Courage and fighting in the First World War: youngsters’ voices in psychological testing in Leipzig and Budapest

The aim of this paper is methodological: it deals with the question of<br/>how to arrive at children’s voices when assessing archival sources.<br/>Based on the current methodological discussion (section 2), I develop<br/>a counter-biased, child-centred reading of archival sources containing<br/>youngsters’ responses to two psychological tests (sections 3 and<br/>4). Both tests aimed at triggering quick, verbal and written reactions<br/>in schoolchildren. In one of them, a psychiatrist asked a class of eightyear-<br/>old girls (shortly after the First World War) to explain what<br/>“courage” meant to them. A comparison with definitions given<br/>before the war showed that for most of these Leipzig schoolgirls,<br/>“courage” had become a gendered characteristic of the soldier fighting<br/>in the war. Nevertheless, through reading “against the researcher<br/>grain”, we can detect how a few used the occasion to self-affirm their<br/>own courageousness. The second test series consisted of word associations<br/>undertaken by a teacher-psychologist with seventeen- to<br/>eighteen-year-old boys at a Catholic secondary school in 1917 in<br/>Budapest, at a time when the group was being groomed to become<br/>“courageous soldiers”. Again, an examination of the outliers helped<br/>me recognise two opposite trends in the boys’ reactions: an echo of<br/>war pedagogy and an expression of resistance and worries. I conclude<br/>that, despite the restrictedness of the testing situations, there<br/>was some room for students’ personal expressions. A child-centred<br/>counter-bias reading seems instrumental in unearthing reactive<br/>options and unheard dissident voices as an alternative to the docile<br/>averages calculated by the researchers.