1. Bringing Back the Prussian Professor:
The Rehabilitation of German Higher Education
Under American Occupation, 1945-1949
Michael E. Dobe
Modern European Research Seminar
Final Paper
December 16, 1994
Illustration Entitled “The Freedom of Science”
Which Appeared in the Satirical Journal Simplicissimus in 1900

2. Cover illustration taken from Kaisermanoever: Zwanzig Erzaelungen
von der Gruenderzeit bis zum Vorabend des ersten Weltkrieges
(Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1978), p. 353.

3. 1
As part of a larger project of indicting Germany for not
coming to terms with its Nazi past, the German film The Nasty
Girl offers a filmic image of a German professor from the 1980s
which is reminiscent of printed images of the German professor
around the turn of the century. 1 Prof. Dr. Juckenack is,
curiously, not an unrepentant Nazi but rather a latter day
Ordinarius of the sort one would expect to see strutting in a
military manner across the pages of the satirical journal
Simplicissimus somewhere in the Wilhelmine Reich. 2 He is not so
much a racial anti-Semite as a conservative bureaucrat, a pillar
of state authority for whom a shameful Nazi past is something one
invokes governmental authority to hide.
The film brings the viewer to imagin e German education in
the post-war era as bearing a striking resemblance to education
in the late nineteenth century, leaving one impressed by the
writer’s ability to use images of the German past to destabilize
the present. It also prods us as historians to reexamine the
historical record to determine how the process of denazifying and
reforming German higher education after the end of the Second
World War reshaped understandings of Germany’s Nazi past.
Inspired by the skillful rendering of images in The Nasty Girl,
1 Michael Verhoeven, prod. The Nasty Girl (Miramax Films, 1990).
2 Ordinarius is the title given to a senior tenured professor in
the German university. As heads of an academic departments, they
exercised virtual dictatorial control over other members of the
faculty as well as over students.

4. 2
this paper will interrogate ways in which the Germans under
occupation, along with their American occupiers, employed images
of the German past at the Stunde Null to rehabilitate German
higher education.
In this film, the young Bavarian heroine's attempt to
uncover her home town's history under National Socialism is
frustrated by the resistance of many elderly notables, but none
offers such vociferous and efficacious resistance as Professor
Juckenack. This conflict between professor and student is a
central tension in the film and serves as a commentary on the
state of the academy in West Germany at the historical moment
just prior to reunification. Professor Juckenack denies Sonya
access to archives, threatens to destroy her if she reveals his
own Nazi past, and actually brings her to court for defamation of
character when she does so. This professor is guardian, not of
any reified freedom of academic inquiry, but of his own status in
society. 3
When threatened with legal action by the profe ssor, Sonya
seeks the assistance of another elderly man, one with knowledge
of the professor's Nazi past. The film argues that he had been
victimized by the American occupation forces at the end of the
3Recent scholarship has demonstrated the problematic nature of
concepts of “free scientific inquiry.” On the development of
archival research and scientific history in the nineteenth
century see Bonnie G, Smith “Gender and the Practice of
Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the

5. 3
Second World War. While the Americans absolved the real Nazis,
like Professor Juckenack, they interned this hapless soul for his
Communist sympathies. The film leads one to believe that
Juckenack, an ardent young Nazi nicknamed “Brown Heinrich”, is
the kind of person the Americans allowed to rebuild German higher
education after the war.
Yet, the professor of the late nineteenth century was not a
heroic figure for the Americans occupying Germany at the end of
the Second World War. The first task which the American
occupation forces faced in reconstructing German education after
the Second World War was denazification, and with this the
demilitarization of the German professoriate. The American Joint
Chiefs of Staff Directive (JCS) 1067 provided guidance for
reconstructing German education. After closing all Nazi
educational institutions, “a coordinated system of control will
be established designed completely to eliminate Nazi and
militaristic doctrines and to encourage the development of
democratic ideas”. 4 JCS 1067 provided the American military
governors with orders not only to eliminate Nazi texts,
curriculum, and personnel, but also to inculcate democratic
Nineteenth Century,” unpublished paper presented to the Modern
European History Seminar, Rutgers University (November 1994).
4 Pollock, James K., James H. Meisel, and Harry L. Bretton, eds.
Germany Under Occupation: Illustrative Materials and Documents
(Ann Arbor, Michigan: George Wahr Publishing Co., 1949. p. 82).
Nazi schools included the Adolf Hitler Schulen, Napolas and
Ordensburgen, as well as Nazi organizations within other
organizations.

