Rezensionen

Alex Amann:
Klaus Mollenhauer

Connections Remembered, Forgotten and

Neglected
by Norm Friesen

Klaus Mollenhauer (1928-1998), as Alex

Amanns outstanding biography richly attests, was one of the most important German
philosophers and practitioners of education
in the postwar era. Mollenhauers adulthood
encompassed the entirety of this period (i.e.
1945-1989), with many of the most important events of the time being registered in,
even inextricably intertwined with, his own
life. Capturing the breadth and complexity
of such a life is no small task, and Amanns
300-page biography achieves it with alacrity.
What is evident throughout Amanns biography is Mollenhauers position as being out
of step, in between, or as Nietzsche said, as
untimely or out of season (Unzeitgem)
contrary to [the] time either coming too
late or too soon. 1928, Mollenhauers year of
birth, fated him to participate in the War, but
also meant that this participation was more of
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a surreal schoolboys adventure (at a desolate

anti-aircraft post) than a confrontation with
the horrors of battle or of Nazi rule. Later,
Mollenhauer completed his doctoral studies
in Sozialpdagogik under Erich Weniger, a representative of the human science tradition
in pedagogy (geisteswissenschaftliche Pdagogik) a tradition which had become emphatically philosophical, and had also accommodated itself to Nazi rule. But the dissertation
that Mollenhauer produced was resolutely
empirical and sociological, an early marker of
the empirical turn in German educational
scholarship with which his name is still associated. In the tumult of the 1960s, Mollenhauer stood out (like the Frankfurt Schools
Herbert Marcuse) as a rare older ally or big
brother of dissatisfied youth, providing refuge and assistance for the likes of Gudrun
Enslin and Andreas Baader, later key members in the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group.
However, it was also Mollenhauer who actively (but unsuccessfully) dissuaded Ensslin
from turning to violence. Finally: the book
that propelled Mollenhauer to notoriety early in his career, Education and Emancipation:
Pedagogical Sketches, denounced the German
traditions of Bildung and human science pedagogy as inadequate to the situation that is
now constitutive of educational reality (9),
while still remaining manifestly and deeply
concerned with these traditions.
The publication of Education and Emancipation in 1968 represents an exception to
Mollenhauers inveterate untimeliness. It was
enthusiastically received, particularly by students and activists, and still stands as the text
for which Mollenhauer is best known in Germany today. As Amann points out, in this
book, Mollenhauer speaks to the problem of
authority in both educational practice and
theory: Pedagogical authority, Mollenhauer emphasizes, is in reality the authority of
domination. Mollenhauer invokes critical
rationality and empirical verification as the
criteria for any truly emancipatory pedago-

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gy. However, Mollenhauer himself soon came

to regret how quickly and convincingly the
expression emancipation made the rounds,
without anyone actually bothering to see how
it might make sense in the larger context of
Bildung and its character (Mollenhauer, cit.
in: Kaufmann et al. 1991, 78).
As its title indicates, Amanns biography
provides an invaluable service in linking
Mollenhauers writing and thought at this
time with his political activism. Amann
describes in detail Mollenhauers work with
youth who were, in effect, imprisoned in often remote juvenile facilities, which had not
been reformed since their inception during
the Kaiserreich. Mollenhauers field of Sozialpdagogik is largely oriented towards children
and youth outside of school contexts, and as
the leading Sozialpdagoge of his time, Mollenhauer actively assisted youth to escape
from these institutions, often accommodating them at his home in Frankfurt.
However, this period of intense and direct
action was relatively brief both for Mollenhauer and for many in the protest movement. 1972 was the year of the publication
of Mollenhauers Theories of Educational Processes: Towards an introduction to Educational
Problems, and also of his return to Gttingen
to accept a position as a senior professor.
Mollenhauers second monograph offers a
strange and sometimes obscure mixture of theories of social critique, of communicative action, psychoanalysis, and (once again) human
science pedagogy. Just as strange is Amanns
scant coverage of this book, and what it might
mean for the arc of Mollenhauers intellectual
biography. Amann describes it as a theoretical explication along the lines only coarsely sketched in Education and Emancipation (174). However, viewed in the broader
context of Mollenhauers career, it can also
be seen as an extended investigation of the
pedagogical relation (Winkler 2002, p. 58),
a notion developed by one of Mollenhauers
teachers in Gttingen, Hermann Nohl, that

seems to lurk in the background of much of

Mollenhauers work.
This relation is certainly evident in
Mollenhauers third and final monograph,
Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (1983), which has been translated
into many languages (including a translation by the author of this review into English,
2014). However, another influence from
Mollenhauers student days in Gttingen is
much more in the foreground, that of Helmut Plessners philosophical anthropology.
Representing a mediation between lifeworld
phenomenology and historical hermeneutics, Plessners thought provided Mollenhauer with a way to reconcile critical historical
awareness with the more intimate, embodied phenomenological emphases of human
science pedagogy. In addition, this reconciliation was accomplished, as Amann brilliantly makes clear, through the interpretive
study of works of art. Mollenhauers approach
amounts to the hypothesis that educational
thought, through the examination of [literary, visual and other] works of art, can read
and understand how the self-formative and
embodied relationship of the individual [engaged in learning] is given sensually. After
all, art is the representation of aesthetic figurations in which the embodied relationship
of the forming self to itself is symbolically
expressed (268).
Art, illustration and historical accounts provide examples which at once preserve their
historical independence in interpretation and
also maintain an embodied immediacy and
even intimacy. From Renaissance portraits
through early modern engravings to medieval
diaries and legal records: all of these can show
the relation of the expressive and formative
self to itself (and to others) in a context that
is concrete, not only in social and historical
terms, but also phenomenologically. Whats
more, these examples could also show what
might be regarded more generally or even
cross-culturally as pedagogical bursting
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Rezensionen

