Worker's degree
Institutionalized measures were referred to as workers' studies , which in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany or the German Democratic Republic served to train a class of academics from the workers . This should enable those who did not have a high school diploma to gain access to university . The measures in question included the preparatory study institutions established in 1946 , from which the workers and farmers faculties emerged in 1949 .
The so-called RabFaks (Russian: Рабфак - abbreviated from Рабочий факультет, in German: Workers' Faculty) existed in the Soviet Union since the 1920s . Other countries of the Eastern Bloc , e.g. B. Czechoslovakia , had comparable worker study models.
Goal setting
As part of the educational policy in the Soviet Zone / GDR, the worker's degree served to select students through party politics, to ensure the dictatorship of the SED through the formation of a new, loyal academic class, to ideological re-education and to bring the universities into line. In September 1947 the SED functionary Anton Ackermann declared :
“We want a different worker's degree. Not only do we want to change the social composition of the university's audience, it is even more important that this newly formed intelligentsia is also educated and trained in the spirit of a new ideology , in the spirit of scientific socialism . "
Since the number of applicants in the first few years after the war significantly exceeded the number of places at university (in Saxony, for example, 80.4% of applicants were rejected in 1946/47), the selection of students was an important political issue Quota for workers as well as the mandatory specification of party membership contributed to a party-political selection of the students. These party selection principles were criticized early on. B. in a letter from the chairmen of the democratic parties in Berlin dated October 8, 1946 to Paul Wandel .
Graduates
The writer Hermann Kant and the actor Peter Sodann were trained at a workers and farmers faculty. Hermann Kant's novel Die Aula deals with the fate of several graduates of the workers and farmers faculty in Greifswald. The surgeon Helmut Wolff was one of the graduates of the preparatory college .
See also
literature
- Hans Georg Gadamer : Workers studies and university. In: Culture and Criticism, Heft 6, Leipzig 1994, pp. 112–122.
- Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk : Spirit in the service of power. University policy in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945–1961 , Christoph Links Verlag , Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-86153-296-4 . ( Online version )
- Konrad Krause: Alma mater Lipsiensis. History of the University of Leipzig from 1409 to the present , Leipziger Universitätsverlag , Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-936522-65-0 . ( Online version )
- Reiner Pommerin : 175 years of TU Dresden. Volume 1: History of the TU Dresden 1828–2003. Edited on behalf of the Society of Friends and Supporters of the TU Dresden e. V. von Reiner Pommerin, Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-412-02303-5 .
- Herbert Stallmann: University entrance in the SBZ / GDR 1945-1959 , Verlag Hans Richarz , Sankt Augustin 1980, ISBN 3-88345-600-4 .
- Gottfried Uhlig : The beginning of the anti-fascist-democratic school reform in East Germany 1945–1946 , Leipzig 1963.
- Rudolf Urban: The Organization of Science in Czechoslovakia , Herder Institute , Marburg / Lahn 1957.
Web links
- A university called Karl Marx , accessed on July 15, 2016.
Individual evidence
- ^ Rudolf Urban: The Organization of Science in Czechoslovakia , Marburg / Lahn 1957, p. 218 ff.
- ↑ Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk: Spirit in the service of power. University Policy in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945–1961 , Berlin 2003, p. 265.
- ↑ Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk: Spirit in the service of power. University Policy in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945–1961 , Berlin 2003, p. 264.