Stefan Fisch, Florence Gauzy, Chantal Metzger. Lernen und Lehren in Frankreich und Deutschland / Apprendre et enseigner en Allemagne et en France. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007. 240 S. EUR 43.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-515-08945-6.

Stefan Fisch, Florence Gauzy, Chantal Metzger, eds. Machtstrukturen im Staat in Deutschland und Frankreich: Les structures de pouvoir dans l'Ã?tat en France et en Allemagne. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007. 188 pp. EUR 36.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-515-08946-3.

Reviewed by Bertram M. Gordon (Department of History, Mills College)
Published on H-German (July, 2008)

Exceptions to the Exceptions? Sonderweg and Exception française

These companion anthologies with eleven and twelve chapters respectively address comparative German and French political and educational development from the late eighteenth century to the present. Machtstrukturen is based on papers originally presented at a colloquium sponsored by the Deutsch-Französisches Historikerkomitee in Otzenhausen (Saarland) in 2000. Lernen und Lehren is drawn from the papers given at a meeting of the same organization in Pont-à-Mousson (France) in 2002. In both cases, footnotes and some passages were updated for publication. Chapters alternate between German and French but each is preceded by abstracts in both languages. The contributions to the two-volume set are informative, tightly argued, draw effectively on sources, and clearly intended for specialists. This review focuses mostly on major themes in the works, such as the German "Sonderweg" and French "exception française," as well as touching on the relationship between patriotism or nationalism and education in both countries. The volumes offer readers a rich mine of information on modern German and French political and educational history.

The first collection, Machtstrukturen, is devoted to comparative state structures. The editors cluster the contributions around three major themes: development of parliaments in the two countries under study; centers of "real" power--monarchs, the military, and ministerial cabinets; and political parties and social interest groups. Not surprisingly, in books devoted to comparisons between two countries, the question of national exceptionalism arises with some frequency. Heinrich Best and Thomas Raithel, the first two authors in Machtstrukturen, suggest that France, rather than Germany, followed a Sonderweg, at least with regard to parliamentary development. Best employs prosopographic data on occupational affiliations of German and French parliamentary members from 1848 to 2003 to argue that while Germany (excluding the GDR) industrialized more rapidly than France, it paradoxically maintained a greater proportion of parliamentary representatives of rural background. The German pattern was typical of other northern European countries, including the United Kingdom. France's larger rural population lost representation by parliamentary deputies of rural background after the 1870s. French parliamentary deputies also tended to have fewer ties to extra-parliamentary organizations prior to the 1930s, reinforcing a Sonderweg that differentiated France from other European countries. According to Best, France's "cumul des mandates," the practice of holding more than one political office at different governmental levels established in the early years of the Third Republic, which has resisted abolition or reform, has contributed to the maintenance of a parliamentary elite, which, in contrast to Germany, has also worked since World War II to restrict the number of women deputies.

Following up on the question of the "cumul des mandates," Jean Philippon offers a quantitative analysis of deputies holding multiple offices from 1790 onward. The député-maire (parliamentary deputy and mayor), a significant example of the practice, dates to 1789, when the French Revolution created a new class of conservative small property holders of confiscated land who looked to their local mayor to protect their interests. This model proved durable, facilitated both by improved railway transportation in the nineteenth century and by district voting systems in the Fifth Republic that favor known personalities. Philippon notes that as of 2000, a majority of parliamentary deputies also held local or regional offices. He adds that recent proposals for reform have been half-hearted at best and that many offices are filled by political parties with little or no popular participation. Despite claims by German conservatives of an historically organic development of German political structures, in contrast to the French, interrupted by the 1789 Revolution, Philippon finds it is the French system that stands out as the archaic exception in today's Europe.

