Bildung before and after Nazism: The Cultural Politics of Arnold Bergstraesser from Hellas to Romanitas

During WWII, there was widespread consensus that the re-democratization of Germany after Hitler would fail without a fundamental transformation in traditional German educational philosophies and structures. Considered incompatible with Western democratic values, the idealist heritage of humanistic Bildung represented by the German Gymnasium was blamed by American occupation authorities for the perpetuation of class conflict in the Weimar era and for the creation of German cultural leaders who could recite poetry in Greek and Latin, but allegedly could not form responsible political opinions based on social reality. It is well known that the American attempt at reform under its policy of "reeducation" from 1945 to 1949 did little to transform the foundations of German education. This paper will argue that the successful democratization of educational philosophy in Cold War West Germany was facilitated not by U.S. authorities but by German thinkers who mediated between Weimar idealist philosophy, on one hand, and "Western" philosophies of political education on the other. Focusing on the writings of one of the most influential figures in the evolution of postwar German thought, the political theorist Arnold Bergstraesser, the paper will provide a new perspective on the postwar shift away from a purist tradition of "self-cultivation" (Bildung) in the Weimar era toward an ideal of engaged, "political self-cultivation" (politische Bildung) in the Federal Republic. By tracing the development of Bergstraesser's own thinking from the late 1920s to his exile in the United States and back to Germany in the 1950s, the paper will suggest that the reemergence and redefinition of Bildung after Nazism was central to the integration of the German cultural heritage into the canon of Western democratic thought.