6. 4
values in the defeated German population. The mandate of
education officers in occupied Germany encompassed a charge to
reform German education in a way which would make our goose-
stepping professor from Simplicissimus a thing of the past. 5
There is a certain irony to a military government of
occupation being ordered to demilitarize a foreign population and
spread ideas about democracy in a defeated nation. Yet the more
immediate task, that of conducting a purge of Nazi personnel,
also proved to be extremely complicated. Many at the time
thought the task of denazification doomed from the very start,
and the historical literature is full of critical accounts of the
occupation which explain the failures of the denazification of
personnel in the American Zone. As in The Nasty Girl, American
and British writers have pointed out since the late 1940s that
the Cold War all too often made allies of unregenerate Nazis and
Americans in the struggle against Bolshevism. 6
5James F. Tent, “Denazification of Higher Education in U.S.
Occupied Germany, 1945-1949,” In Manfred Heinemann, ed.
Hochschuloffiziere und Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens in
Westdeutschland 1945-1952 . (Universität Hannover:
Forschungsstelle EDV, 19900. 9-15.
6 Ingo Mueller, Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). For works on the
failure of denazification see John H. Herz, "The Fiasco of
Denazification in Germany," Political Science Quarterly 63
(1948), pp. 569-594; William E. Griffith "Denazification in the
United States Zone of Germany," Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences (January 1950), pp. 68-76; John D.
Montgomery, Forced to be Free: The Artificial Revolution in
Germany and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957);

7. 5
In describing the American occupation of Germany, historians
have recently allowed for some measure of success in the American
program of "reeducation" and "reorientation," particularly in the
sense that this program pertained to the process of democratizing
Germany. These historians point out that the Americans wanted
defeated Germany to rebuild its own educational structure, with a
minimum of American guidance. By giving the Germans substantial
control over their own educational system early on in the
occupation, the American Military Government gave Germany
practical experience in the process of democratic self-
determination. According to this view, the Americans "retreated
to victory." 7
When explaining American policies toward German education
reform during the occupation, the fundamental role in educational
reconstruction of American and German views of the German
educational tradition (views in particular of the experience of
education under National Socialism and in the Weimar Republic)
form a basic starting point for analysis. Institutional
Constantine FitzGibbon, Denazification (London: Michael Joseph,
1969); Tom Bower, The Pledge Betrayed: America and Britain and
the Denazification of Postwar Germany (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday & Company, 1982); and Lutz Niethammer, Die
Mitläuferfabrik: Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns (
Berlin: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz GmbH, 1982).
7 Edward N. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat
to Victory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977). James
F. Tent notes his substantial agreement with Peterson in his
Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-
Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

8. 6
histories of the American Government of Occupation have addressed
the role of historical consciousness in educational
reconstruction. James Tent has pointed out that several of the
Army civil affairs officers charged with reconstructing German
education were university professors or administrators who had
themselves written on the history of German education. 8
University reform and the reform of elementary and secondary
education are generally treated as two distinct areas by
historians. A current history of the Federal Republic points to
two different dynamics which historians have generally identified
in the American-German dialogue over education reform during the
occupation. According to this view, both Americans and Germans
admired the German university tradition as representative of
another, better Germany. This ensured the rapid reopening of the
universities. By way of contrast, on the level of elementary and
secondary education Americans are said not to have admired the
German tradition, but rather to have sought fundamental reforms
in order to "democratize" Germany by creating a single-tracked
secular elementary and secondary school for all German youth.
German educators and politicians, given substantial control over
8 James F. Tent. Mission on the Rhine. The two most prominent
examples of American military governors who were also prominent
historians of German education are Edward Yarnall Hartshorne,
Jr. and Thomas Alexander. For examples of their work see Edward
Yarnall Hartshorne, Jr. The German Universities and National
Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), Thomas
Alexander and Beryl Parker, The New Education in the German
Republic (New York: John Day Company, 1929).

