Sunday, July 25, 2021

The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles

 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!”

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