Europe outside Europe: developing a German Jewish citizenship in Argentina. The case of the Pestalozzi Schule

MAYER, L. Y SCHENQUER, L

Pragmatics of social and cultural capital

University of Rzeszow

Lugar: Rzeszow; Año: 2013;

The Pestalozzi Primary School was created in 1934 in Buenos Aires by a group of German immigrants opposed to the national socialism, with the purpose of generating an educational alternative to the guidelines of the Nazi Germany, position that earned the school expulsion out of the Network of German schools in Argentina. Another consequence that had its ideological position was that it cooperated in the determination of a particular space for the German Jewish minority once in exile. Moreover, as it was a private educational proposal, it safeguarded the young people from the highly politicized education system, outlined by the government of President Juan D. Perón (1946-55), which for the Jews was usually identified with the national socialist education. The bond between the German Jewish immigrants and the institution was strengthened with the addition of the secondary level in 1958, while that year the school was reinserted again in the German Network. A merge of all these factors led the institution to form and area of socialization that was shared by the Jews in exile, that developed a specific identity, that was antinazi, German and Jewish. As Friedman states (2011), in the exile, nationality stopped being only an ?imaginative community? (Anderson, 1993), to turn into a strong social fabric. While many studies (see Friedman, 2001) analyze the role of this school during its early years, few researches study the later period - from 1956 until the early seventies (Puiggros, 1991), when despite the reputation of Argentinean Educational System, the conclusion of the Nazi regime and that more years passed since the Jews were expelled from Germany, they continued to send their children to this German School. In this sense, it is relevant to study the Pestalozzi School as a sphere where the social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2000) of the German Jewish immigrants could be produced and reproduced, in relation to their homeland on the one hand and their religion on the other, generating a differentiated integration, committed to develop a specific type of student ?and citizen- more closely linked to the homeland of their ancestors on one side and to their religion on the other, than to the students? national reality. To achieve an analysis of the ways in which social and cultural of this minority were produced and reproduced in this school, we will analyze interviews with students and graduates of the Pestalozzi who belong to German Jewish families, who carried out their studies between 1955 and the early seventies, to inquire their schooling and socialization process, to analyze how this school contributed to create and recreate social and cultural capital within this minority and its new generations