Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Parenting Gurus of Nazi Germany
Episode Date: May 7, 2024Robert sits down with Margaret killjoy to talk about Moritz Schreber, the pseudo scientific parenting guru who strapped children into torture devices and helped prepare Germany for the Nazis. (4 Part ...Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Cool Zone Media.
Ah!
I...
Shit. That was not a good way to open it.
I was gonna try...
Well, I had a couple of bad openings started for this.
Most of which had to do with pedophilia.
Can we do another one of them?
No.
Yeah, can we just say that you've had better openings?
I could have just, what if I committed to that, Sophie,
and just done the whole opening bit
from Led Zeppelin's The Immigrant song?
You could have. Okay.
That would have been pretty good.
That would have been pretty good.
I didn't do that.
I didn't do that. It's a pretty good song.
I chickened out halfway through.
It was nothing.
Margaret. Yep.
Killjoy, welcome to the show, Behind the Bastards. And when when you
think of bastards, right, when you think of human evil, naturally, you're going to think
of Germany. And look, that's not entirely fair to the Germans today. But at the same
time, you know, when you go through that kind of World War II shit, it's just gonna be on
everybody's mind.
And as a result, there's like a huge amount of history, a huge amount of like historiography
that's kind of based around variations of the question, why do the Germans be like that
though?
Right?
Can I tell you my story about mistaking a German in a bad way in the middle of the night?
Oh yes, please.
Oh yes.
I was crossing from the Czech Republic into Germany before Czech Republic was part of
the Schengen area and so there was a border control.
It was the middle of the night and I'm on this bus and I wake up, you know, it's this
super cheap, it's this like 10 euro bus or whatever.
And I wake up to a German soldier going, Guten Tag!
And I just, I wake up and my brain goes, oh fuck a Nazi.
Yeah.
That's exactly, that's exactly how Poland woke up one day.
Just a big Guten Tag in their ear.
So he pulled me and the other like long hair boy off the bus and searched us very carefully.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's Germany in my mind.
Look, this is actually getting to the point, which is that I think there's kind of a fundamental
flaw in this idea of like, trying to be like, what is it about the Germans that made fascism
happen there, right?
That made that be the country that like really did that
in the biggest way.
And I think that's actually kind of a,
it's a potentially dangerous thing to obsess in, right?
Yeah, cause it's nationalism.
Cause it's because like bunch of like, yeah, exactly.
Because it didn't just happen there
because they're not the only people vulnerable
and kind of obsessing too much on like,
what is it about German-ness that ensured the Nazis were able to take and hold power, can kind of blind you to the vulnerabilities
we all face.
But at the same time, it is worth acknowledging there are aspects of German culture that ensured
that Nazism was the specific kind of fascism that came to power in that country and that
altered its character, right?
There are specific things about Germany that made it more vulnerable to what the Nazis
were going to do.
So it would also be kind of a mistake to ignore what was going on in German culture in the
years leading up to the war.
And when, you know, historians, some of whom I think are responsible in this and some of
whom are maybe not, try to do this, they inevitably wind up focusing on two areas primarily.
One of them is child rearing, how we're like German parents raising children in the pre
World War II era and like the pre Weimar and the German Imperial era, and then what was
sexual education like, right?
And I think child rearing, this is a sensible thing to get into.
I think when you get into the sex stuff, this is where a lot of like the really bad historiography
gets in because there tends to be this kind of obsession with ideas about the Nazis and
sex that are not necessarily accurate.
And kind of as a result, in the post-war period, particularly in the period that starts like
10 or 15 years after the war ends. A lot of folks on like the left
are going to make some really hideous mistakes
when they, as part of kind of an attempt
to render Germany less vulnerable to fascism.
And they're both some of the most horrifying things
we will ever talk about on this show.
This is kind of what we're building towards.
It's going to take us a few episodes.
It's also a weird story, right?
And this is one of those things,
I know some of our listeners like to wait
until a series is finished.
This is not entirely that kind of series.
We're gonna be talking about a very different set
of stories this week and next week,
but you kind of have to hear them to understand
what comes next too,
because we're gonna be talking a lot about the attitudes
in German academia and society
about like how kids should be raised.
And yeah, anyway, that does mean this week is our fun week.
Yeah.
Hey, girlfriends, it's me, Carol Fisher,
back with another season of the global number one podcast, The Girlfriends.
Last time we investigated the murder of Gail Katz.
This time we're uncovering the identity of the woman who was buried in Gail's grave for
a decade before she disappeared.
Join me and the rest of the club as we tell her story.
Listen to season two of The Girlfriends, our lost sister on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going
to be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were going to go there, Amir.
People that I admire. When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on.
Authors of books that have changed my life.
Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right?
Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one.
Listen to A Really Good Cry with Radhie Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come
from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts
and a celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power.
Our voices are as varied, nuanced and dynamic as the Black experience,
and stories should never be about us without us.
Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Margaret Killjoy,
host of the Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff podcast.
Are you ready to get into today's bastard?
Is it Nazi sex?
No, it's post Nazi sex crimes.
No, no, this is pre Nazi child rearing crimes.
Oh.
And as a result, I mean, some of it's-
Pre Nazi child rearing crimes.
Some of it is depressing,
because this is child abuse,
but it's also pseudoscience.
Oh, okay.
I do like pseudoscience.
So you get some of that fun like,
oh, people in the 1800s,
you believed wacky things about how to raise children.
That's what we're talking about this week,
is like pseudoscience.
Today is like the kind of big pseudoscientific
child development expert in the pre-Nazi era.
And then Thursday is the momfluencer of Nazism.
So we're gonna have, this is the fun week,
next week is all pedophiles.
