Figure 1.--Here we have a porrait of two unidentified German siblings. They look to be about 10-15 years old. The portrait is indated, but the mount style and whicker furniure date it to the 1900s decade brfore World War I. Notice the boy's cropped hair. The girl's white dress and light-weight salor suit show the portarit was aken during the summer. Note the boy does not have a dickie commonly worn with a sailor suit. The studio was H. Dallmann in Jserlohn (probably Iserlohn). Iserlohn is a manufacturing center city in the Märkischer Kreis district, in North Rhine-Westphalia..

Shaved or close-cropped hair was a very common fashion for school-age boys. We are not sure why this was so common in Germany. We believe that it was a practice common in the military before public schools were founded. The photographic record allowing us to follow hair styling only begins well after the public school tradition was well-established in Germany. Parents may have adopted it after it was promoted in schools. Hygiene factors presumably were involved. We are not sure to what extent it was a fashion statement and to what extent it was to prevent the spread of lice. Shaving the head can help keep it clean and make sure it is free of lice. Given that many families did not have running water and indoors plumbing, this had to be an important factor. Hygiene can not have been the only factor because girls rarely had heir heads shaved. And girls tended to have longer hair meaning more obvious host areas for lice. The style looks very militaristic today, but we were not sure that was how Germans at the time viewed it. And it s important to remember hat until after World War I and especially World War II, that Germans had a different attitude toward he military than people in the English-speaking world. In addition German unification was achieved by the Prussian Kingdom and Prussia had a long history of militarism. Shaved heads was a common military style. Thus conformity and discipline is likely to have been a factor. This was not a hair style limited to Germany, but a common style throughout Eastern Europe, but less common in Western Europe. Shaved hair was especially common in Germany, Poland and Russia. We think that Germany might have been the origin of this convention. Remember that it was in Germany that public schools were founded in Europe. Thus countries following the German example may have adopted shaved/cropped hair along with public education. It was rare in America and Britain. And in Germany declined in popularity after World War I (1914-18) in the 1920s. We believe this reflected changing public attitudes toward the miliary. Tragically, Hitler and the NAZIs seizure of power (1933) took national poicy out of the hands of the German people.

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Created: 6:54 PM 11/12/2024
Last edited: 6:54 PM 11/12/2024