Iron Curtain (56 page)

By contrast, most Polish teachers were left alone in the immediate postwar chaos, despite the close links between the wartime underground and the teaching profession. In much of Poland, children had been prevented from attending school at all during the Nazi occupation—the Germans had intended to make the Poles into a nation of illiterate serfs—and many children could not read or write. The resumption of normal schooling was considered a national priority. In September 1945, the minister of state security,
Stanisław Radkiewicz, even signed an internal decree declaring that in light of the “destruction wreaked on schools,” secret policemen should “arrest teachers only when absolutely necessary.” If they had to be incarcerated, then their cases should be investigated and reviewed as fast as possible.
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Over time, however, those who did not conform to the ideology would be intimidated, threatened, and eventually fired. Their actions and behavior would be observed by local secret policemen, by school directors sent from outside, by each other—or even by students themselves. In 1946, the Education Ministry learned that in the small town of
Człuchów, the teenage son of a secret policeman had been threatening both his teachers and his classmates. Bragging that he had “access to the UB building at any minute, without a pass,” he told one child he would be “locked up,” and threatened another for playing a “religious” Christmas carol (“Silent Night”) on the piano. After a teacher described “Russia’s historical push toward Constantinople” in a geography class, he told another student gleefully that “the old man’s just done himself in.” Though the boy was failing (“he can’t do simple math … and in French he is hopeless”), he bragged that, thanks to his father’s influence, he
would pass without doing any work. When the school director finally summoned his parents to complain, she herself received a summons to the offices of the local secret police two hours later.
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That particular case was resolved in the school’s favor, not least because even secret policemen didn’t like children of their employees threatening schoolmates with arrest. But other stories ended less happily, for example when teachers were made responsible for their pupils’ politics. They could lose their jobs for having presumably exerted “bad influence” over children who displayed “reactionary” or anticommunist views.
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In January 1947, a group of about thirty armed secret policemen entered a Polish secondary school near
Sobieszyn, burst into a classroom, and told everyone present to put up their hands and march outside. Some students were separated, questioned, and beaten; the school director’s protests were ignored. An officer brusquely explained that the students came from “bandit” families, and that several teachers from the school had already been arrested. The raid was designed to punish the entire institution, in other words, for failing to maintain an ideologically correct atmosphere.
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By 1948, however, the mood had changed more decisively, and the Polish Education Ministry set out to “verify” the “values, ideological and professional,” of all school directors, teachers, and educators; to “deepen the ideological offensive among teachers and students”; and to “raise the consciousness” of future teachers.
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At about the same time, one German educational bureaucrat declared that Soviet education, after thirty years of experimentation, had finally reached its zenith: the Soviet Union’s experience proved that education “on the basis of socialist humanism” could be successful. All German teachers who aimed to become “qualified progressive pedagogues” must therefore “get acquainted with, study, and increasingly learn to apply Marxist educational science as founded by Marx and Engels; spread by Joseph Dietgenz, August Bebel, and Karl Liebknecht; and further developed by Lenin and Stalin.”
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Similar programs were arranged for teachers all across the bloc.

From 1948, Marx, Lenin, and Makarenko were added to the curriculum in teacher-training colleges across the bloc. Careful attention was now paid to the class background of new teaching cadres, and enormous efforts were made to secure teachers with the “right” class origins. According to the Polish Education Ministry, 52 percent of new teachers in training in 1948 were of working-class origin, 32 percent were peasants, and 7 percent were children
of “craftsmen.” If these statistics are correct, only 9 percent of teachers that year came from “intellectual” families.
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The proletarianization of the professoriate proved a trickier task. In East Germany, a number of university rectors tried to regroup in May 1945 in order to reconnect to the “German university tradition,” but they were almost immediately dismissed by Soviet officials who were horrified by their “reactionary philosophical worldview” as well as their previous Nazi connections. A wave of denazification followed, both mandatory and voluntary, as dozens of German professors fled to the West. By the time of the opening of the winter semester in January 1946, three-quarters of the professors at universities in Berlin,
Leipzig,
Halle, Greifswald, and
Rostock were gone, and Soviet officers began to play an active role in recruiting new ones.
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Since they didn’t have the resources to run the university system themselves, they created a German body, the Central Education Administration, to which they sent often-unrealistic demands. In March 1947, the Soviet military administration issued an order “on training the next generation of academics,” which called upon the Central Education Administration to find “200 active antifascists” within ten days. As one German member of the administration noted, “we cannot in all of Germany get hold of 200 active antifascists who are also academically qualified.” The Germans did eventually come up with seventy-five names of “politically open-minded” professors, but the Soviet administrators rejected thirty-two. Of the rest, most were over fifty and thus not exactly good candidates for a training program.
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From 1948, the authorities in East Germany as well as Hungary and Czechoslovakia launched a more systematic attack on the faculties of history, philosophy, law, and sociology, all of which were transformed into vehicles for the transmission of ideology, just as they were in the Soviet Union. History became Marxist history, philosophy became Marxist philosophy, law became Marxist law, and sociology often disappeared altogether. Most remaining humanities scholars left at this time, though Soviet authorities did make some effort to keep scientists. As one German cultural bureaucrat put it, “When a reactionary philosopher or historian leaves [for West Germany] we smile. But the situation is different with physicians, mathematicians or technicians, whom we need and cannot replace.”
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Scientists were part of the educational establishment, however, and the changes affected them too. When one chemist decided to leave for the West, he told two communist functionaries his
reasons. Among other things, they reported back, “He can no longer accept responsibility for educating his children at our high schools.”
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The end result was the near-total transformation of East German universities. In a relatively short period of time, a new generation of much younger professors—either more ideological, more cynical, or more easily cowed—filled all of the teaching posts and controlled all future academic appointments as well.

