Authors: Zeterberg, Max-Ferdinand, Kirchberg, Anne, Horn, Klaus-Peter, Müller, Hans-Rüdiger & Dietrich, Cornelie
Klaus Mollenhauer (1928–1998) was, to summarize the relevant research findings of science studies and our own research on the reception of Mollenhauer's works, one of the most important German educational scientists of the 20th century. In the more than forty years of his academic career, he made numerous contributions to educational science. Most of his books were intensively received in contemporary academic discourse, and many of his essays also received a great deal of attention (see our detailed comments on Mollenhauer's works). Several of his publications were counted among the most important educational science publications of the 20th century in a retrospective survey of educational scientists (Horn, 2003), and from the 1960s to the 1990s, Mollenhauer was one of the most frequently cited authors in the Zeitschrift für Pädagogik (Tenorth, 1986; Hild, Horn & Stisser, 2018), was regularly featured in educational science textbooks as an educational science theorist (Kempka, 2018) and was elevated to the status of a classic in educational science and social pedagogy during his lifetime and shortly after his death (Niemeyer, 1998, 3. Aufl. 2010; Dollinger, 2006, 3. Aufl. 2012; Lischewski, 2014).
On the other hand, it should be noted that Mollenhauer, like other prominent representatives of the discipline from the 1960s to the 1980s – Herwig Blankertz and Wolfgang Klafki, Wolfgang Brezinka and Heinrich Roth, Andreas Flitner and Saul B. Robinsohn – is hardly received in recent debates: For example, in the Zeitschrift für Pädagogik (Journal of Education), he has hardly been mentioned at all as a a reference author in recent years (Hild, Horn & Stisser, 2018; Horn, Fante & Vogel, 2021), and references to his writings in recent discourse in educational science are at best selective and sporadic, and tend to be found more as a blanket reference to a recognized authority in the field than as a differentiated discussion (Fante, 2021). Mollenhauer thus seems to share the fate of many classics (not only in educational science): their names and individual keywords associated with them – in Mollenhauer's case, for example, “emancipation,” “interaction,” “critical educational science,” or “aesthetic education” – are mentioned time and again, but there is hardly any substantive discussion of their work or further development of the ideas inspired by their works. This cannot be concealed by the fact that This cannot be overlooked, even though Mollenhauer is mentioned in recent introductory works on educational science (albeit, according to the bibliographies, a rather specific Mollenhauer in each case, see, for example, Klika & Schubert, 2013; Zirfas, 2018; Koller, 2020; Thompson, 2020) or social pedagogy (e.g. Engelke, Borrmann & Spatscheck, 2018; Sandermann & Neumann, 2018) and that theses and dissertations on Mollenhauer have been submitted (Sammet, 2004; Füssenhäuser, 2005; Rödel, 2005; Groß, 2010; Lüth, 2010; Hilbrich, 2023), in which Mollenhauer's works from the late 1950s to the 1990s are sometimes discussed in great depth, but at the expense of depth of focus.
At first glance, the fact that biographical and historical studies on Mollenhauer have been published (Winkler, 2002; Aßmann, 2015, Thole & Zeterberg, 2021) suggests that there is still considerable interest in Mollenhauer. At second glance, however, it seems that Mollenhauer's elevation to classic seems to assign the author thus classified a position beyond the current discourse. This promotes—probably unintentionally—a form of reception that, on the one hand, leads to detailed reconstructive examinations of Mollenhauer's approaches and theoretical offerings (see in particular the aforementioned qualification theses), while on the other hand, the classic Mollenhauer is used as an argument without further specification of content (on classic quotations as arguments, see Menck, 1992).
This description is by no means intended to give the impression that Mollenhauer has been forgotten: after all, various reprints and translations of some of his texts (see the bibliographic overview on the KMG portal) and more recent treatises on Mollenhauer in the USA, Japan, and Norway (Chang, 2008; „‚Forgotten Connections‘ Thirty years after“, 2014; Friesen & Hamelock, 2013; Friesen & Sævi, 2010; Sæverot, 2016; Saevi, 2013; Weiss, 2018), on Mollenhauer's role in the (theoretical) history of social pedagogy (e.g., Füssenhäuser & Thiersch, 2001; Scherr, 2006; Klein, 2011; Thole & Zeterberg, 2021) or on his theory of aesthetic education (Dietrich, 2015; Klepacki, 2021), suggests something else.
