Forgotten Romantic and Enlightenment Connections

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Culture and Upbringing: Introducing a 20th-Century Classic to Theory and Practice

Abstract

Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing represents the results of life-long engagement with heterogeneous traditions in educational and political theory. Before writing Forgotten Connections, Klaus Mollenhauer had made landmark contributions in the field of "social pedagogy," a sub-specialization closely related to the social and political theory of the Marxist tradition, and in particular the Frankfurt School. As a student, Mollenhauer had earlier worked closely with representatives of the philosophical tradition of "human science pedagogy" (geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik). This second tradition, in turn, is associated with the German enlightenment and romanticism, going as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century.

In the light of these various influences and contributions, Forgotten Connections clearly represents a return from the former, political/critical orientation to the latter human science tradition, to Romantic-era figures such as Fichte (1762-1814) or the hermeneutician Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Indeed, when asked about an underlying theme in his life’s work, Mollenhauer responded by reiterating a question originally formulated by Schleiermacher: "I can only say [or ask], with Schleiermacher: 'What does the older generation want with the younger?'"

Such an answer indeed encompasses both the explicitly political as well as the less "radical" phases in Mollenhauer’s career; it also frames education as something much broader than the emancipation of younger generations from the constraints imposed by those in the past (as important as that still might be). "Childhood" for example, is not an ideological label forced on the young simply because of the social conditions of late capitalism –the fact that the value of children's labour, for example, is only fully realized once they are grown and educated. As Winkler explains in Klaus Mollenhauer: A Pedagogical Portait, Mollenhauer came to "insist on the real life situations of children, including their powerlessness as part of the characteristic structure of upbringing and the critical understanding of upbringing.... Although they are certainly located within social conditions, [children] cannot simply be explained away as a social function" (2002, p. 58).

In an interview late in his career, Mollenhauer, as a further example, was asked: "Are there key pedagogical writings for you; pedagogical classics, of which you would say: these are texts that one must repeatedly open oneself to?" His response was: "Although I am somewhat embarrassed to answer directly, I will say The Education of the Human Race by Lessing, the Letter from Stans by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and the lectures [on education] from 1826 by Schleiermacher." This presentation will situate Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections in the context of aspects of the enlightenment and romantic human science tradition represented by these figures and texts, and will also locate this work in the developments in Mollenhauer’s own thinking and biography, as he moved from being a hero of the radical "1968 generation" in Germany to a position much closer to the humanism of traditional thinkers who he would have earlier labelled as "bourgeois."

Winkler, M. (2002). Klaus Mollenhauer: Ein Pädagogisches Porträt. Hamburg: Beck.

Author

• Stefan Thomas Hopmann, University of Vienna