Alas, as Arnswald (2004) bemoans, today’s generation of German students has no recollection any more about this part of German history, two decades after the peaceful revolution in the GDR and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Students of other countries will have even less memories of images seen on TV, or accounts read in the print media – moreover, they have not lived through these experiences. This justifies the following literature review, which will give evidence of educational inequality during the GDR regime under the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED). It will be organized in five sub-chapters: 1. the case study of Ute, the “privileged”; 2. a historical overview of the East German school system; 3. the East German School system as viewed by proponents and opponents; 4. the purging of East German schools after the unification (political “soundness”); and 5. the implications for female students after the “Wende” (“Change”; unification).
“We knew what the rewards were.... And we wanted them. The coaches and teachers reminded us every week that we were the Priviligierten. Even if we didn’t always feel so ‘privileged,’ we believed we were the elite”. This comes from the mouth of an East German student. Can one be privileged in the educational sector, thus having unique career opportunities that fellow students do not have? The striking case study of an East German athlete, skater Ute, shall shed light on the unethical and politically and ideologically infiltrated practices of the school system of the former German Democratic Republic.
Introduction
“We knew what the rewards were And we wanted them. The coaches and teachers reminded us every week that we were the Priviligierten. Even if we didn't always feel so ‘privileged,' we believed we were the elite” (Rodden, 2002, p. 139). This comes from the mouth of an East German student. Can one be privileged in the educational sector, thus having unique career opportunities that fellow students do not have? The striking case study of an East German athlete, skater Ute, shall shed light on the unethical and politically and ideologically infiltrated practices of the school system of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR; 1949-1989). The governmental impact on the educational system in the GDR had numerous faces: curricula were adjusted to match governmental goals; new intelligentsias were raised; purges were conducted to get rid of teachers of other ideologies; state funds were directed towards pro-governmental research projects; researchers were driven into emigration or committed “Republikflucht” (flight from the republic; i.e., the GDR); Church and state were rigorously separated; private schools were abolished; instructors lost their licenses or their personal freedom due to their anti-governmental activities; supervision and denunciation were ever-present; students lost their chances for higher education due to non-participation in governmental youth organizations, while other students were the so-called “privileged.”
Alas, as Arnswald (2004) bemoans, today's generation of German students has no recollection any more about this part of German history, two decades after the peaceful revolution in the GDR and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (cf. Arnswald 2004, 28). Students of other countries will have even less memories of images seen on TV, or accounts read in the print media - moreover, they have not lived through these experiences. This justifies the following literature review, which will give evidence of educational inequality during the GDR regime under the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED). It will be organized in five subchapters: 1. the case study of Ute, the “privileged”; 2. a historical overview of the East German school system; 3. the East German School system as viewed by proponents and opponents; 4. the purging of East German schools after the unification (political “soundness”); and 5. the implications for female students after the “Wende” (“Change”; unification).
Case Study of Ute, the “Privileged”
As a spring-board, the case study of a so-called “privileged” student under the GDR regime shall serve as an introduction to the following literature review. In 1994, John Rodden interviewed Ute, a 23-year-old first-year student in German literature at the University of Leipzig in former East Germany. Rodden is to become the author of the first English-language study of GDR education and the first book, in any language, to trace the history of Eastern German education from 1945 through the 1990s: Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995, published by Oxford University Press, in 2002.
Ute was once an accomplished teenage ice skater in a top sports school in the GDR, and at age 16, a “privileged” student on her way to joining the elite travelling sports cadre. She tells Rodden about her expulsion a decade ago from the elect Red circle, which was followed by “the saga of her youthful rebellion against the State and her struggle to leave the GDR in 1988/89” (Rodden 2002, p. 135). Her parents were independent businesspeople, which was rare; upon gaining his high school diploma in the early 1950s, her father could have proceeded to higher education, but his own father had run a small grocery store, and after nationalizing the property, the state permitted the son to administer the store under the auspices of the state business organization. Ute's father had little to do with the political party, and she assumes that was why he joined it (ibid.). Ute herself attended the local school and participated in after-school activities, especially sports. With her father's coaching, she entered into competitive skating at the age of seven.
