Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child: The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective ed. by Dirk Schumann (review)

The eleven chapters in Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child trace the convergence of child-rearing and citizenship training in the twentieth century, comparing German Central Europe and the United States. Center stage is taken by the complex relationship between attempts to improve child-rearing, child welfare, and education and their results in both of the broad geographic areas covered in the book. Raising children in the twentieth century, editor Dirk Schumann writes, meant raising future citizens in a much more systematic and comprehensive way than before.

The first contribution, Sonya Michel’s essay “Children and the National Interest,” provides key background for the chapters that follow by discussing how children’s welfare and the national interest became intertwined in the nineteenth century in the US and Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. Michel shows how nation states identified the health of their populations as a key resource of state power. As a consequence, they devised policies to improve children’s welfare as well as public schooling, using the help of a growing number of experts who formulated and implemented these policies. This could not be done without invading the “private” sphere of the family. At the turn of the century, state intervention into the familial sphere had already become well established on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was quickly expanded even further.

The following ten contributions are divided into three sections. In the first section, “New Beginnings,” all three authors examine novel institutions and practices of child welfare and education spawned by the international reform movement in the twentieth century: Katherine Bullard discusses the racial content of welfare by showing how the US Children’s Bureau, founded in 1912, provided advice and medical support to families but at the same time explicitly distinguished between white and non-white children and families, using white children as the standards against which other children were measured. Andrew Donson describes the convergence of reform pedagogy with German nationalism and militarism. In order to stimulate patriotic and nationalist views amongst German pupils, teachers—who before the First World War had been authoritarian and rigid—were encouraged by the state to develop a close relationship with their students and to experiment with curricula. Thus, key demands of reform pedagogy could be fulfilled, albeit at the price of promoting an aggressive nationalism and militarism in schools. Ellen L. Berg describes the changes within the American Kindergarten movement over the course of the First World War, when leadership redefined its goal of Americanization to encompass a complete and potentially coercive assimilation. Some “kindergartners” turned to promoting patriotic or even jingoistic slogans, whereas most remained committed to the concept of internationalism and world citizenship that had earlier dominated the movement.

The second section, “Redefining Parents’ Roles,” investigates how concepts of fatherhood and motherhood changed from the early twentieth century to the post WWII era. Carolyn Kay shows how advice literature for mothers in early twentieth-century Germany stressed the importance of discipline as a precondition for attaining other middle-class values. Rebecca Jo Plant writes about a fundamental change in the definition of the maternal role in the mid twentieth century, arguing that an older prescription for emotionally intense mother-child relationships was now swept away. In the opinion of experts, overly protective mothers could weaken democratic fortitude in their children to the extent that mothers were actually advised to stay out of their children’s way after their earliest years. Turning from mothers to fathers, Till von Rahden argues that in the late 1950s, West Germans began to develop a concept of “democratic father-hood,” advocating a gentle, playful fatherhood in place of a paternal bond reliant on obedience. This change, von Rahden argues, contributed to the creation of a democratic culture in Western Germany.

The third section, “Parental Rights and State...