9. 7
their internal affairs by the Americans, chose tradition instead
of adopting this reform ideal of a Gesamtschule (common
elementary school). 9
The reconstruction of education at all levels in occupied
Germany had many elements in common, however. The degree to
which both elementary and secondary education were reconstructed
based upon the exigencies of the moment should not cause us to
loose sight of the assumption which Americans in the occupation
government made that Germany was in need of intellectual and
spiritual regeneration as well as the restoration of its physical
plant. As General Lucius Clay recalled, the reconstruction of
German education meant that the Germans had to overcome both
physical and spiritual devastation. In his memoir of the
occupation he writes that
Many German school buildings had been destroyed, others
badly damaged, and still others were occupied either by
troops or by displaced persons. Teaching staffs
contained many ardent Nazis; in one city more than 60
percent of the teaching staff had belonged to the
party. Textbooks were so impregnated with Nazi ideology
that even mathematics problems were expressed in
military terms and logistics. German youth learned to
add and subtract guns and bullets rather than apples
and oranges. 10
9 See Dennis L. Bark and David R. Gress, A History of West
Germany, Vol. I: From Shadow to Substance 1945-1963 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993).
10 Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany. reprint ed. (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 299.

10. 8
For Clay, the task of saving German youth from “lasting habits of
indolence or violence,” could best be accomplished by opening up
schools as rapidly as possible. German youth, raised under
Nazism, now needed to learn how to count fruit instead of
munitions. The great threat to German youth was no longer the
Nazis, but rather the deleterious effects of chaotic living
circumstances.
The priority for University reconstruction was also placed
on restoring the orderly functioning of society. All of the
German universities had been closed in May of 1945 with the
capitulation of the Third Reich. The reconstruction of German
higher education would begin that summer with the reopening of
the universities in the French and British sectors. Fearing for
the physical health of occupied Germany and not wishing to fall
behind the other occupation forces, the Americans reopened the
medical faculty at Heidelberg University. On August 15, 1945,
the newly appointed rector, Dr. Karl Jaspers, gave the keynote
address. He began his speech with an interpretation of the
recent German past. The German universities could reopen because
secretly the core of the university remained in tact.
There were teachers and students whose minds preserved
their freedom. Something has been salvaged, in spite
of dismissals on the largest scale, in spite of
interference in teaching and research, in spite of the
destruction of our ancient constitution and self-
government . . . The fact that the spirit of science
could not actually be destroyed makes it possible today

11. 9
for the university to start anew, though on a limited
scale only. 11
Post-war German education would thus draw on a professionalism,
grounded in the "spirit of science," which Jaspers claimed had
not been corrupted by the Nazi years.
At the risk of historical anachronism, one must ask if
Jaspers was correct in this estimate. It is extremely
significant that the rehabilitation of German higher education in
the American zone began with the reopening of medical facilities.
Recent historical scholarship has shown us that the “Final
Solution” was itself the product of a biomedical vision of
society, a vision which flourished in the Nazi universities. The
Nazi state was a biocracy in which racialized images of inferior
and superior human beings enabled eugenics and ultimately
genocide. 12
Beginning with the medical faculties, one could not end
there. Narrow specialization, and not racialized science, was
the reason for the nazification of education according to
Jaspers. The best defense would be a liberal education for all
who attended the university. This was a vision which the
11 The German word for science, Wissenshaft, encompassing both
the natural and social sciences includes the humanistic
disciplines such as literature and history. Karl Jaspers, "The
Rededication of German Scholarship," The American Scholar 15
(1946): 180-188. James F. Tent points to the importance of this
speech in starting a wave of the German university reopenings.
See Mission on the Rhine, pp. 58-60.

12. 10
American university officers shared with German academicians.
There was no indictment of German science by the Americans in the
occupation government. A common understanding among occupiers and
occupied of the history of German education allowed for their
reconstruction according to a model perceived as "ancient," but
having in actuality first received legal codification at the
founding of the University of Berlin in 1810. Wilhelm von
Humbolt's model of higher education, steeped in Enlightenment
precepts, placed the university in the service of the Prussian
state. As counterbalance to state control, Humbolt stressed the
conception of the university as the site of “free scientific
inquiry.” In the view of those who would reconstruct the
universities under American occupation, it was not until the
Nazi years that the balance between state control and academic
freedom became untenable. In 1945 they sought to return to the
pre-1933 university, and thereby elided the entire issue of Nazi
racism which we now understand lay at the very foundations of the
Nazi academy. 13
History, as Wissenschaft, was one among the sciences to
which Jaspers referred. The integrity of historical
science, as perceived by the German historical profession,
12 For example, see Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine
Under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
13 On the Humboltean model of the university see Daniel Fallon,
The German University: A Heroic Ideal in Conflict With the Modern
World (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1980).