So, just.
Okay.
Enjoy it, what I'm saying is enjoy it while it lasts.
Today's guy is even pretty well-meaning.
He's a bastard because of like,
where this stuff takes him,
but I don't think he was actually out to hurt kids.
He just made a lot of horrible mistakes.
And his name was Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber.
Okay.
Quite a name, quite a name.
Extremely German name.
That's a Guten tag in your ear
as you're woken up on the bus ass name.
Is that a hyphen or is he got two middle names?
No, no, two middle names. No, no, two middle names.
Oh, okay.
Two middle names.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know those kids are always trouble.
So, I thought very little about his childhood, but it does seem to be accurate to say that
he suffered from a form of mental illness that was not diagnosed at the time.
There were notes found long after his death.
In fact, after World War II at a hospital in Dresden
that claimed Shrebr had suffered during his life
from quote, obsessional ideas with murderous impulses.
Now that is a description of this guy's mind state
written by a member of his family
who was treating his son who spoilers
suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
This is very relevant later, right?
So this is this discussion like, well, Schreiber had obsessional ideas with murderous
impulses. This is not a diagnosis. This is family lore that was passed down, right?
Okay.
That said, I have-
So we have like intrusive thoughts a little worse than most people.
Yes. Yes. That, maybe a lot worse. But that is exactly what I thought. Because I have
people in my life with OCD that manifest with intrusive thoughts. And that's what I thought, because I have people in my life with OCD that manifest with intrusive thoughts.
And that's what I thought of
when I read that description of Schreiber, right?
Yeah.
And whatever was going on,
whatever he was dealing with,
it was intense enough that again,
it got passed down in family lore,
like 50 years after his death.
So you have to assume significant,
but also he was a very successful, functional person within his death. So you have to assume significant, but also he was a very successful functional person
within his society.
So it did not stop him from functioning in society.
Right.
He did struggle with depression throughout his life,
which ended in 1861.
Because he didn't get to murder people.
He didn't get to murder people or maybe-
I'm assuming, I don't know anything about,
maybe he did murder people, but you know,
probably he wouldn't have been depressed
if he'd been able to act.
Nevermind, don't listen to me.
You probably shouldn't say that on this show.
Nope, I have no idea what he's gonna do.
It's gonna be bad, so nevermind.
So, Magpie, this is not your show.
Cool things don't happen. I know, I got confused
for a minute, I was like, yeah.
Now, so all of this is relevant
because Daniel Schreiber is gonna have more of an impact
on German child rearing than pretty much anyone else in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Schreiber got his MD and taught at the University of Leipzig.
He is often referred to as a self-proclaimed child psychiatrist.
And normally when you're like someone is a self-proclaimed medical field, it's because
they're a quack or a con man.
In this case, it's just because child psychology
was new at the time, right?
Like if you were a child psychologist,
you had declared yourself that
because it wasn't a thing people became.
Because you're the first guy, the first, yeah.
Very early, you know?
Okay.
He's doing this in the mid 1800s.
The idea that like, prior to the period where he is-
Oh, okay, I was imagining like 1910, okay.
No, no, this guy is in like,
this guy dies right at the start of the US Civil War.
And prior to the period where he was an active academic,
if kids misbehaved or were disturbed,
you just handed them a cigarette
and sent them off to the poison mines, right?
Like there was not any sort of thought
that their mental health might matter.
Right.
Yeah.
So Schreiber was fascinated with children's health
and particularly he was really interested
with how urbanization and the rapid changes
due to modern life had impacted child development.
Like social media and stuff.
Yes, like social media.
He was a real Twitter head.
No, in his case, he's worried about like the social media
of his day, which is like roads and the mail
and the fact that there are tall buildings around
and people don't see trees.
Yeah.
These are like real issues, right?
That he's noticing that like,
this is actually changing the way
in which people are developing.
His books were popular all across the Western world.
He had a lot of readers in the US,
but he was particularly popular in Germany.
You might think of him as like Dr. Spock,
if you're old enough to remember doctors,
not from Star Trek, but like the child development doctor
who was kind of huge, I think, in the 80s and 90s.
I think my parents had a Dr. Spock book or two around.
Yeah, and I never was able to disambiguate that
from Spock from Star Trek.
So I never really understood what was happening.
I didn't understand how there could be more than one person named Spock. Because I assumed Dr. Spock from Star Trek. So I never really understood what was happening. I didn't understand how there could be more
than one person named Spock.
Because I assumed Dr. Spock from Star Trek
would have been a fantastic parenting advice giver.
Oh, absolutely.
He seemed like he had his shit together.
Yeah, a little bit of emotionally detached kid
would come out of it, but you know, that's fine.
You know what, Margaret, that is where the story ends.
But you might think of Schreber,
his impact, his kind of influence in Germany
in the mid 1800s.
And this is really, this is when there's a bunch
of fighting principalities, right?
You've got like Prussia and Bavaria kind of at each other's
throats for part of this guy's life.
So they're not even German yet,
but you might compare him to, if Dr. Spock is too old,
whatever YouTube momfluencer is currently at the height
of her influence
and hasn't yet been arrested
for accidentally murdering her kids.
I wanted to like bring that up
and then bring up like a single case
of a social media mom influencer committing a terrible crime.
But when I Googled momfluencer guilty of abuse,
I was presented with so many different options
that I had to do.
I had like decision paralysis.
How do I finish this bit?
Like this happens so often.
All of these people are fucking child abusers.
Oh God.
I settled eventually on Ruby Frank,
a momfluencer with two and a half million subscribers
on YouTube and Instagram who pled guilty to child abuse
in December of 2023.
