396 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
they were designed to prepare pupils for diff erent occupations and levels
of qualifi cations, these three school types were part of a hierarchy of en-
titlements. In East Germany, however, much of the traditional school sys-
tem was cast aside. The contrast between the three-tiered West German
school system, which had been reaffi rmed and extended in the fi rst two
decades after 1949, and the newly created comprehensive state schools
(Einheitsschule model) for all children in East Germany until eighth grade
(and later tenth grade) was the most poignant expression of the ever
more divergent paths taken by the two states. However, the school model
adopted in the GDR did draw on the educational tradition that had devel-
oped within the socialist workers’ movement. The reinforcement of the
elitist education off ered by the Gymnasien in West Germany contrasted
with the idea that the “bourgeois monopoly on education had to be bro-
ken” in the GDR in the 1950s. The goal in East Germany was to develop
an educational policy that actively counteracted the middle-class domi-
nance of the educational system by privileging the “children of workers
and farmers.” In many respects, the contrasts between both systems can
be drawn out in more number and detail, but the main point remains
that the structural coordinates of both educational systems had devel-
oped contrasting contours in the 1960s. On both sides of the Berlin Wall,
the rhetoric of demarcation left an indelible mark on educational policy,
further underscoring the opposition between the two systems.
There were, however, older lines of the German educational tradition
that continued in analogous structures in some parts of the educational
systems in both states. One of these traditions was the dual vocational
training path, although the word “dual” was avoided in the GDR.^8 The
fact that companies and vocational schools were both involved in the oc-
cupational training process in East and West Germany (despite diff er-
ences in detail) was, in many respects, rather unique when compared to
other structures of vocational education. In the socialist countries that
were members of the COMECON, for example, the entire vocational
training process took place in schools. Both Germanys also continued
to use the Abitur (akin to a high school leaving exam), which was yet
another structural diff erence particular to the German context. While the
Abitur regulated access to the university in East and West Germany, uni-
versity aptitude tests were the decisive hurdle that had to be overcome
in order to gain admission to the university system in the Anglo-Saxon
world as well as in the Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries.^9 It needs to be
borne in mind, however, that neither the opposition between federalism
and centralism, nor that between a three-tier and an integrated school
system, were, in and of themselves, distinctly representative of the re-
spective ideological systems in question. Examples of centralized and