13. 11
rested upon the perseverance of German historicism as an
objective method of inquiry despite the "politicization" of
history under the Third Reich. Amidst those historians who
had maintained the historicist tradition during the Third
Reich and thereby "preserved their freedom" during the Nazi
years, the historian Gerhard Ritter was perhaps the most
vocal in the immediate post-war period. As early as
December 24, 1945, Ritter published an article in Die
Gegenwart, a fortnightly German review operating under
French occupation in Freiburg, in which he explained how he
was able to "publish such independent views on historical-
political questions" even under National Socialism. He
noted that Nazi party functionaries who supervised
university education in the Third Reich had been too ill-
educated to understand the subtleties of the lessons on
contemporary politics which Ritter had drawn in discussing
earlier periods in European history. More importantly, the
guild of professors and administrators who continued to run
the universities in the Nazi years had also protected him --
as a senior member of the profession -- from persecution by
Nazi cadres. Ritter argued that for younger professors,
resisting Nazification had not been possible.
The younger men, those who constituted "the succession"
in the learned world, found it much harder to ignore
the demands of the Party for active participation in

14. 12
its ranks. . . without membership in the Party or, at
least, in the SA, a young teacher had hardly any chance
of appointment. I know of few exceptions to this
rule. 14
For Ritter, there was a key generational aspect to the task of
reconstructing German education in the post-war period. Because
the younger generation had abandoned the scientific tradition of
historicism by becoming Nazified, it was up to the older
generation of scholars who had persevered to reorient German
scholarship.
Americans owed a great debt to the German historicist
tradition. There was a sense in which the Americans were
repaying an intellectual debt to the German universities by
working for their rapid reconstruction, a debt which was at once
intellectual and personal. Eminent Harvard historian Sidney B.
Fay, having himself studied at a university in Wilhelmine
Germany, wrote in early 1946 of "our responsibility for German
universities." As occupiers, the Americans had the
responsibility to restore the German university system as one of
the institutions "which have survived the Nazi shipwreck."
Pointing to the debt which the American academy owed to German
14 Gerhard Ritter, "The German Professor in the Third Reich."
Review of Politics (April 1946). It is interesting to contrast
this favorable view of the accomplishments of German historical
scholarship during the Third Reich with those of Felix Gilbert,
who served as an intelligence officer in the occupation.
According to Gilbert, very little of value was produced by German
historians in the Nazi years. See Felix Gilbert, "German
Historiography during the Second World War: A Bibliographical
Survey." The American Historical Review 53 (October 1947): 50-58.

15. 13
universities, Fay lamented the destruction of the physical plant
of the universities and pointed to the most difficult task of
recreating the faculties. He too feared the Nazifaction of the
younger generation and noted that "the number of men left who
are genuine scholars and who managed to keep their hands clean of
Nazi pollution is a small fraction of what will be needed to run
the universities." He saw the task of reconstructing German
scholarship, in much the same way as Ritter, as a task for the
older generation of scholars. Among others, Fay mentioned
Friedrich Meinecke, Max Plank, and Karl Jaspers as exemplars of
the “unpolluted” few who, though advanced in age, would rebuild
the German academy in the name of true science. Given the Nazi
discourse on race “pollution,” this use of terminology by Sydney
Fay is at best insensitive and at worse betrays a total ignorance
of the role of racism in the German academy. 15
The Americans were, however, not only repaying a debt. They
were also using the Germans to make a good science/Nazi science
dichotomy which helped paper over the highly politicized nature
of American Cold War science, now financed by the American
15 Sidney B. Fay, "Our Responsibility for German Universities"
Forum (January 1946): 396-402. It is of more than passing
interest that Fay would soon translate Friedrich Meinecke's Die
Deutsche Katastrophe into English. See also Fay's introduction
as translator of the English version of Friedrich Meinecke, The
German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1950). On the American debt to German
historicism see Fritz Stern, "German History in America ", Central
European History 19 (2): 131-163.