Depending on the subject matter, topic, and perspective of the authors, these publications present a slightly different Mollenhauer. A certain commonality exists in that the development of Mollenhauer's educational thinking is generally divided into various more or less clearly defined phases: from humanities-based pedagogy to critical educational science to a cultural theory-inspired educational science – and that various segments are mentioned within these: general educational science, social pedagogy, aesthetic education. With this complete edition of Mollenhauer's works we do not wish to present our own interpretation of Mollenhauer1, but rather to offer the opportunity to get to know Klaus Mollenhauer and the development of his professional thinking by examining his writings from 1948 to his posthumous publications.
Mollenhauer's complete works comprise a total of 255 writings in more than 500 distinct versions from the period 1948 to 2004. These include some early texts from the context of the youth movement and a few posthumously published writings. After his first academic treatises in 1953, Mollenhauer regularly published books and essays on issues of general education, social pedagogy, and aesthetic education from 1959 onwards.
The KMG republishes all of Klaus Mollenhauer's publications in a text-critical and annotated form. In doing so, the KMG follows the guiding principle of documenting Mollenhauer's work on the one hand and, on the other hand, making it accessible for further scientific analysis and study purposes through explanations and commentaries. In this way, the KMG attempts to make "texts close to the source available without excessive interference and prior interpretation" (Sahle, 2013, p. 218; translated by the authors), while at the same time offering editorial knowledge for factual accessibility.
The works are divided into three categories in the KMG:
For easier identification, miscellaneous items are enumerated chronologically from „V01“ to „V90“.
Work on the KMG was generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from April 2018 to September 2024. 1 Preliminary work on cataloguing the estate of Klaus Mollenhauer and preparing the application to the DFG was supported by the Foundation of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen with funds from the Lindemann Foundation. The work was divided among four working groups:
The work in the four working groups was carried out in several, in some cases parallel and recurring, steps, which are outlined below.(s. dazu detailliert Hild et al., 2020).
In order to represent Mollenhauer's complete works in the KMG, extensive research was conducted on his publications. The basis for this was Mollenhauer's bibliography, published in 2000 (Dietrich & Müller, 2000, pp. 163–190). Building on this, the tables of contents of the most important educational science and social pedagogy journals, as well as thematically relevant anthologies from Klaus Mollenhauer's creative period, were systematically searched for texts by him and reviews of his works, and targeted research was conducted based on references from his estate or in secondary literature. We also came across some previously unknown texts by Mollenhauer more or less by chance
The heir of Klaus Mollenhauer, Susanna Mollenhauer, his co-authors, and his co-editors were asked for their consent to the republication of Mollenhauer's writings within the framework of the KMG. All persons we asked gave their consent. There were no obstacles to the KMG in terms of publishing rights, as there are no writings by Mollenhauer that were published at the time of his death. All of the individuals we contacted gave their consent. There were no obstacles to KMG from a publishing rights perspective, as none of Mollenhauer's writings were first published within the scope of KMG before the 20-year period specified in the Verlagsgesetz (§ 2, para. 3).
A central aspect of KMG is to represent the changes in the republications (see 3.1). To this end, extensive text comparisons were first carried out. The basis for this was always the first publication, the master text. These text comparisons differed between essays and monographs. The type of edition comparison that was carried out is noted in the XML file of the respective work.
If (a) there were discrepancies between the editions, a detailed comparative reading of the entire main text monograph was carried out with the deviating editions. If (b) no deviations could be found in the excerpt, the remaining pages of the editions were checked by comparing the first and last words of each double page. In addition, a word-for-word check of every twentieth page was carried out as a random sample.
After the edition comparison (b) had been carried out, a selective error check was incorporated as a further safety loop. If errors were noticed during the XML markup of the main text, it was checked whether these were also present in the later editions in order to identify any revisions and corrections. This step-by-step procedure ensured both an economical approach and that text changes were detected and different versions identified.
If (c) deviations occurred in the various samples from (b), a word-for-word comparison reading of the entire editions was carried out.
