Folkehøjskolen som forbillede for tyskere. Anmeldelse af: Harald Behrend und Norbert Lochner: Geshickte und Gegenwart der Heimvolkshochschulen in Dänemark, Osnabrück 1966

Abstract

The Folk High School as a Model for the Germans

By Roar Skovmand

Geschichte und Gegenwart der Heimvolkshochschulen in Dänemark. Osnabrück 1966.

Norbert Lochner: Gegenwart und Zukunft d.r Heimvolkshochschulen in Deutschland. 1968. Beitr.ge zur Erwachsenenbildung vol. 11 and 13. Both books were first sent to Grundtvig Studies in 1983 and are here reviewed by Professor Roar Skovmand, Ph. D.

The aim of both these books is that corresponding German folk high schools ought to be incorporated into the German educational system. But the institute in Münster-Westfalen which sent the books to us dissociated itself in a foreword from the authors’ ideas and plans. Norbert Lochner, however, is still working on them in Luxembourg.

The concept Heimvolkshochschule (a boarding high school) may sound cumbersome to a Dane, but this is due to the fact that a Volkshochschule corresponds largely to the Danish high school evening classes and does not denote a boarding school. In 1968 there were only 23 Heimvolkshochschulen in Germany on the Danish high school model, 6 of these in Schleswig-Holstein. Nearly all of them were out in the country and drew their pupils locally. Both the authors’ analyses are meticulous, with well-chosen quotations from the Danish high school debate in the 1950’s and with comprehensive statistics.

A number of high school songs are even translated into German. Perhaps, however, Grundtvig’s own ideas for a state-run high school would have suited the German authors better than the form and content which they themselves came to know in 1948 and which they were so impressed by.

They believe rather that ‘nationalism’ must be replaced by ‘the European idea’; the historico-poetic element of contemporary studies and natural science and both the ‘happy Christianity’ and agrarian-tarnished liberalism are thrown overboard. The folk high school never succeeded in capturing the town youth in Denmark and managed even less in Germany. Even so they call the Danish folk high school ‘a successful large-scale experiment’. They have not fully understood Grundtvig’s own high school ideas; but they are not alone in that.