The German Body in German Children’s War Art: Fighting the Inept Enemy in World War One

My paper will consider German wartime propaganda and pedagogy from 1914-1916, which influenced young schoolchildren (aged 5-14) to create drawings and paintings of Germany’s soldiers in World War One. In this art, the children drew bodies of German soldiers as tough, heroic, on the move, armed with powerful weapons, and part of a superior military movement; their enemies (French, Russian, British soldiers) embodied disorder, backwardness, ineptitude, and deadly weakness. The artwork by these schoolchildren thus revealed the intense propaganda of the war years, and the children’s tendency to see the German military as the most accomplished combatant in the war. Implicit here too were ideas of Germany’s cultural supremacy. During the first two years of the war, in the Volksschule of the nation, many children did such art under the supervision of teachers who passionately embraced the nation and the war cause. Within the classroom, teachers directed students to imagine the war by drawing scenes of battles, soldiers and nurses, or by making postcards and models. Some of these teachers had been influenced by the Kunsterziehungsbewegung (the arts’ education movement) and thus encouraged children’s creativity in art of the war years. In this pedagogical wartime environment the young student became actively engaged in creative learning and study about the war, expressing romantic ideas of the indomitable German soldier. Examples of such work were shown in the exhibition of 1915 in Berlin entitled “ Schule und Krieg (School and War),” in another exhibit of 1915 in Vienna (arranged by art teacher Richard Roethe), and in hundreds of drawings done in a school close to Hamburg by students of Schule III, Wilhelmsburg. I will analyze the depiction of the body in these sources and also consider the history of art instruction in German schools. This paper will thus address students’ intense connectedness to the war and their imagining of the heroic German body. Sources: Geissler, Gert. Schulgeschichte in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013. Kolb, Gustav. “Der Zeichenunterricht und der Krieg.” Kunst und Jugend. Heft IV, April 1915: 49-54. Pallat, Ludwig. “Kriegszeichnungen von Schuler.” Deutsche Bl atter fur Zeichen-und Kunstunterricht, 20 Jahrgang, 1. Juli 1915, No. 7: 123-124. Rothe, Richard. Die Kinder und der Krieg. Wien: A. Haase, 1915. Stern, William, ed., Jugendliches Seelenleben und Krieg . Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1915. Zentralinstitut fur Erziehung und Unterricht, Sonderausstellung Schule und Krieg . Berlin, 1915.

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