"New Buildings Create New People": The Pavilion Schools of Weimar Frankfurt as a Model of Pedagogical Reform

Abstract

The particular character of reform under the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) lay in the degree to which myriad interest groups were able to forge a single, concerted effort with an overriding ideology after the First World War. Following the German Revolution of 1918 and the initiation of parliamentary democracy under the Republic, reformers from the liberal to the socialist left saw an opportunity to institute the changes for which they had long struggled. Many of their aspirations became inscribed in the new constitution. Along with civil rights, for example, the Weimar Constitution granted every citizen the right to material well-being, i.e., that of having a sound dwelling accompanied by a piece of land, where feasible, as well as the right to an education. How the impoverished state, laboring under the impact of the Treaty of Versailles, was to achieve these goals was a troubling question. The response by the Republic was both idealistic and a species of Realpolitik. Germany's vast bureaucracy, newly organized along modern managerial principles as a result of the war effort, now spun an intricate network of federal, provincial, rural, and urban authorities charged with building housing and public infrastructure. New taxes and other fiscal measures enabled hard-pressed locales to begin construction of the new, democratic Germany. The modernization model for the economy overall, an adaptation of American Taylorism, proposed that the rationalization of production would simultaneously build a peacetime economy, as it solved some of the most crucial material needs of the average German worker. In subsequent years, the collaboration among reformers inhabiting the new state bureaucracy resulted in an astonishing degree of coordination among fields of expertise. In each of Germany's major cities, a coalition of housing unions, industry and 1 Ernst May, Die Neue Schule, Das Neue Frankfurt, 11/12 (1928): 225.