Still our knowledge of NS youth policy shows gaps. Research has comprehensively worked out the offi cial, bureaucratic level of the “Reichsjugendführung”, however there lack empirical studies which could, so to speak, serve for testing the regional-historical practice. For the time being, the local realities of the NS monopoly organisation of the “Hitlerjugend” have not been systematically researched. The plans and concepts of the “Oberste Reichsbehörde” in Berlin were not always in accordance with the actual local situation of the youth organization. Its claim, i. e. winning over every boy and every girl for the National Socialist “Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic community)”, was a goal which in its totalitarian dimension was not completely achieved until the end.

Against the background of the current historiographic debate on the analytical use of the National Socialist term “Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic or national community)”, this contribution tests this perspective for its applicability to the NS youth association. The two chronological dimensions of the term – both the prognostic and the declaratory one – allow for conclusions on the particular dynamic of the attempts to implement this societal main idea. Thus, by understanding it as a process, it becomes obvious that within the state youth association under leadership of the NSDAP social integration happened precisely also by way of exclusion mechanisms. At the same time the unfolding of the refined disciplinary and legal system for young men and women provided a variety of starting points for contributing in various ways and intensities and based on various motivations. Thus, the closely interconnected societal supra-structures of the NS associations can be recognized not only as tools of indoctrination and repression but at the same time as places where a dictatorship of participation was realised.

Due to the wide-spread consumption of Western media, by the beginning of the 1980s also Punk had its followers among youths and adults in the GDR. However, this sub-culture as well as its later manifestations in the course of the 1980s developed under completely different auspices than in the West. The years up to the mid-1980s were completely characterized by persecution by State Security, whereas the second half of the decade was characterized by compromises and attempts at integration. Now, under the label of “the other bands”, this recently persecuted music was heard on state radio and was funded and supported by the FDJ. The article sketches the development and asks about essential actors and discourses.

Die Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED) der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik wies ein ambivalentes Verhältnis zu Heranwachsenden auf. Die Propaganda zeichnete das Bild idealistischer, junger Kommunisten der Zukunft. Versäumten diese jedoch die Annahme dieser Rolle, reagierten die Parteispitzen mit verletztem Stolz, Wut und Aggression. Im Laufe der 1950er-Jahre verschob sich die staatliche Repression von den jungen Christen hin zu Maßnahmen gegen junge Menschen (vorwiegend Männer der Arbeiterklasse) aus den Subkulturen (wie beispielsweise Bebop-, Rock- und Beat-Fans.) Der vorliegende Artikel verknüpft die Archivrecherche mit Stanley Cohens Analyse „moralischer Panik“.

Being a mass youth organisation, the FDJ was a part of the institutional organisation of the GDR and thus an actor in the tension area between rulership and society of the SED dictatorship. The contribution provides a macro-analysis of the critical development of the association until the mid-1960s, with a focus on the success and defi cits of the attempts of implementing the guidelines set by the SED leadership among the target group of youths in the GDR. In particular it asks about the unintended side-effects of these processes, to then sketch some arrangements resulting from the confl icts and existing until the end of the GDR.

Education has long been considered a key element of totalitarian regimes in order to restructure the society and stabilize power. Indeed both, NSDAP as well as SED found very own ways of implementing special schooling institutions where the coming elite of the two dictatorships schould be selected and formed. Whereas schools like the Nationalpolitical Institutes of Education, the Adolf- Hitler Schools in Nazi Germany or Cadett Schools in the GDR were presented as outstanding and privileged places for the future generation in propaganda, the institutes often failed to meet these expectations. Thus, an analysis of these schools looks promising for uncovering the contradictions and limitations inherent in totalitarian concepts of education. Drawing from administration sources and ego documents from school graduates, this article shows how the educational claims of the states often confl icted with reality inside the institutions and to what degree – if so – the two regimes nevertheless managed to affect the graduates.