Report on DJ & HJ I (2/3)
Walter Felscher (walter.felscher@UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE)
Mon, 3 Nov 1997 18:43:22 +0100
School
In the present connection, the school system must be
mentioned which began with four years of identical
elementary school for everyone, but then did split for the
ten year olds. Between three and four percent of them
entered the Gymnasium which normally would keep them until
18 ; another two or three percent entered the middle school
which would keep them until 16 , and all the rest would stay
in elementary school until 14 and then enter the life of an
apprentice or an unskilled labourer - I, for instance, was
the only one of thirty who left for the Gymnasium from my
class in elementary school. Admission to the Gymnasium was
by entrance examination which was not of forbidding
difficulty (I was convinced then that five or ten of my
classmates could have passed it at least easily as I did) ;
attendance at the Gymnasium required a monthly fee of the
equivalent of 5 $ , hence not a serious barrier either. But
it did mean the loss of the youth supporting himself during
the years from 14 to 18 , when the others would earn
already, and that indeed appeared as barrier to many a
parent.
My home town of about 100 000 inhabitants had maybe 10
elementary schools, one Buergerschule, and one Gymnasium.
Boys and girls had separate schools, in separate buildings
and with different teachers. There also was a girl's
gymnasium, but with clearly lower standards.
The composition of my Gymnasium class then was such that
about half of the boys had parents who themselves had not
attended Gymnasium (e.g. the son of a tramdriver, of a
carpenter, two sons of farmers, and the rest sons of small
businessmen or employees); among the others there were again
sons of higher employees such a teachers, of doctors, and
two sons of rich factory owners. In other words: for half
of my classmates, Gymnasium was a ladder for social ascent
into safer, or better paid, occupations than those of their
parents. And for the organized state, the NS government, we
all were future leadership material, leaders for those 90 %
who would leave elementary school with 14 .
Summing up: distinctions between social classes were
certainly more noticeable before 1945 than they have become
since. But the NS state did not enforce social rigidity and
did not impede social movability achieved with the tool
of improved education.
Neither from the four years of elementary school until 1941,
nor from the Gymnasium until 1945, can I remember any direct
political indoctrination by a teacher in the classroom:
themes such as the superiority of NS-dom over the
parlamentarism of the 'Systemzeit', much less so racial
topics and antisemitism, were never mentioned. It is not
unlikeley that they did appear in the curriculum of later
classes, say for the 16- or 17-year olds, but when I had
reached that age the NS rule had already ended; nor is it
impossible that indoctrination was more politicized in the
first, more 'revolutionary' years after 1933 .
Of course, beginning with 1939 the country was in war, and
in the fourth year of elementary school, 1940/41, the
teacher had us write homework essays in which we were to
paraphrase journalistic reports from the front (France just
had been conquered); these we could choose from the
newspapers accessible to us. As I happened to have good
access, I wrote essays judged to be good; yet years later I
learned to my astonishment that the teacher giving these
assignments had, before 1933, been a rather active social
democrat (and so certainly could not be a member of the NS
party),, and after 1945 he even acquired the trust of the
communists and was appointed a 'Schulrat' - an official
supervisor for the county's schoolboard.
During the following years at the Gymnasium, not even such
references to the military effort seem to have been made in
the classroom. Instruction was kept a-political.
But outside the teacher's hours, matters were different.
Though at elementary school, there were only the blue
candles and the postcards. The blue candles were sold, maybe
once every few months, at the start of some class [and
probably by a teacher given this task]. The point of the
candles was to gather money to support Germans in foreign
countries, and together with the candles, small brochures
were handed out, describing their plight. The treaty of
Versailles, forced upon the German government when
WW I ended 1918, had brought sizable German speaking
populations under Italian (Southern Tyrol), French (Alsace),
Tcheque (Sudeten) and Polish governments, and these, trying
to forcibly include their new citizens into their
nationhood, prevented the instruction of German in schools,
and sometimes, it was told, in particular in Southern Tyrol,
even he public use of the German tongue was penalized. -
To help these people, it was said, was what the blue candles
were for. And while some of these reports were true, their
amassment, of course, served to create the impression that
your nation was a beleaguered and misstreated one. - The
postcards were printed from drawings: portraits of war
heros. Of course, everyone had heard some of their names in
the wireless news, or read them mentioned in the local daily
- now their pictures could be seen, and they could become
models of courage and of men doing more than their duty.
Candles and postcards, of course, had to paid for in money,
and children would ask their parents for that. And parents
would be wise enough not refuse a small sum, since if their
child would tell its classmates that the mother thought it
unnessary to have such objects bought, then these classmates
might mention that to their own parents - and so the mother,
or the father, might get into ill repute. Not that this
would have had drastic consequences such as arrestation, but
ill repute might accumulate, and if one day a promotion
stood on, it might be refused to a person of ill repute ... :
"so macht Gewissen Feige aus uns allen."
At the Gymnasium, it were not candles or postcards; it were
the school celebrations and the 'Appelle' - roll-calls,
at the start and the end of vacations - which conveyed
the spirit of the times. About them more below.
[ to be followed by (3/3) ]