From BZ/dpa
It’s about joy, anger and blows: School days are formative for many people. In a documentary about the history of the school since 1945, celebrities look back. What was beautiful – and what was “nonsense”?
In few areas of life are people as close as in stories about their school days. Ulrich Wickert and his classmates sang a song about the teacher’s cane, Margot Käßmann had stomach pains from doing math work – and the toilet at Jella Haase’s school still smells of cigarette smoke.
In the two-part Arte documentary “School Stories” on Thursday at 8:15 p.m., celebrities from Germany and France reveal their anecdotes across generations. It’s about friendships and conflicts, obedience and rebellion, laughter and tears.
Blows with the cane
When the former “Tagesthemen” moderator Ulrich Wickert enters the courtyard of the school near Paris, where he went for three years as a teenager, it is “just like before”, a “very homely feeling” for him. Even if things weren’t always nice. Wickert remembers being beaten with a cane shortly after the war in the elementary school – and quotes a song that was sung in school at the time: “Oh Tannenbaum, oh Tannenbaum, the teacher beat me blue, so I have to stand in the corner and my bruises count.”
Gysi and the horned oxen
In the GDR, students were supposed to learn a trade at the same time as part of the so-called polytechnic lessons in order to be more closely connected to the working class, as did Gregor Gysi as a visitor to the extended high school in the Berlin district of Adlershof. “It was a nonsense regulation,” he says – and reveals the curious story of how he became a skilled worker for cattle breeding.
Gysi wanted to become a car mechanic – for good reason. “It was difficult to get a car in the GDR. But getting it fixed was even harder. I thought to myself: if I can do it alone, all the better.”
However, the substitute solution was not that useless for his later political career, as Gysi once told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”: “I can deal with idiots.”
entertainment
The school system in the Federal Republic was also repeatedly criticized. “We are on the sloping path from the educational emergency to the educational catastrophe,” the documentary quotes a pedagogue from 1964 as saying. In addition to the personal anecdotes of the celebrities, the film tries to show the problems of the different school worlds from a bird’s eye view. With the timeline from 1945 to 2015, which is very ambitious for just under 90 minutes of broadcasting time, it is only enough for brief insights.
What comforts the students in these turbulent times: they are never alone with their worries and anger when they are surrounded by their classmates. The documentary shows that school is still a place that provides a young society with a thick tube of putty before things get really complicated. Or as actress Jella Haase (“Fack Ju Göhte”) puts it so simply: “Everyone is totally different, but they go to this school together.”