Figure 1.--This boy in the 1950s wore a flat cap. It is one of the altest such images that I have noted. It would have been considered rather old fashioned ar the time. He also wears long stockings which were also considered old fashioned by the 1950s.

We have only limited information on flat caps worn by German boys. We are not sure what these calps were called, perhaps some form of "mütze". We note several images of German boys wearing a variety of flat cap styles. Various styles were worn. A good example is a Berlin boy about 1905-10. The flat cap does not, however, seem nearly as popular in Germany for boys as it was in America or even Britain. This may be because of our still limited number of German images, however, our initial assessment is that flat caps were worn, but relatively few boys had them. They may have had the image of a working-class style. In particular we do not note the style being worn extensively during the NAZI era (1932-45). We wonder if the style was not liked by the NAZIs. (The NAZIs had definire ideas about how children should dress.) We see a few images from the 1950s of boys wearing flat caps, but the style had dissapeared by the 1960s. Hopefully our German readers will tell us more about flat caps.

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Created: March 5, 2002
Last updated: August 15, 2002