Margarete Grandner, Gernot Heiss, Oliver Rathkolb, eds. Zukunft mit Altlasten: Die Universität Wien 1945 bis 1955. Einführungstexte zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2005. 380 pp. ISBN 978-3-7065-4236-4.

Leo Haupts. Die Universität zu Köln im Übergang vom Nationalsozialismus zur Bundesrepublik. Studien zur Geschichte der Universität zu Köln. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2007. 406 pp. EUR 49.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-412-17806-2.

Sigrid Oehler-Klein, Volker Roelcke, eds. Vergangenheitspolitik in der universitären Medizin nach 1945: Institutionelle und individuelle Strategien im Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus. Pallas Athene: Beiträge zur Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007. 419 pp. EUR 69.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-09015-5.

Katja Wojtynowski. Das Fach Geschichte an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz 1946-1961: Gründung und Ausbau des Historischen Seminars, des Instituts für Alte Geschichte und der Abteilung Osteuropäische Geschichte am Institut für Osteuropakunde. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006. 128 pp. EUR 27.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-515-08782-7.

Reviewed by Tracey J. Kinney (Department of History, Kwantlen Polytechnic University)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Vergangenheitsbewältigung: The Early Years

Reflecting back on the condition of Germany in 1945, Karl Jaspers remarked that "Germans had lost almost everything: their country, their economy, their physical security, worse still was the loosening of unifying norms, of moral dignity, of self-confidence as a people" (quoted in Haupts, p. 13). Germany was occupied, temporarily divided, and facing certain punishment for the crimes of the National Socialist era. It was also clear, at least in the Western occupation zones, that the occupiers were determined to create a new, liberal-democratic Germany from the ruins of the Third Reich. Austria, too, was temporarily divided by the four occupying powers and facing an uncertain future, newly separated from the German Reich. The physical destruction of both countries only added to the uncertainty facing their citizens and institutions. Under such circumstances it is perhaps not surprising to find that a genuine coming-to-terms with the Nazi past was not the first concern of many. All four of the titles under consideration here lend support to this assertion. They also, without exception, undermine the notion of 1945 as a "Stunde Null"; continuities emerge repeatedly, both with the Nazi past and with earlier periods, rather than a clean break.

Each volume reviewed here focuses on the restoration of higher education in West Germany and Austria during an important and often overlooked period: the immediate postwar era. This era began with the defeat of Nazism and continued through the creation of the East and West German states, the early Cold War period, and the first phase of independent development. In Austria, this period coincided with the end of the Anschluß, the beginning of the Cold War, and extended until the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which restored independence on the condition of Austrian neutrality. A number of the authors note that the history of higher education in this period has been widely neglected in past research. Earlier monographs focus instead on the impact of National Socialism on universities, or the earlier developments during the Weimar era.[1] Yet the immediate postwar era was a vitally important period. Universities faced fundamental questions regarding the future direction of teaching and research. For some, this period was seen as a chance for a fundamental renewal; others sought to restore the traditional Humboldt-inspired vision of the German university. Faculty members would also have to address their actions during the Third Reich, even as the occupying powers attempted to impose their own visions of the future of education on the universities.

A review, no matter how lengthy, cannot possibly address all of the arguments raised by the contributing authors to the volumes under review. A number of themes recur, however, which I highlight rather than attempting every single article in the edited collections. Thus some of the most interesting research in these works will receive only passing mention here, which is in no way a comment on the value of these contributions.

The volume edited by Sigrid Oehler-Klein and Volker Roelcke provides a somewhat broader focus than the other volumes in that it considers one discipline, medicine, at a number of different institutions across all four occupation zones. The collection, consisting of fifteen contributions on three general themes--institutions and personnel, coming-to-terms in each zone, and psychiatry after the Nazi period--developed out of a conference in October 2005 which drew together faculty from a number of medical faculties and other biomedical research institutes. The authors hoped that this collection would open a productive discussion on a little-discussed period in the history of university medical faculties.

