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Copyright of Discourse: Journal of Childhood & Adolescense Research / Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on official SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) local archives and “field materials” (such as school chronicles and minutes of teachers’ conferences) from East Berlin, this article focuses on one actor in the school system who embodied the authority of the SED State in 1950s everyday life: the headteacher. Until now, the headteacher has been a neglected figure in German historiography, which has focused above all on the “new teachers” (Neulehrer) as a result of a wide denazification drive and who were often only considered by West German historians as a “transmission belt” of SED ideology. This figure of political authority seems to be a good vantage point to understand how the SED implemented the basic elements of its socio-political programme at the grass-roots level. Indeed, schools were a place where the SED State gradually entrenched its power during the 1950s. Heads of school had to engage in attempting to turn East German teachers into “political educators” and East German pupils into “socialist personalities”. They were principally involved in a huge process of transformation of school buildings and school temporality, and in the establishment of SED domination. The SED claimed a “total partisan commitment” by headteachers, which was summed up in August 1949 during the 4th pedagogic congress in Leipzig. The aim of this article is to present this professionnal group in East Berlin and to prove that political authority (embodied by headteachers) was the product of social interactions between the representatives of the school system and society. In the early 1950s, 244 headteachers 632 E. Droit were active in the comprehensive schools of East Berlin; 40% of them were older than 60 – their pedagogic experience was that of the Weimar Republic – and it was above all a masculine profession (75% of East Berlin headteachers were men) where women were often faced with misogynistic behaviour from teachers. During the first decade of the GDR’s existence, this professional group was marked by a process of homogenisation. In the early 1950s, about 50% of the headteachers in East Berlin were members of the SED, which was an extreme high degree of political commitment for the time. The SED’s goal was to quickly control this key position in order to recruit new members among the teachers, to control the teaching staff ideologically (the SED expected a growing awareness of the teachers’ political function) and to eradicate former social democratic influences. Within the schools, headteachers contributed to transforming the school system into an instrument of stabilisation of SED domination and to limiting social autonomy. For example, they succeeded in eliminating the democratical pupils’ councils, which were born after the Second World War, and establishing new form of pupil representation which were under the control of the official youth organisations. Since the end of the 1940s, the only two SED-approved mass organisations for youth – the Pioneer Organisation for children between six and 14 years old and the Free German Youth for older teenagers and young adults – were allowed to take an active part in the school system, especially in the organisation of leisure-time activities and ideological education. The micro-historical “bottom-up” perspective on state–society relations sheds new gloomy light on the everyday interactions between the headteachers and others actors in the school system (teachers, pupils). At the local level, headteachers were faced with contradictions, which are due to a discrepancy between the SED’s claim that it was all-powerful and the reality they had to deal with. Schools were clearly defined as a place for political involvement. Local permanent FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, Free German Youth) functionaries were theoretically members of each pedagogic team in any given school. Their presence reflected the will of the SED to control the schools. But the headteachers had to deal with the scepticism of teachers who would not accept them as educators. Tensions and rivalry marked the relationships between teachers and FDJ functionaries. The latter did not consider the former as real members of the pedagogic team. It led the headteachers to look for agreements with teachers in order to preserve a form of “social peace” within the pedagogic teams. This kind of strategy was at the same time a danger for their position as headteachers because ignoring or diminishing the impacts of the actions of the FDJ functionaries could eventually have caused them to be relegated to another school as a simple teacher. Finally, headteachers often depended on some degree of grass-roots cooperation with teachers in order to carry out orders from above. In short, the exercise of political authority was based on interdependent relationships and implied a subtle mix of coercion and mutual accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]