Figure 1.-- Here is a Leipzig primary school class taken in 1950. The boys look to be about 9-years old. Their teacher (in the middle of the photo) is Horst Schmidt. Some of the boys wear suits with jackets while others wear sweaters. At least one boy wears long ski-type pants or possibly just baggy long trousers, but the others seem to be in short trousers, either with long stockings or knee socks. One boy (second row, extreme right) seems to have rolled down his tan long stockings to resemble ankle socks. Note only a few boys are wearing red Young Pioneer scarves. Here age may be a factor.

We do not immediately see differences between schoolwear in East and West Germany after the end of World War II and the beginning of the occupation. The children continued wearing their regular clothes. This at first was the same as worn in the Western occupation areas. This gradually changed as the German Economic Miracle took hold. West Germans with much higherr discretional income were able to spend much more on fashionable clothing. Thus West German boys had much larger wardrobes of more fashionable and higher quality clothing. There seems to have been some similarity in styling even as East Germany took more anod more steps to separate the two Germanies ecomomically and culturally, symolized by the Berlin Wall and extension to the East-West German border. East Germans could, however, receive West German TV and radio and there was of course no language problem. Thus fashions trends in the West tended to flow over the Iron Curtain, especially into East Germany. This is an interesting dynamic to follow as we acquire more East German school images. The first obvious difference at school is the red Pioneer scarves that the children began wearing. We can see a few in the 1950 school portrait here (figure 1).

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Created: 1:02 PM 11/3/2010
Last updated: 1:02 PM 11/3/2010