| After 1945, German university professors drew on traditional university ideals of apolitical science and individual self-cultivation (Bildung ) to deny the involvement of their scholarship, and the universities, with National Socialism. These traditional university values furnished both the cognitive categories and the discursive strategies through which professors constructed an exculpatory interpretation of the recent past. They based this exonerating narrative on a rigid conceptual separation between "political" Nazism and "objective" scholarship, and a focus on spiritual and cultural renewal.;On an individual level, these discursive strategies allowed academics to claim that during the Nazi period they had focused purely on their research and remained separate from politics and Nazism. By "proving" the scholarly nature of their work, they could then escape punishment in the denazification courts. Professors also reemphasized the individual character of self-cultivation by claiming that individual spiritual renewal, an internal rededication to traditional university ideals, offered the best response to Nazism in the universities. Such a move displaced questions of university reform from an institutional to an individual level, and effectively blocked administrative or structural change. This in turn reinforced the traditional power of senior professors within the universities, ensuring their position as privileged interpreters of the past. The reassertion of traditional power relationships allowed professors to perpetuate this exculpatory narrative and marginalize those who offered competing, more negative interpretations of the universities' recent past.;The first part of the dissertation establishes the context in which this discourse was articulated by examining the German philosophy of higher education in the Weimar and Nazi eras, the changes in higher education imposed by the Nazis, and the American approach to occupation and reeducation. The remainder uses both published and archival material to examine the arguments used by German academics in denazification court trials, administrative meetings, and public venues to defend themselves as individuals, and to defend the institutions of the German university. |
