Children’s Phantasy as Object of Control: Female Criminal Police in NS and FRG, 1937-1970 and the Academy of Pedagogic Sciences in GDR, 1970-1990

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Kassung
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2019 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422675480

Since Alfred Binet's research on suggestibility, children’s imagination has been seen as a limit on children’s ability to make truthful statements. By the same measure, since the psychological study of testimony (Aussagepsychologie) by William Stern, Franziska Baumgarten, Maria Zillig and Karl Marbe, the view has prevailed in legal contexts that the testimony of children before court or the police must be treated with extreme caution (if not be excluded as witness testimony entirely). In response to this research the police and the welfare state have, as part of a more general effort to develop scientific and specialized methods, established bodies dedicated to investigating methods for the control of children’s imagination.Drawing on archival sources of the activities of the Female Criminal Police in Leipzig and Berlin (WKP) in the NS and FRG, as well as the Academy for Pedagogic Sciences of the GDR (APW), the project would like to ask how children’s fantasy was constructed as a potential threat and thus subject of necessary control. In the 1920s, the Female Criminal Police was established as an independent police unit in various police administrations of the German states and was responsible, among other things, for interrogating children as victims and witnesses and assessing the credibility of their statements. As part of the broader unification of the police in 1937, the FCP was given a streamlined organisational framework that persisted, with slight modifications, until the 1970s. The APW, which was founded in 1970 as directly subordinate to the Ministry of National Education, has used pedagogical research for the development of pedagogical practice (e.g. nursery, secondary school, curriculum design). This relationship among politics, science and concrete pedagogical practices in schools and teacher’s training merits scholarly and critical investigation.These institutions’ activities raise compelling research questions: What different strategies of investigating children’s imagination were pursued according to the distinct frameworks of specific political regimes? And how did these endeavors produce and implement scientific knowledge, both preventively and in a controlling/repressive manner, to make childhood and children’s imagination the subject of control knowledge and practices? In order to answer these questions, the psychological investigations referred to by pedagogical and police practices, as well as the discourse of pedagogy and police science (esp. interrogation technique), will be reconstructed. In addition, exemplary micro-studies will be used to analyse the concrete forms of practice that the WKP and APW deployed in order to control and discipline children's imagination in local fields.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants