Dennis Shirley
"The Politics of Progressive Education"

Read: Acknowledgements   Introduction   Personal Remarks by the Author

Cover Text

In March 1933, Nazi storm troopers seized control of the Odenwaldschule, a small German boarding school near Heidelberg. Founded in 1910 by educational reformer Paul Geheeb, the Odenwaldschule was acrown jewel of the progressive education movement, renowned for its emancipatory pedagogical innovations and sweeping curricular reforms. In the tumultuous year that followed that fateful spring, Geheeb moved from an initial effort to accommodate Nazi reforms to an active opposition to the Third Reich's transformation of the school. Convinced at last that humanistic education was all but impossible under the new regime, he emigrated to Switzerland in March 1934. There he opened a new school, the Ecoled'Humanité, which became a haven for children escaping the horrors of World War II.
In this intimate chronicle of the collision between a progressive educator and fascist ideology during Hitler's rise to power, Dennis Shirley explores how Nazi school reforms catalyzed Geheeb's alienation from the regime and galvanised his determination to close the school and leave Germany. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished documents, such as Geheeb's exhaustive correspondence with government officials and transcripts of combative faculty meetings, Shirley is able to reconstruct in detail the entire drama as it unfolded. Others have examined the intellectual antecedents of Nazism and the regime's success at developing themes from popular culture for its political purposes; Shirley goes further by analysing the many ways in which German educators could and did respond to Nazi reforms. In the process he identifies the myriad forces that led individuals to accept or resist the regime's transformation of education.

The Politics of Progressive Education offers a richly rewarding examination of how education in general, and progressive education in particular, fared in the turbulent political currents of Nazi Germany. It brings to light a remarkable story, hitherto untold, of one individual's successful attempt to uphold humanistic values in the darkest of circumstances.

Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts 
London, England

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Acknowledgments and Introduction
to
Dennis Shirley's book: "The Politics of Progressive Education"

Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to Natalie and Armin Lüthi-Peterson, the directors of the Ecole d'Humanité. They have unflaggingly supported my work in education with their friendship and counsel for more than a decade. Thanks are likewise due to Margot Schiller of the Ecole, who has taken on the immense task of organizing Paul and Edith Geheeb's literary materials, and Larry and Evi Matson, who graciously allowed me to turn their living room into my private office while I was working on the first drafts of the book at the Ecole. I would also like to thank Ruth Cohn, Sarah Hudspith, Alain Richard, and Frédéric and Fränzi Bächtold-Barth of the Ecole for their friendship and support during the many years I have been working on this project.

I am deeply indebted to Uta and Stephen Forstat of the Odenwaldschule for their hospitality and assistance during my many visits to Oberhambach. Without their constant engagement in my work it would have been impossible to progress so rapidly in my research. Dagny Wasmund, Henner Müller-Holz, and the former director of the Odenwaldschule, Gerold Becker, deserve my warmest thanks for the many lively and rewarding conversations which enriched my thinking about the history of the school.

I owe a special note of thanks to the alumni and former teachers of the Odenwaldschule who shared much of their lives with me in interviews and correspondence. Esra Steinitz, Elisabeth Sachs, Marina Jakimow, Walter Büchler, Theodor Scharmann, Henry Cassirer, and Martin Wagenschein told me about many of their experiences in the school, including those that were not pleasant to recall or easy to discuss.

I wish to thank Patricia Albjerg Graham, Joel Perlmann, and Richard Hunt for their many close readings of an early version of the manuscript. Wolfgang Edelstein, Jane and Reinhard Bendix, Heinz Elmar Tenorth, Jürgen Helmchen, and Martin Näf all gave valuable comments on this work at different stages of its development.

I could never have written this book without financial support, and wish to acknowledge the generous funding I have received from the German Academic Exchange Service, the Chancellor's Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the President's Fund at Rice University. I am particularly grateful for substantial publication subsidies from the Humboldt Foundation and Rice University.

