Authority and Democracy in Postwar France and West Germany, 1945–1968*

Authority and Democracy in Postwar France and West Germany, 1945–1968* Sonja Levsen Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg In a radio interview in 1966, Theodor Adorno severely criticized what he saw as the faults of the German attitude toward authority. He claimed that “even in the literature on education—and this really is something truly frightening and very German—we find no sign of that uncompromising support for education for maturity, which we should be able to take for granted. In the place of maturity we find there a concept of authority, of commitment, or whatever other name these hideosities are given, which is decorated and veiled by existential-ontological arguments which sabotage the idea of maturity. In doing so they work, not just implicitly but quite openly, against the basic conditions required for a democracy.”1 Adorno’s diagnosis was characteristic of German educational debates in the late 1960s. It echoed concerns that were common not only among left-wing intellectuals but also in growing segments of the German public. German education, in this view, tended to undervalue critical thinking and maturity (Mün- digkeit) and was impregnated by an ideology of authority that counteracted the principles of democracy. Intellectuals in the 1960s saw this “authoritarianism” as the base mentality upon which National Socialism had grown and viewed its persistence in the Federal Republic as a “very German” phenomenon, a vestige of the Nazi period. Motivated by the diagnosis of a democratic deficit in 1960s Germany, Theo- dor Adorno delivered a series of radio speeches to the German public. The thread * This article presents some of the findings of a research project on educational change in France and Germany between 1945 and the 1970s, which has been supported generously by the VolkswagenStiftung. I would like to thank the audiences at the Humboldt- University Berlin, the University of Hanover, the Ruhr-University Bochum, and the Uni- versity of Göttingen for their constructive feedback on the central arguments of this article. I am indebted to Till Kössler, Emile Chabal, Jörn Leonhard, Sandra Maß, Claudia Gatzka, Efi Avdela, Kiran Patel, Susannah Brooks, and Matthew Kidd for their critical readings of previous drafts of this article. 1 First published in 1970 as Theodor W. Adorno, “Erziehung zur Mündigkeit,” in Erziehung zur Mündigkeit: Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker, 1959–1969, ed. Gerd Kadelbach (Frankfurt, 1970), 140–55. The quote is taken from the English translation published in “Education for Maturity and Responsibility,” History of the Hu- man Sciences 12 (2009): 23. The Journal of Modern History 89 (December 2017): 812–850 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2017/8904-0003$10.00 All rights reserved. This content downloaded from 132.230.195.079 on March 25, 2019 06:10:36 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Authority and Democracy in Postwar France and West Germany 813 running through his speeches was the concept of “education for maturity,” and it was under this title that they were later published.2 While the German scholar of education Hellmut Becker suggested in the broadcast quoted above that the “non-education of children for maturity” was a “global” phenomenon, Adorno, as well as large parts of German society in the 1960s, interpreted it as a feature characteristic of West Germany.3 What makes the latter interpretation particu- larly interesting is the fact that it tends to inform historical accounts of German society in the 1950s, albeit in a modified form. The image of the early Federal Republic in historiography is that of a society marked by “authoritarian” traditions. Studies on postwar German history frequently use the term autoritär to characterize German mentalities, attitudes, and politics, with the mostly implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that an authoritarianism carried over from the Nazi period and hence the prevalence of “authority-fixated attitudes” distin- guished Germany from its Western neighbors.4 Thus, postwar Germans sup- posedly clung to “authoritarian patterns of behavior”; they were shaped by “authoritarian traditions” and had yet to get rid of “authoritarian structures.”5 Such judgments are often directly based on contemporary diagnoses, with one of the most cited witnesses being Ralf Dahrendorf, who in the early 1960s had con- 2 Theodor Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit: Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959–1969, ed. Gerd Kadelbach (Frankfurt, 1970). 3 Adorno, “Education,” 25. Adorno here concurs with Becker’s statement that this was not just a German problem; however, his phrasing and his earlier remarks in the dis- cussion make clear that he saw it as primarily a German problem. 