Its first five articles focus on the strategies employed by faculty members and universities to address what Sabine Schleiermacher, a historian of medicine at Berlin, calls the thorough "Nazification" of medicine (Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 21). Medical faculty members had witnessed, and at times participated in, the removal of Jewish colleagues, taken part in politically motivated research projects, and some had become deeply involved in racial hygiene studies. Moreover, a great many of these faculty, especially at the rank of full professor, remained in their positions throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the immediate postwar years, these studies find a remarkably similar response to the Nazi period. While many claimed that their research was unpolitical, others drew a contrast between "bad National Socialist science" and "good science," aligning themselves clearly with the latter (Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 22). Yet as Carola Sachse concludes, these justifications failed to address the broader issue of complicity in the Nazi regime (Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 45). Evidently the process of denazification did little to encourage a genuine confrontation with past actions. Despite an early determination, especially in the Soviet zone, to carry out a radical cleansing of NSDAP members, determination soon gave way to pragmatism and Sachse shows that university medical faculty were able to use their privileged position as valued scientists to reintegrate into the new state (in this case, the GDR). Udo Schagen summarizes this early attitude towards the Nazi era by arguing that the phrase "Wissenschaft hat mit Politik nichts zu tun und soll sich von ihr fernhalten" became an all-encompassing mantra that facilitated a rapid and more or less complete reintegration of medical faculty members, despite their activities during the Nazi years (Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 126).

The second part of the Oehler-Klein volume looks more specifically at variations in policy and in the response to National Socialism across the four occupation zones. Here again, however, continuity emerges as the watchword, despite the early efforts by the armies of occupation to enforce a through denazification. Though many medical faculty members were initially judged as complicit in the crimes of the Nazi regime, they were subsequently reassessed as "followers" or exonerated entirely. Kornelia Grundmann provides a detailed statistical analysis of medical faculty members at Marburg and throughout the region of Hesse. She concludes that the necessity of providing healthcare to so large a population led the American occupation authorities to retain 502 out of 602 physicians, despite the fact that they were classified as politically "unacceptable" (Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 182). Sigrid Oehler-Klein discusses the case of Hermann Alois Boehm, named emeritus professor of human genetics at Gießen in 1962. Boehm had been an NSDAP member and professor of hereditary and racial welfare during the Nazi years. Initially judged as a Category II offender, he was subsequently reclassified to Category IV (follower), which made him eligible for emeritus status. Oehler-Klein argues that Boehm's rehabilitation was not only a personal imperative; it became an essential part of the rehabilitation and reunification of the entire Gießen medical faculty. By agreeing that Boehm's scientific research had been solid, though misused, certainty in the value of science was confirmed. Thus a personal strategy for confronting the past became an institutional one. Each of the six articles in this section provides examples of similar strategies. Perhaps most disturbing is Bernd Grün's examination of the case of Sophie Ehrhardt at Tübingen. Grün argues that despite Ehrhardt's role in the selection of Sinti and Roma for extermination and her connection to the concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, she was able to regain her position at Tübingen in 1950. Moreover, an attempt in 1986 to indict Ehrhardt for her past actions failed.

Psychiatry's role in medically sanctioned murder during the Third Reich is given particular attention in the final four articles. Here the article by the late Jürgen Peiffer effectively summarizes the response of the discipline. Until 1950 relative silence prevailed; from 1951 to 1964 there was some discussion of euthanasia and assisted death, but little willingness to address the victims of such actions; between 1965 and 1974 student-led initiatives began to focus on the victims; from 1975 to 1989 the crimes of psychiatry became the concern of historians of medicine and journalists; and, finally, after 1989 the subject became the focus of social-scientific studies which looked at both victims and perpetrators.[2] The key here, and the other articles in this section confirm this, is the generational break with the Nazi period. The generation of students that came of age in the late 1960s was not only willing to challenge previous explanations of the Nazi past, but also revolutionized the discipline with respect to the study of social psychology.

Though Katja Wojtynowski's study of the Faculty of History at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz is relatively short, it nonetheless identifies a number of key issues confirmed by the other works under consideration here. Wojtynowski pays particular attention to the role of the French occupation authorities in the rebuilding of the university, 80 percent of which had been totally destroyed by aerial bombardment. The author argues that the French "reeducation" division perceived the traditionally Protestant-German professoriate as an anachronism. They therefore determined to remake the university in a new mold: "Francophile, but not French" (Wojtynowski, p. 9). To this end books written during both the Weimar and Nazi periods were purged, due to the perception that they provided a negative impression of the French. With respect to the history faculty, the occupiers hoped to create a new pan-European focus and therefore chose faculty whose work had concentrated on the Rhine region, rather than on traditional political history. Wojtynowski provides a detailed look at the decisions involved in hiring the four key history faculty: all spoke French, all focused on the Rhenish region, and all had connections to the French occupation authorities; though several had been NSDAP members, they were able to distance themselves from the Nazi regime by means of their research and their friends among the French. The author also provides insights into the financial difficulties experienced at Mainz during the immediate postwar years. In particular, the rebuilding of the library and the hiring of an adequate number of staff and research assistants remained a struggle well into the 1950s. In the final analysis, the French authorities only partially achieved their original goal. Many of the Mainz historians remained focused on the local region; however, they did come to incorporate what Wojtynowski calls a "European conception of history" (Wojtynowski, p. 114).

