The Body in National Socialistic Education (2003-2006)

Similar to the ancient world the forming and presentation of the filial and adolescent body played a great role for the educational process during the german national socialistic regime. This project theoretically resorts to different paradigm shifts to give a new interpretation on various forms and aspects of incorporation of power, body and gender. Furthermore by using the media of photography, it presents a new source for analysis which has seldom been used for reconstructing the code of practise in national socialistic custom of educating children. This project explores two aspects of todays research practise: On the one hand it meets the demand of a pedagogical historiography orientated on the subject and a systematic localization of the filial and adolescent body in national socialistic education. On the other hand this project makes a contribution to the use and interpretation of historic photography as an adequate instrument of research. The method of analyzing historical photography is recommendable when trying to find access to social and educational historical questions.

The analysis of photographies established the following results: Besides the exposure of the ideal type and the gender stereotype one can find military and fascistic poses which more or less meet nowerdays expectations and clichés when thinking of national socialistic education. Furthermore these pictures represent contradictory ideas of how a body should appear, be presented and formed. At the same time some photos relativize the widespread theses of a consistent ‘Gleichschaltung’ in education – even though only few photographies could be found that show either antagonistic potential or even open objection to the popular ideology.

By giving a methodological and theoretical localization the collected analyses give an important approach for a comprehensive pedagogical historiography of the National Socialism. This approach is keen to give a thick description of the educational practise rather than evaluating it. There is an obvious contradiction between the subjective positive recollection of contemporary witnesess according to their own childhood and adolescence in national socialistic mass organization and the classification of a whole generation as victim of ‘Un-Pädagogik’ in fascistic education. Nevertheless, when looking at the attempts followed by (german) research of historic education one will see that this contradiction was not taken into account by scholars for the past decades. By following a rather new attempt the results of this project are able to bridge this gap. The present analysis shows how important it is to take the children and teenagers shown on the pictures as well as their personal and individual experiences serious. Otherwise they would be demoted to mere string puppets of a criminal and fascistic regime.

This project has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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