„…World of Dreams and Collapse, Farewell and New Beginning, Uprooting and Taking Roots”. Educational Reports of West German High School Graduates from the 1940s and 1950s“
German postwar society of the 1940s and 1950s was characterized by a variety of crises and transformations. The collapse of economy and infrastructure, flight and displacement, occupation regimes and the creation of new political institutions, denazification and re-education formed just some of the challenges at both the societal and individual levels. Adolescents and young adults in particular, who had grown up and been socialized under National Socialism, experienced the changes affecting all areas of life as a biographical break with the simultaneous task of reorientation. How they perceived, interpreted and narrated their own educational and life history against this background is examined in this lecture based on an educational-historical analysis of ego-documents written by West German high school graduates in the 1940s and 1950s. The sources are so-called educational reports (Bildungsberichte), which had to be submitted to the school when applying for admission to the school-leaving examination. In these reports, students were asked to give a detailed account of their personal and educational background. The documents provide insights into diagnoses, interpretations and narratives of crises and transformations in West German postwar society from the perspective of the situation at the time, i.e., before retrospective classifications and structuring began. The focus is on the handwritten educational reports of the graduation years 1947 to 1955, which have been preserved in the archives of a Hamburg high school and have not yet been evaluated. In addition, a collection of educational reports from the years 1946 to 1949 published in 1950 by Kurt Haß under the title “Jugend unterm Schicksal [Adolescents beneath fate]” is used.