ABSTRACT
The first decades of the twentieth century demonstrated an advanced intellectual atmosphere in German-speaking cultures. The conditions favored interdisciplinary transfers of ideas that resulted in parallel approaches, which occurred even without direct communication between the scholars. Umwelt can be defined as the self-centered world of an organism or the world as it is known or shaped by the organism. Martha Muchow’s pedagogic studies and, more specifically, her investigations on the lifeworlds of urban children are among those that relate to Jakob von Uexkull’s Umwelt theory in relatively broad terms. Muchow’s observations and analyses of the life space of the urban child were philosophically based on Uexkull’s model of Umwelt and can be considered an application of the model to human development. Uexkull called the pre-representational Umwelt stage in an organism’s life cycle the “technical phase,” which covers the time of morphological development when the organs are non-functional.