I am also grateful to the following organizations, which kindly granted me permission to quote from or reproduce materials: Ecole d'HumanitéPaul and Archives, for quotations from the correspondence of Paul and Edith Geheeb and others, and for photographs; Odenwaldschule Archives, for quotations and photographs; and Klett Verlag, for extensive quotations from Paul Geheeb's Briefe. The map was created by Raimund Zimmerman of the Historical Institute of the University of the Saarland.

Finally, my deepest thanks go to my wife, Shelley Cochran, whom I met a decade ago at the Ecole d'Humanité when we were both beginning teachers. Her continual readiness to read, edit, and discuss my writing has been a joy, and she has surrounded my work with an atmosphere of love and happiness.

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Introduction

In the late afternoon on 7 March 1933 a dozen Nazi storm troopers climbed into three cars in the small southwestern German village of Heppenheim. Armed with carbines and exhilarated by their party's recent electoral victory, the men drove through vineyards, apple orchards, farms, and pastures, toward a hilltop adorned with elegant houses that faced south toward Heidelberg. Their destination was a small boarding school called the "Odenwaldschule", which was viewed by unfriendly local observers as a "communist Jew school." The leader of the storm troopers, Werner Goerendt, who had been active in Nazi politics for five years, had suffered two brainconcussions at the hands of left-wing opponents, and was eager to exact revenge on a highly visible and vulnerable scapegoat.

The Odenwaldschule was populated by close to two hundred teachers andand studentsstudents and was one of the crown jewels of the international progressive education movement in 1933. For twenty-three years its founder and director, Paul Geheeb, had labored to create a school community based on tolerance for people from different backgrounds with diverse perspectives. Before starting the Odenwaldschule in 1910, Geheeb had been active in the German women's movement, and he had translated his values into practice by making the Odenwaldschule the first fully coeducational boarding school in Germany. The school had almost been shut down by the government during the First World War because of Geheeb's pacificism and his refusal to celebrate patriotic events such as the Kaiser's birthday, but a timely intervention by a friendly archduke ensured its survival. In the 1920s the Odenwaldschule - with no grades, no grade levels, and a prevailing spirit and practice of freedom_ prospered and became a mecca for school reformers from around the world.

The great prestige of the Odenwaldschule among liberal admirers only increased local Nazis' resentment of the school, and the Nazi seizure of power gave these locals a long-awaited chance to act. The storm troopers veered off the paved road, sped across the brook at the entrance to the Odenwaldschule, and drove up the curving hill to stop in front of the main building, Goethe Haus. The troopers jumped from their cars, drew their weapons, pointed them at students and teachers, and swiftly seized control of the main campus. Goerendt and five others burst into Paul Geheeb's of lice in Humboldt Haus, ransacked his possessions, and confiscated left-wing literature.

The storm troopers then ordered the entire student body and teaching faculty into the auditorium in Plato Haus. With Goerendt presiding, they demanded that those who supported communism identify themselves and turnover any political literature they possessed. Pale and speechless, Paul Geheeb sat with his students in the auditorium. When no one stepped forward, some of the storm troopers identified students they had seen agitating in the 5 March elections, searched their rooms, and indeed found a small number of communist brochures. The Nazis then ordered students to bring them all of the communist literature on campus. The students fanned out and brought back the books they thought the Nazis wanted. After a stay of more than two hours, the storm troopers departed, carrying off copies of Marx's Capital,travel books about Russia, literature on coeducation, chemistry books with suspiciously red covers, and a Sanskrit dictionary - which they mistook for Hebrew.

Emboldened by their successful search and their new found powers, the storm troopers returned four days later with a company of fifty men. This time they beat up two Jewish teachers, arrested one of them, and undertook a comprehensive search of the school on their own. Students helped each other to hide or destroy literature they thought the Nazis would confiscate, and the school was filled with the sound of flushing toilets as potentially incriminating papers disappeared.

Appalled by the spontaneous nature of the Nazi raids and alarmed about the security of his students and teachers, Paul Geheeb subsequently began organizing public and surreptitious strategies to contest the escalating Nazi control of the school. He wrote letters to the press and to the government to protest the raids, and he urged foreign school reformers to direct letters to the German government asking it to protect the school. While publicly carrying out a campaign to preserve the Odenwaldschule, Geheeb also made plans to emigrate should the Nazis begin systematically to destroy the school.