4 Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Deutsche Zeitgeschichte nach 1945: Entwicklungen und Problemlagen der historischen Forschung der Nachkriegszeit,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 41 (1993): 1–29, 28; Dirk von Laak, “Der widerspenstigen Deutschen Zivilisierung: Zur politischen Kultur einer unpolitischen Gesellschaft,” in 50 Jahre Bun- desrepublik Deutschland: Daten und Diskussionen, ed. Eckart Conze and Gabriele Metz- ler (Stuttgart, 1999), 297–315, 203. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer criticize the “cliché of German authoritarianism” with regard to the nature of government in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, yet they still speak of “ingrained authoritarian traditions”; Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 19, 171. The terms “autoritär”/“authoritarian” also feature frequently in the chapters of the nonetheless excellent and very stimulating volumes by Arnd Bauer- kämper, Konrad H. Jarausch, and Marcus M. Payk, eds., Demokratiewunder: Transat- lantische Mittler und die kulturelle Öffnung Westdeutschlands 1945–1970 (Göttingen, 2005); and Detlef Junker et al., eds., The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, a Handbook, vol. 1, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, 2004). An earlier but still influential interpretation that centers on “authoritarian traditions” is Martin Greiffenhagen, “Vom Obrigkeitsstaat zur Demokratie: Die politische Kultur in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Politische Kultur in Westeuropa: Bürger und Staaten in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft, ed. Peter Reichel (Frankfurt, 1984), 52–76. 5 Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1955 (Oxford, 2006), 9. This content downloaded from 132.230.195.079 on March 25, 2019 06:10:36 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 814 Levsen cluded that Germany was suffering from an authoritarian “overhang.”6 While historians of the Federal Republic diagnose “authoritarianism” in a variety of as- pects of German culture, they usually incorporate the fields of education and child rearing into their analysis. Socialization and political attitudes are often un- derstood as being closely connected. Thus, an authoritarian West German “political culture” appears to be the product of authoritarian educational traditions.7 In historiography, the narrative of the “authoritarian overhang” is comple- mented by the interpretation that a process of liberalization since the late 1950s eroded the ideology of authority, thereby furthering Germany’s democratization and diminishing the differences between German and Western European attitudes and values. But as the author of the concept of “liberalization,” Ulrich Herbert, has noted, at the present state of research we know neither which as- pects of this process of transformation were specifically German, nor whether Germany was lagging behind Western European societies with regard to the democratization of political culture, the position of women, the inclusion of mi- norities—or parenting and teaching styles.8 6 See Ralf Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland (Munich, 1965), 473; Dahrendorf refers among others to Moritz Scheibe, “Auf der Suche nach der demokratischen Gesellschaft,” in Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980, ed. Ulrich Herbert (Göttingen, 2002), 245–77. 7 When Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba developed the concept of “political culture” in the early 1960s (Civic Culture. Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations [Princeton, NJ, 1963]), it had few repercussions on German debates at first, and the book was never translated. See Max Kase, “Sinn oder Unsinn des Konzepts ‘Politische Kultur’ für die vergleichende Politikforschung, oder auch: Der Versuch, einen Pudding an die Wand zu nageln,” in Wahlen und politisches System, ed. Max Kaase and Hans-Dieter Klingelmann (Opladen, 1983), 144–72. Since the 1980s, however, the concept of political culture has come to play a central role in debates about the early Federal Republic and “authoritarianism” among political scientists as well as historians. While authors use different definitions of political culture (with historians often refraining from definitions) and usually keep some distance from the concept of Almond and Verba, most usages rely on the idea of a close connection between socialization and political attitudes. See, e.g., the influential Martin and Sylvia Greiffenhagen, Ein schwieriges Vaterland: Zur Politischen Kultur Deutschlands (Munich, 1979), 22, 32. Wolfgang Bergem, Tradi- tion und Transformation: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung zur politischen Kultur in Deutschland

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