It has been a very busy few weeks for us in Chicago Hall (and beyond)! Our collaboration has focused on the history of German children’s culture, particularly toys and children’s books, one of Prof. Elliott Schreiber’s key research interests.  Throughout the summer, Kristen Caccavale has assisted Prof. Schreiber with research into the psychology of children’s play as depicted especially in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous children’s story, “Nutcracker and the King of Mice.”   This research will culminate in an article to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in Fall 2014.

Children’s culture also features heavily in Vassar’s year-long Beginning German sequence.  We started our summer with Kristen compiling a list of over 50 contemporary, award-winning German children’s books, which we have ordered for Vassar’s Thompson Memorial Library. We will be using these books in Beginning German to help students improve not only their understanding of the German language, but also of the German culture.  Students in this class write and illustrate their own children’s books and read them to elementary school children at Deutsche Schule New York, located about an hour south of Vassar in White Plains. We have been working with several staff members at Academic Computing Services in order to incorporate iBooks into this project, and we will now be piloting some of the iBooks software in class next year.   We also had a very productive trip to the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York during our fifth week. There, we had access to the museum’s extensive archives, where we were able to look at original editions of German pop-up books written by Lothar Meggendorfer, some of which were over 100 years old. We have ordered reproductions of these books to use in Beginning German, and they will make another excellent addition to the curriculum.

This scene is from the first page of the Lothar Meggendorfer pop-up book; it shows the mother and father being driven in a car on the right, and a maid on the left.

This scene takes place on the fourth page of the book and shows a little girl with her cat and a maid in the kitchen.

While at the Strong also discovered some extensively detailed books regarding German dolls and dollhouses, which Kristen will be using in her culminating Ford Scholar poster and presentation, as well as in a presentation she will be giving to students in Beginning German in the Fall. Kristen has decided to center her presentation on German girlhood in Imperial Germany, and has been reading several girls’ memoirs from that period, as well as researching German girls’ dolls, toys, dollhouses, and societal roles during this time.

The whole book laid out at the Strong National Museum of Play Archives.

In our last few weeks, we will be preparing for our October Ford Scholar poster presentation, as well as looking through the archives in Special Collections for any rare German children’s books or illustrations of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, which we will also be using to educate students in Beginning German about German art, literature, history, and culture. We can’t believe that our fellowship is almost over, but we have certainly made the most of it!