The project

Period:

August 2011 – July 2013

Targets of the project:

The main idea of the project is to use the history of the Second World War and the experience made in that time in different European countries as a source to make children and adolescents aware of the risks of a reassurance of totalitarian ideas in politics and to give them tools to resist the temptations of simplistic ideologies. We shall therefore first of all look for historical evidence of and sources about children who lived through the Second World War (from the side of the aggressors, from the resistance movements, victims, minorities and others). 

In a second step of the project we shall focus on children living today. The children of today will be looking back into the history of their own country and into the history of other countries participating in the project. They will discover common patterns and differences as to how the war affected the lives of children all over Europe and beyond and how they coped with this exceptional situation. 

The children of today will also find out about the methods used to make people go to war, establish dictatorial systems, accept methods of marginalizing social groups. They will find out about ways to identify and to resist these methods and about war as such. The participating children will reflect their findings and compare them to their own reality of today. They will thereby develop a deeper understanding of the principles and the functioning of dictatorial systems of government. The participating students will develop strategies to discover, unveil and resist tendencies of undemocratic/totalitarian systems in their respective societies.