ABSTRACT
How schools tackle the thorny issue of teaching adolescents about sex reveals much about the beliefs and values of a particular society – the balance of power between secular forces and organized religion; between visions of the future and ties to the past; between recognition of an individual’s right to make his or her own decisions and the needs of communities to protect their cultural and social mores. On the eve of its collapse (in the Autumn of 1989), the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had developed a highly secular, rational and differentiated approach to sexual education.1 Educators in East Germany prided themselves on the open-minded and progressive attitudes they passed on to young people, and they saw free and open discussion of sexuality as one of the key achievements of a developed socialist society. They envisaged a systematic approach to teaching children about sex, beginning as early as the Kindergarten stage.2 Historian, Dagmar Herzog, takes this to mean that in East Germany (in contrast to West Germany) ‘sex was not a main site for managing the legacies of Nazism’.3 But the genesis of would-be ‘progressive’ sex education and advice in the GDRwasmore complex and contradictory thanHerzog recognizes. Periods of modernizing reform were interspersed with periods of political and moral repression. In many ways, these pendulum swings reflected the tensions which existed within the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED).4
