Political Education in Germany*

Alessandro Cavalli
Professor of Sociology at the University of Pavia, Italy

There are many reasons why Germany is a Sonderfall, a special case. Also in terms of political education. There is no other country that has done and continues to do as much as Germany to educate citizens about democracy. The causes of this specialty obviously lie in the history of the 1900s and above all, after the defeat of 1945, in the will of the winners to convince (or, perhaps, force) the Germans to change mentality, that is their political culture. The allies (especially American and British) had immediately begun in the territories of their competence an intense work of re-education of the people, that had been dragged into one of the most aberrant forms of totalitarianism. The Germans, at least those who remained in the West, on this side of the iron curtain, took the matter seriously and set up a large number of public but also private organizations, investing substantial intelligences, skills and resources, difficult even to imagine for countries, like Italy, where political education was entrusted almost exclusively to political parties. In Germany too the parties are not absent. Their foundations (also fed by public money) promote various initiatives, aimed above all to train their cadres and their militants. Even private foundations (first of all Bertelsmann and Körber) have been present with numerous initiatives for several decades. However, by far the most active sector is the public institutional network, at both federal and regional levels, which revolves around the BPB (which stands for Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung), founded sixty-five years ago and organized within the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

Since then, many things have happened; there has also been the ‘68 movement which, however, not only did not undermine the building of political education, but rather was even, in a sense, one of its consequences, with the claim of coherence between values ​​and behaviors carried out by the student movement. The one of the sixty-eight has been the first generation not to comply with majority opinion, and to develop what, somewhat rhetorically, is called critical consciousness. It was also the first generation that questioned the responsibilities of the generations of their grandfathers and  fathers, whether they had been guilty of crimes, or had acclaimed the Fuerher, or had tolerated the wrongdoings without doing anything.

Then, almost thirty years ago, the “unprecedented event” (unerhoerten Begebenheit) of the German reunification, as Wolfgang Lepenies wrote at the time, unheard-of because it was unexpected, but also because it allowed one of the most extraordinary social-engineering enterprises in history: the transition from real socialism to capitalism, by the construction from above of a new society and a new state on a territory inhabited by 16.5 million people. The interpretations of this unheard-of event are very different: they go from annexation (Anschluss, to recall the ominous fate of Austria in 1938), to adhesion (Beitritt) of the GDR to the BRD, or to the simple re-union of what was somehow “forcefully” unified in 1866 by Bismarck’s Prussia.

In terms of political education, it was necessary to start from scratch, since the “ossis” (so the fellow citizens of the East were scornfully called in the West) had been subjected to an educational cure of a kind different from, if not opposed to, that of a Western democracy. Educationalists and psychologists were mobilized, as well as political scientists and sociologists. The courses of “teaching political education” and “teaching social sciences” multiplied in Eastern universities, as happened before in the western ones; the Eastern Länder equipped themselves with Landeszentralen für Politische Bildung, private foundations extended their interventions, the same did the foundations of the political parties, the professional associations of teachers and all that complex of small and large civil society agencies that deal with youth organizations and policies.

The canon of politische Bildung was set in a document signed in 1976 in Beutelsbach, a small municipality in Swabia. This document obtained the consent of all the political forces of that time and in particular of the Christian democrats, the liberals and the social democrats. The Beutelsbacher Konsens is based on three fundamental principles: 1. Political education must have nothing to do with the indoctrination put in place by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: its purpose is the construction of conscious citizens who know how to form one’s own opinion; 2. It must deal mainly with controversial issues, where different opinions are compared; 3. It must foster commitment and participation. It does not concern, if not indirectly, what Habermas would call “constitutional patriotism”: the “fundamental law” (Grundgesetzt) is a point of reference, not a normative text to be celebrated, but a text to be discussed, updated and adapted to the changes undergoing in society.

The word and the concept of Bildung indicate something more than education and training, they also indicate the acquisition of a rich and well organized mind, not far from what Morin would have called a “head well made”. Politische Bildung indicates the formation of a citizen who knows how to consciously take a position and be an active presence in public life, without necessarily  being or becoming a professional politician. The term politische Bildung therefore covers a very broad semantic space that goes from education to civil coexistence (courtesy towards all humans and good neighborly relations), civic education or citizenship education (centered above all on constitutionally guaranteed rights and duties), political education proper (which concerns behavior in the political sphere), education for democracy (and therefore a specific form of the political system). The areas of overlap between these different concepts are obviously wide and nevertheless it is appropriate not to hide the lines of distinction.