This scenario - bold Nazi strikes designed to cow opponents and the bewildered response of frightened citizens - was enacted thousands of times in Germany in March 1933. The Nazis intervened in all aspects of civil society, from churches to unions to sports clubs to schools. Yet the developments in the Odenwaldschule were unique. When the Nazis seized power that March, they typically struck first at the groups they perceived as their major enemies: communists, social democrats, trade unionists, and Jews. The first raid on the Odenwaldschule happened before the Nazis in Hesse hit such obvious targets as the Hessian Social Democratic Party headquarters and the local offices of the Social Democratic newspaper, and even before they had fully secured power by taking control of the Hessian Ministry of the Interior or ousting the Social Democratic President of Hesse. Why did storm troopers attack a small progressive boarding school so early and with such vehemence? What kinds of reforms would they foist upon the school? How would the educators in that school, and the director, Paul Geheeb, respond to their incursions?'

This book is a description and analysis of Paul Geheeb's leadership of the Odenwaldschule in the period following the Nazi seizure of power. To understand the original purpose and character of the school, I first present highlights of Paul Geheeb's youth, survey his early pedagogical apprenticeships, and review his founding of the Odenwaldschule in 1910. I then trace the evolution of the school in the last years of the Second Empire and throughout the Weimar Republic, covering its major pedagogical principles, curricular innovations, and structural changes.

The Nazi seizure of power marked a major hiatus in the history of the Odenwaldschule. From March 1933 to March 1934 - the first year of Nazi rule - Geheeb and his colleagues made decisions which set the course of their lives for the next twelve years. In this time Geheeb moved from an initial effort to establish a module vivendi with the Nazis to opposition to their transformation of the Odenwaldschule. The Nazis took many of the Odenwaldschule's key features - student selfgovernment, egalitarian relationships between the sexes, common participation in school events regardless of ethnic or religious background, an overarching ethos of reverence for life - and either destroyed or radically transformed them. By December 1933 Geheeb was convinced that any hope of carrying out truly humanistic education would be impossible under the Nazis. He issued letters to all of his faculty provisionally dismissing them from their work as of March 1934.

Yet the rush of events proved to be more complex than Geheeb had anticipated. Two of his closest colleagues, Heinrich Sachs and Werner wasunderstandableMeyer, felt that Geheeb's principled opposition to the Nazis was understandable, but that he had unwittingly abandoned the Odenwaldschule precisely when it most needed to be preserved. When Geheeb emigrated from Germany in March 1934, Sachs and Meyer reconstituted the school as the "Gemeinschaft der Odenwaldschule," going much further than Geheeb to accommodate Nazi reforms. Meanwhile, Geheeb continued his work in Switzerland and founded a new school, the "Ecole d'Humanité." Both schools were beset with constant crises, but in spite of the obstacles to their survival they persisted through the end of the Third Reich in 1945.

This volume describes and analyzes the conflict between Geheeb and the Nazis, the splintering of the Odenwaldschule in 1934, and the subsequent destinies of the Gemeinschaft der Odenwaldschule and the Ecole d'Humanité. Such a study is important for several reasons. First, there is the intrinsic human interest of the story itself, which appeals not only to the specialist in the history of education or Nazi Germany but also to the lay reader. Paul Geheeb's efforts to found a school based on progressive principles in the unlikely setting of Imperial Germany, the struggles and successes of the school in the Weimar Republic, the rapid Nazi transformation of the Odenwaldschule, Geheeb's odyssey through five Swiss cantons in twelve years, the development of the Ecole d'Humanité as a haven for refugee children, and finally Geheeb's emotional conflict with Sachs after the war - all of this makes for compelling and dramatic history, full of unexpected developments and friction between ethical norms, personal decision making, and political power.