French, rather than German, political exceptionalism in governmental structure is highlighted by Thomas Raithel and Armind Heinen. Raithel argues that parliamentary supremacy within the French state until 1940 constituted, if not a Sonderweg, an "Eigenweg" in contrast to other European countries (Machtstrukturen, p. 49). Raithel sees the 1860s and 1870s as turning points in both German and French political systems as the former turned to a "constitutional monarchy" and the latter to a "parliamentary system" with significant consequences for subsequent German and French history. Comparing the Prussian constitutional crisis that brought Bismarck to power with the 1877 struggle for power between Royalist President Marshal Patrice de MacMahon and the parliament in France, he argues that the 1875 law creating the Third Republic allowed for no authority on the part of the executive to govern by emergency decree, thereby insuring parliamentary control over the state budget, a power the Prussian parliament lacked. Heinen also supports the "exception française" concept, maintaining that the French cabinet ministériel has no German equivalent, or at least not until recently. In the early days of the Fifth Republic, ministerial cabinets attracted relatively young and privileged cadres of administrators and technocrats recruited from the ranks of the French Grandes Écoles, especially the École Normale d'Administration (ENA). In part a reaction to the influence of the political class on the executive authority under the Fourth Republic, the ministerial cabinets had no counterpart in Germany, where the chancellor and political parties held more authority in decision-making. The ministerial cabinets also became models for European institutions such as the EU Commission, but according to Heinen, limits to administrative power and an enhanced importance of markets after the 1970s made the cabinets less attractive to ENA alumni. The cabinets evolved to be more similar to German governmental structures, thereby diminishing French exceptionalism.

The volume does include dissenting voices from this apparent emphasis on exceptionalism. Martin Kirsch, in his comparison of the functioning of nineteenth-century European monarchies, dismisses both exception française and Sonderweg. Despite changes in France's government, he argues, basic constitutional monarchy with growing legislative limits on the executive continued under the Bourbon, Orléanist, or Bonapartist regimes. The short-lived French regimes were paralleled in Spain, which followed a similar evolutionary model of constitutional monarchy, disproving, Kirsch writes, Pierre Rosenvallon's argument for a "singularité française" (Machtstrukturen, pp. 85-86). Nor does Kirsch see a Sonderweg for Germany, despite the conflict between king and parliament in 1860s Prussia. Legitimacy of the monarch (or leader) shifted from God-given to functional performance on behalf of state and nation throughout Europe, including both Germany and France. Shift in legitimacy that developed without restraining checks and balances opened the way to dictatorship. One implication of Kirsch's thesis--although he does not make this case--is an argument for the Ständestaat_ of Adam Müller and other early-nineteenth-century theorists.

Functionalism is also addressed in Klaus-Jürgen Müller's analysis of the German and French militaries, which transitioned from a "political-social power elite" under the late-eighteenth-century monarchies to a "functional professional group" with loyalties to the nation in the twentieth century (_Machtstrukturen, pp. 98, 114). A trenchant example of this shift occurred in 1918, when Wilhelm II's plan to abdicate as kaiser but remain King in Prussia met strong opposition from General Wilhelm Groener, who insisted the army's loyalty was to the nation rather than any dynasty. In France as well, Müller sees the generals' attempted coup in 1962 as inspired by an ethos of service to the nation. It would be interesting to see Müller's analysis extended to naval and air force leaders in both Germany and France. Analysis of the shift to "functional" might also be extended back in time, to assess the role of the military as it transitioned from the medieval society of orders to the monarchical states of the eighteenth century. Both militaries, Müller concludes, are now increasingly involved in international, as opposed to national, missions.

In addition to the chapters on state power, several of the contributions to Machtstrukturen focus on political parties and lobby groups. Philippe Alexandre compares German Left Liberals with French Radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He finds many similarities despite the failure of German Left Liberals, who took their inspiration from 1848, to gain power, whereas the French Radicals, inspired by the ideas of 1789, were politically dominant during much of the Revolutionary period. German Left Liberals included progressives, "freisinnige," and a number of other movements whose names started with "Volks-" or "Bürger" (Machtstrukturen, p. 130). Both German liberals and French Radicals adjusted doctrine to meet changing conditions in their differing political situations. Anti-clericalism did not become the major focus for the Germans that it did for the French during the Dreyfus Affair, whereas French Radicals were not confronted with the rise of a strong Social Democratic Party, as were the German liberals in the years before World War I. If the French Radicals dominated political life prior to World War I while the German Liberals were confined to the opposition, even so, the Liberals planted a spirit of liberalism that flowered in the Weimar Republic. Most significant, however, as Alexandre notes, was the failure of the two left-center movements--a term that Alexandre does not use--to collaborate on an international basis.

