Introduction

This study of the elementary school in Prussia began with the question of why the largest state in the German Empire, which had a government that was preoccupied with social and national integration and a political culture that was deeply affected by the ideology of nationalism, had a public elementary school system that served to reinforce religious particularism through its confessionally divided organization and its confessionally oriented textbooks and instruction. Confessional schooling remained the predominant form of elementary education for Catholics and Protestants in the Prussian state throughout the nineteenth century despite the changes that came in the wake of national unification, industrialization, and urbanization. Neither the secular school nor the interconfessional school providing a common educational experience for all children without distinction as to church affiliation ever took hold. The interconfessional school (the so-called Simultanschule), in which the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant religions were taught to the pupils of each faith in separate classes as one subject in an otherwise religiously neutral curriculum, was the pedagogic ideal of a large number of schoolteachers in Prussia. They saw it as a means of diminishing church influence in the schools as well as promoting tolerance and social harmony in a confessionally segmented nation. When a school law was enacted in 1906 after more than fifty years of political controversy over the school question and abortive school bills, it categorized the interconfessional school as the exception to the rule. A legal seal was put on the prevailing practice of having children and teachers of one and the same faith in a school. Although the confessional public school under the supervision of school inspectors who were clergy by vocation appeared to the schoolteachers to be an anachronism in a modern society, it survived the revolution of 1918 and the efforts of the Socialists to abolish the instruction of religion in the schools. In the Weimar Republic the Social Democrats did not succeed in establishing a secular school system for the entire nation, and no more successful were the German Democrats who sought to make the interconfessional school the only legally valid norm.

Confessional Particularism in Prussian Society and the Making of the School Law

More than half a century passed before the promise of a school law contained in the Prussian constitution of 1850 was fulfilled. The dissatisfaction of the Catholic bishops with Adalbert von Ladenberg’s draft of a school law in 1850 and the unhappy fate of Heinrich von Mühler’s school bills of 1868 and 1869 revealed the deep division of opinion within Prussian society on the school question and the conflicting interpretations that state officials, church leaders, and the liberal parties gave to those articles in the constitution that provided the fundamental principles for a school law. The experience of the Kulturkampf engendered in the Catholics an enduring distrust of the school administration, and in the following years a school law was always one of the prime concessions that the Center party sought as a quid pro quo for their support of government bills in the Reichstag. Catholic politicians looked to a school law to provide a secure foundation for a confessional public school system and solid protection for the rights of the church and confessional minorities in school districts. The possibilities of winning such a concession were enhanced after 1890 when the massive electoral vote of the Social Democrats increased the strategic value of the Center party’s seats in the Reichstag, which now held the balance between the Left and the Right. Assuming that this pivotal position gave the Center party more political power than it actually had, historians have generally seen the School Law of July 28, 1906 as a reactionary, Clerical measure, which was introduced by the government as a concession to the Center party and passed by a coalition of parties strongly motivated by antisocialism.1 An examination of the making of the school law from 1890 to 1906 produces a more detailed and complete picture of what happened and a more profound view of the society of imperial Germany. No progress was made in putting the school system on a modern legal foundation during the 1880s because of Bismarck’s political objections to the reform of school maintenance.