Wojtynowski's research leads to the possible conclusion that institutions that experienced a high level of physical destruction during the war had a better chance of making a more thorough renewal than those institutions which continued on, albeit under difficult circumstances, but less thoroughly devastated. Hans-Georg Hofer's contribution to the Oehler-Klein volume also touches on this issue via an examination of Freiburg after 1945. Hofer argues that the level of destruction in Freiburg facilitated a genuine new beginning, driven by faculty (Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 274). One might also note that both Freiburg and Mainz fell within the French occupation zone and so such parallels might also be related to differences in reeducation policies in the French zone. Nonetheless, this would be a productive avenue for further research.

In their edited collection, Margarete Grandner, Gernot Heiss, and Oliver Rathkolb have assembled seventeen articles on the University of Vienna in the immediate postwar period. Three examine topics pertaining to the entire institution, while the remainder analyze developments in specific departments. Gernot Heiss examines the work of the university senate in the years following liberation, noting that the institution faced a number of challenges: material circumstances were difficult given bombing damage; there was a clear need to strengthen a specifically Austrian patriotism in contrast to the prevailing pan-German nationalism; vacant seats had to be filled; and there was a need to connect the work carried out in Vienna to the international (specifically Western) scientific and learning communities. Heiss argues that here, too, continuity became the primary characteristic of the early postwar years. The occupation authorities were too willing to allow the old structures of teaching and learning to persist and the Amnesty Law of 1948 solidified the reintegration of those faculty members who had connections to the National Socialist regime.[3] This reintegration, however, led to a "paranoid element of distrust" (Zukunft, p. 36) which persisted throughout the postwar years and hindered an honest discussion of the past. On the positive side, international contacts were actively developed and the institution overcame the material difficulties of the late 1940s.

Oliver Rathkolb details the ways in which early efforts to remove all former members of the NSDAP and to create a thoroughly democratic university gave way to the strengthening of the conservative-Catholic tradition of the institution. In pursuit of a distinctly Austrian identity, the university increasingly looked back to the greatness of the Habsburg past, which had the effect of institutionalizing its authoritarian structure. The third broadly focused article, an examination of student life during this period, confirms that conservative dominance over the curriculum persisted for many years. This article, written by Maria Messner and Herbert Posch, is one of the few in the volumes under review to pay detailed attention to the fate of students. Messner and Posch raise a number of interesting points, including the fact that this period marked one of the few times when the number of male and female students was roughly equivalent (a rapid acceleration of male enrollment followed). Through statistical analysis the authors demonstrate that the Protestant/Catholic confessional balance at Vienna remained largely steady; however, not surprisingly, Jewish enrollment dropped from 10.7 percent to .09 percent (Zukunft, p. 58). In terms of programs of study, the majority of students was enrolled in the philosophical faculty. Medicine saw a slight decline after 1945, and law a slight increase. With respect to denazification, the authors argue that denazification for students was actually much more stringent than for faculty: by 1947 almost all students who had been connected to the NSDAP were banned from the university until the mid-1950s. Above all, students in this era were concerned with their material security, which constantly threatened to interrupt their studies.

The remainder of the articles in the Grandner collection are discipline-specific studies. Despite the diversity of disciplines, again a similar picture emerges. Clearly there was no "Stunde Null" with respect to personnel. Nominal party members continued their careers without a break and even those who had been deeply incriminated were largely rehabilitated by the Amnesty Law and subsequent appeals processes in the early 1950s. Ingrid Arias argues that denazification was half-hearted and in no way created a new, more democratic culture; however, the concerted effort to integrate Austrian scholarship with the work of Western European scholars did bring some modernization of methods and theories. Some disciplines, such as art history, did experience a clear break with the Nazi era due to changes in personnel. Here too, however, the determination to retain the traditions of the discipline led to a strong connection with the past, rather than a genuine renewal.

History was another discipline which experienced a radical transformation in its faculty at Vienna, but here one finds a more profound transformation in attitude and a genuine renewal. Gernot Heiss argues that the majority of history faculty in the 1930s and 1940s had welcomed the Anschluß and had subsequently acted as "Propagandisten der Vorherrschaft des deutschen Volkes" (Zukunft, p. 195). Denazification left only three faculty members and one assistant. The process of rebuilding the decimated department led not only to the hiring of many new faculty members, but also to the creation of a new Austrian history and a shift away from traditional political history to a more cultural focus.