Second, a study of Geheeb and the Odenwaldschule enables us to answer many historical and pedagogical questions of enduring interest. In what way was the Odenwaldschule a part of the international "progressive education" or "new education" movement, and how did it relate to the indigenous German analogue known as "reform pedagogy?" How did the Nazis organize their educational policies in relation to the Odenwaldschule, and in what manner did Paul Geheeb respond to their interventions? To what degree was Geheeb's opposition to the Nazi reforms purely defensive and a matter of preserving the school's autonomy, and to what extent was he motivated by political and ethical objections? Can one generalize about other schools on the basis of a case study of Paul Geheeb and the Odenwaldschule?

This volume will play a role in strengthening an emergent approach to education in the Nazi period. Until recently, two paradigms dominated the history of education in the Third Reich. The first was based on top-down analyses of Nazi reforms and examined the kinds of pedagogical, curricular, and structural changes the Nazis made in schools. Historians assembled anthologies of Nazi decrees, interpreted Nazi school curricula, and examined the most ferociously pro Nazi schools. The historical landscape was more or less vacant, however, when it came to exploring the subjective responses of educators to Nazi reforms. Were German teachers, on the whole, passionately pro Nazi, apathetic, or critical of the regime? Were certain groups of teachers - for example, elementary, secondary, or university-level faculty - more susceptible to Nazism than others? How did religion, ethnicity, class, and gender influence loyalty or nonconformity? By not asking such questions, historians flattened out the diversity of the German population, and the manner in which individuals and groups either expedited or impeded Nazi reforms went untouched.

The second paradigm focused more on intellectual history. Several monographs described the theories of reactionary intellectuals from the Second Empire or Weimar Republic, and attempted to show how they created an atmosphere conducive to the rise of nationalsocialism. Others examined Nazi theorists of education, and tried to show their affinities to or their ruptures with other German intellectual traditions. Just as with the first paradigm, however, works in this approach generally evaded questions pertaining to popular receptions of either pre-Nazi reactionary thinkers or Nazi theorists of education. It was left to speculation as to how much weight could credibly be placed on such theoretical influences.

Although both of these paradigms had problematic aspects - particularly related to agency and the subjective motivations of educators in the Third Reich - they accomplished a great deal in clarifying our understanding of intellectual antecedents of Nazism and the exact Nazi strategy for transforming schools to saturate them with a pro-Nazi spirit. The studies of Nazi school reform opened up interesting issues touching on the internal divisions of Nazism that made the regime more "polycratic" than "totalitarian" in nature, whatever the aspirations and boasts of the Nazi Party. By demarcating the increasingly virulent Nazi interventions in schools during the Third Reich, such analyses mapped out the manner in which the regime sought to penetrate and appropriate German schools for its own purposes. By investigating the intellectual precursors of national socialism and explicitly National Socialist theorists of education, scholars identified prevailing themes in the cultural climate of Germany in the first third of the century and their appropriation by official ideologists in the Nazi regime. Yet it is striking that neither paradigm addresses that which is essential from the point of view of social history - namely, how educators responded to Nazi reforms at the moment when there forms were imposed on their particular schools. Only since the mid-1980s have we begun to investigate the residual agency possessed by teachers in the Third Reich, and to ask which factors led them to support, disengage from, or oppose the regime.

The approach to this book did not develop in a vacuum. I have profited from the work of a small group of historians - Martin Broszat, Ian Kershaw, and Detlev Peukert - who have explored differentiated approaches to Nazi society which gauged the exact boundaries of popular enthusiasm for, apathy toward, and criticism of the Nazi regime. By transforming our approach to German society in the Third Reich to move beyond strict dichotomies of either unconditional support for national socialism or adamant resistance, these historians have enabled us to explore the vast intermediate terrain of conformism, resignation, dissent, intermittent refusals, and systematic forms of opposition which never developed into explicitly political challenges to the Nazi state. They have further enabled us to see the way in which individuals could be supportive of some aspects of the Nazi regime - such as the economic reforms which benefited the middle class or the recovery of the Saar in the prewar years - but critical of others, such as Nazi support for euthanasia or the conduct of German foreign policy during the Second World War.