And this, I settled on Ruby Frank because she's relevant to our German discussion for a few reasons,
including the fact that prosecutors accused her and her husband of turning their home into a concentration camp-like environment
to control their children and use them to feed the ever-hungry YouTube parenting content mill.
They made...
I didn't expect this to feed so well into the theme
of the episode, but alas, Ruby ensured it did.
So she made videos and she eventually separates
from her husband.
He's filing for divorce.
I think he's probably,
seems like he's less involved in this,
but I'm not certain that he's not.
Or he's just bitter
because he didn't get the money for it.
He didn't get as much of that sweet YouTube money.
They made videos, like one example of their content
is a video blog titled Eight Passengers,
which focused on punishments for kids.
One example punishment given
was they banned their oldest son from his bedroom
for seven months for playing a prank on his brother.
Again, if you're doing anything to a kid for like seven months,
that's too long for a punishment.
That's just abuse at that point.
That's an insane length of time for a punishment.
In one video, Ruby brags about refusing to bring lunch
to her kindergartener who'd forgotten it at home.
And again, she's a kindergartener.
Like what kind of shit is she supposed to have together?
In another video, she threatened to behead a doll
to punish her daughter, which like,
if you are taking child rearing tips from ISIS,
you know, you've gone awry.
I think that the parent is the one who needs
the punishment right now.
Yes, yes.
It's amazing.
Again, this was all on videos, so it's perhaps not surprising that eventually prosecutors
realized there was something going on here.
I'm going to read a quote from NPR about what was happening in the Frank household
that's going to be surprisingly relevant to some of the things that come next.
Frank also admitted to kicking her son while wearing boots, holding his head underwater and smothering his mouth and nose with her hands, according to the
plea agreement. He was also told that everything that was being done to him were acts of love,
the agreement states. Jesus. So this is, you know, what we're talking about with Miss Frank,
she is, you will, it is not uncommon to find people advocating today for this kind of like
tough love practice
towards raising children.
There's a very popular book among the Christian right
called To Train Up a Child.
And the basis of it is you should,
when children are infants,
do stuff like lay them down on a mat.
And if they like wiggle to such a point
that any part of their body is off of it,
you like whip them basically.
You like beat them. There's a lot of discussion of like,
what kind of things you should hit children with and win.
But the idea is that any tiny act of what it terms
is like misbehavior or disobedience, right?
Which we would just call,
well, kids aren't fully in control of themselves
or their bodies because they're developing still.
You know?
That that's an act of like willfulness
against not just the parent, but against God, right?
And that attitude again, which is still super with us
is very much in the intellectual chain of custody
that it doesn't, I wouldn't say it starts with Dr. Schreber.
It probably starts much earlier than that.
I'm sure parents have been doing this for forever
in various ways, but the kind of the intellectualizing
of that impulse that bad parents have always had to like,
if my kid does anything that I don't want them doing
in the moment, I need to respond with pain, right?
Schreber is one of the first people to kind of try
and medicalize that attitude, right?
And again, he's a lot less hateful about it.
I don't think he's coming from a place of wanting to hurt kids.
I think he's coming from a place of like, he kind of has obsessional OCD.
And so he obsesses on like little movements from kids and it bothers him.
And so he develops all this kind of like scientific theory around how you should treat the small
ways children move that are again in reality due to the fact that they're not fully in
control of their bodies.
So like baby muscle phrenology.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's kind of what's going on here.
And I want to read a passage from a German author named J. Elk Erdl about kind of what
Dr. Schreber focused his intellectual efforts on in regards to child rearing.
Quote, Schreber aimed at creating obedient children from the day the baby is born.
Harsh discipline started with cold baths.
The child's comfort and self-esteem were never considerations.
And stroking, cuddling, and kissing were forbidden.
As a result, generations of Germans went without
direct loving contact with their parents.
Now, it'll, again, this is a German writer
writing about her attitude towards
Shreiber's impact on Germany.
It's not fully his fault.
There's a lot of other child development experts
and intellectual experts who are a part of this
like lack of loving contact between German babies and their parents.
But it's not uncommon to find people with Erdl's attitude
that Schreiber basically paves the way for Nazism.
He has been described as the spiritual precursor
of Nazism.
And again, it's not totally fair to say that
but there is no denying that he influenced
the cultural environment in which Nazism grew.
As soon as you said that, I was like, oh yeah, like no, okay, a whole, like, you know, four
generations of kids who weren't allowed to talk, like touch their parents.
Yeah, no, I could see how that could lead to some monstrosity.
The more accurate thing to say would be that like, Schreiber popularized the kind of intellectual argument
for abusing your children in this way. And that provided a lot of space for other intellectuals
in the decades to come to make similar arguments and extensions of his arguments. And in that
way, yes.
And put them into the political sphere or whatever.
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And that is part of what's going on in Germany. Now, one thing that really, again,
fucks me up about this is that unlike basically
everyone else we're gonna talk about,
Schreber's teachings, while they end in a bad place,
they start from a pretty good place,
which is he's recognizing we have cities now,
most kids are growing up in cities now,
and kids who grow up in cities
don't exert themselves outdoors
as much as children probably have
throughout most of history. And we need to make accounting for that in how we raise them, right? That
they're not getting the kind of outdoor exposure that they evolve to get, right? That's not
wrong. Yeah.
Like that is like a thing about urban life that you do need to take into account when
raising children.
Is that like, if you're not careful,
they will not get enough time to move their bodies around.
Right?
That's like a problem with modern life.
Yeah, so it's like the modern parenting thing
where like, or the generation,
about a half generation older than me is like,
what the hell, just kick your kids out of the house
and make them go run around and play outside.
