Katie Raney

Education in Dystopias: A Look at Repression in Nazi Germany

At the beginning of the semester, after picking up all of my books from the bookstore, I decided that I wanted to get a head start on my reading. At that time, I had only heard rumors of Ayn Rand and the laborious, thought-provoking literature that she produced. Thinking it would be one of the more challenging books (the irony!), I read through Anthem.  At first, all I could think about was how the society was undeniably reminiscent of the Borg, the collective group from Star Trek.  However, I also could not help but notice how Equality 7-2521 kept a diary, which would have been against the rules within their society.  This made me think of Winston, the main character of 1984, who also kept a diary, which was useful for processing his thoughts and enabling him to begin thinking for himself.  This idea of a lack of literacy within dystopias began to form an interest for me.  In addition to this, as we began the semester by reading More’s Utopia, I was intrigued with how the citizens of Utopian “must employ [their free time] in some proper exercise, according to their various inclinations, which is, for the most part, reading” (More 2.8).  This connection between reading and education within utopias continued in our other novels.  For example, in Herland, Ellador announces that, “The mind is as natural a thing as the body, a thing that grows, a thing to use and enjoy. We seek to nourish, to stimulate, to exercise the mind of a child as we do the body” (Perkins Gillman 9.90).  In addition to this, in Bellamy’s Looking Backward, education seems to be highly stressed as he writes that the “period of youth [is] sacred to education” (Bellamy 6.7).  Even in The Giver, a dystopia, the principle was shown as Jonas walked into the Giver’s office and was amazed at his library of books. Jonas had not even known there was that amount of books that existed. These novels seemed to be pointing to the idea that in utopias, education is a critical value, and within dystopias, education, specifically the ideas of reading and critical thinking, are deemphasized. This led me to my main research question: Do dystopias discourage or repress education and critical thinking skills as some of our novels have suggested? Needing to find a historical dystopia to examine, I selected Nazi Germany, a society that I felt would be a definitive dystopia. 

Before discussing the education system of Nazi Germany, it seems prudent to establish what their system was like in the years preceding Nazi Germany.  Previously, Germany had been one of the “foremost educational systems” (Blackburn 105).  It has been described as being “excessively cerebral,” and students were well-read and well-educated (Blackburn 94).  At the university level, there was “important research works in the field of cancer, bone and brain diseases and in the field of industrial diseases” (Ziemer 173).  However, after years of being entrenched with a new Nazi model of education, the effectiveness of education within Nazi Germany was being questioned.  University enrollment was down by three-fifths, students were giving “unsatisfactory performances” in regarded to their core subjects (Grunberger 291).  One paper even reported a headline asking, “Is our youth getting more stupid?”  Apparently, “out of 179 entrants, 94 had spelt proper names without capital letters and 81 had been unable to spell the name Goethe, Germany’s foremost poet” (Grunberger 293).  Some scholars have referred to this as having a “semi-literacy” that had developed within the Nazi Germany era.  There were even reports that some of the students wanting to join the army were displaying “[an] inconceivable lack of elementary knowledge” (Grunberger 292). All of these things seem to suggest that literacy and education had really been deemphasized within Nazi Germany, just as I was first speculating. 

To look at the issue further, I began to really investigate how and why Nazi Germany’s education had taken this path.  Though I was able to read several sources for this project, one that I particularly enjoyed was Gregor Ziemer’s Education for Death.  Ziemer, an American, and president of The American Colony School in Berlin in the 1930s, took an inside look into the German schools.  After bribing German officers with coffee and writing several letters and making specialized visits to the Nazi headquarters, he was able to attain access into the German education system from preschool to college.  It was through his firsthand accounts of speaking with German administrators, teachers, parents, and students that I was really able to see much of how the German school system operated during this time period. It seems that there were several factors leading to this decline, but two main issues are: emphasizing physical strength and conditioning and a lack of critical thinking skills and reading.