A number of the discipline-specific articles discuss the importance of the 1960s as the first genuine break with the past. Heinz Fassmann argues that only the generation change of the 1960s and 1970s brought a clear alteration of personnel and research interests in the field of geography (Zukunft, p. 289). Likewise, in ethnology, modernizations such as the introduction of field work would have to wait until the generational shift of the so-called '68ers. These conclusions parallel the schema provided by Jürgen Peiffer with respect to changes within the field of psychiatry.

At least one of the articles in this collection seems to challenge the editors' assertion that science can never be separated from its sociopolitical context and is therefore never "unpolitical." Wolfgang Reiter and Reinhard Schurawitzki acknowledge that the members of the physics and chemistry departments were an integral part of the National Socialist regime: 59 percent of faculty members belonged to the NSDAP (Zukunft, p. 238). However, they argue that the Nazi worldview had little impact on the disciplines of physics and chemistry, as opposed to the radical transformation in biology. It must nonetheless be noted that physics and chemistry contributed to the aims of the Nazi regime, even if their core principles were not changed. Reiter and Schurawitzki do confirm that radical alterations in personnel in these disciplines did little to break the conservative-Catholic dominance of the administration. In this sense, continuity remained the watchword.

Grandner's collection closes with Johannes Feichtinger and Heidemarie Uhl's examination of the Austrian Academy of Science (previously The Academy of Science, Vienna). This article provides an excellent synopsis of the problems facing Austrian institutions and the common, if problematic, resolution in the immediate postwar period. Sixty-four members of the Academy were, to some degree, implicated in the activities of the Nazi era. Of these, thirty-four were removed from the academy, deemed by Austria's education minister as having promoted the "anti-democratic, perverse Hitlerian worldview" (Zukunft, p. 321). In the postwar period the academy adopted a two-fold, somewhat contradictory strategy: to emphasize the "objectivity of science" but, at the same time, to stress the specifically Austrian character of the academy. After the 1948 Amnesty Law many former Nazis were readmitted to the academy and, once again, substantive change would have to wait until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The final volume under consideration here is Leo Haupts's study of the University of Cologne between Nazism and the creation of the West German state. Haupts details the major problems of the postwar era, while emphasizing the potential for the university to play a key role in the creation of a liberal democratic society. Education was the means by which internal and external security could be recreated. The American occupation authorities saw the university as an important tool in the creation of a new conception of citizenship and responsibility, hence the rapid reopening of educational institutions.[4] The British, too, had seen the potential for the university to assist in the creation of liberal-democratic, republican ideas. Thus all members of the NSDAP (other than those deemed to have had only nominal affiliations) were to be removed and the university would be rebuilt around a cohort of professors with no connection to the party. In the end, however, Haupts admits that almost all of the Nazi-era professors were readmitted to their positions or, after a delay, granted emeritus status. Far more effective, according to Haupts, was the British decision to encourage foreign exchanges for all lecturers and students so that they might experience political traditions far removed from their own.

Haupts argues that the university's first postwar rector, Josef Kroll, played a key role in the remaking of the institution. Kroll determined that the university would return to the original idea of the Humboldt-inspired university. Emphasizing Christian humanist principles, the university would take on a broader social role. More controversially, given the benefit of hindsight, Kroll argued that the new university must be unpolitical, this despite his own close ties to the CDU and the clear antagonism of the institution towards socialists and Social Democrats.

The second section of Haupts's monograph discusses the transformation from city university to a state university (as Nordrhein-Westfalen assumed the majority of responsibility for the university's funding). Despite the shift, freedom of teaching and learning was guaranteed and the right to confer the Habilitation remained with the faculty. In fact, Haupts argues that the only substantive changes to both faculty and the larger institution came in 1955 with a number of retirements from among the postwar generation. 1955 also saw the division of the formerly unified philosophical faculty and the creation of a faculty of mathematics and natural sciences.

