Colloquium - The Invention of Democratic Subjectivity: Political Education in the Federal Republic of Germany

What skills should a democrat have? What defines a democratic personality? And how can democratic characteristics be fostered? Questions such as these were occupying the general public in Germany long before the rise of current populist parties. Indeed debates have been raging around such central and contentious issues of social and political interest since 1945 against the backdrop of the ‘collapse of civilisation’ caused by National Socialism and the emerging Cold War.

Pedagogues, education experts, textbook authors and education policy makers attempting to establish political education in schools found themselves at the centre of such debates. They claimed to know what constituted a democrat, how a democrat could be subjectively supported through teaching and how schools and lessons should be reformed. This presentation highlights the controversies surrounding the principle of democratic subjectivity in German political education. It focuses particularly on the transformation of civic models of subjectivity and the rise of the democratic bourgeoisie between the 1940s and the 1990s which in turn sheds light on the longer-term political and cultural processes of change in the Federal Republic of Germany.