16. 14
government for military research primarily on atomic weapons.
Clearly, the nascent Cold War conflict with Soviet Russia made
the German Ordinarius a far more palatable image than he had been
under the de-Prussianization regime. Now we had Russia to deal
with, and America needed German technology. With American war
heroes like General Patton hoping for a march on Moscow, the
readily available image of the Prussian defenders of Western
Civilization against the Slavs of the East was perhaps too much
to resist. 16
Sidney Fay was in a unique position to understand the
situation of the German universities in the post-war period,
and he was also in a position to resuscitate the Prussian
professor as moral exemplar for a new Germany. His son-in-
law, Prof. Edward Hartshorne, had studied under Meinecke in
the mid-1930s and was at this time an Army civil affairs
captain working to reopen the German universities in the
American zone as quickly as possible. Hartshorne's view of
the recent history of German universities was very similar
to that of his father-in-law (and not surprisingly to that
of his mentor Meinecke). He too saw the task of
16 On the American programmatic exploitation of German technology
in the Cold War see John Gimbel, Science, Technology and
Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Post-war Germany
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). On the role of
racial ideologies on the Eastern Front during W.W.II, see Omer
Bartov Hitler’s Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

17. 15
reconstruction as an exercise in restoration. In 1937 he
had written that under National Socialism
the German university has lost in essentials the signs
of a free institution. The privileges which had helped
preserve it from the interference of the State Power
have melted away. Its semiautonomous administration
and the traditional independence have collapsed before
the impact of a powerful new ethic which demands
undivided loyalty to the demands of the social
community.
Hartshorne went on to trace the freedom of inquiry which marked
the German universities to Martin Luther's "freedom of a
Christian man." This was the American equivalent of Jaspers's
formulation of an ancient constitution of the German university
which occupiers and occupied should work to restore. For
Hartshorne and Fay, the National Socialist period had been a
deviation from German tradition in higher education, a tradition
which was basically sound. Here one finds that the
pronouncements of the Germans and the Americans correspond quite
closely. 17
Yet the impulse for Americans to restore the German
universities to their pre-Nazi glory was not unalloyed. Other
Americans were not so sanguine as Hartshorne and Fay about the
benefits to be reaped in returning Germany to its traditional
system of university education through the good offices of an
aging professoriate. Indeed, some Military Government officers
17 Hartshorne, The German Universities and National Socialism , p.
153.

18. 16
and influential American observers of Germany in the immediate
post-war years reacted very negatively to what they referred to
as the Prussian influence on German education. The Prussian
model of education, which in their view continued to dominate
both the schools and the universities in Germany, needed reform.
At the opening of the theological faculty of Wuerzburg
University on October 19, 1945, 1LT Russell H. McIntosh warned
the assembled faculty of the dangers of those antidemocratic
values which German education had inculcated in the population at
least as far back as Frederick the Great. It would be up to the
educators of a new Germany to choose the democratic way of life
and inculcate this into their students. Education in the new
Germany would have to proceed from an entirely new basis, since
it never had the marks of "a free institution" as Hartshorne had
indicated. German educational tradition, antidemocratic and tied
over the past century to the interests of the Prussian Junker
class, was no basis on which to build the new Germany. 18
This hard line toward German educational reconstruction
corresponded quite well with the approach of the first chief of
the military government’s Education and Religious Affairs Branch,
181LT Russell H. McIntosh, "Address to the Theological Faculty of
the University of Wuerzburg in the Ceremony of the Re-opening of
that Institution," Fiche no. 3-A-193 in The U.S. Occupation of
Germany, Educational Reform, 1945-1949 , Gary H. Tsuchimochi, ed.
(Congressional Information Service, 1991). For an example of an
exile German historian who criticized German educational
"peculiarity" see Frederick W. Craemer, "The Reeducation of
Germany: An American Experiment,” Forum (October 1945): 114-119