If (d) the publisher stated in one or more subsequent editions that it was a modified (edited, expanded, supplemented, etc.) edition, a word-for-word comparison reading of the editions in question was also carried out.
When comparing the texts of the essays, all essays published multiple times in different editions of anthologies or in different collections, journals, or monographs were checked word for word. Deviations were marked in the main text
Of all the works by Mollenhauer that we identified, the first publication of each was digitized and subjected to digital text recognition (OCR). The text data, now available in digital form, was stored as XML files in TextGrid, a virtual research environment for the humanities and cultural sciences. There, the texts were thoroughly corrected for text recognition errors and manually marked up according to the TEI application profile developed in the project (see 3.2). All text representations in the online edition as well as in the study edition are based on these XML files.
The texts recorded in TEI were then checked by both project locations (four-eyes principle) in order to correct any markup errors that could not be detected by automatic validation. Further correction loops were carried out based on the representations on the web portal and in the study edition.
The critical commentary refers on the one hand to the respective work as a whole, and on the other hand to individual passages in the works:
In addition to working on the texts to be edited, the project also catalogued and processed Klaus Mollenhauer's estate so that it could be used for critical commentary on the KMG. When handed over to the project team, the estate comprised a total of 25 file folders containing a) correspondence (mostly sorted alphabetically by correspondent), b) texts and manuscripts, and c) teaching materials, as well as ten boxes of additional correspondence and teaching materials, documents relating to his work at the university, excerpts and working materials, additional manuscripts and texts, some of which are fragments, biographical materials, and texts about Mollenhauer. After review and archival processing by the KMG project, the estate is now systematically organized in 52 archive boxes. Upon completion of the project, the estate was transferred to the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Göttingen, where it will be made available for further research.
The KMG aims to make the changes between the various editions of Mollenhauer's texts comprehensible. To this end, editions with identical texts are grouped together in the KMG to form individual versions. Each version is assigned a letter for identification purposes; if there are only very minor differences between versions, the versions are assigned the same letters with an additional number. The “first-hand” edition, i.e., the earliest publication, represents the first version and the editorial reference text. This decision also takes into account a characteristic feature of Klaus Mollenhauer's work, namely that some of his important monographic works are based on essays that had previously been published in various places. The orientation towards the first-hand version The focus on the first-hand version is intended to clarify these original temporal and contextual connections without negating the special nature of the compilations of essays in separate books.
An application profile (AP) was developed for encoding the texts in TEI-XML based on the TEI-P5 guidelines in version 4.7.0. This This application profile is documented on the web portal and published in the TextGrid repository. The development of the AP followed the following editorial principles:
Since the end of the 20th century, debates have been taking place (not only) in Germany about how to deal with racist language (for example, with regard to certain terms in scientific and literary texts or the naming of streets or public buildings). The staff of the KMG project consider criticizing and dismantling racism to be an important task.
For the KMG, this has two consequences:
The web portal contains all of KMG's texts. These are presented in such a way that Mollenhauer's edits and corrections can be traced. Depending on user preferences, the versions can be viewed individually or, if there are several versions of a text, in an interactive, comparative view. In addition, the digital edition represents all editorial edits, corrections, and comments based on careful comparisons of the different text versions, materials from the estate, and the author's notes. In addition, the digital edition represents all editorial edits, corrections, and comments based on careful comparisons of the different text versions, materials from the estate, and supplementary research. All editorial additions can be traced; except in the cases mentioned above, “tacit” adjustments have been avoided. Finally, Finally, comments are available for all works with information on the context of their creation, the various versions and translations (if available), the contents of the respective work, its position in Mollenhauer's complete works, and its reception (see 2.5).
The texts can be accessed via an interactive edition overview, in which the texts can be filtered by keywords, text type, and decade of publication. The texts can be sorted in alphabetical or chronological order. Another way to access the texts is via the registers of people, works of art, and pieces of music. There, additional information on the respective entities is also provided. Finally, there is also a full-text search function that allows users to find the relevant passages in the texts.
