Iron Curtain (55 page)

After that, Supka plunged into depression, fearing his arrest. He obtained some medical documents from a doctor, which he hoped would help him avoid detention or deportation. He tried to make contact with some people he knew in the communist party leadership. He reached out to a couple of Freemasons who seemed to have made their peace with the regime—one of them wore a brand-new suit and had a new car—and he discussed rumors that people like himself were being sent to work on collective farms in the Soviet Union. In August 1952, he told the informer that he now left his apartment only rarely. Supka didn’t want to see the world of the present, the informer declared in his report to the secret police, it had become so completely different from what he had imagined:

Though a collective celebration was impossible, friends did come to visit the former grand master in small groups on Supka’s seventieth birthday. After that he was often ill, according to the informer’s reports, though he still liked to discuss politics. Géza Supka finally died in May 1956, five months before the Hungarian Revolution. Some 400 people came to his funeral. As the informer reported, “there were several wreaths and several people put acacia leaves on them, symbol of the Freemasons …”

THE SHOW TRIALS, the arrests, and the assaults on clergy attracted national and international attention during the era of High Stalinism. But pressure from above was only one of the tools the regimes deployed to convince their fellow citizens of their right to rule. They also attempted to create enthusiasm and cooperation from below. If the immediate postwar period had been characterized by violent attacks on the existing institutions of civil society, after 1948 the regimes began instead to create a new system of state-controlled schools and mass organizations which would envelop their citizens from the moment of birth. Once inside this totalitarian system, it was assumed, the citizens of the communist states would never want or be able to leave it. They were meant to become, in the sarcastic phrasing of an old Soviet dissident, members of the species
Homo sovieticus
, Soviet man. Not only would
Homo sovieticus
never oppose communism; he could never even conceive of opposing communism.
²

In the era of High Stalinism, no one was exempt from this ideological
instruction—not even the very youngest citizens. Though teenagers had long been a communist priority, now the focus was expanded to include kindergarteners. As
Otto Grotewohl, the new East German prime minister, declared in 1949, the youngest German children were “our cleanest and best human material.” They were “the gold reserve for our future.” They must not “fall prey to reactionary forces,” and they should not “grow wildly, without care and attention.”
³

The notion of small children as blank slates or lumps of clay that the regime could mold at will was not a new one in Germany: the Nazis had used very similar metaphors (as had the Jesuits, among others). But the content German communists poured into the allegedly empty brains of infants would not be Nazi. As early as June 1945, a Berlin newspaper wrote of the damage already done to children by years of Nazi education:

Right away, the Soviet occupation force banned private kindergartens and forbade former Nazis and Nazi fellow travelers—a loosely defined category—from teaching in any kindergartens. When that edict led to a teacher shortage, the Soviet occupation regime, which surely had more urgent matters on its plate, organized six-month courses to train new preschool teachers.
⁵

More was to come. Indeed, the extent and nature of the Soviet Union’s desired influence over education came as a shock to many Eastern European and especially to German educators, many of whom had enthusiastically anticipated that a left-wing regime would support the progressive, avant-garde pedagogy advocated in the 1920s, with its emphasis on spontaneity, creativity, and what would nowadays be called “child-centred” education. There had been
Montessori kindergartens in Budapest and Berlin since before the First World War;
Janusz Korczak, a progressive educator and children’s author, had experimented with the idea of “self-government” in his Warsaw orphanages, encouraging children to write their own rules and form their own parliaments.
⁶

Instead, Eastern Europe’s educators learned that the “correct” methods of instruction would not be found in Montessori textbooks but rather in the works of Soviet educational theorists, and most notably in the writings of
Anton Makarenko, a particular favorite of Stalin. In the 1930s, Makarenko had been the director of the
Gorky colony, a reform school for juvenile delinquents. His methods were heavy on peer pressure, repetition, and indoctrination, and he emphasized collective living and working. The most eloquent passages of
The Road to Life
, his book about the Gorky colony, are dedicated to the glories of collective labor: “It was a joy, perhaps the deepest joy the world has to give—this feeling of interdependence, of the strength and flexibility of human relations, of the calm, vast power of the collective, vibrating in an atmosphere permeated with its own force.”
⁷

Like
Trofim Lysenko, the fraudulent Stalinist biologist who believed in the inheritability of acquired traits, Makarenko believed in the mutability of human nature. Any child, however unpromising his background and however reactionary his parents, could be transformed into a good Soviet citizen. Put him in a team, tell him that everybody works for the good of the group, patiently repeat slogans in his presence, and he will learn. While the real Makarenko was surely more sophisticated than his followers, crude “Makarenkoism” (like crude “Lysenkoism”) looked a lot like ordinary ideological brainwashing.

