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  • Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918
  • Jason Crouthamel
Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918. By Andrew Donson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. ix plus 329 pp.).

Social historians have thoroughly examined the history of youth in Weimar and Nazi Germany, but a comprehensive study focusing on German youth culture during the First World War has not yet appeared.1 Andrew Donson’s excellent new study not only fills this gap, but also sheds new light on the origins of political radicalization and ideological extremism in this crucial, diverse social group. Donson aims to present a comprehensive history of German male and female youth and schoolchildren during the Great War, and his arguments challenge scholars’ assumptions about the foundations of National Socialism’s radical and largely obedient youth culture. The cultivation of extreme militarism and glorification of violence that characterized Nazi Germany’s education of men and women was not rooted in pre-1914 imperial Germany’s teacher culture and youth associations, as historians have argued. Rather, according to Donson, it was the First World War that mobilized radical youth movements.

In any approach to youth culture, one is limited by the lack of available sources produced by youth themselves. By focusing on changing pedagogies, Donson ingeniously finds an avenue into the complex lives of youth through the lens of teachers’ and officials’ fears about the behavior of young Germans. Donson identifies an interesting tension in imperial Germany’s educational culture. On one hand, authoritarian teachers who treated students like obedient, passive subjects prevailed. At the same time, according to Donson, historians have largely overlooked the minority movement of “reform pedagogy,” which advocated less hierarchical and more active learning programs. While advocates for reform pedagogy, mostly Social Democratic Party activists, made little progress in changing the school system, their criticism of existing pedagogical structures provided a model for challenging authoritarianism.

After August 1914, in an effort to ease social tensions and promote unity, teachers took a wholesale revision of education that would ultimately radicalize both young men and women. Paradoxically, the introduction of war pedagogy in 1914–1915, during a time when the government began to control virtually every level of politics, the economy, and society, actually widened youth agency. Teachers nurtured active learning and loosened discipline and rigid hierarchies in a new class environment. This was in stark contrast to imperial Germany’s educational culture, where reformists who called for active learning were marginalized and ridiculed. War pedagogy shunned crass indoctrination in favor of encouraging boys and girls to debate, think critically, and take initiative in their learning. Class content also changed radically. Donson emphasizes that while the majority of prewar teachers were conservatives who celebrated colonialism and nationalism in the classrooms, the actual content of class activities before 1914 rarely glorified war itself. Now war became the topic of all academic subjects, and teachers took nationalism to another level with celebrations of violence and radical territorial expansion. Even the Social Democrats, at least in the first two years of the war, eased their pacifist rhetoric in their recommendations for curricula. Gender socialization also became more radicalized. Essays and [End Page 557] exams encouraged boys to fantasize about the power of soldiers and the glories of violence, and in a more stimulating learning environment in which students felt empowered. Girls read the same material as boys and were encouraged to imagine they were soldiers and write war mongering essays, but teachers still catered to “feminine” expressions of patriotism for girls, like knitting for men at the front. Encouraged by teachers, boys embraced a “masculinity” strongly associated with militarism and aggression, departing from prewar images of men as self-controlled and calm. Girls still practiced Wilhelmian domesticity, but teachers also recognized the relative independence they gained in the public sphere as workers and volunteers for the national project of war.

War pedagogy was successful in affirming children’s enthusiasm for war, but this would change by 1916 when human losses and economic crisis took their toll. The shortages, hunger and depravation that set in during the last years of the war caused teachers...

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