Analysis of colonial lobbies would appear an initially unpromising field of comparative research, given obvious and significant differences in colonial status. Peter Grupp nonetheless reveals important similarities in the colonial lobbies in both countries. Both saw colonization in terms of mentalités, in contrast to political or economic interests only. The Germans, however, focused on prestige, especially in connection with their booming economy, whereas the French emphasized their longstanding vision of bringing civilization to other peoples. The Parti Colonial Français was represented in parliament, unlike its German counterpart, since Bismarck placed colonial matters in the private rather than the state realm. Unlike the left-center movements in Germany and France, the colonial lobbies of the two countries were in frequent contact, in part because of their common rivalry with England.

Further analysis of contacts between the German and French colonial lobbies might have put into sharper historical focus the last two chapters, which address mutual German and French industrial and commercial interests in the de-colonizing world of the 1950s-1970s. Sylvie Lefèvre-Dalbin's study of the influence of German and French industrialists on the formation of the Common Market (EEC) covers the decade following the mid-1950s, during which she finds three key moments in which industrialists' lobbying made a difference: the role of French industrialists in negotiating the Treaty of Rome; that of their German colleagues in supporting extension of the free trade zone and the admission of Britain in the early 1960s; and the role of both in resolving the French withdrawal from meetings in 1965. In both countries, industrial lobbies were influential in shaping the structure of the early EEC but the French had to be convinced that the international organization would not be overly "dirigiste." Jean-François Eck's contribution studies the Franco-German Chamber of Commerce, organized by an initiative of both states in 1955. It grouped together 2,000 representatives of businesses, associations, and individuals five years later. The Chamber promoted exchanges on many levels and supported the emerging EEC, playing a constructive role in the 1965 crisis. Eck describes the Chamber's wide-ranging networking activities, including Bierabende, but notes that eventually the French were outnumbered by German members. Obviously restrained by the essay genre, neither Lefèvre-Dalbin nor Eck addresses in depth how post-World War II German-French styles of networking differed from those of earlier periods, apart from the obvious difference in their frequency and interaction with the EEC.

Connecting the theme of these local power centers with Philippon's essay on French députés-maires, François Roth offers an essay on local government in Lorraine during its inclusion in Germany (1871-1918). Roth argues for the uncoupling of Lorraine from its frequent hyphenation with Alsace. The two provinces were significantly different and had separate histories before 1871. Alsace counted twice the population of Lorraine and its people were closer to the Germans in language and culture. Local family notables continued to be elected in Lorraine, showing continuities in regional political elites even after annexation by Germany. After 1918, the notion of "Alsace-Lorraine," cultivated by decades of German administration, broke apart again as the Lorraine elite sought their own accommodations with the Paris government.

The comparative essays on German and French political structures and movements are paralleled in the second collection under review, Lernen und Lehren in Frankreich und Deutschland. This volume was published against a background of growing interest in educational methodology and its history in both countries because of the 1999 adoption of the "Bologna Process," which sought to create a European higher education area with raised and common standards for universities. In 2001, German schoolchildren had lower scores on standardized tests than other Europeans, creating something of a media shock and also drawing attention there to educational issues. Contributions to this second collection, which covers the period since 1806, focus on educational leaders, curricular content, educational goals in the schools, and aspects of the evolving universities. Several articles point out the success with which educational establishments resisted change, whether in nineteenth-century Prussia, among the university faculty in post-1945 Germany and France, or among French language teachers in the GDR.