Kids these days don't play outside
Yes, yes, exactly He is he is one of the first people kind of start and he's starting on the reasonable end of that
Where it gets unreasonable is that he he kind of comes to the conclusion that the issue of kids having all this energy
Should be remedied not with them running around outside but with systematic remedial exercise now
That sounds on the surface like,
oh, maybe he's like suggesting a PE program, right?
Which I'm sure you and I have both had our issues
with different physical education programs.
Is he putting them in the minds?
Yeah, no, it's worse than that.
The minds would have been better than this.
So the term remedial is key here.
Schreiber didn't just believe kids needed exercise
to get rid of excess energy or to stay healthy.
He felt that they should be subjected
to specific exercises repetitively
to stop them from engaging in behaviors
like slouching and masturbation.
Now, again, some of what he's doing is reasonable.
He believes that you can sharpen a child's eyes
by periodically forcing them to estimate the sizes
of objects
at varying distances, right?
How big do you think that is?
How far do you think that is?
That doesn't actually sharpen your eyes,
but that is a good exercise for a kid
that will help them, you know,
like if you do that with your child from a young age,
it will kind of help them focus on things in the world.
That's not a useless thing to do with the kid.
They can become scouts in the army at that point, you know?
Right, right, right.
How many troops are there?
How far away?
What's the composition?
Yeah.
So some of it's fine, but he's also obsessed with posture.
He writes in his very popular 1855 book, quote,
one must see to it that children always sit straight
and even sided on both buttocks at once,
leaning neither to the right or left side.
As soon as they start to lean back or bend their backs, the time has come to exchange, at least for a few minutes, the seated position
for the absolutely still, supine one.
If this is not done, the backbones will be deformed.
Half resting and lying or wallowing positions should not be allowed.
If children are awake, they should be alert and hold themselves in straight, active positions
and be busy.
In general, each thing which could lead towards laziness
and softness, for example, the sofa in the children's room
should be kept away from their circle of activity."
So both Sophie and I sat up straight
while you were telling that.
I'm willing to bet most of the listeners
have adjusted their posture while listening to you say that.
Even though we know it's a bad person saying it.
Yes, and he is, he's so,
I think we all had this version of the adult in our lives
who was like, straighten up,
straighten up, your posture's bad, right?
Maybe more than one.
Schreiber, he isn't just doing that when kids are awake.
He thinks that they're like sleeping too lazily.
They should only be allowed to sleep in a straight position,
flat on their backs,
or else this laxity will spawn moral lapses and render them unfit
for the life of discipline that German society demanded.
Even-
I hope they had to sleep with their arms crossed
like vampires.
Yeah, they do, they kind of do.
Even infants have to lay prone and straight,
otherwise it's going to start them on the road to sin.
Like newborn, you have to police
how your newborn baby lies down,
or they're not gonna grow up German enough
to conquer France.
Yeah.
Just teach him not to invade Russia
it would have worked out.
Yeah, no, I mean, we're so far ahead of that.
Like we're trying to get kids ready
for the idea of breech loading cannons
and by God he does.
All right.
Speaking of breech loading cannons, you know who does. All right. Speaking of breech loading cannons,
you know who else loads their new Kruppstahl cannons
from the breech, Margaret?
The products and services that support the show,
which is the arms industry.
Yeah, the arms industry specifically in 1870 Europe.
That is the primary sponsor of our show.
Margaret, have you ever heard of the Mitre-Lioux?
I have not. It's an early French machine gun and it's not good at doing what we use machine guns
for today, which is sweeping broad arcs of fire in order to contain areas, but it's really good
at shooting one guy a bunch of times. So, you know, if you need a Mitra Liu in your life, they don't legally
count as machine guns for reasons that are complicated to explain, but very much true.
Anyway, Gatling guns, not technically, basically why? Yeah.
Like Craig operated. Yeah. The ATF, the ATF, everyone should own this by a Mitre-Lieu. It worked really well in World War I.
Well, not World War I so much.
It worked.
Oh no, I'm just thinking of my knowledge of the history of machine guns is that they were
used colonially by the Western forces.
But then the first time that they were used against other white people was in World War
I, and that's when everyone realized how fucking, what nightmare they had created.
Yeah, that's when people really fucked it up. Mitra Liu is a little more complicated the French had it and it was like actually
Pretty effective in a couple of battles, but they never actually deployed it right they thought of it more as a piece of artillery
Rather than support for the infantry so anyways and they lost that war pretty badly
But you don't have to you know you can you can use your crank operated machine gun for what God wants you to use it for.
Just cranking, nevermind.
That guy, our hero of today wouldn't want you to.
No, he sure wouldn't.
Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya,
in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry.
We're gonna talk about and go through all the things
that are sometimes difficult to process alone.
We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into
holistic personal development and just building your mindset to have a
happier, healthier life.
We're going to be talking with some of my best friends.
I didn't know we were going to go there.
I mean, people that I admire.
When we say, listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on.
Authors of books that have changed my life.
Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right?
And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy thing we call life.
I already believe in myself. I already see myself.
And so when people give me an opportunity, I'm just like, oh great, you see me too.
We'll laugh together, we'll cry together and find a way through all of our emotions.
Never forget, it's okay to cry
as long as you make it a really good one.
Listen to A Really Good Cry with Raleigh de Vlucca
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey girlfriends, it's me, Carol Fisher.
I'm so excited to tell you about the brand new series
of The Girlfriends. In season one, we told you about the brand new series of The Girlfriends.
In season one, we told you about the murder of Gail Katz at the hands of my ex-boyfriend Bob.
