Abstract
No institution stirred more passionate debates in Germany’s post–World War II years than did the school system. In the Soviet Occupation Zone in particular—the region that would officially become the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949— German and Soviet decisions about how to educate young people after twelve years of a National Socialist (Nazi) dictatorship became part of a broader social and political discussion about the future of the German nation. At a critical time in the state’s development, its educational system both reflected and contributed to a nascent antifascist national consciousness that was uniquely East German.1 For a half-century, seventeen million residents of the GDR attended a school system that in form and content differed radically from its partner across the border in the Federal Republic (West Germany) and from all previous German educational systems. For the first time, German educators promised all citizens an education that was coeducational, secular, comprehensive, and free. This revolutionary “antifascist-democratic unity school” was neither a product of Moscow nor a tool of hard-line communists in East Berlin.
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