The Decline of the German Mandarins after Twenty-Five Years

Abstract

When Fritz Ringer published The Decline of the German Mandarins in 1969, the history of education and of the professions occupied a very modest position in the historiography of modern Germany. In the Federal Republic, the reprinting in the mid-1960s of Friedrich Paulsen's History of Scholarly Instruction in the German Schools and Universities and German Universities and University Study, both dating from the turn of the century, highlighted the lack of more recent scholarship, although it also heralded a major revival of interest in the field. In the United States, the experience of the two world wars had almost completely eroded the older admiration for aspects of German education ranging from the kindergarten to the research seminar. The search for the roots of National Socialism had led many historians to criticize German schools and universities for their teaching of authoritarian, militaristic, nationalistic, and even volkisch values. Yet during the two decades after World War II, a brief condemnation of the universities by the German exile Frederic Lilge was the only book-length study on any area of German educational history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to appear in the United States.