The Education of Western Europeans
This chapter focuses on the Social Democrats and the compromises on values they felt forced to make—particularly the abandonment of their previous platforms of pacifism and internationalism—in order to resonate with West German voters in the climate of the Cold War. In the years after 1953, as the Western Allies turned over sovereign decision-making power over foreign relations to the Federal Republic's government, Germans showed signs of coming to agreement on precisely the issue of values and “ideals” for the German youth that had caused such crisis during Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The common ideal that bound them together was twofold: the value of “Europe” and the foreign policy of “binding to the West.” In the years leading up to 1953, Germans from across the Federal Republic's political spectrum participated in the creation of educational institutions designed to shape a generation of young people capable of overcoming centuries of conflict in a common “European” identity.