Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

Children and War - photo collection of Reinhard Schultz

There was shown at the Imperial War Museum in 2005 an exhibition about the various roles children played during WWII, that is when London was under the bomb siege of Hitler's Luftwaffe. Often they were used as message carriers. Presumably they were asked to do this because they could slip easier than adults through the rubble of bombed out houses. Naturally they were constantly exposed to many dangers, unexploded bombs just one of them.

It should also not be forgotten that Chomeiny's Iran used children as mine sweepers in the war against Iraq. It was organised in a most sinister way. Families with many children were approached to offer one child with the promise once having become a martyr because killed, another child of the family would be granted the Right to study at university. For a low income family, this was too good an opportunity, but amounts to sacrificing one child.

Naturally children play games and thereby learn to grasp a reality through imitation. Often they enact something more real and equally frightened as if they wish to visualize and comprehend something they cannot really understand.

Invaluable are the photos Reinhard Schultz has made available to allow for another kind of narrative about 'children and war'. A great tribute should be given to him for making us see this reality. Photography has this value since it is another empirical testimony which cannot be wiped off the table by some good story which circumvents the far more real questions.

Raphael Vella posed this in his exhibition with the title 'How to educate a revolutionary'. In it, he shows photos of children who became later well known figures: Hitler, Stalin, Bush etc. Who would have predicted out of these innocent faces depicted by photos at their young ages that such persons would emerge? Has it to do with the transition from childhood into adulthood having gone badly wrong?

That question was posed by Robert Musil in his novel about the novice Törless who attends a private school and is tortured there by fellow class mates who end up later joining the SS and the Fascist movement in Austria, a country which to date still has difficulties in coming to terms with that dark past.

When referring to Austria and Vienna, there comes to mind Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalysis which explores what happened during childhood and what can follow as he made explicit in his analysis of Leornardo da Vinci. His thesis is that a sexual drive can gone astray. It will lead to an extra exploration, at the surface an enormous innovative drive as replicated in all the inventions, in particular war instruments, Leonarda da Vinci had made. Freud thinks that he suffered under omnipotence since the father tended to dominate so much the son, that Leonardo not merely suppressed his sexual drive, but never managed to achieve the potency his father who produced many children. Freud remarks that it is not without irony that Leonardo develops the soul of an accountant. For he keeps an acribed record of what he gives his father, and what he has received in return from his father.

Sometimes what a son can get, is at best a condenscending pat on the head from the father. He misses a warm hug or else some words of encouragement. It is even rare if the father shows an understanding of what the son would like to do. Rarely do fathers give the son the self confidence needed to live free from any suppression. It is no accident that the Oedipus complex has become a dominant feature of many inter generatonal tension fields. To gain freedom it still matters that a son has to avoid becoming an Ikarus.

Hatto Fischer

Berlin 23.11.2015

Children during First World War in Paris

Lodz children - the Jewish star an indication what they will face but not know yet

Girl in a desperate situation otherwise known as war scene

 

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