“Du bist Nummer 55”: Girls’ Education, Mädchen in Uniform, and Social Responsibility

Abstract

Christa Winsloe’s Mädchen in Uniform texts offer a means to examine the role of education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German society while also exemplifying the genre of boarding school literature. This article provides an overview of educational debates in Prussia and the German Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially as these debates relate to girls’ and young women’s schooling and their intersectional concerns with social class. The schools in question lie in a framework of Foucauldian disciplinary institutions, which one can see in excerpts from Winsloe’s novel Das Mädchen Manuela.