Progressive educators were forced to make a rapid retreat. “I overemphasized children’s independent activities, underestimated the necessity of political leadership, and [mistakenly] believed that people become educated through the acquisition of experience,” one German educational theorist declared in her apologetic memoirs. She also regretted not following the advice of
Erich Honecker, who, though of course not an expert in early-childhood education, “approached all questions with a clear political-ideological class viewpoint” and thus reached the “right conclusions.”
⁸
At about the same time, Korczak—who had died tragically in
Treblinka, along with his orphans—was denounced in Poland for promulgating “education in the spirit of mindless subservience to the existing order.”
⁹

With only six months of training, the army of brand-new kindergarten teachers in Germany would have had difficulty understanding these theoretical debates, let alone deploying them in the classroom. But the basics, as they and their colleagues across the bloc soon learned, were not difficult. Politics was to lie at the center of the curriculum for every child, from kindergarten onward. Acceptable topics included the history of the working class, the Russian
Revolution, and the achievements of the Soviet Union. Children were to participate in the party’s various campaigns for “peace,” for
North Korea, for the Five-Year Plan. Teachers who did not teach these topics or pursue these campaigns risked losing their jobs.

Naturally some of the material had to be changed for the benefit of small children. In Poland, the cult of Stalin was transmitted through the study of an utterly fictional version of the Soviet dictator’s childhood, which had in reality been rather grim. Polish children were taught to call him by his childhood nickname, Soso (they also learned to call
Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the terrifying founder of the Soviet secret police, by the nickname “Franek”), and they read of his various exploits and youthful successes. Popular children’s magazines contained tales designed to stoke admiration of Stalin, such as the story of a child who asks his mother the meaning of the word “Generalissimo.” She explains that because “the whole Soviet nation deeply loved their leader” the USSR had granted him this special title as a gesture of thanks. Impressed by this deep faith, the child determines to learn how to spell the difficult word “generalissimo” and remember it forever.

The glories of central planning were meanwhile conveyed through books such as
Six-Year-Old Bronek and the Six-Year Plan.
¹⁰
The evils of capitalism were transmitted though tales like the story of Mister Twister, an American who visits Leningrad and is shocked to find a black man staying in his hotel—or through poems about American plans for war:

Novelists also worked hard to supply the children of the new era with reading material. In the late 1940s and 1950s,
Alex Wedding—a
communist whose books had been burned by Hitler in 1933—published a series of children’s books in eastern Germany. The first was
Die Fahne des Pfeiferhansleins
, the tale of a fifteenth-century peasants’ rebellion, which features a flute-playing rebel leader, a
Pfeifer
, who dreams of “a free homeland” without rulers and ruled. The rebellion ends badly, but the rebels don’t give up hope: “Someday the sun of freedom will break through the clouds. Someday even our exile will end, and we will see our motherland again, a beautiful motherland,
free of the arbitrary rule of the dukes and lords … and then the flag of the
Pfeifer
will wave from all towers …”
¹²

Existing children’s stories were sometimes rewritten to conform to the new ideological spirit. A beloved Polish children’s comic strip—
The Adventures of Matolek the Goat
—reappeared with a few subtle changes. Before the war, Matolek had looked down upon Warsaw and seen the Royal Castle and the spire of a church. After the war, he only saw the Palace of Culture, a towering monument to Stalin. Before the war, policemen in trench coats had swung their batons at Matolek for breaking traffic regulations. After the war, as one reader remembered, “nice socialist militiamen politely point him in the right direction.” The original Matolek discovered a treasure that he gave to “poor children in Poland.” Because there were no poor children under communism, postwar Matolek gave the treasure to the “dear” children in Poland instead.
¹³

Textbooks also had to be rewritten to reflect the new reality. In November 1945, at a time when its bureaucrats were still collecting shoes and sweaters from the UN relief agency and handing them out to desperate teachers, the
Polish Education Ministry ordered the writing of a new history of education, designed to emphasize “the fight for democratic education” and set up a committee to write new history textbooks as well.
¹⁴
When that rewriting process didn’t take place fast enough, more drastic measures were used: for a brief period, in 1950–51, only Soviet history texts were allowed in Polish schools.
¹⁵
In eastern Germany, the rewriting efforts were more successful. The history curriculum for thirteen-year-olds described the postwar period as follows:

Most urgently of all, teachers had to be retrained—or replaced—and not only kindergarten teachers. The Soviet military regime first proclaimed the “democratic renewal of the German school,” in August 1945, in an order that
also called for a “new type of democratic, responsible, and capable teacher.” Soon afterward, educational policy in the Soviet zone of Germany was handed over to the most senior and most trusted “Moscow” communists:
Anton Ackermann, a leader of the wartime National Committee for a Free Germany;
Paul Wandel, a member of the Soviet, not the German, communist party; and
Otto Winzer, a member of the Ulbricht Group.
¹⁷
Soviet authorities would in due course use educational reform as a type of denazification, as well as a means of offering ambitious, pro-regime young people a path to rapid advancement.
¹⁸
A whole generation of
Neulehrer
—“new teachers,” often with minimal training—were rapidly deployed in place of old ones, and they were expected to show their gratitude to the new regime by following every one of its precepts.