19. 17
the organization charged with the reconstruction of education in
the American Zone. Dr. Thomas Alexander, a student of Weimar
education, took a harsh view of traditional German education.
According to the man who succeeded him as General Clay’s cultural
affairs advisor, he had a “troublesome” view of the Germans, for
he thought that the educational structure that existed “had been
responsible in no small part for the fact that the Germans had
been the aggressor in two world wars.” 19
Even during Alexander’s tenure, restorative tendencies
predominated in higher education reconstruction. Despite the
critical view of Prussian hegemony in education, which was also
voiced by Germans in the Rhineland and numerous German exile
historians living in the United States, the former celebrants of
Prussia-Germany provided the greatest sense of legitimacy to the
cause of German educational reconstruction. Bent by age, living
on the verge of starvation, and with their self-confidence shaken
by the Nazi experience, the older generation of German
academicians still retained moral authority. 20
19Herman B. Wells, “Higher Education Reconstruction in Postwar
Germany”, In Manfred Heinemann, ed. Hochschuloffiziere und
Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens in Westdeutschland 1945-1952 ,
pp. 43-52.
20 Felix Gilbert recalled a visit to Meinecke’s quarters in the
fall of 1945, where it became apparent that Meinecke and his wife
relied on handouts from the Americans in order to eat. See the
concluding chapter of Felix Gilbert’s A European Past: Memoirs
1995-1945 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988).

20. 18
The Americans of the military government were personally
involved in this process of lending legitimacy to the scholarship
and academic leadership of this older generation. It was Edward
Y. Hartshore who found a publisher for The German Catastrophe
in 1946. In this work Friedrich Meinecke set the tone for
the approach to National Socialism in Germany under American
occupation. In this work, Meinecke portrayed the appointment
of Hitler as chancellor as one of the tragic accidents
(Zufälle) of history. Though he was willing to attempt
some insight into the roots of National Socialism, the
Nazi state itself lay outside the stream of German
history. As Robert Pois observed in his study of
Meinecke's involvement in twentieth Century politics, The
German Catastrophe demonstrated Meinecke's "tendency to view
the Nazi period as a nihilistic aberration and thus
relatively opaque to historical investigation." The
Americans were not about to force on the Germans any other
interpretation. 21
21 Friedrich Meinecke, Die Deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden:
Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1946), 82, 95. In a chapter devoted
to the rise of Massenmachiavellismus (machiavellian thinking in
mass society), Meinecke argued that this trend represented a
spiritual crisis which was endemic to "the West" as a whole. In
a chapter on the role of coincidence and general trends in
history, Meinecke recalls that when he heard that Hitler had been
appointed chancellor, his response was "That was not necessary."
Hitler's appointment did not represent the inevitable response to
a general socio-political trend, but was rather attributable to
the coincidence of Hindenburg's personal weakness. Robert A.
Pois. Friedrich Meinecke and German Politics in the Twentieth

21. 19
As an American state department official observed, the
American occupation forces were, by the Fall of 1946, ceding the
intellectual high ground to the German "gerontocracy." 22 It was
with the assent of the Americans that the older generation of
German scholars reassumed positions of leadership in the German
universities after the war. In the 1960s, scholars would
discover that an understanding of National Socialism as "a ship
wreck" or a "catastrophe" did not allow for coming to terms with
the broader implications of recent German history. Yet it was
apparent to critics of reconstruction policy after the war that
the elitism of German universities had contributed to the rise of
National Socialism. These critics were quick to point out that
in an academic-political sense this included the provision that
the "freedom of science" guaranteed the same complete authority
to senior tenured faculty as heads of institutes at German
universities in the post-war period as they had exercised in the
nineteenth century. Yet there were few alternatives, as few
exiles wanted to return to a Germany which had once persecuted
them. Furthermore, a visiting professorship in Germany of the
late 1940s was very unappealing to most non-German academicians
in the United States. Few American academicians responded to
invitations to come to Germany and help reconstruct German
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 151-
2.
22 Eugene N. Anderson, "Report on Trip to Germany - Fall 1946,"
Fiche no. 1-A-58 in The U.S. Occupation of Germany.

