Children's Institutions, Corporal Punishment, and Colonial Scandal in Germany ca. 1900 SoSe 2023, Roi Ball

In the years around 1900, statisticians and social reformers noted a stark increase in underage crime across Prussia and Imperial Germany. For many, a main reason for that was the indiscriminate criminalization and incarceration of young people for petty crimes. Instead, the Prussian state decided to confine young people of the destitute working-class in separate institutions rather than prisons and set up a new system of non-criminal confinement called Fürsorgeerziehung. The lack of any regulation or supervision of such institutions soon led to a series of violence and sexual abuse scandals that widely circulated in the press, causing a popular outrage. Nevertheless, the system was retained and continued into the interwar era and beyond. Even as the Prussian system of Fürsorgeerziehung was taking shape, the German empire moved to tighten its control over the African colonies it had won on paper in 1884. Culminating in brutal wars of oppression and genocide, German colonial rule in Cameroon, Togo, Namibia and Tanzania gave rise to a range of policies of racial segregation, which particularly in Namibia, were meant to separate White from African children and limit the contact between White children and their African carers and/or relatives. Also around 1900, colonial scandals about “excessive” violence and cruel treatment of Africans by German colonial administrators were a frequent feature in the press and the political arena, which popularized and instrumentalized the symbolics of colonial violence, such as the whip. The imagery and language of violence used to discuss and condemn some aspects of colonial rule were remarkably similar to those deployed in the context of Fürsorgeerziehung scandals. 

The Übung proceeds from the hypothesis that the similarities and connections between different kinds of “excessive” and thus scandalous violence might not accidental and could point towards deeper connections between structures of power that involve race, gender, and labor and the exercise of violence. We will discuss and critically concretize this hypothesis using historical literature and contemporary sources, primarily visual culture. Students would undertake their own research, uncover new historical sources, and form their own questions, methods of analysis, and conclusions. The class will include a final reflection paper of 6-10 pages. 

Kurs im HIS-LSF