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Elementary School Teachers and the Struggle against Social Democracy in Wilhelmine Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Marjorie Lamberti
Marjorie Lamberti*
Affiliation:
Middlebury College in Vermont
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Extract

Even before the Reichstag defeated the renewal of the law banning the Social Democratic party in January 1890, Emperor William II was ready to discard Bismarck's policy of repression and to use pedagogy as a weapon against socialism. In an order sent to the Prussian State Ministry on 1 May 1889, the king of Prussia and German emperor demanded that the schools make a greater effort to refute socialist theories and to impart to the pupils a “healthy” view of society and the state. He proposed that the instruction of history cover more closely the modern era and especially the social policies of the Hohenzollern dynasty, from the abolition of serfdom to the sickness and old age insurance legislation of the 1880s, “in order to show that the rulers of Prussia have always considered it their duty to improve the living conditions of the laboring classes” and that “in the future workers can expect justice and security only under the protection and care of the king at the head of the state.” The emperor wanted the teachers to describe the menace of revolutionary socialism in such dark colors that the pupils would be “filled with revulsion and fear.”

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 73 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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55 Vorwärts, which never hesitated to jeer at the German Teachers' Association for not taking its opposition to a radical point and for clinging to the “liberal illusion” that school reforms could be achieved in a “class state,” conceded in 1912 that from any comparison of the association's newspaper with the speeches of Progressive party politicians, one must conclude that the teachers were more democratic and consistent in their position on educational reform than the vacillating Progressives in the House of Deputies. Vorwärts, 24 Mar. 1912, no. 71.Google Scholar

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61 Lamberti, , State, Society, and the Elementary School, ch. 5.Google Scholar

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68 On this incident, see Pädagogische Zeitung, 10 June 1909, 537–38. In an article exposing the league's plan to recruit and train elementary school teachers for antisocialist agitation, beginning with a course in the fall of 1908, Vorwärts on 2 Oct. 1908 exclaimed, “Is the supply from [these] teaching circles for the league's work so big.” On the league, see Fricke, Dieter, “Der Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie von seiner Gründung bis zu den Reichstagswahlen von 1907,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 7 (1959): 237–80; Hall, Alex, “The War of Words: Anti-Socialist Offensives and Counterpropaganda in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914,” Journal of Contemporary History 11 (1976): 11–42. Neither Fricke nor Hall discusses this attempt to train elementary school teachers for antisocialist agitation. Roger Chickering and Marilyn Shevin Coetzee note the active participation of numerous teachers in the Gymnasien and Realschulen in the politics of ultranationalism in their analyses of the social profile of the local leaders of two leagues. Chickering, Roger, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984), 114–15; Coetzee, Marilyn Shevin, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York, 1990), 88, 92–93.Google Scholar

69 Neue Preussische Zeitung, 21 Feb. 1912, no. 87; see also the debate sparked by Ackermann's allegations in the Prussian House of Deputies in Sten. Berichte, 15 Mar. 1912, 2867ff.Google Scholar

70 Hagener, , Radikale Schulreform, 98, 221–25; Milberg, , Schulpolitik, 92. See also Stöhr, Wolfgang, Lehrer und Arbeiterbewegung: Entstehung und Politik der ersten Gewerkschaftsorganisation der Lehrer in Deutschland von 1920–1923 (Marburg, 1978), 150ff.Google Scholar

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73 Sten. Berichte, 21 Apr. 1910, 4399ff.; ibid., 11 Mar. 1911, 3768–70; ibid 21 Mar 1912, 3291–97; ibid., 22 Mar. 1912, 3382–86.Google Scholar

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75 See the full disclosure of how the Breslau proposal was torpedoed in Vorwärts, 21 May 1910, no. 116. The newspaper reproached the leaders of the association for seeking a safe refuge behind the “fiction of political neutrality” rather than fighting more directly for a teacher's political right to support the Social Democratic party, as Paulsen, Wilhelm, an elementary school teacher from Hamburg, had done. On the other hand, the right-wing press attacked the association for not ousting the Socialist teachers. See Neue Preussische Zeitung, 21 May 1910, no. 232, and the articles in Die Post and the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, quoted at length in “Stimmen der Presse zur Deutschen Lehrerversammlung in Strassburg,” Pädagogische Zeitung, 2 June 1910, 531–32.Google Scholar

76 See the stenographic report in Pädagogische Zeitung, 13 June 1912, 461. Quoting Röhl's speech at the convention of 1912 out of context, Wolfgang Stöhr's analysis of the prewar period gives a misleading picture of the German Teachers' Association's opposition to Social Democracy. See Stöhr, , Lehrer und Arbeiterbewegung, 32, 36.Google Scholar

77 Vorwärts, 26 May 1912, no. 121; ibid., 31 May 1912, no. 124.Google Scholar

78 For the text of the appeal, see Pädagogische Zeitung, 6 Mar. 1913, 186–87. Riding on the Pan-German bandwagon, Friedrich Rommel, a Gymnasium teacher in Berlin, also called on elementary school teachers to reaffirm their patriotism and disavow Heinrich Scharrelmann and other radical pedagogs in Bremen in “Kämpfe unserer Lehrerschaft,” Die Grenzboten 72 (1913): 605–9.Google Scholar

79 The Social Democrats had a high regard for Wolgast and other members of the German Teachers' Association who worked to improve the quality of children's literature. See Die Neue Zeit 16 (1897–98), vol. 1, 612–17; ibid., 22 (1903–4), vol. 1, 153–54.Google Scholar

80 On the controversy over their pamphlet, Der väterländische Gedanke in der Jugendliteratur, see Pädagogische Zeitung, 24 Oct. 1912, 840–41; ibid., 31 Oct. 1912, 872; ibid., 21 Nov. 1912, 939; ibid., 28 Nov. 1912, 955; ibid., 5 Dec. 1912, 977–79; ibid., 12 Dec. 1912, 977–1001, 1015; Neue Preussische Zeitung, 24 Jan. 1913, no. 40; Sten. Berichte, 11 Apr. 1913, 13887–902.Google Scholar

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82 Pädagogische Zeitung, 6 Mar. 1913, 186.Google Scholar

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