CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Long before "political socialization" became designated a field of study and part of the domain of psychologists and social scientists, philosophers and political thinkers were asking how it is that children come to feel themselves members of a particular political system. Plato's Republic asserts that the state must take an active interest in the upbringing of children, whom Plato perceives first and foremost as future citizens. Rousseau addressed the relationship between family life, schooling, and the larger society in Emile, as well as in his posthumously published The Government of Poland ("When a Pole reaches the age of twenty, he must be a Pole, not some other kind of man."). Another Frenchman, Napoleon, remarked in 1808 that "as long as children are not taught whether they ought to be Republican or Monarchist, Catholic or irreligious, the State will not form a Nation." How does this process of becoming a member of a particular nation—with its unique history, preoccupations, ideals—get under way? And how best to examine childhood in such a light?
I asked these and related questions in the striking world of East and West Berlin, where two deeply opposed political systems (sprung from a unified German nation more than forty years ago) confront one another so visibly and unrelentingly. There I spoke with children living on either side of the Berlin Wall, in the hopes of better understanding the sense they make of the efforts of their respective nations—The German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany—to secure the allegiance of their children. These are young people who share a linguistic, cultural, and historical heritage, as well as family ties that transcend political borders. Yet they are coming of age in two radically different political and economic systems. How do they come to terms, emotionally and cognitively, with this unique, frequently painful and frustrating reality? What are the lessons intended for them? And what are the lessons they in fact learn? How do these children persist as Germans while at the same time becoming something else—socialist or capitalist Germans?
This is the first generation of Germans to grow up with the Berlin Wall. They know nothing, through experience, of a physically undivided Berlin. They are left to grapple with the questions such a stark reality elicits from them. In so doing, they make observations that illuminate their political, moral, and psychological concerns. What or who does this barrier keep out, or protect us from? What is included within its reach? Who are we, and what do we believe in—as opposed to those people "over there"? In their efforts to address these questions, children look carefully at their surroundings, listen to what they are taught (formally and informally), and often find themselves somewhere between the demands of rhetoric and the persuasiveness of experience.
Certainly I chose an environment that by no means can be considered "normal" or representative of cities elsewhere in the Federal Republic of Germany (the FRG, or West Germany) or the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). These are indeed special political circumstances in which these children find themselves. It appeared likely to me that here certain aspects of the child's developing sense of ideological and national allegiances might stand out in sharp relief. Nowhere else in either nation is a child confronted so early with such a striking manifestation of East-West political divisiveness. Yet, as Freud knew, a careful consideration of pathology can be useful in illuminating the vicissitudes of normalcy. Likewise, I suspect that a clearer understanding of childhood in extreme conditions might also offer us a greater appreciation of the political and moral life of children elsewhere.
I decided to spend my time with latency-age children—ten to twelve years old, by and large. Though certainly not a period of visible Sturm und Drang as can be the later, adolescent years, this is nonetheless a very crucial period in the child's life when he is beginning to make increasingly complex connections with the larger social world. Anna Freud refers to latency as "the post-oedipal lessening of drive urgency and the transfer of libido from the parental figures to contemporaries, community groups, teachers, leaders, impersonal ideals, and aim-inhibited, sublimated interests." In his extensive work with children in this country and abroad, Robert Coles has pointed again and again to the fact that young children are not only able but quite willing to maintain an active involvement with the world of politics and ideology.
I felt it was important to continue looking at this period of the child's life in "the field" in order to better understand the process whereby children come to feel increasingly related to their social and political milieu. How do children make use of the particular elements of political life in a setting as ideologically charged as that of Berlin, East and West? How do they use or discard various pieces of information in their efforts to establish an allegiance to their group? In such a setting do children readily establish national or ideological allegiances, or do they develop a more ambivalent sense of national or ideological affiliation?