The situation in Poland was different, in part because the war, the Warsaw Uprising, and the Katyn massacre had more thoroughly devastated the Polish intellectual class. In 1939 the Nazis had sent the entire faculty of the Jagellonian University in Kraków, the oldest in the country, to
Sachsenhausen (where they were incarcerated alongside more than a thousand students from universities in Prague and
Brno).
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It wasn’t easy to fire a Polish professor, because there might not be anyone remotely qualified to replace him, and as a result there were far fewer ardent young ideologues in university faculties than there were in East Germany. As late as 1953, law students in Kraków could still study most of their subjects, including the history of Polish law, legal theory, and logic, with prewar professors. Only one or two obligatory courses in Marxism-Leninism were taught by new appointees. As
John Connelly points out in his definitive study of High Stalinist Eastern European universities, the culture of Polish academic life was also different. Many academics who survived had worked in the “flying universities” during the war, teaching students in secret, and the habits of patriotism were strong. It was quite common for academic administrators to pay lip service to the regime, but to teach, lecture, hire, and fire without any regard to politics. Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, older professors habitually protected younger students and colleagues from police investigation.
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Ties of family, loyalty, and academic influence often proved stronger, at least behind the scenes, than fear of the party or the secret police.

But the proletarianization of the student body was, for the communist parties, far more important. Bourgeois professors would die out eventually, and then they could be replaced by eager members of the working classes. In Polish, the term for this wave of academic affirmative action was
awans społeczyny
, a rather ugly bureaucratic phrase that translates, more or less, as “social advance.” The term took on enormous significance over time, referring both to a policy—the rapid promotion of peasants’ and workers’ children into higher education—as well as to the “socially advanced” class that emerged as a result. A similar form of social advance was a central goal of
every country in Eastern Europe. In a speech to the 1949 German party congress,
Grotewohl proposed to single out and promote “workers and peasants” from among the Young Pioneers. They had, he said, “experienced a different kind of learning from early childhood” and could therefore be transformed into a “genuinely new, democratic, socialist intelligentsia … which we will need to command our economy and to carry out socialist measures.”
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The attempts to create a “new, democratic, socialist intelligentsia” to replace the old, suspect, bourgeois intelligentsia ranged from the admirable to the absurd. In Poland, where schools of all kinds had been forcibly closed throughout the duration of the Nazi occupation, the postwar illiteracy rate was an extraordinary 18 percent. The party launched a mass “battle to liquidate illiteracy” campaign in 1951, preceded by a school reform that emphasized technical education.
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The success of this program persuaded many intellectuals of the party’s good intentions. One former Polish schoolteacher, though not a communist himself, spent the first part of his career teaching adult literacy classes to refugees from Ukraine and marveled at the impact: “They became different people.” Participating in the campaign helped convince him that the party, though it made mistakes, ultimately meant well.
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But the mere teaching of reading and writing would not by itself create a new elite. Across the bloc, other forms of more aggressive affirmative action were also put in place. The children of workers and peasants had privileged access to university places, training programs, jobs, and promotions. In East Germany, education bureaucrats actively recruited workers and peasants to join special courses designed to move them quickly up the ladder. Students could qualify for these preuniversity entrance courses if their parents came from the correct social background and if they could submit “political character references of democratic organizations,” either trade unions or youth groups.
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In Poland, Union of Polish Youth activists actually took control of the university admissions process through the institution of “technical secretaries,” functionaries who were placed in deans’ offices where they “through self-sacrificing work contributed to the improvement of the action.” Thanks to these efforts, between 1945 and 1952 the number of students of worker and peasant origin at East German universities rose from 10 to 45 percent of the total. In 1949, the numbers of worker-peasant students at Polish universities rose to 54.5 percent.
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Polish communists also created their own alternative institutions of higher education to increase the speed of this social advancement further. Students with
no high-school education were offered the chance to obtain a Polish baccalaureate—the
matura
, similar to a high-school graduation certificate—in six months at the
Central Party School. With this so called “small”
matura
, they could enter a university. Although other institutions offered faster degrees at this time as well—many young people completed the two-year preparatory course to enable them to enter a university without finishing high school—the Central Party School had different criteria: “political consciousness” was considered far more important than the ability to read and write well.

The result was predictable. In 1948, the Central Committee Secretariat complained that some 20 percent of the students at the Central Party School course—overwhelmingly young, working-class men with no secondary education—couldn’t finish the course because they weren’t competent enough to take lecture notes.
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More than fifty students at Humboldt University in East Berlin reportedly had nervous breakdowns in the 1950s.
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Professors, particularly in Poland, sometimes quietly advised young workers at the beginning of their courses that they weren’t going to make it and should return to their factories. There were also reports of Polish students faking their social origins: “Sons and daughters of merchants, kulaks, and prewar colonels came to the examinations in dirty overalls” and pretended to be workers, as one indignant report had it.
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In Hungary, some students from bourgeois families were instructed outright to spend a bit of time working as laborers and then to reapply for university places. Minor displays of loyalty, such as becoming a youth group leader, helped secure university places too.
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Material gaps between the worker-peasant university students and the children of prewar intellectuals remained, however—the former often lived in shabby university dorms and the latter lived at home—and the two groups often kept their distance from one another.
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