Not surprisingly, these essays, which emphasize the politics of formal education and views of it in both countries, connect readily to the political themes raised in Machtstrukturen. Volkmar Wittmütz, for example, observes that nineteenth-century Prussian elementary schools were later made responsible for the 1848 Revolution, the military emergence of Prussia in the 1860s, the German economic takeoff later in the century, and a political quietism that rendered Germans vulnerable to dictatorship. Tracing the evolution of the Prussian school system from the late eighteenth century through the Humboldt reforms and the spread of schooling during the first half of the nineteenth century, he finds no correlation between the schools and the 1848 Revolution even if some teachers saw new educational opportunities created by the ideas of 1848. Nor were Prussian schools incubators of unbridled discipline and political quietism. The years after the Kulturkampf saw higher salaries for an increasingly professionalized teacher corps that incorporated increasing numbers of women in its ranks. Although nationalism appeared in the schools, Wittmütz holds that they were more liberal than often claimed, because curricula did not always follow a centralized formula, varying instead by school and by teacher. His case would be stronger with a definition and examples of the more liberal ideas taught in the Prussian schools. Liberalism in its early nineteenth century opposition to aristocratic conservatism and the influence of Clemens von Metternich's was the very essence of the Staatslexikon (first edition, 1834-43), a political encyclopedia that gained wide acceptance and credibility among the Vormärz German middle classes. Its very partiality was its strength, according to Fritz Taubert, as its goal was to train Germans for citizenship in a united liberal state and it was widely influential during the 1848 Revolution. The Staatslexikon depicted Prussia as a relatively progressive state and its educational system was compared favorably with that of the French, oriented by Napoleon toward despotism.

Given the history of the past two centuries, it is hardly surprising that the relationship of schools and universities in both countries to patriotism and/or nationalism, is a recurring theme in Lernen und Lehren. Marcel Spivak, more inclined than Wittmütz to accept the perception of Prussia's schools as discipline-oriented and nationalistic, argues that the French schools did not adopt this model after 1871. Even earlier, French educational leaders looked to emerging Prussia as a possible model and Turnvater Jahn was mentioned in a reform proposal in 1868 but, after 1871, the French rejected the gymnastic model. Paralleling Wittmütz's argument that the Prussian schools were less militaristic and nationalistic than commonly thought, Spivak writes that although such sentiment was clearly present in French society prior to 1914, it was not fostered in the schools.

Comparing patriotism in German and French schools between 1871 and 1914, Philippe Alexandre notes that despite differences in the situations of the victorious Germans and the defeated French, both countries witnessed the establishment of new political orders seeking to legitimate themselves through the schools. Both educational systems portrayed war in heroic and nationalistic terms, extolled the military, and viewed the enemy of 1870 as a potential future foe. Even so, significant differences were present. Republican France emphasized anti-clericalism, especially after the Dreyfus Affair, while Germany kept religion in the schools to buttress loyalty to the empire. French republicans divided between national and internationalist perspectives, while Hegelian concepts of freedom, in which the state was seen as a person incarnated by the emperor, dominated German schooling. Alexandre describes French school patriotism as inspired by "progress tied to modernity," in relation to the ideas of Ernest Lavisse and Jean Jaurès, whereas the German variation had a "phobic character" (Lernen und Lehren, p. 94) manifested in Pan-Germanism and the mobilizing effects of the celebration of the centennial of the Battle of Leipzig. Alexandre takes the strongest position of any of the contributors in relating the schools to nationalism in holding that the "union sacrée" in both countries during the crisis of August 1914 would have been impossible without the patriotic indoctrination in their schools prior to the war (Lernen und Lehren p. 101).

Patriotism involves learning to be a citizen, the subject of Jeannie Bauvois Cauchepin's essay, which focuses more on what was actually taught in Germany and France during the early twentieth century. Cauchepin points out that education for citizenship was multidisciplinary, extending into history, law, philosophy, and geography. As do some other contributors to the book, she focuses on patriotism, maintaining that whereas Aristotle's definition of humans as political animals implied a universalism, civics education taught individuals to become citizens of nation-states. The extension of the franchise to women under the Weimar Republic implied the production of new educational programs to train them for citizenship, but this subject is not developed in her essay. The German Sonderweg can be found in the schools of the Weimar Republic; Cauchepin diagnoses an unwillingness in them to trace a historical influence on German history to either the French revolutionary or the English liberal paradigm, a refusal that formed part of a resistance to a political system perceived as imposed from abroad. This resistance eased after the Second World War as both countries adopted more internationalist perspectives in their curricula. As Cauchepin concludes, however, myths continue to play significant roles in educational systems. "Secularization," she notes, "is not de-sacralization" (Lernen und Lehren, p. 117). A new myth of "democracy" has replaced the older national narrative.