22. 20
education, despite the fact that Germany was quickly becoming the
ideological front line in the Cold War. 23
This mixture of shortages of professors and destruction of
the physical plant of the university was particularly acute in
Berlin, capital of the defeated nation and for many the symbol of
Prussian militarism. Berlin had been the scene of highly
destructive combat at the end of the war. The University of
Berlin, known as the Friedrich-Wilhelms Universitaet, was located
in the Soviet Zone. The war had seen the destruction of 50
percent of its buildings. Having served as a nazified showplace
during the war the Berlin University’s professoriate was
particularly heavily implicated in the crimes of National
Socialism, and many had simply fled at the approach of the Red
Army. 24
23 In the very specific sense of history faculties, this lead to
what George Iggers has called the "exoneration of the German
national tradition." In a more general sense it meant the
resurgence of what Fritz Ringer labeled a conservative academic
class of "German mandarins". See Georg G. Iggers, The German
Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical
Thought from Herder to the Present , 2nd rev. ed. (Weslyean
University Press, 1983; Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the
German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). On the fate of exile
historians see Catherine T. Epstein, A Past Renewed: A Catalog of
German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States After
1933, 1st ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press and The
German Historical Institute, 1993).
24Hubert Laitko, ed. Wissenschaft in Berlin: Von Anfängen bis zum
Neubeginn nach 1945 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987). On the
reopening of the Humbolt University see Henny Maskolat “Die
Widereroeffnung der Berliner Universitaet im Januar 1946” In

23. 21
The Soviet vision of university reconstruction, as its
vision of reconstruction in general, favored revolution over
evolution. Where the Americans were “shocked by data that
revealed the small number of working class youth in university
enrollments,” the Soviets expected to find this. 25 They sought
to break down the barriers to higher education by immediately
establishing the Einheitsschule, or Soviet version of the single
elementary and secondary school for all German youth. In
addition, the Soviets gave preference to the children of workers
and farmers in admissions decisions. So convinced were they that
the class nature of German education had led to militarism,
imperialism, and ultimately fascism that they established an
entirely new system of university education called the Arbeiter
and Bauern Fakultaeten (Workers and Peasants Faculties), where
people could study who had not come from the privileged
background necessary for education in the Gymnasium, or
university preparatory program. 26
Conflict over the role of Marxism-Leninism at the Berlin
University was based in large part in differing approaches to the
Forschung und Wirken. Band I. Festschrift zur 150-Jahr-Feier der
Humbolt Universitaet zu Berlin 1810-1960 (Berlin: VEB Deutscher
Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1960), 605-627.
25Wells, 43.
26Ulrich Thiel. "Zur Geschichte der Arbeiter-und-Bauern-
Fakultäten in der DDR (1949-1955)." Ph.D. Dissertation, Freiberg,
Bergakad., Fak. für Gesellschaftswiss., Diss. A, 1987.

24. 22
relationship between politics and academic inquiry. Where the
leading intellectual lights in West Germany stressed the “value
free” nature of academic inquiry, the Germans in the Soviet zone
freely admitted that the university professor was a propagandist.
To Karl Jaspers, while “thought and research depend on the
political situation . . . the political events of the day are not
a topic for lectures at the university”. In stark contrast to
this stood the view of Juergen Kuczynski, a prominent Marxist
social scientist in the Soviet Zone. According to Kuczynski, the
university professor should propagandize. As he explained in an
article for the journal Forum, it was much more interesting (and
useful) to students if a professor explained that nineteenth
century economic history was driven by class interests than
simply to cite trends in international trade. This, argued
Kuczynski, was also part of anti-fascist propaganda. 27
In a much publicized case, a group of students at the Berlin
University ran afoul of the Ministry for Popular Education
(Ministerium fuer Volksbildung ) and were expelled from the Berlin
University. Curiously enough, the students Otto Hess, Otto
Stolz, and Joachim Schwartz were accused of being politicians and
not scholars. Quite clearly, they were conducting the wrong type
of propaganda in their publication Colloquium. Since Berlin was
27Karl Jaspers The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial
Press, 1947), pp. 9-10. Jürgen Kuczynski, "Soll ein
Universitätslehrer Propaganda treiben," Forum: Zeitschrift für
das Geistige Leben an den Deutschen Hochschulen 1, no. 2 (1947):
22-23.

