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We know the school was located in Bierfeld, but we are not sure that was the name of the school.
We can see their school in the background. It looks like a raher modern school, probably built in the 1920s or 30s, We are not sure what type of school this was. A reader believes it is a priary school, but we are not sure about this. Note that it was a coeducational school. We find single gender schools more common in Germany. A German reader tells us thatvit was the only school in Bierfeld and did not have a special name. Germany does not appear to have named schools as was common in America.
There is an interesting web page with images from Bierfeld. One old photograph of a school class was taken in 1900. We see a photograph of boy playing--he "Dorfjugend" (boys standing in grassland). It is undated, but probanly taken in the 1920. The school photograph here was taken in 1940.
We do know that the school wa located at Bierfeld, Germany. Bierfeld is a small village in the Saarland. This was the German area in the southwest between France and Germany. It was occupied by France after World War I, but in a plebecite voted to return to Germany (1935).
The photograph ws taken in early in World War II. The War had not yet affected living standards in Gemany. The Germans suffered few casualties in the early campaigns of the War. In addition, Hitler did his best to curb civilian consumption, conviced that it was the deprivations on the hime front that caused Germany to lose World War I.
This is clearly a class at the school (figure 1). We would estimate that the children are 11-12 years of age. But without knowing the type of school, we cannot tell what kind of class it was.
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The boys seem to be mostly wearing long stockings with short trousers. Some boys may be wearing knee socks, it is a little difficult to tell. At least three of the boys seem to have unfastened their hose supporters and rolled their stockings down below the knee to look like knee socks. This was a common practice by boys who didn't like wearing long stockings, but that was strictly disapproved of my their mothers in most cases. The age of the boys here is about the age that boys began to complain about wearing long stockings. Adult German readers have commented that they rolled down their stockings when they were out of the sight of their mothers but then had to reattach the garters and wear their stockings at thigh-length when they were at home or in the presence of parents. For a closer look at the rolled stockings, see the detail in the second image Figure 2). One boy in the front row sitting
cross-legged is wearing his stockings fully pulled up over his knees, but he has apparently outgrown them so that there is a gap between his shorts and the stocking tops. Boys also rolled down their long
stockings for reasons of seasonality--down during hotter periods of the day and up when the weather turned cooler at night or in the early morning. HBC has discussed te issue of rolling down stockings.
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