There is a growing body of research devoted to various aspects of the child's "political socialization" that is widely divergent in focus and theoretical conceptualization. Researchers have looked at the relationship between family life and the child's acquisition of political values; they have examined the impact of formal education and the media on these same values. At the same time, several researchers have tended to limit their discussion to elements of the child's political life that can be "measured" in some fashion. They speak of the child's "sense of political efficacy," or of the child's "attitudes toward political authority," or "party identification." Not surprisingly, attempts to isolate specific sources of political and ideological influence have revealed the fairly conservative influence exerted by any one source, be it family, school, or the media. Common sense, along with close observation of children, points to the need for careful scrutiny of a range of such "influences"—family, education, social class, media, historical and political circumstances—as they bear down on children. This is a herculean task, yet one that approaches the complex reality of the political life of children.
I discovered in the field how difficult it is to establish a firm correspondence between the "message" children receive from various "sources" and the political views of those children. In addition, it became clear that an "agent of political socialization" that may be especially influential in East Berlin may play a relatively negligible role in West Berlin, and vice versa. For example, the fact that western television programs can be picked up in East Berlin homes is of enormous significance for the development of political beliefs held by East Berlin youngsters. In addition, the Lutheran church in East Germany plays a very important role in encouraging young people to experience and express (within the safety of a church group) their decidedly mixed feelings toward the East German state.
Although this is primarily a study of the ways children make sense of their political world, as opposed to a study intent on isolating and examining specific "agents" of political socialization, I did hear again and again from these children about the importance to them of this or that "outside influence." In both cities children referred directly or indirectly to the family, the school, and the face of a city as it reflects history and politics: monuments, scars from the last war, and most importantly, the Berlin Wall. In East Berlin, children also spoke frequently of the significance of television and the Lutheran church. I would like to examine briefly a few of these here, before turning to the children themselves.
Family life undoubtedly exerts its influence on the child's larger political views, along with his sense of being a member of a particular national community. This is especially evident in East Berlin, where the family unit often manages to serve as a bulwark against state intrusiveness. Various studies of the relationship between the child's experience within the family and his feelings toward political authority figures serve as an illuminating backdrop for my observations in the capital city of East Germany, Some of these studies suggest that young children express great faith in important political figures on account of their great identification with parental authority, along with an inability to disengage one kind of authority from another. Positive feelings for the political authority figure appear to be rooted in positive familial experiences. Yet not all research has confirmed these findings, and some studies indicate that under certain circumstances (political, socioeconomic, historical) children may express quite different feelings toward political authority figures. These studies dismiss the simplistic correlation between positive family experience and positive regard for political authority as most likely the product of exclusive reliance on middle-class, urban children. Also, many of the studies mentioned are concerned with American children.
In my work in East Berlin, I found that the situation can be very different when the children studied live in political systems where the leadership is not considered particularly benign and is not perceived as representative of the people. A child's views of political authority may reflect positive experience with parental authority, assuming that the political authority does deliver on its promises and can be fairly readily identified with parental authority. The relationship between family and regime becomes more complicated when, as is often the case in East Berlin, the gap between family values and regime values is fairly wide.
Because of the political system that obtains in East Germany, one that is extremely resistant to scrutiny by outsiders, very few studies of children have been conducted in that nation. Those that have been carried out generally serve to illuminate the state's efforts at winning the allegiance of children, but it has proven difficult to ascertain the effectiveness of those efforts. Certainly there are many obstacles to just such an understanding, not the least of them being the well-documented "socialist schizophrenia," whereby the individual may hold "politically incorrect" personal opinions side by side with "correct" political philosophy. It takes time and a good deal of mutual trust for an investigator to begin to distinguish the two lines of thought—two lines of being, really. As this trust developed between me and the children and families I came to know, I began to see how many parents encourage in their children an outward acceptance of the regime coupled with a more guarded personal assessment. The issue for them is less one of ideological conviction and much more one of survival—personal and professional. Rather than providing a strong foundation of support for government values, the family unit often serves as a counterpoint of deep personal resistance. What is extraordinary to observe are the ways children learn, at a very early age, to juggle the "personal" and the "political" (which are not always diametrically opposed). And these are lessons gleaned in good part from the family.
Other lessons are, of course, acquired in the schools, although in many instances the lessons learned are not the lessons intended. The educational systems in East and West Berlin have set very different agendas for themselves, although the assumption underlying those agendas is shared: that the school is an extremely important setting in which to inculcate in children nationally desirable beliefs. A number of researchers have devoted attention to the significance of formal education in the child's acquisition of political values. In his valuable, immensely readable portrait of the modernization of rural France, Eugene Weber states that "the school ... compulsory and free, has been credited with the ultimate acculturation process that made the French people French." And Urie Bronfenbrenner notes the tremendous value that the Soviet authorities invest in education; he suggests that the schools, through behavioral techniques as well as textbooks, do an impressive job of inculcating certain desired qualities— ideological, social, personal—in children.
My work in Berlin suggests that children are sifting and weighing various pieces of information that they pick up in the school—each of them making somewhat different sense of it all, according to his or her particular circumstances. Certainly the formal curriculum varies considerably between East and West Berlin, reflecting the vastly different values of the two nations. Although such differences will be most visibly expressed in history, government, and economics classes, they appear even in apparently unrelated courses such as math and science, music and art. A typical problem in an East German fourth-year math textbook asks the student to calculate the difference in military strength between opposing socialist and capitalist armies. Extracurricular activities are also avenues of political and ideological instruction. On top of that, children can be very responsive to the informal curriculum in school: not simply what the teacher says, but how he or she says it. For example, although there is no clear and unified approach in West Germany to teaching about the Second World War and the Holocaust (so that, in fact, very little gets taught), many teachers nonetheless try to convey to children their lack of responsibility for what happened forty years ago. Yet a number of teachers have difficulty themselves with the subject, and their own hesitations and feelings of guilt and responsibility are frequently apparent to their young students, who are then left to struggle with these conflicting messages.
And in East Berlin, children are constantly witnesses to the politics of power within the classroom. They learn early about the ways fellow students are variously punished or rewarded for the manner in which they express their views (personal and political) in school. They are taught about the concern their government, along with local authorities, has for ordinary people ("comrades") like themselves; yet they see just how serious the consequences can be for even minor infractions of the ideological rules. Over the years, then, these children are learning lessons that do not always coincide with their formal lessons—lessons that teach them about the realities of being East as opposed to West Germans.
One must keep in mind that schools are part of a larger culture, and the messages children acquire in school are often contradicted by messages coming from other quarters. In his study of French village life Laurence Wylie sheds light on this very issue: "In preaching civic virtue to the school children, the authors of the civics book recognize that their precepts describe an ideal rather than an actual state of things.... Yet the children constantly hear adults referring to government as a source of evil and to the men who run it as instruments of evil. There is nothing personal in this belief. It does not concern one particular government.... It concerns government everywhere, and at all times." This is an important reminder of the lopsided view one gets when trying to isolate one or another element of the child's life from its larger context, that is, the complex life of the child himself.
One of those other "elements" to consider is the role of the media. Although it is not clear how pivotal television is for West Berlin children, it was dramatically apparent just how influential that medium is for the children and young people of East Berlin. There, with easy access to televised programming from West Berlin, children are forcefully confronted with political views and social perspectives diametrically opposed to those espoused in their schools and in the national media. Many children with whom I spoke pointed to television as their primary source of information not only about the West, but about their own nation as well. It provides them with perspectives unavailable to them elsewhere and puts them in a position to weigh several points of view outside the reach of the official view. As these children reveal in their comments, such a position is by no means a comfortable one.
I do not claim to have conducted a formal study of television viewing in East and West Berlin (nor of education, or the family). Yet I would concur with two studies that have managed to take the discussion of the relationship between television viewing and the child's political views beyond the narrow confines within which so much of the related research is conducted. Wallace Lambert and Otto Klineberg, in their provocative study of the views of children toward other nations, found that television was an oft-cited source of information used by children in developing their opinions about foreign people. And R.W. Connell, who has done remarkable work with Australian children, suggests that television viewing disrupts what he sees to be a developmental progression of political awareness—starting with an awareness of local community, then of region, and finally of native country and other nations—and instead introduces children to the full range of global politics at once. They come to know about—and react to emotionally—events that are both far removed from their lives and out of the control of those around them. This is no doubt as true for children in West Berlin as for those in the neighboring city of East Berlin. Yet the crucial difference has to do with whether and how television programming supports or undermines a nation's stated values. In East Berlin, where there is little unequivocal support for the government, western television serves to further erode the generally ambivalent support of many young people.
