Forgotten Romantic and Enlightenment Connections: A personal approach to Mollenhauer’s seminal works

There are many ways to situate Enlightenment and Romantic traditions in Continental educational history, not the least in German-speaking countries. Moreover, between the histories of Enlightenment and Romanticism, we have to add a third strand, which is normally considered as the “Classical” period of educational theorizing, connected to names like Humboldt, Herbart, Schleiermacher and sometimes Hegel (cf. for example, Klafki 1986). They are credited for having shaped the specific German tradition of “Bildungstheorie”, a concept hardly possible to translate into English. Klaus Mollenhauer’s works have been linked to all of them, depending on where one sees the key ingredients of his approach. I will not try to present a historical account of this background, but rather move on to a very personal approach to this issue’s meaning for me in my educational biography. The very first book by Mollenhauer that I read was a small volume of collected essays, which was published in 1968, and titled Education and Emancipation. I was 16 or 17 then, a member of the State Student Board and later, its President. I had already had my fair share of Marxism and critical theory before by chance bumping into Mollenhauer’s book. I bought it because of the title. I was desperately looking for theories that could tell us in the student movement how to shape education and schooling in a way that fostered the emancipation of the disadvantaged in society. The big theories were good at explaining why we were where we were, but they were unable to point to ways of how to bring about change. It is obvious in my copy of the book I stopped reading it closely after the introduction and the first chapter. Somehow, I must have been disappointed. Of course, the book carried the familiar references to critical theory from Adorno to Habermas, but it was definitely not a part of that movement. “Reason”, the concept that Adorno and Horkheimer (1968) had so thoroughly deconstructed in their book on the dialectics of enlightenment, still seemed to play a prominent role in Mollenhauer’s thinking. Moreover, he used concepts like “functionality”, rather more typical for post-Parsonian thinking than for critical theory. Finally, this was mixed with elements of the “geisteswissenschaftliche Padagogik”, which was considered stone dead at that time. Looking back, I would say that I did not trust any rational re-conceptualizing of enlightenment, which seemed to be at the core of the book, as an answer to the social struggles of the time. I was not able to understand and systematize all these relations then. But I simply felt that there was no clear answer in the book on how to emancipate the children of the working class – and no less was my final goal as student representative back then.