Church without School. Education in the School System of Ethnic Germans in Romania 1942–1944

Abstract

Möckel, a contemporary witness of the times, asks himself whether his parents’ generation of Transylvanian-Saxons should not have involved the younger generation more in their doubts, distance and skepticism towards National Socialism. Because for this younger generation, there was a clear mental boundary at which opinions differed: It was not a political dividing line – because the hermeneutics of the agreement with ‘völkisch’ thinking had generally belonged to family-church socialization – it was a spiritual dividing line. In contrast to the ‘barrack yard mentality,’ there was a spiritual distance of an ecclesiastical-altruistic supranational character. Accordingly, the young Möckel was able to follow with curiosity alternative concepts and attitudes in conversations between his parents and Christians from the German Reich, and to observe contrasting experiences.

Looking back, however, he wonders how he as a teenager – exposed to the fog of the ‘zeitgeist’ – did not notice the great contradictions. As a student and a member of the German Youth, he was more exposed to National Socialism than his parents were and puts forth examples to demonstrate “the confusion in our heads.” He was vulnerable to his own need for validity, instrumentalization, militarization and signals of intellectual resistance – a “rivalry of claims” – but he cannot remember having been warned by any (of the cautious opponents among his) parents or teachers. His generation had been easy to manipulate: a lockstep generation of ‘little Nazis,’ invoking sorrow and shame in Möckel.