Differentiating Scholarly Generations: On Hitler’s child soldiers, 60’s Revolutionaries and Forgotten Connections

Abstract

In December 1986,i three years after the appearance of Forgotten Connections – with a second German printing and a Dutch translation already out – its 57-year old author, Klaus Mollenhauer, sat down with Theodore Schulze and a handful of selected colleagues in Tubingen. They had gathered for a colloquium, an inter-generational conversation, in order to capture their perspectives in an edited collection (Kaufmann/Lutgert/Schulze/Schweitzer, 1991). These circumstances granted the gathering a particular atmosphere of openness, even intimacy. Initially Mollenhauer and Schulze held an open conversation on the former’s biography, followed by a discussion on salient points brought up by the rest of the group. Whether all of the participants named in the collection were actually present at this conversation is uncertain. But, by simply looking at a listing of the participants at the Tubingen colloquium in, an interesting image emerges of direct interactions between representatives of different "generational locations", to reference Karl Mannheim (1928). A study of the dynamics of these discussions – my principle task in this short essay— makes it clear how those present articulate quite different life courses, based on their varying birth years. To borrow two further ideas from Mannheim, they give expression to particular "generational context," showing the formation of their own "generational unity".(Mannheim, 1928, p. 541) The younger, in this case, those who were later called "68er’s," clearly differentiated themselves from those slightly older, the 45-er’s; those who had been forced in their childhood or youth to serve as Hitler’s “child soldiers,” or more specifically, as “air-defense helpers” (hereafter Flakhelferii) in the desperate final days of the war. I would like to show how Klaus Mollenhauer (born in 1928) articulated his own generational location or position in his dialogue with Schulze, while those present whom identified with the events of 1968 used the same discussion to delimit their own generational location. Forgotten Connections plays, at first glance, only a very marginal role. However, the positions of the participants become increasingly significant, particularly, the younger generation’s identification with a disciplinary paradigm developed from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. This was the condition of the possibility of the coalescence of an entire generation of educational scholars. Or, in other words: The disciplinary formation and identity of education, its very existence as a field, was seen as dependent on its relationship to critical theory.