Because most of the essays on post-1945 Germany in both collections focus on the FRG, the rare comparisons that cross the inner German divide are all the more valuable. Ulrich Pfeil's chapter discusses the teaching of French in the GDR and Manuel Meune treats the use of cartography in East German schools. Complaining that to today's German students, the GDR is as remote in time as the discovery of America, Pfeil also focuses on political influences on curriculum. French language studies never achieved widespread popularity in the GDR, where Russian was the mandated second language and English usually a third choice. The French government tried to promote French studies in the GDR, but was limited by its desire not to antagonize authorities in Bonn. Although the East Berlin authorities did expand French language training, especially after the construction of the Berlin Wall gave them a greater feeling of security, ideological proclivities and restricted resources made its program problematic. Like teachers in nineteenth-century Prussian schools, teachers of French in the GDR often found ways to subvert official guidelines by using their own resources and presenting their own perspectives. Meune examines the use of political ideology in the "battle of maps" in the 1980s school atlases of the GDR. GDR atlases looked similar to those published in the West but were characterized by a specific political viewpoint. In the case of an atlas for the primary grades, East Berlin was labeled "capital of the GDR" with West Berlin shown either as a hole in a brightly red bordered map of East Germany or in a dull gray. The only other countries with maps devoted to them were China and Cuba. Additional maps showed the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands but not the Japanese to the Kuriles and, closer to home, the use of Polish (Szczecin and Wroclaw) rather than German (Stettin and Breslau) designations for cities assigned to Poland after 1945.

Changes initiated by various governments in Germany and France were often resisted during implementation on the local level or, as in the case of both countries after World War II, undone at least in part over time. If German schools changed little after World War I, the purges that occurred after 1945 were more substantial, Corinne Defrance argues in her chapter comparing the countries. Changes accompanying the advent of the Weimar Republic and the post-Liberation French Provisional Government were carried through by national governments, whereas in post-1945 Germany, occupation authorities supervised university purges in four zones, where policies varied in contrast to one "national" policy in France. In Germany, Karl Jaspers, who had so strongly influenced the young Golo Mann, argued for a "purification" of good versus evil, as did some in France who maintained that Vichy's National Revolution needed to be undone. In France, some 10 percent of university faculty were punished in one way or another, whereas for Germany the figure reached 73% in the Soviet zone, 46% in the American zone, and roughly a third in both French and British zones. Even after World War II, however, German universities proved resistant to change as, for the sake of social cohesion, many of those who had been purged immediately after the war were eventually reintegrated, such as Hans Günther, a racial theoretician of the Third Reich who was fired from Fribourg in 1945 and hired at Erlangen in 1954. The reintegration of compromised professors may have aided social cohesion in the 1950s but contributed to the generational alienation that erupted in 1968. Even in the GDR, where a new university system, the Aspirantur, was modeled on the Soviet system in an attempt to recruit a new, more proletarian and socialist professoriate change was only partial. One-fourth of GDR professors in the 1950s had a "brown past" (Lernen und Lehren, pp. 76-77). As most university administrators may attest, faculties can prove exceedingly resilient and, seen long-term, this was the case largely in both German states as well as France.

A study parallel to Defrance's with regard to subject, if not time period, is Gabriele Lingelbach's assessment of the degree to which German university historical pedagogy served as a model for France in the nineteenth century. Here, as in so many other instances, local educators proved more resistant to the imported "model" than often realized. Lingelbach traces the shift in the teaching of history from the lecture format that accompanied the universal history perspectives of the eighteenth century to the seminar format for more restricted topics, intended to train teachers in the nineteenth. Deputations of French scholars visited German universities in the 1860s but returned unfavorably impressed with a "Prussianized" perspective and too heavy an emphasis on detail. In France, the écoles normales, which train history teachers, and the École des Chartes, which trains archivists, experienced little change, as their purposes remained unaltered. Where the German seminar model gained greater acceptance, however, was in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which developed as the center of historical research during the late nineteenth century. Only a small minority of French students, however, attended the École Pratique, significantly limiting the impact of the reform. As Pierre Ayçoberry notes in his essay on French university visitors to Germany, the establishment of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1868 was met with considerable resistance on the part of the French and most of its first students came from countries other than France. Lingelbach and Ayçoberry both conclude that during the late nineteenth century the German model was used as a rhetorical device to win resources for university reform in France but once this was accomplished, little of the model was ever actually implemented. One might think of reaction in American higher education circles after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957! Ayçoberry adds the possibility that the "German model" for French universities was a polemical myth created by the French nationalist right to discredit the universities and subvert their requests for resources, again suggestive of university politics in other countries.

