School Magazines in the Context of Grammar School Cultures in the 1950s and 1960s in West Germany

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Pursuant to the original proposal, the research project extension targets a cultural historical analysis of West German student journals dating from the 1950s and 1960s. A substantial contribution is thus made to a history of student journals in the Federal Republic of Germany that is yet to be established. The project is based on the hypothesis that the production and reception of student journals, which to a large part were issued at academic-track secondary schools (Gymnasium), enabled students too experience themselves as (self) effective subjects playing an active role in school life. As artefacts of school culture, student journals have held significant shares in school cultural change and the gradual development of school cultures, marked by participation. In the course of the project, a comprehensive collection of student journals was described as to its structural characteristics; roughly 7,000 individual journals were incorporated, most of which are accessible in digitised format and bibliographically indexed. Previously, the material had not been researched from a scientific perspective. Because indexing was more time-consuming than we had anticipated, we have only just been able to begin working on the next steps. For instance, we have not yet concluded the assessment of magazines regarding their content, thematic scope and (political) positions held by the authors. If the assumption is correct that in the act of production but also reception and communication of school journal contents, the students experienced themselves to be effective subjects able to influence public life at their schools, changes in (political) positions are presumably evident at different levels, particularly regarding the students' relationship to teachers, the institution as such and thus school authorities, apparent in school journals. Regarding the proposed project phase, a detailed analysis is envisaged at the level of individual articles, focusing on linguistic and layout patterns used in reports on (educational) political topics, US-America, the GDR and what happened at the individual schools. Considering the case studies for two regions that are currently work in progress (North-Rhine Westphalia and West Berlin), the existing corpus of sources will be complemented by qualitative data assessed by ourselves (e.g. witness interviews). On this basis, we intend to reconstruct how student journals were established at individual schools, how they changed and how daily school life phenomena and youth culture were processed in and by means of student journals. Respective work will be continued in the proposed period of project funding.