In times of crisis and social transformation, there is often a rethinking of concepts of childhood, as was the case after 1945. Studies from the early post-war period showed that children and young adults who had grown up under National Socialism, with violence and war, were often incapable of empathy even after the end of the war and remained strongly influenced by nationalist ideology. In order to free this generation from its emotional apathy and nationalistic perception of the world and to create a hopeful future with them, both German and American psychologists and pedagogues gave a great deal of thought to new concepts of education and childhood. In doing so, they stood in different traditions of research with regard to their concepts of education and childhood. Jella Lepman’s ideas about childhood–she had a German Romantic conception of childhood as ‚paradise‘–can be evaluated against the backdrop of the educational discourses of her time on the basis of her texts from the 1960s and selected projects of the International Youth Library, such as the international exhibitions of children’s drawings. This shows that, on the one hand, she represented a traditional educational ideal in the neo-humanistic sense and, on the other hand, was guided in practice (in her work at the International Youth Library) by pragmatic American educational concepts.