Destructive Childhood Experiences and the Penchant for Authoritarians

Review of Sven Fuch’s Childhood is Political. War, Terror, Extremism, Dictatorships as Consequence of Destructive Childhood Experiences (Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag, 2019), ISBN 798-3-86809-143-4, 406 pages, paperback, €18.90, in German only.

Sven Fuchs is a young German historian who has written the dramatic and disturbing tale of the history of childhood. In his successful blog, he has articulated some of these insights, and feedback from followers, that he discovered about the history of childhood. His ideas all come together in Childhood is Political. War, Terror, Extremism, Dictatorships as Consequence of Destructive Childhood Experiences (Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag, 2019, ISBN 798-3-86809-143-4, pages 406, €18.90, in German only). He follows in the footsteps of Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (translated by Robert Baldick, 1962), Lloyd deMause’s The History of Childhood (1974), and editor Katharina Rutschky’s Black Pedagogic: Sources for the Natural History of Middle-Class Education (1997, only in German, au-

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thor’s translation). Fuchs’ work is, however, even more precisely underpinned by pertinent recent studies. The most powerful aspect of his work is the vast amount of research he presents about the abusive childhoods of past and current authoritarians. In the past, they were usually called dictators, tyrants, and more rarely monarchs. From Louis XIII to Hitler, Stalin, and Putin, he shows in precise detail how their childhood misery turned them into abusive leaders; leaders who showed little mercy to those who surrounded or surround them, and their embrace of war as a solution to national and international problems.

One can only hope that this significant work will be translated into English and thus made available beyond the German-speaking context. Here are only a few highlights: the book is divided into two parts. The first six chapters deal with childhood history, that is, abuse, in general. Beginning with chapter seven, Fuchs discusses abuse in specific populations, like general populations worldwide, criminals, terrorists, soldiers, politicians, and so on.

In the “Complex Introduction,” Fuchs outlines why he argues that childhood is political. He clarified at the very outset the close relationship between difficult childhood experiences and adult behavior. After highlighting, for example, Adolf Eichmann’s authoritarian upbringing, he writes that, “The possible consequences of an authoritarian upbringing are not only blind obedience: They are also callousness, thinking in extremes, and a passion for destructiveness and annihilation” (16). He sees two poles in childbearing practices: one in which “The child is treated without violence, lovingly and solicitously and the other in which the child experiences only sorrow, misery, neglect and abuse…. Between these poles are uncountable gradations and mixed forms” (16). While one person recently described the abusive household in which he grew up as a concentration camp, the more Fuchs reads about the many horrible forms of abuse, the more he describes it as “torture” (19). He does not see a step-by-step improvement in childrearing and discovered many remaining abuses today, even as he points to improvements in some parts of the world.

The main text begins with the second chapter, in which he argues that, “There was no Paradise!” This is an extraordinary opening chapter. For someone who taught World Civilizations for decades, the idea that the pre-civilizational societies were murderous is not new. What is new is that I had absorbed anthropologists’ argument that, in spite of the frequent murder of infants and chil-

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dren, these societies lived peacefully and that violence within societies and against each other began with the early agricultural societies.

Fuchs found incontrovertible evidence that the murder rate of pre-agricultural societies remains on the whole much higher than such rates even during recent wars. He cites Amy E. Nivette’s “Violence in Non-State Societies: A Review” (British Journal of Criminology, vol. 51, 2011, 578-98), who calculated the average murder rate of 93 pre-agricultural civilizations to be 182.6. If the city of Hamburg (about 1.8 million inhabitants) had the same murder rate, it would stand at 3,292 per year. Jürg Helbling’s Tribal Wars: Conflicts in Societies without Central Authority (in German only, 2006) calculated the war related death rate for 19 tribal societies to be 25.2%; by comparison, the war-related death rate for Germany during WWII was 5%.

While it is true that most anthropologists did not concentrate on what happened to children in tribal societies, their older generation became apologists for these societies. Margaret Mead, for example, wrote home from New Guinea in 1932 that an infant’s corpse floated by, adding, “they are always throwing away infants here” (51). Mead seemed unconcerned about the practice of throwing infants away. Whatever the excuse for the murder of infants, be it that the tribe did “not need more” girls, an infant had an unacceptable birthmark, or that the group needed to kill some of its offspring to survive, is it really a surprise that in such societies children did not experience attention and care, let alone love? That as adults these children acted with equal brutality and inattention? Such high murder rates exerted significant influence on their societies; and the myth of peace-loving and gentle tribes has exploded. The way children were treated is obviously political.

The third chapter brings the author into more recent periods and an overview of the history of the continuing suffering of children. The fourth follows right along with details of “The History of Human Societies Up to Now is a History of Mistreated Children.”

Fuchs illustrates here his disagreement with deMause’s proposition that humanity gradually improved its approach to children. He highlights recent experiments, like Stanley Milgram’s well-known one, that tested several hundred participants about their willingness to abuse their “subjects.” Milgram noted that, “Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority

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figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up” (Saul A. McLeod, “The Milgram Shock Experiment,” Simply Psychology, updated February 5, 2017). Although no one asked about the childrearing experiences of participants, Fuchs assumes from their age, 20-50 years old, that they were children when many of them in the U.S. grew up in authoritarian households and were beaten regularly. No wonder a considerable percentage showed a high willingness to obey commands to “zap” their “subjects.”

