Kentler’s career was framed by his belief in the damage wrought by dominant fathers. An early memory was of walking in the forest on a spring day and running to keep up with his father. “I had only one wish: that he should take my hand and hold it in his,” Kentler wrote in a parenting magazine in 1983. But his father, a lieutenant in the First World War, believed in a “rod and baton pedagogy,” as Kentler put it. Kentler’s parents followed the teachings of Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, a best-selling German authority on child care who has been described as a “spiritual precursor of Nazism.” Schreber outlined principles of child rearing that would create a stronger race of men, ridding them of cowardice, laziness, and unwanted displays of vulnerability and desire. “Suppress everything in the child,” Schreber wrote, in 1858. “Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.” When Kentler misbehaved, his father threatened to buy a contraption invented by Schreber to promote children’s posture and compliance: shoulder bands to prevent slouching; a belt that held their chest in place while they slept; an iron bar pressed to their collarbone, so they’d sit up straight at the table. If Kentler talked out of turn, his father slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “When the father talks, the children must be silent!”
Teresa Nentwig [...] planned to write her habilitation thesis, a requirement for a career in [German] academia, on Kentler’s life and work. [...] In the summer of 2020, when we first spoke, she told me, “I have no future in the university, because it is very hard to have success with this sort of subject. I am criticizing the academic world [for having enabled systematic pedophilia].” I assumed that, as ambitious people tend to do, she was motivating herself with a fear of worst-case scenarios. But the next time I spoke with her, this spring, [...h]er university contract had not been renewed, and she blamed the premature end of her academic career in part on her decision to research Kentler. “I’m a political scientist,” she said, “and people were always asking, ‘What is political about this topic?’ ”
ReplyDelete[Her forthcoming] book, which comes out in September, [...] reveals that Kentler, the single father of three adopted sons and several foster children, appeared to be conducting his own, informal version of the experiment that the Berlin Senate had authorized.