The third, most substantial section of the monograph discusses the individual disciplines that made up the philosophical faculty. Here it is useful to parallel Haupts's discussion of the department of history with that of Gernot Heiss. Haupts, too, cites the role played by historians in legitimizing and promoting National Socialist views, arguing that, despite a few opponents, there was clearly a generation of Nazi historians. In the case of Cologne, so many faculty were incriminated that the discipline faced a crisis upon reopening. Even faculty hired after the war were not free of Nazi associations. Haupts details the example of Theodor Schieder, hired in 1948, who came to be one of the most influential postwar historians. Nonetheless, Schieder had been a member of the NSDAP and head of the Office for Press and Propaganda for the NS-Dozentenbund. Schieder benefited from an influential network of supporters, which included exiled historian Hans Rothfels, who spoke in his favor, and from a lenient decision of the denazification authorities, who chose to impose only a 1,075 RM fine for Schieder's wartime activities (Haupts, p. 262). By the mid-1950s, Haupts argues, the department had restored its reputation and resumed its contributions to the advancement of the discipline.

In his concluding remarks, Haupts tends to provide a more positive picture of the state of the university in the 1950s. The Kroll era, he argues, brought stabilization, rebuilding, and a favorable reputation. Integration was favored over division, even with respect to the reintegration of former NSDAP members. The university established not only its local importance, but also a regional role. Access was opened to all and learning became the key to a better future. Haupts ends by noting that a generation of outstanding postwar professors contributed to the remaking of society and the economy in the new West German state. One could counter that, despite the obvious achievements of the postwar generation, the conservative orientation of the postwar professoriate certainly left a number of problems unanswered, thereby paving the way for the upheavals of the late 1960s.

Despite the overall quality of these volumes, a few minor concerns should be noted, some of greater importance than others. With respect to the Wojtynowski volume, the author's name is misspelled on the cover and spine of the work, though oddly it is correct elsewhere. In the Oehler-Klein work, the English-language terms needed to be more thoroughly proofread. The Grandner collection utilizes APA notation, rather than more traditional footnotes or endnotes, which creates a tremendous amount of parenthetical material in some articles that impedes the flow of the argument. The Haupts monograph provides voluminous detail on the arts disciplines, but includes only a very short section on mathematics and natural sciences during the years in which they were incorporated into the unified philosophical faculty. Finally, the publishers of each volume have chosen to provide only an index of names, which is of limited utility. A more comprehensive, thematic index would be very useful.

Though the titles under consideration focus on a wide range of issues, each offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the restoration of higher education in the immediate postwar era. The authors provide a number of important insights into the impact of occupation policies, the fallacy of "Stunde Null," the nature and impact of denazification (both personal and institutional), the continuity of elites and the resultant postwar conservatism in the universities, and the issues which led to the conflicts of 1968. Above all, as Grandner, Heiss, and Rathkolb note in their preface, these works remind us that the past cannot be quickly dismissed and that claims of "unpolitical science" or "unpolitical research" are entirely unfounded. Teaching and learning are inextricably bound to the sociopolitical context in which they take place (Zukunft, p. 7). Hindsight thus allows us to condemn the inadequacy of the early phase of denazification and the ease with which former members of the NSDAP resumed their careers in the postwar period. Likewise, one must reject simplistic claims that the work produced during the Nazi era was in any way unpolitical. Nonetheless, these volumes also remind us that many areas of Germany faced utter devastation and chaos in the early years following the Nazi defeat. Under such circumstances, one can understand the profound need to reestablish some type of normality. The fact that a true accounting of the Nazi past, and the role of academics therein, did not take place until the 1980s and 1990s, though, is much more difficult to rationalize.

Notes

[1]. For example, Gernot Heiss et al., eds., Willfährige Wissenschaft: Die Universität Wien 1938-1945 (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1989).

[2]. Peiffer cites the categories utilized by Norbert Frei in developing his own phases of coming to terms with the Nazi past; see Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005).

[3]. According the Allied Denazification Bureau, of 530,535 registered members of the National Socialist Party, the Amnesty Law cleared 487,067 (91.8 percent). See Allied Commission for Austria, International Organization 3, no. 2 (May 1949): 371.

[4]. Cologne was initially occupied by American authorities. In mid-June 1945 the British took over control of the region.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Tracey J. Kinney. Review of Grandner, Margarete; Heiss, Gernot; Rathkolb, Oliver, eds, Zukunft mit Altlasten: Die Universität Wien 1945 bis 1955 and Haupts, Leo, Die Universität zu Köln im Übergang vom Nationalsozialismus zur Bundesrepublik and Oehler-Klein, Sigrid; Roelcke, Volker, eds, Vergangenheitspolitik in der universitären Medizin nach 1945: Institutionelle und individuelle Strategien im Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus and Wojtynowski, Katja, Das Fach Geschichte an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz 1946-1961: Gründung und Ausbau des Historischen Seminars, des Instituts für Alte Geschichte und der Abteilung Osteuropäische Geschichte am Institut für Osteuropakunde. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23741

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.