This volume brings together ten contributions from a symposium, which provided the title for this volume, and a workshop entitled “Schulentwicklung in den neuen Ländern”. Both formed part of the Seventeenth Congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungs-wissenschaft, which took place in 2000 in Göttingen and had as its overall theme “Bildung und Erziehung in Übergangsgesellschaften”.
Most of the contributions concentrate on the transformation process which east Germany underwent during the 1990s, but the last two provide a comparative perspective: Johann Steyn compares the process of building a new culture of democratic education in South Africa with that in east Germany, while Gerlind Schmidt describes the process of transformation of the educational system in Russia without making direct comparisons with east Germany.
One theme occurs again and again in the contributions, namely the fact that the eastern Länder found themselves confronted with the need to undergo a second transformational process in the educational system in the latter part of the 1990s before they had had time to evaluate and modify in the light of experience the effectiveness of the structural reforms of the early 1990s, when the eastern system was adapted to the western one. The dramatic collapse in the birthrate, which meant that between 1993 and 1995 approximately 60% fewer children were born compared with 1989. This has resulted in educational authorities being forced to look for new ways of rationalising their school structures to make the process of school closures and mergers less painful. This process is described by Melanie Fabel as a “doppelter Modernisierungsprozess”. She argues that because the process of change has been so dramatic in the east, necessitating a turning-away from the traditional three-tiered system in all but one of the eastern Länder, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, leading to the creation of a two-tiered structure with more integrated and flexible structures than in the western Länder, eastern Germany can be seen as a “Vorreiter” which could provide a model for future solutions to problems in the educational system of Germany as a whole.
A number of contributions also concentrate on the lost opportunities that resulted from the introduction of the western system to the east. These are particularly apparent in higher education, as outlined by Lutz Reuter. While underlining the negative features of a highly centralised system under rigid political control in the GDR he points, as many other commentators have, to the advantages of the eastern system with its smaller numbers and tighter structure, leading to shorter graduation times. He demonstrates how the transformation process in higher education was dominated by political and financial considerations, thus resulting in a failure to appreciate some of the advantages of the eastern system.

One of the most interesting contribution is that by Axel Gehrmann who presents the results of a DFG research project on the role of teachers in the eastern Länder. Comparisons are made with western teachers attitudes and they are seen to be surprisingly similar in certain respects. For example, attitudes concerning job satisfaction almost mirror each other from the mid-1990s onwards. While job satisfaction in the east is much lower than that in the west in 1994, by 1996 it has risen to almost that of western teachers in 1996; over 70% of teachers in both parts of Germany were either “sehr zufrieden” or “durchaus zufrieden” with their roles in 1996. In both parts of Germany there has been a slight fall to under 70% in 1999, but again the western and the eastern figures are remarkably similar. I doubt whether such a high degree of job satistfaction would be expressed by British teachers!
Altogether this volume presents some interesting material for those interested in the impact of unification on the eastern system, although inevitably the contributors are describing a system which is still in a state of permanent flux, and the situation has clearly developed further since the end of the 1990s, especially with regard to the impact of demographic change on the education system.

Reviewed by Peter Barker, Director of the Centre for East German Studies, Department of German Studies, University of Reading

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