Mollenhauer’s hermeneutics: Tempting and Risky

When I re-read my own review of Mollenhauer’s 1983 book Vergessene Zusammenhange (Levering 1987), written on the occasion of the publication of the Dutch translation of the book in 1986, it was quite clear what fascinated me most at the time. It was his new approach, his use of products of art that resulted in a new view of the history of education in Europe. Neither the pictures nor the literary quotes were new; the clarifying effects of these devices had been previously discovered. But, they had been used as illustrations; as commentary to material that finds its conceptualization in different sources. In this new book, Mollenhauer did not illustrate – he used the products of art as sources of research as such. In my view, it was not Mollenhauer’s main enterprise to find out how it really has been in the past. His main enterprise was to try and find up-to-date answers to old pedagogical questions, by taking detours via the past. In Forgotten Connections he is quite brief about his new methodology but three years later in 1986 in his collection of essays Umwege. Uber Bildung, Kunst und Interaktion (Detours. On Education, Art and Interaction) he delivers several elaborations. The full meaning of Mollenhauer’s ‘detour approach’ is shown in the last chapter of Forgotten Connections where he tries to find a solution of a new pedagogical problem: the problem of identity. Up till the eighties of the twentieth century ‘identity’ had not been recognized as a pedagogical theme, but the postmodern disorder made the quest for identity an urgent question with serious pedagogical consequences. Mollenhauer, confronted with the problems with identity, simply diagnoses the problems as too difficult to solve them as such, decides to take a dive into history to see if that can shed light on the problem. Let us take a look at his use of paintings in that fifth and concluding chapter of Forgotten Connections entitled Difficulties with identity .