At one point, a woman's torso washed up on Staten Island and was misidentified as Gail.
She spent nine years in Gail's grave, and then she just disappeared.
It's almost like it's become this moral obligation to find her.
And that's what we're going to do, find this missing girlfriend and tell her story. With the
help of some of your favorite girlfriends from season one, like my producer Anna. Oh my god.
My friend Dr. Mindy Shapiro. Hi, it's Dr. Shapiro, and I'd like to speak with the deputy medical examiner.
And of course, Gail's sister, Elaine Katz.
Having no closure, it kills you.
Join us as we try to solve a 35-year-old cold case.
It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be one hell of a ride.
What?
I can't believe this. It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be one hell of a ride. What?
I can't believe this.
Listen to Season 2 of The Girlfriends, our lost sister on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Everyone in our country has a voice.
It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are.
Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power.
Our voices are as varied, nuanced and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us.
Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Margaret and I both have our crank operated,
not technically machine guns.
That's right.
Yeah, as I hope all of you do, you know.
Anyway, unless you're in Germany,
where I think that probably is illegal
because I'm sure they wrote their laws more.
Like less like Americans, shall we say.
So yeah, we're talking about Schreiber
and his whole attitude is that like,
if kids slouch, if they like, you know,
when they're laying down, they flop around,
if they're not basically straight while standing
or straight while prone at all times,
they're going to get started on the road to moral ruin.
So since children would naturally curl or lean
on their bodies at some point,
it wasn't enough for him to say,
he's not just the kind of guy who was like,
maybe that adult most of us had,
who was like, you should straighten up.
You gotta care about your posture, right?
He developed corrective treatments to reverse the damage.
His attitude was like,
well, unless people have been applying my teachings
to their infants from birth,
those kids probably have bad habits.
And so we need medical or thoughtic devices
to correct their bad posture.
Now, some of these-
Did he invent the back brace?
Yes, he kind of did actually, but worse.
Yeah.
Now, one of his first creations was the bridge.
And this didn't require any new devices.
This is when to correct a child's posture,
you suspend them in the air by chairs
underneath their head and feet.
And they kind of like keep themselves straight.
This is like a hardcore crossfit exercise today.
And he was saying, if you're four-year year old slouches, this is what you do.
Sophie's gonna show you a picture from his textbook.
And he wanted you to do this,
to apply the bridge to children,
if you caught them walking with a quote, forward slump,
which he defined as an expression of weakness,
dumbness and cowardice.
Okay, so I'm looking at a picture of,
I mean, there's two chairs,
a man is sitting not with his shoulders on the top chair, but literally his head.
His neck is doing a lot of work.
His neck is going to be ruined for life.
I love the idea that like, oh yeah, forward slug, dumb coward stuff.
No, it doesn't seem like that's not like the way he's, it's because there is an exercise,
a plank exercise that kind of looks like this
But all of the all of the weight is being placed on the child's neck in this picture
We love to see it Margaret now bad bad as a vampire
That would have been a lot less harmful to the kids that is my
Theory about almost everything that happened in Europe in the 19th century. Oh, you see, I was going to say my theory is that most of the problems with kids is
that they have too much blood, but similar places.
That actually could be the solution to the problem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, bad posture is not the only thing that Schreiber sought to eliminate.
Writing in 1858 that parents had to, quote,
suppress everything in the child,
emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.
That's such a telling phrase.
Yes, the seed of being able to love your parents
has to be suffocated through constant discipline.
He urged parents-
What is the point of life?
I genuinely wonder, what does he think that? The point of life is for the German
principalities to form a unified block to defeat France.
Margaret, get your shit together.
France is just over there being France,
and I understand that.
Hey, they've been fucking around a lot by the mid 1800s.
This guy is born at the start of the 1800s.
To be fair, his childhood has a lot of French fuckery
going on and it's, some would call them the Germans
of their era.
It's fine everybody.
We're, you can't tell European history
and have a good time without being unfair
to France, Germany or the, and I choose all three.
I'm also going to give some shit to Belgium, don't worry.
So again, he urged his parents to apply his methods as early as possible, because children
who are older will develop harmful habits that are more deeply rooted.
For these unfortunate souls, he developed orthotic methods.
One was a shoulder band.
It's basically a figure eight shaped leather belt
that you wrap around a child's shoulders,
kind of like the holsters movie detectives wear,
and then you tighten it to the point
that it ties a child's arms and shoulders
back straight behind them.
I can advertise these on Instagrams right now.
Yeah, yes you could.
Yes you could, doctor approved orthotics for your child if they slouch.
Yeah.
Schreber instructed parents to make sure their kids wore these things all day, every day
until their posture was fixed.
And throughout the mid 1800s, as he's writing his books, he designs this spree of child
torture gadgets.
My favorite of which is the Schrebersch Geralthalder.
The literal translation of that name is Schrebers' Straight Holder.
In an article for the journal Selma Gundy, Morton Schatzman writes, describes it as,
an iron crossbar fastened to the table at which the child sat to read or write.
The bar pressed against the collarbones and the front of the shoulders to prevent forward
movements or crooked posture. He says the child could not lean for long against the barbones and the front of the shoulders to prevent forward movements or crooked posture.
He says the child could not lean for long against the bar because of the pressure of
the hard object against the bones and the consequent discomfort.
The child will return on his own to a straight position.
He added excitedly, I had a Jared Halter manufactured, which proved itself to be suitable after
multiple tests on my own children. You're sort of inverse crucifying your children.
Yeah, you're building devices to correct your kids.
He is like, yeah, you love that kind of self
or experimentation on your own brood.
