Celebrating Nikolaus Day: Ideology and Emotion in a German Children's Ritual

Abstract

A child growing up in Western society is confronted with a complex array of educational ideas and institutions. Discovering their meanings and the range of authority of various educators can be an arduous process for the child. I shall focus on a few themes related to the rearing and educating of children in a German community. Through an analysis of a ritual event in kindergarten and its corresponding celebration in the local music association, I attempt to show how these themes appear in ritual situations and how they are revealed to the children. Normative statements regarding the relationship between the individual and the collectivity, which appear in various forms during a person's lifetime, are embedded in the rituals I describe. The main point is that the ideological and moral mission of the ritual is part of the more encompassing person-forming project of upbringing. The concomitant arousal of emotional conflicts is seen by adults as more or less unintended consequences, but the emotions that the rituals induce in the young performers are better interpreted as part of the message that makes the ritual efficacious. The emotional aspects are particularly important for children since they do not have the experience and knowledge of adults and are not as capable of understanding symbolizations. ERZIEHUNG: LEARNING TO BE A PERSON This article concerns how children in a German parish are reared and about some of the institutions engaged in this endeavor.(2) The topic of person-forming raises questions relating to issues of a more general nature; e.g., individualism and Western conceptions of the person, ideas about the nation-state and national identity, and conceptions about learning and about the world of pedagogics. The idea of the person does not necessarily stand out as a clear-cut entity in Western thinking, but there seems to be an overall adherence to certain notions about the person as a bounded, independent, rational being who acts and chooses by free will (Lukes 1985). The person is somehow made autonomous in relation to the social world, yet the individual will not become a person other than through the dedicated endeavors of society. Western societies, particularly, have a great preoccupation with techniques of child-rearing, of defining what a child is, and what is a natural and normal development. There are rival orientations of how best to rear children and there are endless discussions and political debates about form and content in education. Various writers on Germany (cf. Dahrendorf 1965; Dumont 1986; Forsythe 1989), point to a particular concern with personhood in terms of being German. This has to do with notions about individual freedom, but also with a strong sense that being part of a whole entails subordination to the collectivity. I found German people were continuously concerned with such questions. How to raise children (Erziehung) properly in Germany is a central concern, and at times quite demanding of children, parents, and teachers, Through a long process of learning, the child is thought to be transformed into a good and capable person who can master the hardships of life. Erziehung is also conceptualized as the main means by which to realize the good, sound society and state. Recurring proclamations of cultural and social crisis are not seldom related to faults in the upbringing and educating of children (cf. Kupffer 1984). Erziehung is regarded as the process of separating the person from an amorphous nature, the good from the potentially evil, through a technique of teaching and learning that combines intricate forms of praise and punishment. It operates progressively through the institutions of family, kindergarten, school, and church. Notions of order and freedom are closely linked. People believe that through proper upbringing and education a child will become a socially acceptable being, an orderly and free person (ordnungsliebend und selbstandig, literally, a lover of order and independence), and one that is capable of or fit for living (lebensfahig). …