25. 23
located deep within the Soviet Zone, the American military
government had an interest, both political and ideological, in
the request of these students to found a new university in the
American sector of Berlin. It was with General Clay’s blessing
that a the Free University of Berlin opened in Berlin-Dahlem in
November 1948. 28
The situation in Berlin was in many ways exceptional, but
the role of students in the founding of the Free University is
significant. When the Germans students looked for a rector for
their new university, they found a symbolic figure in the person
of Friedrich Meinecke. His very presence would be a powerful
symbol of continuities with the pre-1933 academy. With a little
coaxing from the Americans, the aging Meinecke accept the
position as the students’ choice for rector. 29
28 Some of the most important works on the founding of the Free
University include Siegward Lönnendonker, Freie Universität
Berlin: Gründung einer politischen Universität (Berlin: Duncker
und Humbolt GmbH, 1988); Bernd Rabehl, Am Ende der Utopie: Die
Politische Geschichte der Freien Universitaet Berlin (Berlin:
Argon Verlag, 1988); Ulrich Schneider, "Berlin, der Kalte Krieg,
und die Gründing der Freien Universität 1945-1949," Jahrbuch für
die Geschichte des Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 34 (1985): 37-101.
James F. Tent, The Free University of Berlin: A Political History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Information on
the founding students of the Free University was provided by Dr.
Armin Spiller, archivist of the Free University of Berlin, HSA
FUB: Kurzdok. d. Gruendungsstudenten der FU Berlin (prov.
intern), zsgest. v. Universitaetsarchiv FUB, 1987.
29On the relationship between Meinecke and the Americans see
Gilbert, A European Past: Memoirs 1995-1945.

26. 24
When Friedrich Meinecke spoke at the opening of the Free
University of Berlin, he referred to “the voice of youth” which
had demanded a new university and a “true locus of science and
its teachings”. In this address, he described his relationship
with the youth who had given the initiative for the founding of
the Free University as that of a grandfather, as he was indeed
the oldest faculty member of the new university community. He
attempted to normalize the university’s existence by likening the
intellectual relationship of these young scholars to their
immediate Nazi forbearers as that of father and son, a
relationship which is often marked by rebellion. It was only
natural, argued Meinecke, that the relationship of the academic
youth would be much more harmonious with their intellectual
grandfathers. As the older generation had resisted the
propaganda of national socialism, now their intellectual
grandchildren would carry forward the struggle against the
politicization of scholarship taking place at the Berlin
University. 30
Though the student participation in university government at
the Free University, from its founding onward, was progressive by
the standards of the times there were other signs of continuity
in the Free University which were more traditional. As the
30Friedrich Meinecke, “Die Stimme des Gewissens,” Colloquium 3:1
(1949):1 , as cited in Siegward Lönnendonker, et al., 55-56.
Tilman Fichter, and Claus Rietzschel, eds., Dokumentaton FU
Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin 1948 - 1964, Hochschule im
Umbruch Teil I-III 1945-1964 . (Berlin: 4. Dezember 1978).

27. 25
American education officer for Berlin noted, “like the West
German universities it was to a large extent a restoration of the
pre-Hitler institution with its elitist character, its rather
authoritarian professoriate, and its old-fashioned curricula.” 31
If this was the case for the most “progressive” of German
Universities, what can be said of the rest of West Germany?
At the Free University, as elsewhere in West Germany, the
discourse on “apolitical” scholarship, carried out at first to
differentiate the reeducated and reoriented Germans from the
Nazis, now served to institutionalize a hierarchy of power in the
Cold War. In this new discourse on the nature of academic
inquiry, traditionally-oriented academicians justified their
further preeminence in society through a mastery of “apolitical”
scholarship. Especially since the youth were co-opted at the
Free University, the appeals to objectivity were all the more
useful. German youth, threatened by concerns over their
nazification, could redeem themselves by becoming objective
scholars. In this way, the next generation of scholars aped the
manners of their grandfathers. This provides at least a partial
explanation of why, as the Nasty Girl implies, German education
in 1980s resembled German education in the late nineteenth
century.
31Carl G. Anthon, “My Work as Higher Education Advisor in Berlin:
A Brief Memoir”, In Manfred Heinemann, ed. Hochschuloffiziere und
Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens in Westdeutschland 1945-1952, p.
66.

28. 26
The price of rehabilitating German scholarship after the
Nazi dictatorship was the institutionalization of academic
conservatism and the return of the Prussian professor. When the
Federal Republic was founded in 1949, the political party which
assumed control of the new nation was the Christian Democratic
Union (CDU). The CDU’s campaign slogan was “Keine Experimente,”
or no experiments. This would be the slogan of the rehabilitated
German academy as well.