Conclusion

In the imperial era schoolteachers and left-wing liberals in Prussia viewed the confessional school under the supervision of school inspectors who were clergymen as an anachronism in a modern society. Its survival defied their expectation that demographic mobility and urbanization would increase the confessional mixture of the school enrollments and disproved their contention that the imperatives of national and social integration should make interconfessional schooling the goal of every modern state. Disheartened and demoralized after years of striving in vain to achieve their pedagogic ideal, the leaders of the Prussian Teachers’ Association could not easily admit or accept the reasons for their failure. After the enactment of the school law of 1906, they contrived an explanation—“they wanted to fight Social Democracy through the law”—that obscured their inability to influence public opinion and the programs of the major parties and obviated a more probing investigation of why the political conflicts over the school question stretching over half a century ended with a law that made confessional schooling the rule. The alarm of the governing class over the growth of the Social Democratic party affected the fate of school reform in Prussia far less than the experience of introducing the changes at the height of a religiopolitical conflict that deepened the divisions within the nation. The circumstances in which the interconfessional schools were opened in the 1870s gave them the reputation of being a “Kulturkampf institution” and this unfortunate association of school reform with Kulturkampf politics remained in the consciousness of both Catholics and Protestants for years to come. Although the Ministry of Education under Adalbert Falk formulated a moderate and prudent policy for establishing interconfessional schools gradually with some consideration to the pedagogic benefits of the innovation, the liberals who agitated for the reform and the city officials who introduced it were more radical and were motivated by political objectives as well as by educational interests. The campaign for school reform became entangled in the political battle that zealous Kulturkdmpfer waged against the Catholic church and the Center party. The introduction of interconfessional schooling did not have popular consent.

Confessional Schooling and School Politics in the Imperial Era

A reaction against Falk’s school policy was inevitable when a Conservative belonging to the Pomeranian landowning nobility took over the Ministry of Education in July 1879. During his first months in office, Robert von Puttkamer made several highly publicized gestures to communicate to the nation his disapproval of the school reforms and his intention to end the Kulturkampf in the school system. In September 1879 he used the occasion of a reply to a petition signed by more than 400 priests in the dioceses of Miinster and Paderborn to announce a policy of reconciliation. He declared, “I wish nothing more fervently than to be able to grant to the clergy of the Christian churches an effective role in the supervision of the elementary school.” He pleaded with the Catholic clergy “not to succumb to the mistaken notion that the policy of the state is to be hostile or indifferent to the beneficial influence of the church on the instruction and moral and religious education of the youth.” Once their resistance to the May Laws ceased, he promised to reinstate them in their former local school inspection offices. Another signal of the oncoming reaction was Puttkamer’s dramatic intervention in the school conflict in Elbing, a city in the province of East Prussia, where the municipal council decided to organize an interconfessional school system in 1875. Ignoring the objections of the Catholic minority, city officials carried out the first phase of the reform in 1876 with the opening of four interconfessional schools for girls. The Catholic parents protested this change and the forthcoming merger of the confessional schools for boys in a petition addressed to Falk in April 1877. Their petition remained unanswered, and only after they renewed their appeal in February 1879 did the minister request a report from the district governor in Danzig. The report arrived in Berlin on July 28, apparently held back until after Falk left office. The district government informed the new minister that “the Catholics in Elbing harbor a great distrust toward the interconfessional school, which the city government itself has provoked because it has constantly shown a conspicuous contempt toward all demands made on the school system from a church and confessional standpoint.”

The Politics of School Reform and the Kulturkampf

Bismarck’s struggle against political Catholicism and dissatisfaction with the supervision of the schools in the Polish-speaking areas of Prussia propelled the school administration on to a new course after 1870. His choice of Adalbert Falk brought to the head of the Ministry of Education on January 22, 1872 a judicial official who was philosophically close to the National Liberal party. During his seven years in office, Falk broke with the practices followed by his predecessors and introduced measures to dissolve the traditional bonds between the church and the school. The objectives of the school reforms were to professionalize school supervision by the appointment of full-time school inspectors in place of the clergy, to weaken the church’s influence in the school system by curtailing its right to direct the instruction of religion, and to merge Catholic and Protestant public schools into interconfessional schools, providing an education that would dissolve religious particularism and cultivate German national consciousness and patriotic feeling. These innovations thrust school politics into the foreground of the Kulturkampf in Prussia. School affairs became a matter of high politics for Bismarck when groups whom he regarded as enemies of the German Empire coalesced into a Catholic political party in 1870. Opposition in the Catholic Rhineland to Prussia’s aggressive war against Austria in 1866 led him to question the political loyalty of the Catholics, and the political behavior of the Catholics after the founding of the North German Confederation confirmed his suspicion. While the Polish faction in the Reichstag of 1867 protested the absorption of Polish Prussia into a German confederation, other Catholic deputies took up the defense of federalism and criticized those articles in Bismarck’s draft of the constitution that created too strong a central government. In the final vote the Catholics formed part of the minority that rejected the constitution. This act reinforced his image of political Catholicism as an intransigent and unpatriotic opposition. The organization of the Center party was a defensive response to the vulnerable position of the Catholic minority in the new empire, which had a political climate of liberal anticlericalism and Protestant nationalist euphoria that seemed to threaten the rights and interests of the Catholic church.

