Germany’s Postwar Re-education and Its Weimar Intellectual Roots

During its occupation by the United States and throughout the 1950s, Germany experienced one of the most dramatic intellectual, cultural, and educational transformations in history. Historians have often observed the intrusion by the USA into German intellectual and institutional life as part of the USA’s overall plan to ‘re-educate’ Germany and to tie it to its own political traditions and Cold War goals. Through examination of the political theories and academic educational reforms of Carl J. Friedrich, one of the most important intellectuals of the Cold War, this article argues that US policies were simultaneously shaped and determined by intellectual traditions from the Weimar period. It shows how Friedrich’s educational theories, which had a tremendous influence on both US and German academic establishments after the war, were developed already in the context of the Weimar-era ‘Heidelberg School’ and the political theories of Max Weber. Through this example, the article seeks to offer a new and more complex picture of Germany’s postwar democratization in general.