In addition, the web portal offers information on the biography of Klaus Mollenhauer, including a list of the courses he attended during his studies, the courses he taught during his academic career, and the doctoral theses and postdoctoral dissertations he supervised as first reviewer. The overview of works lists all texts published by Mollenhauer as well as the book series he edited. Finally, the web portal contains documentation of the TEI-AP, this edition report, and a description of the KMG project.
Aßmann, Alex (2015). Klaus Mollenhauer. Vordenker der 68er – Begründer der emanzipatorischen Pädagogik. Eine Biografie. Paderborn: Schöningh.
Chang, Shu-Mei (2008). On K. Mollenhauer’s Development and Shift of Educational Ideas. Bulletin of Educational Research, 54(4), pp. 1–17.
Dietrich, Cornelie (2015). Die Theorie der ästhetischen Bildung bei Klaus Mollenhauer. In Tom Braun, Max Fuchs, & Wolfgang Zacharias (Hrsg.), Theorien der Kulturpädagogik (pp. 277–289). Weinheim, Basel: Beltz Juventa.
Dietrich, Cornelie & Müller, Hans-Rüdiger (2000). Bildung und Emanzipation. Klaus Mollenhauer weiterdenken. Weinheim, München: Juventa.
Dollinger, Bernd (2006). Klassiker der Pädagogik. Die Bildung der modernen Gesellschaft. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Dollinger, Bernd (2012). Klassiker der Pädagogik. Die Bildung der modernen Gesellschaft. (3., durchgesehene Auflage). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Engelke, Ernst, Borrmann, Stefan & Spatscheck, Christian (2018). Theorien der Sozialen Arbeit. Eine Einführung (7., überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage). Freiburg: Lambertus.
Fante, Jonathan (2021). Der Einfluss Klaus Mollenhauers auf den erziehungswissenschaftlichen Diskurs. Eine exemplarische Rezeptionsanalyse der Jahre 2000-2010. In Daniel Erdmann & Katharina Vogel (Hrsg.), Erziehungswissenschaft aus der Distanz. Empirische Studien (pp. 161–226). Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
„Forgotten Connections“ Thirty years after (2014). Phenomenology and Practice, 8(2).
Friesen, Norm & Hamelock, Merilee (2013). Augustine, Wittgenstein, and “the Call” in Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 94–107. https://doi.org/10.29173/pandpr19864
Friesen, Norm & Sævi, Tone (2010). Reviving forgotten connections in North American teacher education. Klaus Mollenhauer and the pedagogical relation. Journal of curriculum studies, 42(1), pp. 123–147.
Füssenhäuser, Cornelia (2005). Werkgeschichte(n) der Sozialpädagogik. Klaus Mollenhauer – Hans Thiersch – Hans-Uwe Otto. Der Beitrag der ersten Generation nach 1945 zur universitären Sozialpädagogik. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren.
Füssenhäuser, Cornelia & Thiersch, Hans (2001). Theorien der Sozialen Arbeit. In Hans-Uwe Otto & Hans Thiersch (Hrsg.), Handbuch Sozialarbeit Sozialpädagogik (2., völlig überarbeitete Auflage, pp. 1876–1900). Neuwied, Kriftel: Luchterhand.
Groß, Stefan (2010). Zwischen Politik und Kultur. Pädagogische Studien zur Sache der Emanzipation bei Klaus Mollenhauer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Hilbrich, Ole (2023). Erziehen und Streiten. Erziehung und ihre Theorie unter der Bedingung der Demokratie. Paderborn: Brill mentis.
Hild, Anne, Horn, Klaus-Peter & Stisser, Anne (2018). Von Klassikerknochen und Empiriebrosamen – Referenzanalysen zur Entwicklung der (bundes)deutschen Erziehungswissenschaft seit 1980. In Katharina Vogel, Christiana Bers, Johanna Brauns, Anne Hild, Anne Stisser, & Klaus-Peter Horn (Hrsg.), Wendungen und Windungen in der Erziehungswissenschaft. Empirische Studien (pp. 155–189). Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt.