the bounds of earlier uses of the term, for

example, by Nohl. Amann asks: Had any
pedagogical author engaged in this way with
the embodied structures of education and
upbringing? Through aesthetic perception,
embodiment shows itself not only to be something [pace Plessner] that we as humans
both have and are, but also shows that in every experience of embodiment there hides
a memory of the pedagogical as something
common to all peoples. Our entire culture
[Mollenhauer showed] is pedagogical (280).
The possibilities that this methodological
configuration offers are enormous, as evidenced by the reappearance of specific pictorial and textual examples originally chosen
and developed by Mollenhauer in important
work by others. The image from the cover of
Mollenhauers 1983 Forgotten Connections,
for example, is taken by Max van Manen
for the cover of his own 1991 The Tact of
Teaching. A second visual example from Forgotten Connections reappears on the cover of
Dietrich Benners book, Allgemeine Pdagogik, as does an important textual example in
its pages provided with grateful attribution.
It is unfortunate that these and related studies, however, do not seem to consider why
and how such examples and illustrations are
compelling, and how Mollenhauers powerful
combination of the cultural or historical and
phenomenological might be reapplied more
broadly.
A related oversight, sadly, is also evident
in Amanns own extensive biography: he
does not trace the scholarly influence of
Mollenhauers earlier texts (e.g., evident in
Klafki 1996; Gruschka 1998) or of his later
work (e.g., as manifest in Gruschka 2004;
Wulf/Zirfas 2013). Amanns biography also
does not venture to address what in the opinion of many remains the key theme or even
mystery in Mollenhauers main works: His
almost obsessive concern with the questions
of human science pedagogy and specifically,
with the pedagogical relation. As mentiIJHE Jg. 6 (2016), H 1

oned above, the pedagogical relation can be

interpreted the central theme of Theories of
Educational Processes; and this book, in turn,
has been seen as an elaboration of the earlier sketches in Education and Emancipation.
And according to Amann and also Benner,
Mollenhauers Forgotten Connections can also
be seen as attempting to work out these same
issues still further. Indeed, many have speculated that the connection that is forgotten
in Forgotten Connections is precisely the pedagogical relation: In this sense, Forgotten
Connections recapitulates earlier versions of
the pedagogical relation as well as [seeks] its
current whereabouts, asking for what seems
to be unavoidable, namely anthropological
ingredients, and that which is bound by time
and space (Hopmann 2014, 48).1
The pedagogical question or challenge that
Mollenhauer could not shake over some 40
years of ceaseless activity and enormous productivity remains present, even urgent, for us
today. Amanns biography does us a great
service in illuminating many rich facets of
Mollenhauers manifold and original responses to it; however, at the same time it only
makes this pedagogical question seem all the
more elusive and enigmatic.

References

Gruschka, Andreas: Negative Pdagogik: Einfhrung in

die Pdagogik mit kritischer Theorie. Wetzlar: Bchse der Pandora 1988
Gruschka, Andreas: Bestimmte Unbestimmtheit. Chardins pdagogische Lektionen. Gieen: PsychosozialVerlag 2004
Hopmann, Stefan: Forgotten Romantic and Enlightenment Connections: A personal approach to
Mollenhauers seminal works. In: Phenomenology
and Practice 8(2014), N2, 45-49
Kaufmann, Hans B./Ltgert, Will/Schulze, Theodor/
Schweitzer, Friedrich: Kontinuitt und Traditionsbrche in der Pdagogik. Ein Gesprch zwischen
den Generationen. Weinheim: Beltz 1991

1 In a similar vein, Bas Levering goes so far as to render the title of Mollenhauers text in English as The
Forgotten Relation.

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Klafki, Wolfgang: Das pdagogische Verhltnis. In:

Wolfgang Klafki et al. (Hrsg.): Erziehungswissenschaft 1. Eine Einfhrung. Frankfurt: Fischer 1970,
55-91
Levering, Bas: Vergessene Zusammenhnge: ber Kultur und Erziehung (The Forgotten Relation: About
Culture and Education). In: Phenomenology and
Practice 5(1987), N3, 272-273
Mollenhauer, Klaus: Erziehung und Emanzipation: Polemische Skizzen. Mnchen: Juventa 1968
Mollenhauer, Klaus: Theorien zum Erziehungsproze:
Zur Einfhrung in erziehungswissenschaftliche Fragestellungen. Mnchen: Juventa.1972
Van Manen, Max: The Tact of Teaching: The Meaning
of Pedagogical Thoughtfulness. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press 1991

Winkler, Michael: Klaus Mollenhauer: Ein pdagogisches Portrt. Weinheim: Beltz 2002
Wulf, Christoph/Zirfas, Jrg (Eds.): Handbuch Pdagogische Anthropologie. Frankfurt: Springer 2013

Alex Amann: Klaus Mollenhauer. Vordenker der 68er Begrnder der emanzipatorischen Pdagogik. Eine Biographie.
Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh 2015,
342 S.
CHF 48.70; EUR 39.90
ISBN 978-3-5067-8105-5

Prof. Dr. Norm Friesen, Boise State University, Department of Educational Technology,
1910 University Drive, MS 1747, Boise, ID 83725-1747, United States, normfriesen@boisestate.edu

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