“Every City Dweller is, if not Ill, at Least in Need of Recovery.”1 The Schullandheim (Rural School Hostel) in the Context of Crisis and Reform after the First World War

Rural school hostels have hardly been the subject of interest in educational history to date. This is despite the fact that after the First World War an actual rural school hostel movement was formed in Germany and corresponding institutions still exist today. The founding of rural school hostels can be placed in the post-war context, which was characterised by crises. At the same time, their success is fuelled by a multitude of intersecting and mutually reinforcing discourses whose origins go back further. These are reconstructed in this article under keywords such as urbanisation, hygiene and community education. While the hygienic objectives (health, nutrition, architecture, etc.) followed a logic of objectification and standardisation, the ideal of a personalised close relationship between teacher and pupils was guided by modes of subjectivity and individualisation. The combination of these two tendencies merged sometimes into ideas of pedagogical omnipotence. Moreover, the focus on the individual child was always framed by an overarching collectivising idea of community, which was to take on increasingly totalitarian traits at the transition to and during National Socialism.