Reviewed by: War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars ed. by Mischa Honeck and James Marten Elizabeth N. Goodenough War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars. Edited by Mischa Honeck and James Marten. Cambridge, UK, and Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press, 2019. x + 199 pp. Cloth $99.99. Anthropologist Pamela Reynolds declared in 2008 that narratives of children’s experiences in war “have barely entered the archive” (Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War, eds. Goodenough and Immel). In their ground-breaking volume, Honeck and Marten seek to supply missing research around a crucial paradox: How could adults barely a century ago seek to protect children while mobilizing them for political sacrifice? War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars compiles accounts of children’s crises locally, nationally, and across borders against the backdrop of the military buildup and scarring aftermath of two world wars. From Manchuria to Poland to Turkey to the American Midwest, the global reach of these essays reminds us of the present. The collection includes government reports, news articles, school curricula, and Holocaust drawings, all offering fresh evidence of the indoctrination and recruitment of children during times of war. Together these fourteen chapters skillfully conjure up and dissect what growing up felt like during 1914–45, a period Winston Churchill called “another Thirty Years War” (3). The compelling introduction, “More than Victims: Framing the History of Modern Childhood and War,” stakes out topics that historians must address. The co-editors establish “five bodies of scholarship,” including Dominic Sachsenmaier’s “global history trend,” the “total war” paradigm, and children as “the true missing link” for understanding modern warfare (7–10). Shedding light on the complexity of youthful attitudes and socialization, they emphasize diversity in the “intergenerational tugs-of-war” (16) ranging from peace pedagogy to war toys. Whether as eyewitnesses, future defenders, or ideal constructs over which wars are fought, boys and girls portrayed in this book will unsettle the reader’s notions of childhood. Penny Dreadfuls in World War I Germany and patriotic handicrafts from Republican to Communist China promote propaganda through leisure on the home front as well as skills on the battlefield. Examining families and individual children, this book avoids fictional formulations and sociological abstraction. How could public horror also spark happy memories and such “primitive excitement” (11), as Anna Freud defined? [End Page 330] Part I smartly addresses transnational themes alongside ethical questions. The introduction to part I, “Inspiring and Mobilizing,” mentions age and culture-specific responses to wartime involvement of youth. For example, the contention that children should be children (whatever that means) competed with arguments for defense service training in Swedish schools during World War II. Learning to shoot at age eleven gained ascendancy when boys were placed between Home Guard units and an advancing enemy. Though consensus was never reached in this neutral nation, Swedish girls joined in as air surveillance personnel. How the making of these “model citizens” influenced their adulthoods remains a living question. How do we integrate personal details with geopolitical rivalries and genocides? Comparing youth movements and early reading, including alphabet books from the USSR and US during World War II, one must consider how “children were reinventing the meaning of childhood for themselves and the societies they inhabited” (11). The final essay of part I, Honeck’s “Good Soldiers All? Democracy and Discrimination in the Boy Scouts of America, 1941–1945” describes youth fervor, setting the stage for part II, “Adapting and Surviving.” Part II thus surveys a dialectic—how adult decision-makers organized and then reacted to the mobilized young. The “alternative sources, produced by children rather than for or about them” (171) expand on ways this next generation altered the nature of war. Giving voice—or space—for “Drawing the Great War” in France, Germany, and Russia illuminates children’s pivotal, first-time role in public life. Youthful enthusiasm confronting conventional ideals acquired agency in “the trope of the patriotic child” (15). Statistics and interviews dramatize childhood as a “relational category,” one played out as sensitive innocents “eagerly sought to participate in—or resignedly submitted to participating in” (7)—the...
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Jun 27, 2024
Julija Suligoj 
Open Access