The conversational style of the seminar is based on the Socratic method of dialogue, which Eberhard Demm addresses in relation to Alfred Weber, one of its most gifted and influential practitioners, who developed an earlier form into the "discussion principle" used in his sociology seminar in Heidelberg, where he influenced future scholars, including Erich Fromm and Karl Mannheim. Weber, who wished to create a "new man" in interwar Germany, was forced to resign after 1933. Demm says little about his intellectual resistance during the Nazi years but focuses, instead, on his role in reinvigorating German higher education following his return in 1945. In the name of a "sociology of freedom," Weber subsequently critiqued the apparatchik or bureaucratic personality capable of serving National Socialist and communist dictatorships, as well as the technocrats of the "managerial revolution," all of whom he saw as dehumanized and dehumanizing. Ten years after his death, student revolutionaries invoked his teachings in 1968, vindicating his beliefs in individual responsibility, political activism, resistance to irresponsible political power, and the application of the sociology of freedom to daily life. Given the comparative theme of the two volumes under review, Demm's conclusion invites a contribution comparing the 1968 student movements in Germany and France.

Alfred Weber's intellectual development bears similarities to that of Golo Mann, addressed in a contribution by Matthias Schulz, who uses Mann's extensive autobiographical writings to follow his intellectual trajectory through his schooling in Munich, Berlin, and Heidelberg. Following the rise of the Nazis, Mann taught German language and literature in the École Normale Supérieur d'enseignement primaire, a teacher training school, in St. Cloud, near Paris. His humanist opposition to dictatorship parallels Weber's and his pedagogical approach also followed the Socratic tradition. He brought to France the dialectic pedagogical methods used by the reformer Kurt Hahn at the Salem Castle Landerziehungsheim, which he attended from 1923 through 1927, together with his subsequent Heidelberg University experiences of Karl Jaspers' humanistic and anti-militarist seminars, in which he saw the basis for a postwar democratic restructuring of German education. The career of Mann, who found the French schools more democratic in their training than the German, spanned both Germany and France and, accordingly, relates more closely to this collection's themes than does Weber's. An interesting counterpoint to Mann's career is that of Robert Schuman, who served as deputy from the Moselle after 1919 and whose experience helped cement a different vision of German-French relations after 1945. Schuman is discussed at some length in François Roth's essay in Machtstrukturen.

As have others, Matthias Schulz emphasizes how little German schools changed after the First World War. German and French student exchanges, so common today, were rare. When Pierre Bertaux, the son of a noted French Germanist whose family was acquainted with Mann's, entered the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1927, he was the first French student there since 1914. Few French traveled outside their country in the interwar years, Schulz notes, and Mann became the first non-French conversation partner for the St. Cloud school's Director.[1] However, French pedagogues who did travel to Germany are discussed by Pierre Ayçoberry, who follows an intermittent stream of French university "pilgrims" to Germany from the time of Madame Germaine de Staël, known for her De l'Allemagne (1810-13), to the Second World War. Nineteenth-century French scholars who followed de Staël to Germany included Victor Cousin, who introduced Hegelianism into France, and Edgar Quinet, the "anti-de Staël," who found his future wife in Heidelberg but grew increasingly critical of a Prussian "parvenu" spirit as that country became increasingly powerful. French scholars who visited Germany and emerged as prominent historians later included Jacques Bainville, a well known Germanophobe, and Marc Bloch, who helped establish the Annales School during the interwar years. Ayçoberry concludes that the French Romantics, who came back with glowing reports about Germany in the early nineteenth century, were followed by rationalists with mixed reviews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before World War I and postwar tensions made cross-border exchanges increasingly problematic.