School Politics and the Polish Nationality in Prussia

In their efforts to suppress the language and nationality of the Polish people in the eastern binational provinces after 1870, Prussian state officials looked to the Volksschule to serve as an instrument of germanization. The school’s function was not only to teach Polish children to speak German but also to acculturate them into the German nation. Far from spreading the use of the German language and assimilating the youth into German society, this policy bred germanophobia and a repugnance for the school in Polish families. In spite of all the means of coercion at their disposal, the school authorities did not succeed in achieving these objectives. The total bankruptcy of the germanization policy was exposed when the Polish people resorted to political defiance in the school strikes of 1906. While it is true that the increasingly forceful germanization campaign aroused fervent affirmations of Polish national identity and provoked a countermobilization of Polish nationalists, the failure of the government’s school policy began before the development of a Polish nationalist movement in the 1890s and the outbreak of Polish resistance after the turn of the century. It was the outcome of a long succession of injustices and mistakes made by state officials. Their first error was to underestimate the difficulties, if not the impossibility, of teaching Polish children to speak and read German in the most impoverished and destitute school system in the Prussian state. Although Upper Silesia was the home of 1 million Polish-speaking inhabitants, the heartland of Polish culture and the center of the nationality struggle was Posen. Polish society in Posen was predominantly composed of agricultural laborers and peasants, but there existed also an indigenous nobility and middle-class groups that could provide a cadre of political leaders. The Catholic clergy were Polish and active in public life, unlike the priests in the diocese of Breslau who were mostly German and were under orders from Archbishop Kopp to refrain from antigovernment political activity. Clergymen of high rank represented the electoral districts of Posen in the Reichstag and the House of Deputies.

The School System before 1870

Through most of the nineteenth century the public elementary school in Prussia was de jure an institution of the state but de facto an institution of the church through the clergy’s virtual monopoly of school inspection offices and the precedence given to confessional religious instruction in the curriculum. So extensive was church influence in the public school system that Catholic Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler of Mainz was moved to praise the Protestant monarchy in the north. In 1867 he wrote that a peaceful solution of the school question, which had kindled a bitter conflict between the state and the Catholic church in Baden, was already present in Prussia, in the practices of the school administration and in the constitution of 1850. The bishop’s depiction of the Prussian school administration as a model for the other German states to emulate is a poignant reminder of a point that has not always been fully appreciated in modern historical scholarship. The Volksschule in Prussia was not an affair of the state alone. The traditional partnership of the church and the state in the supervision of the schools was put on a secure and enduring foundation when the constitution recognized the church, the local community, and the state as social entities with legitimate interests and formal rights in the public schools. The General Civil Code of 1794 defined the Volksschule as an institution of the state but did not consistently carry out this principle. While the civil code proclaimed that the schools were under the supervision of the state authorities, it also recognized the church’s historical ties to the schools and entrusted school supervision to the superintendents of the church dioceses and the parish clergy. The local pastors or priests inspected the schools, watched the work and personal conduct of the schoolmasters, and reported any deficiency or disorder to the civil and church authorities. Adding to the ambiguity of the school’s institutional nature was the continuation of the Kilsterschule in which the teacher served also as the church organist and sexton. In many villages the school remained an extension of the parish church.