Beobachte das Stolpern : Ein pädagogisches Denkbild zwischen Bauhaus und Benjamin

Stumbling has been a proven means of art at least since Charlie Chaplin at  the  start of the twentieth century.  In modernist discourse, however,  it has not been adequately reflected on, either as a bodily practice or as a methodological principle. Symptomatic here is Henri Bergson's negative understanding of stumbling as an interruption in the adaption to the living. In contrast, the present investigation traces the motif of stumbling in the art pedagogy of the 1920s. Here it appears as a Denkbild (thought-image) of the aesthetic and of the latter’s education and learning processes, which allow other, new ways of living to emerge. The focus is on László Moholy-Nagy’s texts on art education at the Bauhaus, Heinrich Jacoby’s music-pedagogical conception of another kind of listening, and Walter Benjamin’s “Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater.” In these texts and practices from the 1920s, stumbling comes into its own as a moment of reflection of a selfbeholding modernity, while also becoming readable as an example of a different philosophy of life, one that welcomes failure as a productive force for the living.