The increased German-French tourism and cultural exchanges that followed the Élysée Treaty of 1963 lay behind a West German reform movement in romance cultural studies in the 1970s that criticized the essentialist approach that had emphasized national differences in the interwar years. Calling regional studies (Landeskunde) the "unloved child" of German romance studies, Roland Höhne analyzes the attempts of reformers to build a more scientific basis for regional studies that could be integrated into the study of the romance languages and cultures, much as the field of "civilization allemande" had developed in France (Lernen und Lehren, pp. 224-225). The problem lay in defining Landeskunde. In 1978, Manfred Bock argued that it should be based on the comparative study of industrial societies, as both Germany and France fit that model. Others pressed for a more general sociological implantation into language and literature studies, only to meet resistance from philologists, who were more inclined to accept the more culturally defined fields such as philosophy than the social science-oriented disciplines. Coinciding with the "linguistic turn" in the social sciences, the new amalgam in Germany blended discourse and narrative studies with a focus on regions--cultural and political--unlike the Cultural Studies of the Anglophone countries. Noting that the new Landeskunde seeks to emphasize and value differences among cultures as historically rather than ontologically based, Höhne concludes that the jury is still out on its ultimate success. (In my opinion, the new Landeskunde bears a strong resemblance to Herder.)

In conclusion, Machtstrukturen and Lernen und Lehren group together an excellent collection of essays, all well worth the attention of specialists in their topics and in German-French political and cultural relations in general. In a variety of German and French contexts, the contributions to Lernen und Lehren highlight the difficulties involved in reforming universities and the subtle ways in which higher education faculties so often resist change. With so many references in the contributions to Sonderweg and exception française, the collection calls for either an introductory or concluding chapter on national exceptionalism and perceptions of it in history. German and French historians are not alone in claiming exceptionalism for their--or one another's--country, as an abundance of literature devoted to the United States makes clear.[2] Looking ahead, a fruitful approach would be a full taxonomy of exceptionalist claims in history that could place the German-French nexus into broader historical context.

If there is a gap in the coverage in Machtstrukturen and Lernen und Lehren, it is in the period of the two world wars of the twentieth century. What politically and educationally mutual influences and/or reactions, if any, characterized Germany and France during these conflicts? German-French political collaboration during World War II, for example, has been much studied. Were the German-French exchanges of literary and artistic figures during World War II paralleled in the field of education?[3] The Nazi and Vichy periods are treated as parentheses in history as many of the contributors to the two volumes under review emphasize the desires of the post-1945 Germans and French to put this past behind them. Instead, the chapters focus on a very different, and more positive, postwar intensification of cross-border collaboration in political, economic, and educational spheres. Machtstrukturen and Lernen und Lehren are shining examples of this different form of German-French cooperation and should serve as examples for scholars in other countries where relations are more problematic.

Notes

[1]. The unusual nature of any French youth visits to Germany in the interwar years was emphasized to me in an interview I conducted with Marc Augier, in Paris, on July 4, 1974. Augier later volunteered in French formations such as the Anti-Bolshevik Legion and the Charlemagne Division that fought alongside the Germans during World War II. See Bertram M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 256-257.

[2]. An extensive literature, for example, devoted to American exceptionalism includes Byron E. Shafer, ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from The Old West to The New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1997); Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); Steven L. Hellerman and Andrei S. Markovits, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Charles Lockhart, The Roots of American Exceptionalism: Institutions, Culture and Policies (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003); and Michael Ignatieff, ed., American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

[3]. See Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Histoire de l'Art, Paris 1940-1944, Ordre National, Traditions et Modernités (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1986), 94-95.

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Citation: Bertram M. Gordon. Review of Fisch, Stefan; Gauzy, Florence; Metzger, Chantal, Lernen und Lehren in Frankreich und Deutschland / Apprendre et enseigner en Allemagne et en France and Fisch, Stefan; Gauzy, Florence; Metzger, Chantal, eds., Machtstrukturen im Staat in Deutschland und Frankreich: Les structures de pouvoir dans l'Ã?tat en France et en Allemagne. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14780

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