EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 395
position within the cultural, economic, social, and political systems of a
given society. These four key functions associated with educational pro-
cesses can be seen in societies ordered along democratic as well as au-
thoritarian or dictatorial lines. They provide the theoretical framework for
this chapter’s analysis of the two educational systems with fundamentally
diff erent basic coordinates in East and West Germany.
Not long after 1945, the educational systems in the two German states
began to develop in very divergent directions. Despite a shared heritage
and some ongoing points of interaction, two entirely diff erent educational
systems emerged within the context of the Cold War and the division of
Germany. This process of increasing disentanglement progressed consid-
erably in the 1950s. In West Germany, education became a core element
of the federalist system that was erected after 1945. From the very begin-
ning, the individual states (Länder) in West Germany insisted on the im-
portance of their “cultural sovereignty.” Although the federal government
was granted some jurisdiction of educational policy for the fi rst time by
a change in the Grundgesetz in 1969, its ability to shape the educational
system was still limited.^3 In contrast, the educational system in the GDR
was highly regulated by the centralized state and subject to the control
of the SED’s political apparatus; the states themselves were dissolved in
- As of 1963, Margot Honecker, the wife of Erich Honecker, stood
at the helm of the Ministry of Education (Ministerium für Volksbildung).
Consequently, the ministry had a stronger, more inviolable position vis-à-
vis the educational section within the party apparatus.^4
Not surprisingly, therefore, schools in the GDR were called upon to help
secure the ideological rule of the SED from the very beginning, while ed-
ucation in West Germany was bound up in the country’s basic pluralistic
order. Educational policy in the West served as an arena for the general
competition between the parties, which had, however, largely been toned
down through the consensus demands of “cooperative federalism.” The
East German dictatorship, in contrast, not only infi ltrated the realm of
education, but also it went as far as to infuse ideology into the basic up-
bringing of its citizens (Erziehungsdiktatur).^5 It pursued the Promethean
goal of cultivating “fully developed socialist personalities.”^67 Meanwhile,
schooling in West Germany after 1945 followed in the institutional foot-
prints of the system that had existed before 1933. According to assumed
aptitude types and levels, children were usually divided among three dif-
ferent school types at the end of fourth grade, namely the Hauptschule
(“traditional” education), the Realschule (intermediate education), and
the Gymnasium (the most prestigious form of secondary school, which
provides the pathway to university education). The three types of schools
diff ered in their learning goals as well as their educational niveaus. Since