Paradoxical Education – Resistance – Surviving. Secret teaching and children’s drawings in the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Meike Baader
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416725854

At the centre of the proposed project are two unpublished collections of source material from the Ravensbrück concentration camp: around 50 drawings by a fourteen-year-old girl, and around 12 teaching booklets providing material for a covertly organized form of teaching among the imprisoned Polish women. The drawings are probably connected with the teaching, and are likely to have been done – at least in part – in the children’s group. Both the drawings and the teaching materials, produced by the Polish women themselves, point to cultural practices and paradoxical processes of education. These will be analysed more closely within the framework of the project. So far most of what is known about teaching in concentration camps relates to the Theresienstadt camp; this project seeks to expand this knowledge by exploring forms of teaching in Ravensbrück, and to connect it with children’s cultural practices such as drawing pictures. The aim of the project is to give a nuanced description of these aspects of children’s lives/survival under the violent regime of the camp. The first step will be to systematically index the sources, the second to analyse them in their respective contexts, the third to link them with discourses in the history of childhood and of education, and the fourth to make them accessible to the public. A key concept here is that of “paradoxical education”, which links in with debates on “paradoxical educational conditions” in concentration camps (Brumlik 2014).The empirical part of the project works with approaches based on practice theory, from historical cultural studies and social sciences. These allow us not only to examine the textual and visual level, but also to reconstruct the specific conditions of creation, and women and children’s modes of reception, in the extreme conditions of a violent system. A particular focus here will be the interdisciplinary development of methods for analysing pictures that children have drawn under violent, extreme conditions. Thus the project will, on the one hand, produce specific multi-perspectival analyses of the sources, and, on the other hand, contribute to a relatively undeveloped area of historical childhood studies and educational research, by developing better methods for analysing drawings and created objects. A further dimension of the project has to do with the culture of remembrance: it explicitly reveals how the persecuted children and adults perceived the genocidal crimes, and interprets their cultural expressions and paradoxical educational processes as practices of resistance. At the same time, it provides material for pedagogical work on the culture of remembrance, by publishing the results of the project in an illustrated book and an edited volume, and thus making them accessible for further scholarly and pedagogical work.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants