COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP AND UNIVERSITARY M ILIEU - SOCIAL-HISTORY OF ACADEMICS IN THE GDR, 1945-1961

Since the end of the ferries the SED tried to enforce a rapid turnover of the teaching staff of the East German universities. The professsor iate in academic fields like economics or law could be changed complet ely within a few years and in the humanities a small counter-elite of former emigrants successfully started to build up a new teaching staff . Only in the medical and natural sciences the old personnel, milieu a nd mentality survived until the early sixties. Continuity in these dis ciplines depended upon the lack of qualified scientists, the open bord er in the West (until 1961), the autonomy of the scientific discourse and the informal power of the academic establishment. In the social sc iences and the humanities a rapid change was possible because the SED was either able to implement an alternate elite of loyal intellectuals or to destroy the scientific autonomy of these disciplines so that ac ademic credentials where not an absolute prerequisite of the career fu rther more.