Youth in Competition. Mobilization, Competitive Spirit and the Shaping of the Future during the 20th Century

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Reinhild Kreis
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566050384

The project explores competitions for children and youth, which became a mass phenomenon during the 20th century. From playing music to scientific and technical projects to foreign language skills, a broad and ever-growing set of activities was transformed into competitions which aimed at the mass of young people. Behind the competitions stood – in various constellations – companies, political parties, government ministries and associations that worked closely with schools and other training facilities. This format was equally prominent in democracies and dictatorships, market economies and planned economies. Despite their enormous popularity youth competitions have received little scholarly attention. Germany is an excellent starting point to examine youth competitions as a particular mode of shaping social and economic order under different conditions. The project thus lays the foundation for further international comparative research. The competitions are part of a larger history of national and individual comparison, social self-observation and self-quantification in connection with discourses and practices relating to achievement, meritocracy and inequality. In order to examine youth competitions as a comprehensive but also dynamic, multifarious and context-dependent phenomenon, the project consists of two studies. Study 1 focuses on children's and youth competitions in the GDR; study 2 examines competitions in the Federal Republic of Germany, with both studies including transnational perspectives and longer historical lines. The applicant will expand existing research on National Socialist youth competitions and develop a framework for cross-temporal and international comparisons through conceptual contributions. The project is the first to shed light on youth competitions as a fundamental signature of the 20th and 21st centuries. It contributes to our understanding of competition cultures and ideas and practices of achievement in connection with incentive structures that were intended to interrelate individual and social interests under different conditions. Three joint perspectives connect the studies within the project: Firstly, youth competitions are examined as practices of acknowledging certain performances as achievement and to attribute participants accordingly; a second focus in on how the competitions functioned (or were hoped to function) as instruments in shaping individual life courses as well as overall economic and social developments; a third set of questions revolves around youth competitions as arenas in which the relationship between the individual and the collective was negotiated. The aim of the project is to explore youth competitions as a mode of social interaction. By asking about the mindsets, ideas of social and economic order, and emotional regimes inherent to the competitions the project aims at showing how diagnoses of the present have been used in attempts to shape both individual and collective futures.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Denmark, Sweden
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Christina Lubinski; Professor Dr. Daniel Lövheim