Zeitraum: 1.8.2011-31.07.2012

Förderorganisation: Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung

Policing as Pedagogy. The State, the Police and Civic Identity in Germany 1920s-1950s.

The research project examines the policing of the local community, the educative functions of policing and its reshaping according to political, social and cultural changes. Police officers, local officials and the public constantly redefined their own role(s) within this process. By concentrating on the role of the German police as a carrier of state authority and civic culture from the 1920s to the 1950s, it explores how politicians and officials at state, regional and local levels created a particular role for the police force in their respective political systems. This was a dynamic process equally influenced by the police’s reactions to these attempts. It is especially fruitful to concentrate on Germany’s Schutzpolizei, the branch of the police in charge of everyday civic policing issues. The notion that policing needed to have an educative function was essential for all political systems under consideration (Weimar and Nazi Germany, FRG, GDR). The project focuses on three major areas which link the policing of the urban environment and run through the entire period: 1. efforts to promote a positive public image of the police, 2. the regulation and control of traffic as a system of public education, and 3. the important area of contested control of the police between municipal authorities and the state.