Hild, Anne, Kirchberg, Anne, Dietrich, Cornelie, Horn, Klaus-Peter, & Müller, Hans-Rüdiger (Hrsg.) (2020). Die Klaus Mollenhauer Gesamtausgabe (KMG): Textkritische und kommentierte Edition. Ein Werkstattbericht. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
Horn, Klaus-Peter (2003). Abbild oder Zerrbild? Ergebnisse der Befragung zu den „pädagogisch wichtigsten Veröffentlichungen des 20. Jahrhunderts“. In Klaus-Peter Horn & Christian Ritzi (Hrsg.), Klassiker und Außenseiter. Pädagogische Veröffentlichungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (2., korrigierte Auflage, pp. 7–21). Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren.
Horn, Klaus-Peter, Fante, Jonathan & Vogel, Katharina (2021). *theor* in Fachzeitschriften der Erziehungswissenschaft 2007–2016. In Daniel Erdmann & Katharina Vogel (Hrsg.), Erziehungswissenschaft aus der Distanz. Empirische Studien (pp. 13–47). Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
Kempka, Andreas (2018). Die disziplinäre Identität der Erziehungswissenschaft. Ein bibliometrisch-netzwerkanalytischer Zugang. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt.
Klein, Alexandra (2011). Verwahrlosung – Eine sozialpädagogische Vergegenwärtigung mit Klaus Mollenhauer. Soziale Passagen, 3(1), pp. 115–125.
Klepacki, Leopold (2021). Pädagogische (Un-)Möglichkeiten des Ästhetischen. Die Verhandlung des Verhältnisses von Kunst und Pädagogik bei Klaus Mollenhauer, Gunter Otto und Gert Selle. In Jörg Zirfas, Moritz Krebs, Leopold Klepacki, Daniel Burghardt, Diana Lohwasser, Juliane Noack Napoles, & Tanja Klepacki (Hrsg.), Geschichte der Ästhetischen Bildung. Das 20. Jahrhundert (Bd. 4, pp. 261–285). Paderborn: Brill, Ferdinand Schöningh.
Klika, Dorle & Schubert, Volker (2013). Einführung in die allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft. Erziehung und Bildung in einer globalisierten Welt. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz Juventa.
Koller, Hans-Christoph (2020). Grundbegriffe, Theorien und Methoden der Erziehungswissenschaft: Eine Einführung (9. Auflage). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Lischewski, Andreas (2014). Meilensteine der Pädagogik: Die Geschichte der Pädagogik nach Personen, Werk und Wirkung. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag.
Lüth, Torben (2010). Klaus Mollenhauer—Ein kritischer Pädagoge? (Fachportal Pädagogik). Göttingen: Pädagogisches Seminar der Georg-August-Universität.
Menck, Peter (1992). Klassikerzitate als Argumente – Eine Skizze. In Harm Paschen & Lothar Wigger (Hrsg.), Pädagogisches Argumentieren (pp. 221–231). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag.
Niemeyer, Christian (1998). Klassiker der Sozialpädagogik: Einführung in die Theoriegeschichte einer Wissenschaft. Weinheim, München: Juventa.
Niemeyer, Christian (2010). Klassiker der Sozialpädagogik. Einführung in die Theoriegeschichte einer Wissenschaft (3., aktualisierte Auflage). Weinheim, München: Juventa.
Rödel, Bodo (2005). Rekonstruktion der Pädagogik Klaus Mollenhauers. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pädagogik in der Postmoderne. Hamburg: Kovač.
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Saevi, Tone (2013). Why Mollenhauer matters. A response to Klaus Mollenhauer’s book Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing. Translated into English, edited and with an introduction by Norm Friesen. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 180–191. https://doi.org/10.29173/pandpr19869
Sahle, Patrick (2013). Digitale Editionsformen: Zum Umgang mit der Überlieferung unter den Bedingungen des Medienwandels: Teil 1: Das typografische Erbe. Norderstedt: Book on Demand.
Sammet, Jürgen (2004). Kommunikationstheorie und Pädagogik. Studien zur Systematik „kommunikativer Pädagogik“. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
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Zeterberg, Max-Ferdinand, Clausen, Lasse & Heyhusen, Lisa-Katharina (2022). Vom gedruckten Buch zur digitalen Analyse am Beispiel der Klaus-Mollenhauer-Gesamtausgabe (pp. 49–64). Verlag Julius Klinkhardt.
Zirfas, Jörg (2018). Einführung in die Erziehungswissenschaft. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.