At least it's the responsible, it's not responsible,
but that's how he does it.
So one look at a picture of a pair of school girls
using this device makes one of its uses very clear,
which is that it stops kids from crossing their legs.
This is good because Schreiber felt cross legs were immoral.
The Gerald Halter was such a, yeah, he didn't like kids like,
I think particularly it might've been that like,
if boys did it, he felt like they were rubbing
their genitals.
I don't know. Okay.
But he wanted to make sure.
Because girls are like expected to cross their legs
because if you don't, you're a bad person.
There was like a little rhyme in school that we all.
He doesn't want anything going on at all
movement wise there, right?
He wants those legs straight
and children unable to move,
deviate from the position they are sat in their chair
without iron bars being pressed against them.
And no bent arms while saluting.
You need to keep your arms straight while you're saluting.
No, otherwise you're not gonna defeat Napoleon III.
Yeah.
So the Jared Halter was a huge success,
very popular in his day.
And it's such a success that he follows it up quickly
with a new device, which is essentially a belt
tied to a child's bed that ran across their chest
to force them to lay straight on their back while sleeping.
The diagrams for this are really quite upsetting, Margaret.
It looks like a dead kid in a bed.
It looks like one of those.
Like, 20.
There's vampires, there's vampires everywhere.
Yeah, you're just preparing the kid
to get fucking feasted on.
Yeah, I mean, it's just a picture
of a girl lying in a bed.
Wide open eyes, clearly like strapped so tight
into that bed that she cannot sleep.
Yeah, great.
I'm sure this never goes badly.
No, no, no.
It generations of kids are healthier as a result of it somewhere.
There's someone in a kink scene who's like, oh, the blah, blah, blah.
Well, oh, yeah, of course.
I'm sorry that leather manufacturers in this day charge a lot more
than they did back in Shreveberg's day.
So the last device we'll talk about, but by no means the last device Shreber created,
was the kopphalter, or head holder, which was a strap to hold a child's head in place
while they were at a desk.
Schatzman writes, quote, the kopphalter was a strap clamped at one end to the child's
hair and at the other to his underwear.
So it pulled his head if he did not hold his head straight.
It served as a reminder to keep the head straight.
This is a shrubber.
The consciousness that the head cannot be lowered past a certain point soon becomes
a habit.
He admits it was apt to produce a certain stiffening effect upon the head and should
therefore be used only one or two hours a day.
Oh, it's progressive of him. Yeah. Yeah after you like do permanent damage to your child's musculature
You should you should limit the amount of permanent damage you do
I want to I want to build a time machine to bring him to the present and show him kids looking at cellphones
Oh, man. Oh god
My torture for him that that is his hell is just watching modern kids play video games, just shrieking at us
from the astral plane.
Now again, the goal of all of these physical interventions
was to improve moral character by altering
the physical attributes of children.
The goal was to create a better class of person.
And it's not hard to see the spiritual echoes of Nazism here.
Again, people often mistake what the Nazis believed as like, they thought that they were
the Uber mention, right?
That they were super humans, you know, because they were Aryan.
No, no, no.
They thought that they could create people who were closer to the original Aryans through
a mixture of selective breeding and like different rearing techniques, right?
They didn't think they were there yet.
They wanted to build it.
That's a crucial distinction, right?
That they were trying to create this better kind of person.
Not that they thought they already were.
Like they were trying to do it with the O-R-A-X
or the O-R-A-X.
Someone's gonna be really mad at me for that.
The O-R-A-X, yes.
The O-R-A-X.
Yes, the giant cow things, yes.
Yeah.
They wanted to build giant cows and giant Nazi men.
They're not wrong about wanting giant cows. Everything else I don't support, but I do think we should have bigger cows.
I would fully support a Jurassic Park project.
Absolutely.
Honestly, I would support a Jurassic Park that ended exactly the way the one in the movie did and I would go to that park.
I would take the risk.
Absolutely. Yeah, I'd be a little disappointed if they didn't break free and start roaming the-
Imagine if we were the top predator.
If it's just like a normal park,
you're like, you're ready to leave,
like, I don't know,
it just feels like something's missing.
I feel like it'd be like something more honest
where you like, you know,
you kiss your husband goodbye and you head out to work
and you look both ways and run to your car
before a velociraptor gets you.
Yes, yes, like Muldoon.
We should all commute to work exactly like Muldoon commuted
across briefly across a street in Jurassic Park
that one time.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, anyway, when we're looking at like a guy
whose goal is to improve the moral character
by altering physical attributes of children.
It's not hard to see spiritual echoes to Nazism here, as writer Rachel Aviv notes in an article
for the New Yorker.
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.
Now, Dr. Schreber's books were so popular and influential that his book on children's
posture and corrective exercises went through more than 40 printings. Late in his career,
he seems to have acknowledged that some of his physical corrections did not produce the
intended moral results. And he actually, again, this is why this guy's not fully, I can't
really call him a bastard. He, because of peculiarities, posits a lot of ideas that cause tremendous harm to children.
There are like parenting groups that are not insignificant in size through the middle of
the 19th century that are using aspects of Schreber tactics, but also he recognizes that
like, oh, you know what?
This stuff isn't working the way I thought it would.
And kind of late in his life, he comes around to lobbying for more playgrounds and cities to give children a place to exercise. And his most well regarded
achievement to this day is the establishment of what are called Schreiber gardens, which
are all around Germany today. These are community gardens in urban areas meant to provide children
and parents with healthy outdoor activity. So again, that's kind of wholesome. That's
nice. That's good. He started from like strapping children into torture cages, but he ended up in community gardens
Okay. Oh, yeah. I okay good work Schreiber. Yeah, you have to be fair to the guy
He's not like I don't think he is a bad faith. I don't think he's wanting to hurt kids
I think this is just, he's kind of a weird dude who obsesses about certain things and
that leads him to coming up with some harmful ideas about how children should be treated.