In the history of education in particular, an explosion of studies in recent years has analyzed the nature of popular responses to Nazi school policies. Case studies of individual teachers, schools in urban centers such as Berlin and Hamburg, rural schools, Catholic schools, and emigre reform pedagogical schools, show that the popular reaction was more contingent on specific policies and uneven in its overall development than one might suspect. Yet even in these studies one often misses a sense of the exact incidents and interpretations which led educators to shift from accommodationism to oppositions

This study is based on the conviction that one of the most important things we can learn from the Nazi era involves questions pertaining to the way in which popular acceptance of fascist regimes - which is not identical with approval - is either won or lost. By placing the emphasis on the intentional and incremental character of Paul Geheeb's development from compliance to opposition, one can discover the manner in which the new Nazi school reforms - pedagogical, curricular, and political - catalyzed Geheeb's alienation from the regime, his determination to close the Odenwaldschule, and his decidecision to leave Germany. Such a minutely investigated case study - the most comprehensive to date of one school director's response to Nazi changes in education in his school - can then allow us to ask broader questions about education and national socialism. One upshot of the inquiry, for example, will be to contribute to current debates on the degree to which German reform educators either supported or opposed Nazi interventions in education.

Paul Geheeb is generally recognized as one of the best German practitioners and representatives of "new education," a romantic movement in education which swept Western Europe and the United States in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century. The new school movement, which was developed with different emphases as "progressive education" in the United States and England, "education nouvelle" in France, and "reform pedagogy" in Germany, introduced bold reforms which continue to provoke controversy today. Those reforms included far-reaching student self-government, flexible curricula programs, hands-on approaches to learning, and a Reemphasis on competition and rivalry between students as expressed in grades and awards. The "new education" movement in general has received much attention by historians, yet most studies have been curiously parochial and have only focused on researchers' home countries. As a result, even those readers of English who are well versed in the history of American progressive education are unlikely to have heard of Paul Geheeb and the Odenwaldschule, let alone to have pondered the consequences of Nazi reforms in the school during the Third Reich.

Oddly enough, the situation has hardly been better for readers of German. While such readers could gain access to a biography of Geheeb and a history of the Odenwaldschule, these studies told us almost nothing about Paul Geheeb's exact motivations in contesting the Nazi transformation of his school. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the only histories of Paul Geheeb and the Odenwaldschule were compiled by Walter Schäfer, who was a director of the school in the 1960s. Schäfer's work was largely uncritical of Geheeb and the school's past, and he may have been hesitant to probe too deeply into the Nazi period for fear of evoking controversy among the alumni. Second, most of the primary documents for this book are stored in Paul Geheeb's old office at the Ecole d'Humanité, and at the time I conducted my research the material was largely unorganized. Until her death in April 1982, Edith Geheeb exercised a discretionary control over the primary documents. Since then the Ecole's directors have handled the material, and their ties to Paul and Edith Geheeb have led them to maintain strict control over access to the primary documents. In fact, it is highly unlikely that I would have had access to the papers upon which the book is based had I not been a teacher at the Ecole from 1980 to 1983.

The primary documents at the Ecole d'Humanité throw a tremendous new light on Geheeb's opposition to Nazi school reform in the Odenwaldschule, and I was thrilled to find papers which explain incidents hitherto oblique or altogether unknown to historians. These include the precise minutes of Geheeb's combative faculty meetings with Nazi teachers in the Odenwaldschule in the autumn of 1933; Geheeb's fine, penciled notes, which he passed to his deaf friend Adolphe Ferrière as part of their "conversations" during Geheeb's visits to Switzerland in 1933 and 1934; and Geheeb's exhaustive correspondence to family members, government officials, and educational colleagues. From these papers, with the selective incorporation of documents from primarily German public archives, I was able to reconstruct in detail the exact kinds of deliberations, confusions, and arguments Geheeb encountered as he desperately fought against Nazi reforms.

