Paper short abstract:

A scientific worldview was popularised in the GDR by means of public education. The paper discusses the structures, materials, and narratives of these approaches and asks for their handling of pre-socialist inheritances: How where they legitimised? And when were they criticised?

Paper long abstract:

Creating a new society in the socialist states of the 20th century also meant bringing a new, distinct worldview to the masses. This worldview was defined in several dimensions: materialistic, scientifically informed or even scientistic, and non- or even anti-religious. There were multiple ways to implement it, among which public or adult education played an important role. Taking the GDR as an example, the paper looks at such popularisation efforts, their structures, their materials, and their narratives. How was the scientific worldview spread? And which technologies were central to the visualisation of scientism?

Another aspect of the paper will be ruptures: The socialist societies had only inherited the idea of a “scientific worldview” from bourgeois predecessors (e.g. freethinkers) and thus, they had to deal with this legacy. The GDR never modelled a consistent way to do so and remained somewhat hesitant: sometimes, the classic critics of religion were accepted and honoured, while at other times they were rejected and criticised for their ‘limited class perspective’.

Socialist societies have been described as ideal examples for the conflict thesis, i.e. for a confrontative setting of religion and science. The popularisation efforts of the GDR illustrate that. But at the same time, they increasingly tried to transgress this opposition – in a tentative or oscillatory movement that will be the third aspect of the paper.