Moving Pictures in Class: The Audiovisual Heritage of Gdr Educational Films on Science

Classroom films have certain aesthetic and didactic characteristics, and they are linked to specific conditions and practices of education within a political system. In the GDR, nearly every child was confronted with a certain audio-visual culture, its specific rhetoric and its visual 'pathos formula' in school transmitted by teaching aids. Educational films were explicitly appreciated as particularly affect-oriented teaching materials. Thus, beyond the mere conveyance of specialized knowledge, the educational films were used to influence attitudes and transmit positions towards aspects of knowledge. While educational films from the former West Germany are stored in he Leibnitz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library (TIB) and accessible through an online portal, this is not so much the case for the Eastern German educational films. The GDR audiovisual heritage is hold by the Federal Archive, but it is hardly inventoried. Here only The Wende Museum in Los Angeles, US, provides their digitalized collection on GDR films. In this contribution I will examine how historical classroom films visualize and document historically predominant images of science as well as self-interpretations of a society, but also the filmmakers' conceptions of the target audience, the teachers and learners. This is only possible by looking at film collections as a whole, rather than focusing on singular films. The presentation focuses on 16mm educational films on science in the GDR and FRG and questions the purpose of moving pictures as an educational tool as well as a historical resource.