Klaus Mollenhauer: Emancipation, Bildung and six questions for education

Klaus Mollenhauer (1928–1998) is one of the most important German theorists of education in the postwar era. Mollenhauer is often remembered in Germany today for his first book titled Education and Emancipation: Polemical Sketches, but he received international renown for his final monograph, Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing. Although Mollenhauer characterized Forgotten Connections as actually working to move towards a more “substantial conception of emancipation,” many of his followers and colleagues such as Kaufmann et al. saw it as nothing less than an act of “infidelity to those who had taken on his emancipatory pedagogy” (Kaufmann et al., 1991: 86). In the light of these differences in emphasis and interpretation, this paper provides an overview of Forgotten Connections that (following Wivestad and Saevi) sees it as presenting six main questions and themes—ranging from “Why do we have children” to “How can we respect and draw out a child’s inherent character?” However, in doing so, this paper simultaneously traces Mollenhauer’s own efforts to develop a more substantial concept of personal and political emancipation in this text.