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My article considers German wartime propaganda and pedagogy from 1914 to 1916, which influenced young schoolchildren (aged 5–14) to create drawings and paintings of Germany's military in World War I. In this art, the children drew bodies of German soldiers as tough, heroic, on the move, armed with powerful weapons, and part of a superior military movement; their enemies (French, Russian, British soldiers) embodied disorder, backwardness, ineptitude, and deadly weakness. The artwork by these schoolchildren thus reveals the intense propaganda of the war years, and the children's tendency to see the German military as the most accomplished combatant in the war. During the first two years of the war, in the primary schools of the nation, many children did such art under the supervision of teachers who passionately embraced the nation and the war cause. Within the classroom, teachers directed students to imagine the war by drawing scenes of battles, including the sinking of the Lusitania. Some of these teachers had been influenced by the Kunsterziehungsbewegung (the arts' education movement) and thus encouraged children's creativity in art of the war years. In this pedagogical wartime environment the young student became actively engaged in creative learning and study about the war, expressing romantic ideas of the indomitable German soldier and sailor. My research has involved analysis of over 250 school drawings done by children aged 10–14 in a school in Wilhelmsburg, near Hamburg, in 1915. I analyze the depiction of the German forces in six of these sources and also consider the history of art instruction in German schools. Furthermore, I address the ways in which historians can analyze children's art as a historical document for understanding the child's experience.

The 20th century, declared at its start to be the "Century of the Child" by Swedish author Ellen Key, saw an unprecedented expansion of state activity in and expert knowledge on child-rearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Children were seen as a crucial national resource whose care could not be left to families alone. However, the exact scope and degree of state intervention and expert influence as well as the rights and roles of mothers and fathers remained subjects of heated debates throughout the century. While there is a growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood, research in the field remains focused on national narratives. This volume compares the impact of state intervention and expert influence on theories and practices of raising children in the U.S. and German Central Europe. In particular, the contributors focus on institutions such as kindergartens and schools where the private and the public spheres intersected, on notions of "race" and "ethnicity," "normality" and "deviance," and on the impact of wars and changes in political regimes