This volume aspires to be neither a biography of Paul Geheeb nor a history of the Odenwaldschule, although it contains elements of both. It is, rather, an effort to use the first year of crisis following the Nazi seizure of power as a medium for investigating Geheeb's responses to Nazi incursions in the Odenwaldschule. To enhance the intelligibility of those responses I have drawn freely upon Geheeb's biography, the institutional history of the Odenwaldschule, and the social history of German education. I have also explored the complex and unresolved consequences of Geheeb's decisions, to show that decisions made in 1933 have had a lasting impact on the school and its alumni - an impact which continues today.

Although I intend for this book to have sufficient intellectual rigor to make for a compelling narrative and a solid contribution to history, on the deepest level I have written it to repay a debt. I loved teaching at the Ecole d'Humanité, and found the humanistic, individualised approach to education practiced there to be a refreshing corrective to my own schooling. I was distressed to find, however, that little work had been done on the history of the Ecole. The school was in danger of losing a sense of its origins.

This deficiency became particularly poignant in the fall of 1981, when a small cluster of students, expressing their enthusiasm for punk music, began sporting swastikas on their coats and scrawling them on the school's walls. In any school the presence of swastikas As twilightcould and should create problems; in a school founded by anti-Nazi emigres it was impossible to belittle or ignore such symbols. As part of a concerned group of teachers and students, I met with Edith Geheeb - who was the ninety-six years old - and listened to her talk about the complex origins and the intense personal drama which lay behind the founding of the Ecole. As twilight settled over the northern flank of the Alps, Edith dazzled us with her smooth blend of German and English and her incisive memory. She moved easily from anecdote to explanation to further illuminating anecdotes, unraveling the circumstances and decisions which led her to migrate with her husband out of Germany almost a half a century earlier. Eventually our group prepared an evening assembly on the meaning of the swastika, and were capitulated what Edith had told us to the assembled students and teachers of the school. The swastikas disappeared - not because we ordered students to remove them but because the students were moved by Edith's experience and understood that swastikas carried more meaning than the simple shock value they had ascribed to them. The following April Edith passed away, and a major chapter in the history of the Ecole closed.

After Edith's death I resolved to write the history of the transition from the Odenwaldschule to the Ecole d'Humanité. The research has been richly rewarding, and not only on an intellectual level. Through studying the Geheebs' educational work, I have been exposed to and appropriated the basis of what I hold to be the most enduring merits of their practice of education for my own work as an educator. If I have achieved my goal in this book, the reader will encounter a pedagogical Weltanschauung through Paul Geheeb that resonates with a subtle but profound balance of individual self-realization, tolerance for others' differences, and a humanistically construed practice of social responsibility. To contribute to that project, and to ensure its continuity, has been the largest motivating force and raison d'être of the book at hand.
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Dennis Shirley
1998 Greetings to the Ecole

I consider it one of the greatest blessings of my life to have been a Mitarbeiter at the Ecole from 1980 to 1983. I met and befriended many wonderful people who profoundly influenced my life and development, and I began to think about education in entirely new ways. In the fall of 1981, however, I experienced a darker side of the Ecole when a group of students began sporting swastikas on their clothing or marking them on buildings. I was one of a group of Mitarbeiter and Kameraden who met to discuss these issues, and as part of our activity, we met with Edith Geheeb, who told us about her emigration out of Germany and the transformation of the old Odenwaldschule into the Ecole d'Humanité in the 1930s. Our group then prepared and presented our Andacht, which seems to have had a good influence, as the visibility of the swastikas disappeared.

Personally, however, I was left with the desire to know more. I entered graduate studies in education at Harvard University in 1983 and returned to the Ecole in 1985 to gather material to write about the origins of the Ecole. Aided by the tireless Margot Schiller and stimulated by many rich conversations with Armin and Natalie, I was able to complete a doctoral dissertation and gradually to shape it into the book called "The Politics of Progressive Education."
The strength of the book lies not in my own writing, but in the amazing and inspiring struggle of Paulus and Edith Geheeb to keep alive the best principles of their philosophy of education during the 1930s and 1940s.
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