Germans show a widespread and sound conviction that democracy does not assert itself due to its intrinsic virtues, but must be constantly supported by an education to democracy, capable of forming competent citizens, both cognitively and in terms of the ability to engage in participatory and discursive practices, and to get involved to defend one’s values.

Last March, the 14^th Political Education Congress was held in Leipzig, Saxony’s capital, attended by more than a thousand people, officials from state agencies at all levels, youth policy and association workers, scholars and teachers who discussed the role of emotions in politics and society. The theme of emotions, feelings and passions in politics is an ancient and ever present theme, especially in a historical phase in which ideological anchors and trust in institutions have collapsed, and opinions are subject to winds and trends of fashions, leaving those who intend to explain everything with the model of the rational actor dismayed and perplexed. Among the many themes that have been debated in the dozens of workshops which have animated the congress, I would like to point out at least three: the need to link political education at school and outside of school, the need for participatory and active teaching methods, and the connection between political system and political education.

In German schools, to varying degrees and modes from Land to Land, there is a specific teaching that takes different names, sometimes on a bi-weekly basis, or monthly or otherwise. These are spaces where current events enter the school in their own right. And current affairs are not just about Germany, nor even in the first instance. The focus is on the world, above all on environmental issues, Europe and its neighbors, France and Poland, the traditional enemies of past history, countries with which youth exchange programs have been underway for years.

Particular attention is paid to the need to establish interactions and relationships with the extra-curricular activities of youth, religious, cultural, recreational and sports associations. Welding between school and extra-school matters, so that these are not two mutually extraneous worlds, is a widely discussed topic, the importance of which testifies to the existence of a problem. In Germany, as indeed also elsewhere, it is believed that there should be complementarity and not competition or hostility between these two worlds, disconnection is often perceived as a problem.

Take team sports, for example. There is no doubt that they are contexts where respect for rules, respect for opponents, cooperation and competition can be learned. They are all traits (in the language of modern educational thinking one should speak of “competences”) that have to do directly with political culture, and it is not surprising that much care is devoted to the training of all those who, in school and outside, deal with young people. Just think of the relevance that, for example in the field of political socialization, do have the coaches who deal with sports in late childhood and adolescence, and who are adult reference figures whose authority is often greater than that of parents or teachers.

The same applies to the many musical activities that are part of the school context: choirs, orchestras and youth jazz bands populate the scholastic panorama almost like sporting activities, and their organization functions as a laboratory / training ground of civil virtues that do not have directly to do with “politics” in the strict sense, but are somehow the premise to it. Leafing through a magazine specializing in the field, we realize that, in addition to the purpose of training in listening to and practicing music, a considerable space is dedicated to the transversal competences of the social behavior that making music together involves. In sport, cooperation serves to “team up” for a competition; even in the case of music the competitive element is not entirely absent, but is accompanied by the idea of a performance where the individual “tunes in” with the group, and this is also “political” in a broad but not improper sense of the term.

The emphasis on building a relationship between school and extra-school has implications for educational action, in the sense that the practice of democracy is based on “doing” as well as “knowing”. In this regard, there is no doubt that the pedagogical tradition to which political education is linked is that from Pestalozzi to Dewey, and cooperative learning. Democracy cannot be taught (and learned) by listening to a lesson and reading a textbook. We must learn to dialogue, and also to discuss animatedly, articulating our opinions and listening carefully to and respecting those of others, avoiding, above all, the demonization of those who do not share our positions. Just the opposite of what is learned from television talk shows, where the aim seems to be to prevent the adversary from expressing himself, and where the public is encouraged to take sides with one or the other following one’s gut feelings.

Around the politische Bildung, also a fairly large publishing sector has gradually emerged: several publishing houses produce teaching material for teachers and students, several magazines are aimed at teachers and an academic audience.

