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Courage and fighting in the First World War: youngsters’ voices in psychological testing in Leipzig and Budapest

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The aim of this paper is methodological: it deals with the question of how to arrive at children’s voices when assessing archival sources. Based on the current methodological discussion (section 2), I develop a counter-biased, child-centred reading of archival sources containing youngsters’ responses to two psychological tests (sections 3 and 4). Both tests aimed at triggering quick, verbal and written reactions in schoolchildren. In one of them, a psychiatrist asked a class of eight-year-old girls (shortly after the First World War) to explain what “courage” meant to them. A comparison with definitions given before the war showed that for most of these Leipzig schoolgirls, “courage” had become a gendered characteristic of the soldier fighting in the war. Nevertheless, through reading “against the researcher grain”, we can detect how a few used the occasion to self-affirm their own courageousness. The second test series consisted of word associations undertaken by a teacher-psychologist with seventeen- to eighteen-year-old boys at a Catholic secondary school in 1917 in Budapest, at a time when the group was being groomed to become “courageous soldiers”. Again, an examination of the outliers helped me recognise two opposite trends in the boys’ reactions: an echo of war pedagogy and an expression of resistance and worries. I conclude that, despite the restrictedness of the testing situations, there was some room for students’ personal expressions. A child-centred counter-bias reading seems instrumental in unearthing reactive options and unheard dissident voices as an alternative to the docile averages calculated by the researchers.
DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2025.2506069
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411148684
FWCI: 4.02
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Cited by: 1
Related to: 10