418 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
reforms had to take place in the schools themselves. This process led to
unprecedented experiments with new administrative norms, as well as
new content and methods in the classroom in the early 1990s.
After the Wende, most East German teachers found themselves in a
precarious situation. The system of coordinates around which many East
German teachers had built their lives collapsed in their faces. Many of
them were forced to acquire new teaching credentials (switching from
teaching Russian to teaching French, for example), but all of them had
to adapt to new curricula. Some of them were also pushed out because
of their previous ideological commitment, or they were “de-stasifi ed”
(entstasifi ziert).^116
In the 1990s, East German teachers had to reshape their identity as
a professional group.^117 Their commitment to education and their high
level of expertise in their respective subjects made them a valuable re-
source for mastering the post-reunifi cation transition. Yet this trans-
formation process was more or less diffi cult depending on the school
subject in question. Their function as communicators of knowledge and
norms, which was part of their professional identity as teachers, played
a key role in helping them to cope with the system change and its eff ect
on their personal lives. From the perspective of these teachers, education
was no longer “partisan” in any way, but rather it entailed the dissemina-
tion of general norms and values of living together as a society.
The Transition and Liquidation Process
for the University System in the New Federal States
Reunifi cation became a far-reaching, if not dramatic, turning point for
the East German universities. The unifi cation treaty foresaw the disman-
tling of the Academy of Building, the Agricultural Academy, and, most
importantly, the Academy of Sciences (with its sixty institutes and about
twenty-four thousand employees). The Institutes for the Education of
Teachers were dissolved, and the pedagogical colleges were either shut
down or integrated into other universities. While many research insti-
tutes also closed their doors, some were given new names and continued
to operate. The old East German centers for cancer, cardiovascular, and
molecular biology research, for example, were brought together to estab-
lish the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin in 1992,
but a fourth of the staff was let go in the process.
As was done in the school system, representatives of the East and West
German universities had already begun to meet and talk in early 1990.
During the academic year 1991/92, moreover, numerous well-known ex-