German Elementary Education from 1890 to 1945

In this innovative analysis of German elementary education, Katharine Kennedy uses textbooks, curricula, and pedagogical texts to trace continuities and changes in the lessons taught in the elementary schools of Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Germany. Children in all three periods were exposed to recurring texts that reinforced attachment to God, region, and fatherland. However, they also encountered evolving symbols of the nation and shifting ideas about the identity of Germany and the German people. By blending lessons on Hitler, race, and heredity with traditional narratives, Nazi education conveyed its ideology under the cloak of virtue, patriotism, and normality. It provides a compelling example of how a dictatorship manipulates religion and tradition to legitimize a brutal, lawless, and racist regime.

Katharine Kennedy is the Charles A. Dana Professor Emerita of History at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia. A specialist on the history of German education, her publications encompass the Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi periods and address themes such as religion, colonialism, regionalism, and music. Her recent publications include the article “Singing about Soldiers in German Schools, from 1890 to 1945” (Paedagogica Historica 2016) and the chapter, “‘German Youth, Your Leader!’: How National Socialism Entered Elementary Schools in 1933”, in From Weimar to Hitler: Studies in the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932–1934 (Berghahn Books 2019).

“This is an excellent book with a wide-ranging and ambitious scope, covering education in three key periods of modern German history: Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Kennedy presents a careful analysis of schooling in each of these three eras. Examining textbooks and curricula, Kennedy provides an important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the history of education in Germany, between 1890 and 1945.” • Lisa Pine, Institute of Historical Research, University of London