A Recap of the KidsUni Workshop hosted by the Chair of Modern History
On April 5th 2025 the KidsUni workshop “History Detectives in the Newspaper Archive: Searching for Clues in Cologne‘s Past“ took place, lead by Elias Mahiout and Jonas Wernz in cooperation with the Archive for the History of Journalism. 20 students from Year 5 and 6 from Cologne and the surrounding regions “investigated” three exciting historical “cases” together with research assistants from the Chair of Modern History, as well as the student assistants Marie Benke and Lisa Schmitz, on-site at the Archive.
The workshop’s goal: to familiarise students with the methodological work of historians using an explorative approach, and to playfully initiate self-reflexive historical thinking. In three stations progressively building on each other, the workshop participants not only gained an insight into the diverse facets of Cologne’s history. They also acquired the methodological skills to independently work on historiographic tasks. Equipped with a detective badge and a “case file” for solved cases, the students and assistants assembled in small groups to go on a “hunt” for “clues“ in the journalistic sources.
Following on from the question of what type of medium a (historical) newspaper actually is, the students first mastered the art of reading and writing “Fraktur-Schrift” (a German typesetting) at Station 1. With the help of a Fraktur-alphabet grid, the history detectives managed to decipher the historical “code” of an article written in Fraktur, thereby discovering the history of Cologne Cathedral as Cologne’s “eternal construction site”.
Based on their work in Station 1, the students then worked on the topic of “Kulturkampf” in Cologne at Station 2, using the incarceration of Cologne’s Archbishop Paulus Melchers in the “Klingelpütz” prison in March 1874 as an example. The children discovered multi-perspective evaluations, wordings and contextualisations of the same case in two contemporary newspapers available at the Archive, Kölnische Volkszeitung and Neue Preußische Zeitung, by comparing and contrasting the two sources. To accomplish this, they closely had to examine the sources’ historical language - what does “hiesig” (antiquated German for “local”) mean and what is an “Arresthaus” (antiquated German for “prison”) or even a “telegraphische Depesche” (“telegraphic dispatch”)? And why would two newspapers report so differently on the same incident? With help from the research assistants, the students reflected on possible motives behind the reports and learnt to critically analyse the newspaper excerpts by “reading between the lines”.
At the final station, the focus was on the examination of visual “evidence”, the analysis of the historical newspapers’ designs. The workshop participants answered the question of which focus each of the newspaper placed and how the individual page design influenced the reporting by examining the case of Petermann, a famous chimpanzee who escaped from Cologne Zoo in 1985. By inductively comparing a newspaper article from EXPRESS and Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the students analysed the interplay of page layout, visual material and headings.
After the successful completion of three historical “cases”, the workshop group summarised their insights into what makes a good history detective. Apart from inquisitiveness, founded reading and writing skills, the ability to take on other people’s perspectives and contextual knowledge, the appropriate “evidence” - the historical sources - was on the list of qualities, things and skills history detectives require to work.
All children received a detective certificate after the four-hour long workshop in the Archive for the History of Journalism, documenting their successful basic training as young historians. This workshop is the first contribution to the KidsUni programme by the Chair of Modern History and the University‘s Historical Institute. Professor Ute Planert‘s team is delighted by the lively interest and participation and is planning on contributing to the programme in cooperation with the Archive for the History of Journalism in the future.