Abstract:

When the two Germanys unified in 1990, the stage was set for the most comprehensive and speediest restructuring of an entire country's educational system in European history. The GDR's unified polytechnic system was replaced by a primary and three-tiered secondary school system; teachers were politically evaluated and retrained; schools were totally reorganized and consolidated; and the old curricula, materials, and accepted pedagogy thrown out and replaced with new. This five year study is a critical ethnography of restructuring as it was achieved and experienced in secondary schools between May 1991 and December 1996. Follow-up interviews were conducted in 1997 and 2001. Following the first class to graduate under the new system along their varied career and educational paths after the Abitur , it also analyzes how one generation of eastern youth shaped its future and interpreted its past. The fieldwork is based on extensive observation and interviews in 23 schools and focuses on one Gymnasium in an eastern Berlin district. The ethnography is contrasted with media representations of youth, schooling, and the east-west divide during the same period.

The problems and challenges that teachers and students faced show what was impossible to know beforehand: how different the systems really were and perhaps what 'democratization' really means. The redistribution of school property, the restructuring of institutional authority, and the redefinition of social roles within and around schools were all highly contested processes, and they were constantly being smoothed out and covered over for the sake of national unity. I argue that in spite of some extreme forms of quality and content control, many schools and individual teachers created new niches of autonomy for themselves; in spite of the worsening economy and strong anti-eastern prejudices, many students used their 'GDR socialization' to advantage. The study provides a situated counterpoint to both the extensive policy research on schools and the surveys of young people in eastern Germany, and I hope it will contribute to a greater understanding here in the United States of the local effects, lived costs, and real achievements of German unification in the early and mid nineties.