Hitler himself exposes one of the main reasons that German schools suffered from a lack of intellectual education within his work Mein Kampf when he writes, “the individual’s education has to focus upon and to promote first of all physical health” (Hitler 613), and surely, physical health became the main component for the Nazi education.  Within Adolf Hitler schools, the day consisted of “five periods of physical training and one and a half periods of intellectual pursuits” (Grunberger 298).  The demand for being physically fit was so intense, that if students did not meet good physical training standards, they could be met with expulsion from the schools.  Even the teachers were required to participate in rigorous workouts. Women were no exception for this requirement as much of their schooling revolved around this, as well.  This was the main focus of the education system, because “boys [would] become solders; girls [would] become breeders” (Ziemer 16), and both of these tasks, require the health of one’s physical body.  

Though their plan for education was physically rigorous, the Nazis never desired to extend this type of discipline to “the mental sphere” (Grunberger 292). The lack of reading and critical thinking also played into their digression of education. At one point within Ziemer’s book, he expounds on some of Rust’s, who was the minister of education during Nazi Germany, views.  According to Rust, there should not be “too much emphasis on detail,” which makes minds “critical and analytical.” They should also abandon any form of class discussion, because “lecture is the only safe method of instruction.” The students should exhibit “blind obedience” to their teachers and be “disciplined hearers to the word of Hitler” (Ziemer 22-23). They should merely focus on the ideology of the party; even teachers should be “unquestioning interpreters” of Hitler.  Essays “required” the “regurgitation of propaganda hand-outs” (Grunberger 288). All of these things emphasize the fact that this dystopia repressed individual, critical thinking, which was in part that they wanted everyone to feel as if they were equals. Much like the society in Anthem that repressed individual thought, this German dystopia seemingly did the same thing. To demonstrate the lack of value that the Nazi education system gave to reading and writing, Ziemer tells a story of a university classroom he attended once.  The teacher had a knapsack of books in which he slowly drew out one at a time.  After pulling each book out, it was spat on, placed on a bundle of pine branches, doused in kerosene, and then burned.  There were several notable books mentioned, among them the complete works of William Shakespeare and The Bible.  Instead of reading classics, they were immersed in stories of their war heroes and of defeating their enemies on the battlefield. In regards to thinking, there was even a slogan that demonstrated their ideals which said, “We think with our blood” (Grunberger 298).

Early in the assignment, I wanted to trace the link between education and dystopias.  Though I only selected one dystopia, the link between it and some of the dystopian literature that I have read seems undeniable. Clearly, the emphasis on the body rather than the mind and the lack of critical thinking illustrate that this dystopian did not emphasize education. With this in mind, I cannot help but recall the definition of dystopia on Dr. White’s page that defines it as “a utopia that’s gone dysfunctional.” Though I learned much about the Nazi education system, I also I noticed some utopian drives within the system as I was researching. Just as Hitler longed to create a nation that stressed the State as more important than the individual, this is a theme that has been seen even among our utopian literature! People working strictly for the good of the nation were seen in all three of the utopias we have read so far. Furthermore, the emphasis on physical strength and desiring a lack of disease was witnessed in Herland. It is interesting how some of these “utopian” ideals are seen within Nazi Germany. Yet, I cannot help but recall that it went completely “dysfunctional.” The research on the German education system proved so interesting to me, that I did not get to explore literacy and education within utopian societies, something I would like to explore in the future. 

Works Cited

Blackburn, Gilmer. Education in the Third Reich. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1975. Alfred R. Neumann Library. The University of Houston Clear Lake. 17 June     2011. <http://library.uh.edu/record=b3375783~S13>.

Grunberger, Richard. The 12-year Reich; a Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933-1945. New  York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Print.

Hitler, Adolf, and John Chamberlain. Mein Kampf: Complete and Unabridged, Fully Annotated. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939. Print.

Ziemer, Gregor. Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi. 1941. New York: Octagon, 1972.    Print.