https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/21/fkft-j21.html
Frankfurt university winds down research on National Socialism
By Marianne Arens
21 July 2015
If the Goethe University in Frankfurt gets its way, future teachers will
no longer receive instruction in the history of National Socialism. This
is the only conclusion to be drawn from the recent attacks by the
university’s education department on the Center for Research on National
Socialist Pedagogy.
The head of the Education Department has decided that student attendance
of lectures on National Socialist pedagogy will receive little or no
official recognition. Students in the teacher training program will no
longer receive any credit points, while students in the master’s program
in education will, in future, receive only half as many credit points as
previously. The credit points correspond to the “certificates” that were
previously awarded to students as proof of their academic achievement.
The short statement from the department and the Academy for Educational
Research and Teacher Education does not deny depriving student teachers
of credit points. In a bureaucratic manner, it refers to the “joint
agreement of all German states,” produced at the Culture Ministry
Conference on Teacher Education. According to this agreement, topics
studied have to concentrate on “instruction, training, diagnostics, and
school development.” National Socialist pedagogy, which is ascribed the
status of a “special topic,” is considered a “requirement neither in
Frankfurt nor in other German or international institutions of teacher
education,” the statement reads.
The Research Center for National Socialist Pedagogy was set up four
years ago as a pilot project at Frankfurt University. By 2013, it had
worked out a two-semester course of study aimed at providing all student
teachers and pedagogy students with a knowledge of National Socialism,
its crimes and ideology. This course of study has now been carried out
successfully three times.
The lectures were always well attended and were frequently overflowing.
Professor Benjamin Ortmeyer, who leads the research center, made
comparative analyses of pedagogical writings during the period of
National Socialism, and researched topics such as National Socialist
propaganda against the workers movement and the enforced conformity of
opinion (Gleichschaltung) of the Frankfurt University during the Third
Reich.
Ortmeyer invited Theresienstadt concentration camp survivor Trude
Simonsohn to one of his lectures. Another time, he spoke about Josef
Mengele, the concentration camp doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, who had
written his doctoral dissertation in Frankfurt on “race research” and
about whom the professor has written a book ( Beyond the Hippocratic
Oath: Dr. Mengele and the Goethe University ).
The past four years have clearly shown that the course of study on
National Socialist pedagogy answers a growing demand. The study of the
Third Reich by prospective teachers is all the more important, since the
German university and media establishment has evinced a clear trend
towards downplaying the role of National Socialism and the lessons of
the World War II.
This historical revisionism is closely connected with the revival of
German militarism and the aggressive foreign policy of the German
government. For example, Herfried Münkler, who teaches political science
at the Humboldt University in Berlin, said at the beginning of the year
in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “It is barely possible to conduct a
responsible policy in Europe based on the notion: We are to blame for
everything.” Münkler argues openly for German hegemony in Europe.
Münkler’s colleague Gunther Hellmann is also pushing for a new foreign
policy strategy on the part of the German government. He wrote a book
for the Munich Security Conference in 2015 and promotes the new white
paper of the armed forces on the web site of the Defense Ministry.
Consequently, it cannot be viewed as accidental that the university
management refuses to secure the Center for Research on National
Socialist Pedagogy in its curriculum. The department has cut even the
modest funding that it had previously provided to the academic staff at
the research center, who subsist largely on third party funding provided
by the Hans Böckler Foundation, which is close to the trade unions. The
presidium will temporarily provide funding, but this is only guaranteed
until May 2016.
One of the topics that the research center has already examined
illustrates how important the continuation of its work would be. This
topic is the enforced conformity of opinion (Gleichschaltung) and the
role of the university rector, the infamous Ernst Krieck. In 1939,
Krieck wrote, “as in the city of Frankfurt, so also at its university,
Marxist ideology and the Jews of a foreign type penetrate and advance.
During the epoch of systems, ever more Jews and supporters of Marxism
gained academic chairs. … All these elements must be wiped out. … At the
same time, the student body will also be purified of them.”
The passage can be found on a panel in the exhibit that was created by
students at the university for its 75-year anniversary celebration in
1989: “The brown seizure of power. University of Frankfurt 1930-1945.”
The exhibit documents the book burning, suppression and expulsions,
“race research and hereditary biology,” and every kind of active support
that the Goethe University gave to fascism.
The exhibit plates are still hanging in the old cafeteria building at
the Bockenheim campus. Their days are numbered, however, since the
university moved to a new location at the Westend campus five years ago.
Although the hundred year anniversary of the university was celebrated
with great pomp last year, there was no comparable effort or expense put
into examining its National Socialist past, and no concrete plans have
yet been made to move the exhibit to the new location.
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