The basic theme that has transversally crossed almost all of the thirteen sections of the congress has certainly been the task of political education in the face of the returning right-wing extremism (the one on the left, at the moment, is of less concern). The institutions of political education in Germany owe their reasons for existence to the fight against extremism, right and left. First, Germans had to overcome National Socialism, and come to terms with their own past, then they had to act as a bulwark against communism, that had conquered part of the country; now they must face a new threat, the Euro-sceptical neo-nationalism fuelled by hostility towards immigrants and the fear of Islam. A new problem arises for public institutions of political education. How in the long run, with taxpayers’ money, will it be possible to pursue the goal of countering right-wing extremism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, when the party that supports these stances has won in the political elections of 2017, in a democratically legitimate way, as many as 94 seats in the federal parliament? It is unlikely that the voters of Alternative für Deutschland and the elected parliamentarians would recognize themselves in the Beutelsbacher Konsens. It does not appear that the Bundeszentrale so far has been subjected to explicit public attack or criticism by the AfD. It is unpredictable what will happen in the future and this will depend a lot on how the German political system will evolve in the passage from a sort of attenuated bipolarity (that has allowed the alternation between periods of “big coalition” and periods of center-right or center-left governments) to a multi-party system where from time to time composite coalitions could be established, with or without the exclusion of the extreme formations of right and left.

It is important to observe how today the Bundeszentrale, in the materials it makes available to its public, addresses the issue of right-wing extremism. It cannot avoid addressing this issue for the simple fact that fighting against extremism is, I repeat, the raison d’être of the institution itself. It recently published two dossiers on extremism and right-wing populism on its site. The first begins with excerpts from three video interviews with three experts, two political scientists and a social psychologist, who define the phenomenon (7-8-minutes); another interview follows with a German sociologist of Turkish origin on the subject of “racism”; then follow 5 texts (roughly 10 pages each) of historians, biologists, psychologists, sociologists on different aspects of racism, other video-interviews and texts on conspiracy theories, ideologies, anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism, language, group actions extremists, on denial, on organizational practices, on measures to combat the phenomenon. Overall, about ten video-interviews, about a hundred articles, dozens of references to iconic audio and video documentation available in the BPB video library, including a document from the National-Socialist period where somatic traits are described in detail to identify the true Aryans. Similar attention is given to the theme of “populism”. Here, however, the perspective is extended to all of Europe, with wide-ranging essays on the phenomenon, articles for each national case, and in the extensive documentation there is also a group photo taken in Koblenz last year at the “international” meeting of populists, in which you see all the leaders with the smiling faces of Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Matteo Salvini at the very center of the picture.

The effort to be clear without being prejudicially accused of partisanship is evident; the German adjective sachlich expresses well the intent on the one hand to concreteness and on the other to objectivity. Proceeding along the Sachlichkeit ridge requires a delicate balance between impartiality and non-indifference. This explains the wide recourse to the expert opinion of scholars and in particular of historians and social scientists and, where opinions may not coincide, an attempt is made to offer the opportunity for a confrontation that remains within the poles of the democratic sphere. To give an example, the theme of the denial of nazi crimes is not avoided, but what is avoided is giving the floor to negationist exponents, resorting instead to the documentation of controversies on the phenomenon in the judicial context and to the opinion of experts who propose explanations on why and how the phenomenon has presented itself and spread, possibly in a comparative perspective.

Orientation towards objectivity does not imply absolute trust in an alleged scientific “truth”. The awareness of the limits of objectivity is present and even explicit, but this is not resolved in avoiding controversial questions, but not even in embracing an extreme relativism in which every opinion is recognized as having equal legitimacy. It is clear that the subjectivity / neutrality theme constitutes the theoretical pivot around which the system of political education revolves. And it is also a very real and problematic issue. A node that can be tackled, but not resolved, with a (cautious) confidence in the ability of social sciences to offer reliable knowledge on the basis of which to orient the processes of teaching / learning.

The German experience suggests some paths of reflection that can help to tackle the issue of political education also in other countries. They can be summarized in three points: 1. Peoples are not “naturally” democratic, but can be educated and trained in democracy; 2. Politics and democracy cannot be a matter of education if divisive issues are not addressed: the controversial nature of the subject is the basis of politics and democracy; 3. The only possible objectivity is that provided by science,  accompanied however by the awareness of its limits.

*A slightly longer and modified version of this paper was published earlier in “Il Mulino”, 2019, vol. LXVIII, n. 503, pp. 459-466.