The Ills of German Culture

FRENCH EFFORTS TO DENAZIFY, de-Prussianize and democratize their zone in occupied Germany immediately after the Second World War had a strong cultural dimension. French specialists on Germany viewed reshaping German culture, especially its education system, as crucial to ensuring that Germans turned away from militarism and pursued peaceful relations with their neighbors. For French officials and scholars such as Pierre Benaerts, Paul Olagnier, and Edmond Vermeil, Germany at the end of the war was “a cultural wasteland.” As a result, “any reeducation program would have to include wide and sweeping reforms and the development of new institutions as well as reorientation of old ones.” Edmond Vermeil was France's most influential expert on German culture. He was a professor of Germanic studies at the Sorbonne before the war. He fled to London in 1940, and his ideas came to shape the thinking of many French administrators. He wrote numerous works arguing that Germany had strayed from the humanistic foundations of modern Western civilization, namely the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment, and International Socialist traditions. He thus saw France's cultural mission in Germany as that of bringing the Germans back into the fold of Western civilization.

Vermeil did not see the reintegration of Germany into Western civilization as an easy task. Although he advocated a general reeducation of the German populace aimed at transforming its culture and politics, he also feared that reeducation policies would have only a limited effect. In his view, Prussia's militaristic mentality was too entrenched among the older generation. Moreover, Nazism had left a permanent mark on Germany's youth. Vermeil thought that the French should concentrate their efforts on children and especially on reforming the school system in their zone of occupation. His focus on Prussia was to some degree understandable, given Prussia's role in Germany's history and its wars since 1870.