I honestly, I have a weird sympathy towards this where he had an idea where he was like,
okay, I want to try and improve people and it didn't work.
And he was like, okay, I'll try something different. Like I think about, I like, I wish I had been taught to stand equally on both my feet more.
Oh yeah, yeah.
I have, I have.
Because my sciatica exists in part because, and I actually blame, I took like art classes,
right?
And they taught me about contrappasta where they were like, this is the way people normally
stand and it's like, cause all the old Greek statues are like someone standing on one leg with
all their weight on one leg. And so I thought that was like the normal way to stand. So I did that
all the time. And now I have like, you know, 20 years later, it causes some problems in my life.
And I'm like, yeah, I wish I put my weight on both feet.
He's acknowledging his, his solutions are because he's growing up in mid century Europe.
He's a child of the Napoleonic Wars. His solutions are nightmarish, but he's growing up in mid-century Europe, he's a child of the Napoleonic Wars,
his solutions are nightmarish, but he's like,
well, kids are living in cities,
they're not getting enough exercise,
we have to do something to remedy this problem.
And he does, I think he lands ultimately
pretty close to the right answer,
which is like, give kids playgrounds,
make sure they have access to nature
through stuff like gardens, right?
I still think that's basically the best answer to this problem today.
Yeah. And tell people like, well, if you don't stand up straight,
it'll cause problems further down the line. And it's your body.
Yeah, it's your body. Make your own decision.
Again, don't strap them in.
Yeah. The problem is that people follow his teachings well into the 20th century.
And after you kind of see.
Yeah. After he gives up on aspects of them.
Now that's not like he's not like 180.
He's not like the alpha wolf guy.
No, no, no, no, no.
OK, his his kids do not grow up to be what you would call straight backed moral paragons.
Not that they're bad people, but you can kind of see how flawed his methods are by
by what happens to his two
sons in particular.
His eldest son commits suicide in 1877, and it seems as if mental illness is pretty common
in his family.
Again, he seems to suffer from it, but it's his son Daniel who's going to become famous
for it.
And this is like one of the most famous cases in the history of psychology, particularly of someone with
paranoid schizophrenia.
His son is a guy named Daniel Paul Schreiber.
He is subjected, again, his dad writes about testing his methods, testing these different
torture devices on his kids when they're little kids.
So Daniel is subjected to his father's strict discipline and these physical torture devices
constantly as a young child.
For a time, he seems to have grown into exactly the kind of disciplined functional adult that
Dr. Schreiber wanted to create.
He is appointed a judge by the Ministry of Justice in 1867.
He is a judge for more than a decade through the establishment of the German Empire.
In 1884, he runs for a seat in the Reichstag.
So, so far we're like, well, this seems like the kind of ultra productive,
efficient German citizen that Schweber was seeking to create through these methods.
Right.
When he loses-
The aurochs of people.
Yeah, the aurochs of people.
But when Daniel loses that Reichstag election, he has a mental breakdown,
which causes him to take, he has to go like spend six months in an asylum.
Now psychiatrists have since diagnosed what he was likely suffering from as dementia precox
or paranoid schizophrenia.
Essentially he had a psychotic break, right?
Like that's, that's what went down.
He lost this election and he had a psychotic break.
At the time it was assumed to be an isolated incident and he did return to work.
But a few years later, after he became a presiding judge, his wife had a stillbirth and he experienced
another psychotic break.
This one did not get better, and he spent years institutionalized only being released
in 1899, at which point he wrote a memoir about his nervous illness.
This is one of the most influential texts in our early history of understanding psychiatric
illnesses because Schreiber is not just a guy who's dealing with paranoid schizophrenia
before it is something that medical literature has fully described.
Schreiber is an educated man who is aware of the extent of the delusions that he's suffering
from and writes about them in detail.
And so this is an influential-
That's kind of interesting.
Yes, it's very interesting.
And it's oddly enough, actually,
Kurt Vonnegut's one of his kids
does something kind of similar.
But as a result of the fact that he writes this memoir,
we get this look inside of the head of someone
who has a thing that a lot of people struggle with.
Most of the people who struggle with it
do not have the advantage of this guy's education or social position.
So he is not just, not only is he able to write about what he's experiencing, but people
pay attention to it because this is a judge and they want to know what happened to this
very functional man, right?
Freud writes a pretty noteworthy review of Schreiber's memoirs and in true Freud fashion,
he blames Daniel's disturbances and paranoia
on repressed homosexuality.
Specifically, Freud is like,
he wanted to fuck his dad as a kid,
then he wanted to fuck his brother,
and he couldn't, you know,
he does the Freud thing, right?
This is kind of silly because Schreiber
does experience paranoid sexual fantasies,
but not that kind.
He specifically writes that he woke up one morning with the thought that it might be
fun to quote, succumb to sex as a woman, right?
Oh, and that is a pretty normal thought.
Like a lot of people have thoughts about like, oh, it might be fun to experience this the
other way.
Um, maybe that means that he was repressed and homosexual.
Maybe it's just a normal thought that a lot of people have,
but either way, Freud tides this directly to his schizophrenia, which I don't think is accurate.
That just seems like a thing a person would experience. But Schatzman, who we've quoted
from before, pointed out that the delusions Schraber suffered from that he describes in
his book coincide directly with the kind of experiments
carried out by his father.
