In solidarity with ongoing UCU strike action, this week’s talk was moved out of the university into the Brass Monkey pub’s back room, trading rows of seminar desks for cosy sofas and cushions. The session was adapted into a less formal ‘teach-out,’ aiming to emphasise the possibilities for an accessible and non-hierarchical educational culture. Aptly, the discussion centred around visiting speaker Sonja Levsen’s research into conceptions of democracy and authority in postwar French and West German educational policy, inviting comparisons with educational attitudes and policies today. Mathew Nicolson sent this report.
Sonja began the discussion by introducing some of the central themes of her research. Teaching styles and society’s attitudes towards young people underwent a significant shift across much of Western Europe during the postwar years. One such notable development proved to be the ‘permissive turn,’ characterised by dialogue within parent-child and teacher-student relationships, greater toleration of youth sexuality and a growing distaste of corporal punishment.
In attempting to understand such a rapid social transformation, historians have tended to focus upon European consumer society, 1960s youth culture and developments within social sciences as key drivers of change. However, these approaches have yet to fully explain how this shift in attitudes occurred and often lack transnational perspectives. In her work, Sonja has added further insight to these debates by offering a comparative analysis of France and West Germany in which she highlights growing perceptions of young people as citizens and democratisation in education.
As Sonja noted, the history of education can provide a particularly useful contribution to German history. Since the 1960s, one leading historical interpretation analyses German history through the prism of authoritarianism. In this view, modern Germany has been defined by its authoritarian society of which Prussian militarism, nineteenth-century imperialism and National Socialism were all simply different manifestations. Accordingly, it is argued that, after the Second World War, West Germany retained these authoritarian trappings, beginning its transition to a more democratic society only during the 1960s, at which point teacher and parent attitudes similarly democratised.
Sonja situated the origins of this concept of authoritarianism in the occupying powers’ ‘diagnosis’ of Germany’s problems and associated anthropological ‘national character studies.’ This led to a major push for democratic reform which reached down to educational establishments. By the 1950s, West German schools and universities had created student councils, preceding those formed later in France and Britain. In contrast, despite recently emerging from the Vichy regime, there was little inherent contradiction between authoritarianism and democracy in postwar France, particularly within the sphere of education. Indeed, even the student activists of 1968 spoke more in the language of anti-capitalism than anti-authoritarianism, while in West Germany much of the focus remained on tackling the vestiges of Nazism and authoritarianism.
In West Germany, concerns about authoritarianism intersected with new developing attitudes towards sex and youth sexuality. Taking inspiration from the research and ideas of Wilhelm Reich, by the 1960s ‘diagnoses’ of authoritarianism increasingly attributed Nazism to repressed sexuality. Thus, democratisation and sexual liberation should occur hand in hand. As this idea gained traction, West Germany became the second country after Sweden to introduce sex education which acknowledged sexual pleasure, moving beyond a solely biological approach. To better understand the connection between attitudes to sexual liberalisation and authoritarianism, Sonja’s upcoming research project intends to extend her transnational analysis into sex education.
Finally, Sonja engaged with the argument that social change naturally followed economic change in postwar Europe – that liberalisation accompanied consumerism and prosperity. She questioned this sense of inevitability, highlighting regional variations despite similar economic contexts as evidence of a more complex reality. Instead, she suggested we focus on the importance of influential actors in political and public life, viewing social change as contingent upon the possibilities for different social groups to be visible and vocalised in the public sphere.
Commenting on Sonja’s research, Anita Klingler (doctoral student in history at Edinburgh) provided some further points for discussion. She highlighted the possibility for other transnational comparisons in educational policy, such as with Britain or Italy, and raised the question of whether Saarland, administered by France until 1956, adopted French or West German ideas of democracy and authority within educational systems. Responding to these points, Sonja acknowledged the lack of research into other countries’ education policies and argued that from a German perspective, British and American schools and universities represented a democratic ideal to aspire to, even when the reality – for example, British public schools – fell short of this image. In the case of Saarland, Sonja added that student newspapers only proliferated after the transition to German administration, further emphasising the importance of political context in driving democratisation within education.
The session ended with a wide-ranging discussion, which lasted for over an hour. Sonja was grilled about the methodological and empirical foundations of her work, and she responded superbly to the many different questions. The very open discussion between staff, postgraduates and undergraduates was proof that, under these unusual circumstances, it is possible to break down some of the hierarchies of the university. Long may this continue!
Mathew Nicolson is an MSc by Research student in Scottish History. His research interests focus on the politics and culture of postwar Scotland with particular emphases on its ‘peripheral’ island groups and imperial connections. His dissertation explores Scottish responses to the Apartheid regime in South Africa.