Psychohistorians, Nazis, Violence, and Fear

This essay is about the trail-blazing work of some leading scholars of Germany’s children and their pasts, including my own. It is also about how we understand the take-over and control of the National Socialists in Germany beginning in 1933. The well-known names of these scholars include Lloyd de Mause, Alice Miller, Katharina Rutschke, David Beisel, and Aurel Ende.

Reading Tony Judt’s “Three Memoirs” elucidates how and why one approaches a topic a particular way (The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010). His experience with basic education at the Emanuel School in Battersea in London, England was quite harsh. By contrast, mine in an elementary school in the mountains of Northern Italy and then in monasteries in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands was uneventful. The oddity is that Judt’s experience took place in England and mine in German-speaking areas. The even greater oddity is that only one of my teachers treated their students in the harsh fashion characteristic of Judt’s teachers. (Judt’s observations were confirmed by Leena Mehreen Akhtar in “Intangible Casualties: The Evacuation of British Children During World War II,” Journal of Psychohistory, 37, 3, Winter 2010: pp. 224-254.) Let me add that Professor Judt was born in 1948—11 years after me; I was born before “the war” and he after it. Unfortunately for the profession of history, he is now very seriously ill, paralyzed from the waist down with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease).

I was brought up and educated during the 1940s and early 1950s by my parents, an extended family, and monks from different Catholic religious orders. Even with careful

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scrutiny based upon my being a psychohistorian for decades, I find this upbringing no less helpful than that of almost every educated American I have met in the last 50 years. Yes, I was fortunate in most of the persons who surrounded me as a child; for example, the two prefects who led the monasteries during my attendance were intelligent, considerate, and humble. They took seriously one of the main points of Christianity’s teaching: treat others as you would like to be treated.

Indeed, differences in locations and experiences produce divergent approaches to childhood and children. In the early 1980s, Lloyd deMause pointed us to an aspect of the past that led most of us, thankfully, to a better understanding of the unspeakable harm inflicted on children over hundreds of generations. With his approach, he worked to legitimize the study of the past of children by scholars, especially in this country. He also pointed to the reality that particularly abusive forms of rearing, say of Greek and Roman children, led to societies that were “inherently” violent and brutal. But even in that torrid past, some parents learned from childhood abuses and thus their children emerged as adults who sometimes were able to lead their societies into more humane directions. The progression of child-rearing modes he shows us is a powerful tool with which to investigate the past, not least because it allows us to see an improvement over time in the way parents and others approach future generations.

DeMause was not alone. About the time he presented his theory, Katharina Rutschke (1/25/1941-1/14/2010), an excellent scholar and profound interpreter of childhood in whose memory I write this essay, brought forth massive accounts of the history of German child rearing. Her first collection was the extensive German Children Chronicle (1983); she followed it with German School Chronicle: Four Centuries of Learning and Educating (1991). The variety of documents and the depth to which she drilled into every nook

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and cranny of the past of German’s childrearing is astonishing. She too was not alone. Jürgen Schlumbohm, ed., Children’s Rooms: How Children Became Farmers, Burgers and Aristocrats (1983); Rudolf Kreis, The Hidden History of the Child in German Literature: German Language Teaching as Psychohistory (1980); and Wolfgang Scheibe, Punishment as a Problem in Education, 3^rd ed., (1977) all came out during this seminal time. Regrettably, hardly any of these have been translated into English.

Because Hitler and the Nazis took over Germany and instituted there one of the harshest regimes ever found on this planet, Lloyd deMause (most recently, “Childhood Origins of World War II and the Holocaust,” JHP, 36, 1, Summer, 2008; pp. 2-33) and others thought this violence to be connected to the rearing of German children. One of their key assumptions was that Germans acceded to the takeover because they experienced inhumane upbringings.

But there is an underlying problem with this approach, and it is highlighted by my rather “normal” childhood experience. Because of it, I have not only looked for “black pedagogy,” but also for light spots in the past. My childhood started during the National Socialist period and continued into the late 1950s. Surely astonishing to some fellow psychohistorians, I was neither beaten nor excessively manipulated by parents, caregivers, or monks. Nor were other students; some of us are still in contact. Except for one person, I had better trained and more humane teachers than had Judt. But better or worse childhood upbringing does not imply more or less intelligence.

One of the major problems with the now “traditional” interpretation of childrearing is that we tend to look for the exception, not the ordinary. Yes, there was abuse in Central Europe, as is in most other parts of the world, and it was recorded. In the study of female education in Germany from

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the Reformation to the 18^th century (Peter Petschauer, The Education of Women in Eighteenth-Century Germany, 1989), I found that the society as a whole was acutely aware of what needed to be undertaken for the benefit of children and passed literally hundreds of school ordinances. They also experimented with educational innovations with almost as much vigor as we do today. All of this had one purpose: to improve the situation of children. Even then the intelligentsia did more, and by the end of the 18^th century it refined caring love between marriage partners and between them and their children. Indeed, they invented “real” love, as we understand it today. Given this perspective, the childhood experiences of some Germans of the post-WWI period may point to a different reason for the takeover, and German acceptance, of the Nazis.

Rather than assuming from notable examples that all German children experienced a similarly miserable past, whether fifty or hundreds of years before 1933, it would be more fruitful to stress the childhoods of the National Socialist leaders and those who cooperated with them directly at home and in other European countries. As much as Alice Miller decried the then-current child abuse in For Your Own Good (revised ed., 1980), she understood one key issue; even as she concentrated on Hitler, she did not project his experiences onto all German or Austrian children.

My point is simply that we need a more differentiated image for Germany. The counter to the emphasis on negative childhood experiences is to seek an approach that highlights the vicious men (and some women) who as adults abused their fellow citizens. In contrast to the considerable number of Germans who had moved into a more caring approach to their children, this group abused those who had undergone similarly negative experiences and those who had emerged into the more humane mode. But a society filled with families who had been weakened by other stressful cir-

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cumstances—defeat in war, economic collapse, and job loss—encouraged the abused to grow into abusers of their society.

There is another component to this argument. The threat of abuse and violence, and its practice, was amazingly effective against the more humane population groups in Germany. Fear, as many autobiographers and other authors have shown, permeated German and Austrian societies. Such persons have had and still have difficulties with bullies because they/we have no meaningful defenses against them.

Yet, in the long run, good parenting, decent education, brilliant art, and exceptional music reemerged in Germany and allowed for those with better childrearing to emerge as leaders after the defeat of the horrible regime.

The lesson seems to be this: those who have had abusive experiences as children are still among us, even if many families and individuals have moved to a more child-centered approach. Given other pressures in a society, they can become a danger again, especially in this very violent country. The less violent population, that is the one with “normal” childhoods, is as easily cowed, or out-manipulated, as it was in Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s.

If the Nazi takeover in Germany had to do with childhood, and surely it did to a degree, then it was made possible not because most Germans were abused as children at this late stage of history, but rather because those who were could all too readily browbeat those who developed no defenses against abuse. Anyone who has read Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir (2002) understands the vicious brutality with which the abusers proceeded and how quickly the rest of the population was overcome with fear and dejection. It was the fear of all too many of the unfamiliar abusers and their unspeakable abuses that made the take-over possible and maintainable until its defeat in 1945.

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