Dissertation Information for Kristian Bernt BlaichNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Creating the socialist university: Academic culture and GDR politics at Greifswald University, 1945--1961 Abstract: This dissertation examines the SED's higher-education project between 1945 and 1961. It seeks to uncover the inherent tensions between the expectations of a traditionally elite professional stratum and the political demands of socialist society--contradictions that ultimately impaired the long-term viability of the SED's goals. Eschewing a top-down approach to academic culture in favor of an examination of everyday life at one East German university, this project is a case study of the effects of social leveling at the University of Greifswald. Focusing on professors' reactions to the Party's attempts at transforming the university into a socialist institution, this study argues that the SED did not meet with the success for which it hoped. During its early attempts to alter the universities' sociopolitical composition, the SED encountered three practical obstacles. First was the personnel problem. In order to ensure that its universities were staffed with qualified teachers and researchers, the SED was often forced to retain, hire or promote bourgeois professors rather than those from more ideologically desirable working-class backgrounds. Secondly, the implicit threat of losing renowned scholars to the West served to remind SED functionaries of the value of their professors. The existence of what amounted to an open border between the GDR and the FRG until 1961 meant that the SED had to be willing to keep its professors contented enough to remain at their posts. Finally and most basically, the power of tradition simply proved too strong for the SED to overcome. The inherent nature of academic work--its intellectual hierarchy, its promotion based on merit, and its mentoring function--precluded any serious social leveling within the university. Ultimately, rather than turning elite positions into jobs for the masses, GDR universities served essentially to transform workers into elite leaders. While the SED was eventually able to build a professoriate that was politically loyal to the socialist state, this goal was only achieved at the cost of compromise. |
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