
U.S. Occupation of Germany, Educational Reform, 1945-1949, Gary
H. Tsuchimochi, ed. (Congressional Information Service, 1991). For an
example of an exile German historian who criticized German educational
"peculiarity" see Frederick W. Craemer, "The Reeducation
of Germany: An American Experiment," Forum (October 1945):
114-119
19. Herman B. Wells, "Higher Education Reconstruction
in Postwar Germany", In Manfred Heinemann, ed. Hochschuloffiziere
und Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens in Westdeutschland 1945-1952,
pp. 43-52.
20. Felix Gilbert recalled a visit
to Meinecke's quarters in the fall of 1945, where it became apparent
that Meinecke and his wife relied on handouts from the Americans in
order to eat. See the concluding chapter of Felix Gilbert's A European
Past: Memoirs 1995-1945 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988).
21. Friedrich Meinecke, Die
Deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1946),
82, 95. In a chapter devoted to the rise of Massenmachiavellismus
(machiavellian thinking in mass society), Meinecke argued that this
trend represented a spiritual crisis which was endemic to "the
West" as a whole. In a chapter on the role of coincidence and general
trends in history, Meinecke recalls that when he heard that Hitler had
been appointed chancellor, his response was "That was not necessary."
Hitler's appointment did not represent the inevitable response to a
general socio-political trend, but was rather attributable to the coincidence
of Hindenburg's personal weakness. Robert A. Pois. Friedrich Meinecke
and German Politics in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1972), 151-2.
22. Eugene N. Anderson, "Report
on Trip to Germany - Fall 1946," Fiche no. 1-A-58 in The U.S.
Occupation of Germany.
23. In the very specific sense
of history faculties, this lead to what George Iggers has called the
"exoneration of the German national tradition." In a more
general sense it meant the resurgence of what Fritz Ringer labeled a
conservative academic class of "German mandarins". See Georg
G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition
of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, 2nd rev. ed. (Weslyean
University Press, 1983; Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German
Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1969). On the fate of exile historians see
Catherine T. Epstein, A Past Renewed: A Catalog of German-Speaking
Refugee Historians in the United States After 1933, 1st ed. (New
York: Cambridge University Press and The German Historical Institute,
1993).
24. Hubert Laitko, ed. Wissenschaft
in Berlin: Von Anfängen bis zum Neubeginn nach 1945 (Berlin:
Dietz Verlag, 1987). On the reopening of the Humbolt University see
Henny Maskolat "Die Widereroeffnung der Berliner Universitaet im
Januar 1946" In Forschung und Wirken. Band I. Festschrift zur
150-Jahr-Feier der Humbolt Universitaet zu Berlin 1810-1960 (Berlin:
VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1960), 605-627.
25. Wells, 43.
26. Ulrich Thiel. "Zur Geschichte
der Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Fakultäten in der DDR (1949-1955)."
Ph.D. Dissertation, Freiberg, Bergakad., Fak. für Gesellschaftswiss.,
Diss. A, 1987.
27. Karl Jaspers The Question
of German Guilt (New York: Dial Press, 1947), pp. 9-10. Jürgen
Kuczynski, "Soll ein Universitätslehrer Propaganda treiben,"
Forum: Zeitschrift für das Geistige Leben an den Deutschen Hochschulen
1, no. 2 (1947): 22-23.
28. Some of the most important
works on the founding of the Free University include Siegward Lönnendonker,
Freie Universität Berlin: Gründung einer politischen Universität
(Berlin: Duncker und Humbolt GmbH, 1988); Bernd Rabehl, Am Ende der
Utopie: Die Politische Geschichte der Freien Universitaet Berlin
(Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1988); Ulrich Schneider, "Berlin, der Kalte
Krieg, und die Gründing der Freien Universität 1945-1949,"
Jahrbuch für die Geschichte des Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands
34 (1985): 37-101. James F. Tent, The Free University of Berlin:
A Political History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Information on the founding students of the Free University was provided
by Dr. Armin Spiller, archivist of the Free University of Berlin, HSA
FUB: Kurzdok. d. Gruendungsstudenten der FU Berlin (prov. intern),
zsgest. v. Universitaetsarchiv FUB, 1987.
29. On the relationship between
Meinecke and the Americans see Gilbert, A European Past: Memoirs
1995-1945.
30. Friedrich Meinecke, "Die
Stimme des Gewissens," Colloquium 3:1 (1949):1, as cited
in Siegward Lönnendonker, et al., 55-56. Tilman Fichter, and
Claus Rietzschel, eds., Dokumentaton FU Berlin: Freie Universität
Berlin 1948 - 1964, Hochschule im Umbruch Teil I-III 1945-1964.
(Berlin: 4. Dezember 1978).
31. Carl G. Anthon, "My Work
as Higher Education Advisor in Berlin: A Brief Memoir", In Manfred
Heinemann, ed. Hochschuloffiziere und Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens
in Westdeutschland 1945-1952, p. 66.
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Comment