Scripture, School, Community
On 9 October 2026 at 3 pm, the Mitte Museum will open the exhibition ‘freihand. Writing, School, Community’. It showcases works by pupils from the Mitte district, spanning a period of around a hundred years: calligraphic pieces from an art class at the Herbert Hoover School and twenty handwritten exercise books that children at the 308th Gemeindeschule on Leopoldplatz wrote, drew and bound themselves between 1926 and 1928. In both cases, the pupils decided what would appear on the paper.
Image gallery
freihand.
The calligraphic works were created in 2025 as part of the Calliversity project. Under the guidance of artist Daniel Arab, sixteen pupils from an elective art course – taught by Hella Mittrücker and Ingolf Watzlaw – learnt to work with pen and ink, fractals and decorative lettering. The result was abstract calligraphy, in which the script is detached from the meaning of the words.
The 308th Municipal School was a secular experimental school during the Weimar Republic. As a ‘community school’, it followed its own curriculum; each class drew up its own work plans for a four-year period. ‘It was in the spring of 1926 that we founded the class newspaper,’ begins H. Fink. After that, many contributed: essays about their experiences, puzzles, comics, and a guide to linocut printing with precise amounts in pfennigs. The editorial team changed, and the newsletter was not always published on time.
This progressive educational practice came to an end in 1933. Headteacher Heinrich Mäcke and deputy headteacher Else Hiebsch were dismissed; the former headteacher, Max Kreuziger, was later interned in a concentration camp; and the school library was burnt down. It is thanks to Bruno Stephan – a teacher at the school since 1922 and, after 1946, director of the Wedding Local History Archive – that the issues have been preserved.
In April 2026, the same pupils handled these booklets at the Mitte Museum, wearing cotton gloves, and deciphered the unfamiliar handwriting. Questions raised by the old articles inspired them to write their own texts. In art lessons, the pupils traced the illustrations in ink, coloured them in the same way as in the second edition of the historical newspaper, and bound them into a booklet. This new collaborative newspaper is on display alongside the originals.
- Curation and project management: Luise Haubenreiser (CAMPI Fellow)
- Design: form und konzept
The calligraphic works were created as part of the ‘Calliversity’ project at the Herbert Hoover School, a certified cultural school within the Language Education Specialist Network.
The project days with Daniel Arab were funded by the Pankstraße Cultural Education Network of the Mitte District Office and supported by cultural agent Anne Krause as part of the ‘Cultural Agents for Creative Schools Berlin’ programme.
The programme is implemented by the German Children and Youth Foundation and funded by the Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family Affairs.