Because research has for the most part maintained that men have principally engaged in punishments of children, Fuchs’ fifth chapter highlights female violence toward children. In the next chapter, Fuchs then digs into reasons silence still surrounds the abuse of children. He includes an interesting discussion about Theodor Adorno and the reasons he thought some punishment of children to be all right.

With chapter seven Fuchs becomes specific about the behavior of various groups within societies. He begins with general populations and the current worldwide abuse of children in these groups. He continues this topic in chapter eight with a discussion of the childhoods of violent individuals and offenders. The data is devastating. Details from interviews of male and female German prisoners illustrate that they were significantly more abused and mistreated as children than children of the population as a whole. The statistics he presents for the U.S. are equally disconcerting, and he connects them to the point that this data confirms how these persons and society as whole suffer as a consequence.

In chapter nine Fuchs deals with childhoods of extremists and terrorists in general; this analysis brings us to the discussion of the childhoods of publicly known extremists and terrorists. There are a number of individuals in this section who are probably known to American readers, including Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Osama bin Laden; included are many other lesser-known personages. Uniformly they experienced troubled childhoods and the cost to society was and remains high. This section leads directly into the next chapter which deals with the silence of perpetrators regarding their childhoods and the difficulty of discovering the truth about their early abuse.

In chapter 12, Fuchs discusses general biographical issues

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pertaining the political actors he details in the next chapter. In it, he investigates the childhood of political leaders, dictators, and warlords. Among the Americans are John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, both Bush presidents, the Clintons, and many others from around the world. He includes Louis XIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Putin. Let me linger on Louis XIII, Hitler, and Putin.

The childhood trauma of Louis XIII, the future French king, has been highlighted by several authors as an example of the misery and abuse of children in the 17^th century; thus no need to recount the daily beating, sexual abuse, and other excesses that the royal child experienced. The point Fuchs makes is that such abuse, together with the abandonment of elite children to nurses, tutors, the military, and monasteries, created insensitive and hostile societies that abused internally and externally. I was surprised that he consulted Aries on Louis and not Jean Heroard’s Journal de Jean Heroard Sur L’Enfance Et La Jeunesse de Louis XIII (1601-1628) (2012 ed.). French would surely have been accessible to many German speakers.

No doubt, Hitler’s childhood was traumatic and influenced his entire life. But, historians who dealt with der Führer, including Allan Bullock (A Study in Tyranny, revised edition, 1962), for the most part maintained that Hitler had a difficult childhood and ignored, for example, the routine beating his father meted out. Bullock simply wrote that Hitler did not get along with his father (Tyranny, 26). Quite true! In one session alone, Hitler tolerated 32 lashes without wincing. The abuse was so continuous and vicious that he tried to escape several times. His younger brother left home at age 14 and never returned. Fuchs argues that Hitler simply separated himself from the pain and thus later had no empathy for the pain of others.

With the Russian leader, Fuchs focuses his having been beaten by his irascible father, a man most likely suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I would add as well that Putin was swaddled. Swaddling, Fuchs maintained earlier, is another of many abuses of children. Let me add as well that Putin was most likely beaten in the military. One can see several implications of this in his adulthood, including the beating of his wife during their stay in Dresden and his “beating” his opposition once he gained power in Russia. There is more to be said, but it would lead too far.

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In chapter 14, Fuchs answers suspicions many of us have harbored about the childhoods of Hitler’s followers, among them Rudolph Hess, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Amon Göth, and many more. The misery of the childhoods of these leaders is a common theme, along with its negative political implications.

The following chapter deals with the childhoods of male and female soldiers. Most surprisingly, male volunteers to the recent U.S. military uniformly showed difficulties in childhood, in contrast to the society as a whole. Fuchs concludes the chapter with the horrible childhood of Howard Wasdin, a Navy Seal. He argues that this tale of woe illustrates the extreme for such elite soldiers, but fits into the pattern discovered by David Mark Mantell in Familie und Aggression (1978).

From the chapter, “[How] Individual Consequences of Violence Toward Children Become Consequences for Society,” only one quote is needed to gather Fuchs’ point. Peter Riedesser said in 2001 during the children’s protective society award (Kinderschutzpreis) in Hamburg: “The more children are neglected, beaten and humiliated and slide into desperation and hatred here and worldwide, the higher the destructive potential in our country and worldwide. In view of this background the protection of children has become a question of survival” (317).

The last chapter, 17, is entitled “Not All Mistreated Children Become Perpetrators” and “Not All Nations Whose Individuals Experienced Troubled Childhoods Make War.” Fuchs concludes that these two statements are not reasons to diminish our awareness of the influence of childhood experiences on societies.

Fuchs ends with a “Fazit” and a personal note. I agree with him here that, in spite of the terrible story of child abuse from pre-agricultural societies to today, one can remain optimistic. Part of this attitude stems from his ability to overcome difficulties in his own childhood, part from pockets of reforms and improvements for children. As one might expect, these pockets concentrate on some of the more advanced Western societies. Having been abandoned twice in my own childhood, and yet having experienced caring and culturally enriching environments, overcoming a difficult childhood is possible, but it requires loving environments beyond the immediate household.

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