Session Information
Contribution
In this paper I will study the meaning of the body and health, the psychologizing c.q. educationalizing of it, and more practically the shaping c.q. disciplining of it, in the context of open-air education in pre-nazi Germany, through the case study of ‘Waldschule Senne I’ in Bielefeld (1922-1933). This particular school, although it was the property of a social insurance company and the community of Minden, was said to be spiritually founded by Karl Triebold (he had a son named after him, therefor Karl Triebold ‘senior’) who, if we may believe his own discourse, caught lung tuberculosis on the field during the First World War. Less heroic seems however that he was admitted at the Field Hospital of the 7th Army in Lippspringe shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914. There, after his recovery, he first founded an adult school for lung-sick soldiers. Unfortunately for Triebold, the military hospital and its adult school became useless after the war, so he had to look for other job opportunities, something he seems to have been particularly good at. Some strategic visits to sanatoria and open-air schools as well as some handy lobby-work in popular hygiene periodicals of the time, got him funds and premises to build his first open-air school. Apparently there was a market for schools and teachers that tended to psychologize and educationalize bodily health. Apart from tuberculosis itself, all kinds of bodily, mental and moral malfunctions related to the oh so delicate nervous system, were good enough excuses to allow children to benefit from a medico- pedagogical regime like that of the Waldschule. As many authors have pointed out, the increased focus on the child's body, from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, was merely symptomatic. Beneath a general concern for the social body ran the undertow of eugenics, inspired by international tension. The child's body and health as metaphors for the nation's present and future heritage, became the subject of disciplining and shaping strategies. I will investigate how the body was conceived of and dealt with in the German context and more in particular in Karl Triebold’s open-air school. I will demonstrate how it was used not only to ensure the individual's, family's or nation's health, but also to establish a medical and above all educational authority. The concern for the continuing existence of the open-air schooling process, obtained a life of it's own. The rhythm followed within the open-air school, was not as much that of the child or nature, but rather that of the institution itself and society in general. Through its more explicit attention for the body and health in relation to mind and morals of an 'abnormal' target group, the open- air school reveals a key focus of the educational health system in general: the normalising of the social body, paradoxically interwoven with the social and sanitary bracketing of certain of it's members. Rather than limiting my research to the meso- and macro-level of the institution, I will search for evidence of paradoxes of educationalization on the micro-level of the educational shop floor. Nevertheless I will investigate the ‘body language’ of Karl Triebold and others on the meso-level of the open-air movement as well. As the head of a school and figure head of the national and international open-air movement, Triebold seems to have actively enhanced the incorporation of the open-air ideology in that of national-socialism. Maybe the case study of Waldschule Senne I and it’s metaphorical conception of the body reveal some of the factors that made this possible.
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