Kinderland in the Fatherland: Growing Children in Imperial Berlin
This dissertation explores the milieu in which children of Imperial Berlin were raised. When contemporaries in the rapidly expanding capital of the Second German Empire (1871-1918) looked at children, this milieu darkened. The city, they argued, threatened children's growing bodies, and such institutions as the home, the clinic, and the school sought to counteract its effects, producing new childrearing technologies to produce so-called normal, healthy children. I trace a shifting visuality over the course of this half century whereby this milieu brightened---not in the least by the work of the well-known artist Heinrich Zille, whose images of robust, cheeky children living in Berlin's supposedly darkest corners became immensely popular. Imperial autobiographers, too, saw glimpses of a Kinderland , a children's paradise, in the Fatherland. While historians have displayed an inability to see children in urban pasts, I center young children, from infancy to the start of elementary school at the age of six, in the narrative of fin-de-siecle Berlin. The story, then, is as much about children's ability to adapt to the urban milieu as it is about adults' efforts to discipline the urban milieu and, subsequently, children.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign