Antifascism, Unity, and Division

Abstract

In October 1945, the Saxon school administrator Herr Viehweg declared in his report on a regional meeting with school supervisors, “Our school should be democratic antifascist. We know what that means. But how do we accomplish it?”¹ Viehweg went on to discuss practical considerations for setting up the “new school,” such as the need for new teachers, but, like his colleagues throughout the Soviet zone educational system, he never specified the exact ideology behind antifascist democratic education or even defined its philosophy. Practically, much of what became “antifascist democratic education” referenced earlier school reforms from both the previous century and the Weimar era, but no single educational project was inherently antifascist. There was no one definition of antifascist democratic education in the Soviet zone, just as there was never an explicit definition of antifascism.