Her career started at 12, when she received a “certificate of calling” after a successful ice skating competition to attend the major district Sportschule in the city of Erfurt which trained 900 students in 8th to 10th grades for all the major Olympic sports. (As a side note, this sports school was named after a Communist Party member and athlete who had died in a Nazi concentration camp.) The school offered a full monthly check-up at the health center on the premises, and the students received the best medical care the state had to offer.1 The athlete's studying experiences were as follows:
“I soon noticed that academics meant very little,” Ute recalls. Every athlete had to belong to the FDJ (Communist youth organization); “study hall” was often given over to the FDJ meetings. Teachers, all of the Party members, would lead the daily political discussions. Topics included freedom fighting in Bruderlaender [brother countries] such as Nicaragua, Western imperialism in El Salvador, and the American invasion of Grenada. (Rodden, 2002, p. 137)
According to Ute, it was better to keep quiet and say little, since silence was usually interpreted as agreement which made a meeting end sooner: “Sometimes I felt like disagreeing just because of the arrogant attitudes of some of the discussion leaders (...). But I never said anything in public - it was pointless to say anything.” (Rodden, 2002, p. 137) Ute maintained her father's standpoint - indifference towards the GDR regime, instead of rebellion - and had no desire to watch Western TV (which was forbidden). She wanted to become a top performance athlete like Katharina Witt, the “ice princess,” to whom her brother referred as “Socialism with a beautiful face2 ” (138). The peak in Ute's athletic career was when she made the semi-finals in her age group in the GDR's 1984 youth Spartikaid in Leipzig. Then, Ute suffered a leg injury and had to undergo surgery. Soon thereafter, the head of the ice skating department informed her that she “had no perspective any more” and would be dropped from her skater group and put in the 10th-grade “exit class” for six months, after which she would be discharged to a regular high school. Ute was out.
She had no idea why, since her coaches had told her that her injury was not that bad, and the operation had been successful. Then, she understood why: her brother, 20 years old, who was already “in trouble for expressing public criticism of GDR life” (140) had officially joined the Lutheran Church and been confirmed in the faith, and - to express solidarity with friends jailed on political grounds - had applied a month before to emigrate.3 “GDR Kader had to come from families unswervingly loyal to the state and had to be without relatives in capitalist countries.” (Rodden, 2002, p. 140).
Thus, Ute was punished for her brother's defiance. As Rodden states, [h]er acceptance into this elite “red” school was one of those inexplicable screw- ups so characteristic of bureaucracy - and of totalitarianism generally, where so much was being watched and recorded that accumulation far exceeded the capacity for assimilation and action: the inefficiency of paranoiac hypersurveillance. (Rodden, 2002, p. 140)
[...]
1 Author's note: To non-Germans, this might sound bizarre, but “ordinary” people in the GDR had no access to good health care; only politicians and athletes. The author's own cousin had a difficult pregnancy causing kidney failure, and was treated in a low-quality hospital where the doctors performed a tracheotomy and total removal of the female reproductive organs. The girl became deaf after the treatment, but at least gave birth to a healthy son. This would not have happened under “privileged” health care.
2 This joke stems from Dubcek's famous remark during the Prague Spring of 1968 that he sought to build “socialism with a human face.”
3 Author's note: Again, non-Germans need to know that both the Lutheran and Catholic dioceses could sponsor a limited number of emigrants from the GDR on religious grounds. One of the author's cousins and her husband (a former Catholic priest) were thus “expelled” from the GDR as “un-worthy” of living there, since they did not contribute productively to the Communist state but rather undermined it due to their Catholicism and political views. This cousin (21 years old at that time; the author was 13) lived with the author's family for a year, and then found a job and established a family in West Germany. Her own parents and sister still live in the Eastern part of Germany. They were not allowed to visit her as long as the Berlin Wall stood. Married couples could not leave the GDR together to visit their relatives in the West; only older people could go to West Germany for a short visit if their spouses stayed behind in the GDR, and only if there was a birthday-related reason which ended in a 5 (like becoming 65, 70, or 75 years old). This made sure they would always return to their loved ones in the GDR!
-
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X.