And again, I don't think what Judge Schreiber does doesn't cause paranoid schizophrenia.
You can't cause that that way.
But the nature of the delusions that Judge Schreiber suffers from are very much influenced
by what his father does to him as a child.
So in his book, Judge Shrubber uses the term miracles
to describe these kind of delusions that he is experiencing.
And it's hard to explain like why he chooses the term miracle,
but that's not really important.
What you need to understand is that when he is talking about the term miracle,
he's essentially talking about a hallucinatory fantasy.
And many of these
fantasies that he is gripped by as an adult are based on his real childhood experiences.
For example, he describes the miracle of head compression with some regularity,
which he imagines as a gang of little devils that are inside his head, compressing it as though it's
in a vice by turning a screw, right? He has these kind of like fantasies of devils
screwing his head in a vice.
And- This is really interesting to me
because it's like- Yeah.
I'm really interested in when metaphor
is a better way to understand things.
Yes.
Than other ways of describing it.
And so even the calling it miracles
sort of ties into that in my mind.
I don't understand, you know, I haven't read this piece,
but no, this is, because we're looking at the period in which
modern conceptions of reality start developing is the end of the 19th and early 20th century.
And even the like a repressed homosexuality thing to be a man who desires to experience
sex like a woman would have been essentially homosexual at that time in terms of not just
because it would have been a man doing it to you, but like transness was not distinct
from homosexuality in the late Victorian, like pre 1910 or so era.
Absolutely not.
And there's, there's, you know, this is, this is also, it's kind of worth noting, all considered mental illness at the time too.
So like it all gets conflated together.
And so of course being like,
oh, there's just demons that do this thing to me.
But it's like not wrong.
That's what's so interesting about it.
There were demons doing this to him.
And I think an aspect of like why he describes these
as miracles is that his dad, who is doing this to him,
kind of describes it as like,
I'm doing this to help you, right?
Much like that momfluencer we talked about, right?
Like where, you know, you're abusing the kid
and telling them that I'm doing this because I love you,
right?
Dr. Schreber legitimately does think he's helping.
And, but what he's doing, like the fact that he fantasizes
about this gang of devils screwing his head in a vice.
Well, his dad is tying his head into a device
that causes it to like pull against his fucking like this
like bar strapped to his underpants or whatever,
whenever he leans forward and shit, right?
My guess is that part of what's happening here
is that the different devices that are used on him as a kid
cause some lifelong pain.
And when he experiences that pain,
he has kind of a hallucinatory fantasy
that attributes the pain to something not all that different
from its likely cause.
That's what I see is happening here kind of.
That makes sense to me.
This is all debatable, but I think it makes sense.
In his paper, Paranoia or Persecution,
the case of Schreber published in the journal, Salmagundi,
Morton Schatzman writes, quote,
why did Schreber turn memories into miracles?
My hypothesis is that his father had forbidden him to see the truth about his past.
His father had demanded that children love, honor, and obey their parents.
As I illustrate later, he taught parents a method explicitly designed to force children
not to feel bitterness or anger towards their parents, even where such feelings might be
justified.
He wished to rid children of dangerous feelings.
Schreber, in order to link his suffering with his father, would have had to consider his
father's behavior towards him as bad.
This I infer his father had forbidden him to do.
He is unable or unwilling to violate his father's view of what his view of his father should
be.
Prohibited from seeing the true origin of his torments, he calls them miracles.
As a result, he is considered crazy."
Now again, Schatzman is writing here in like the eighties and he is also not talking about
any of this in a way that is contemporary to our understanding of like the actual medical
science here.
Also Schreber is considered crazy because he has paranoid schizophrenia, right?
It's the kind of, it's not that because he describes these schizophrenia, right?
It's not that because he describes these hallucinations as miracles, it's because he's having them
in the first place that he is institutionalized and the like.
But I do think Schatzman is accurate in sort of laying out that the form and nature of
what delusions Schreber faces are influenced heavily by his father's teaching techniques.
What I think is most interesting about this is this idea, and again, I think this is kind
of where Schatzman makes some mistakes, but he's like, well, Schreiber's technique, he
wanted to make it basically impossible for kids to blame their parents or feel bad.
These were some of the bitterness and angerness towards parents. These were some of the like bitterness and anger is towards parents
These were some of the bad feelings that he thought he could kind of smother in an embryonic stage if you established enough physical discipline
Which they were just called his exorcism
Yeah a couple hundred years earlier, but he has a basket in science as if it's the same fucking thing
But also, you know as we talked, Shrebr is not a monster. He's a guy who is trying to actually help kids and who changes throughout and who comes
up with some very positive things.
And so I think that Schatzman is kind of over-applying.
Well, because of his father's teachings, his son couldn't see the harm that he had done.
I think part of it is that because of the good attributes of his father, the son is unable to fully see the harm that he did too.
Which is like actually not a thing that's even related to paranoid schizophrenia.
That's something all of us deal with basically.
Like trying to separate the things that our parents did that were flawed and bad and even
related to the fact that they are products of their time from the things that they did
out of love, out of self-sacrifice that are good.
That's a lifelong process for a lot of us.
And Schatzman doing this thing that a lot of people do when they analyze cases of mental
illness is kind of wrapping it all up in the paranoid schizophrenia.
When I read this, I'm like, oh yeah, Schreber was grappling with the fact that his dad had
a complicated legacy.
Yeah.
And he was also had paranoid schizophrenia.
So he did it in a different way than most people do.
But I don't see that as being like,
I think it's a pretty rational thing to struggle with, actually.
What it almost like puts him in a position where he can see things,
explain things in ways that are like shocking.
Yeah. That like still draw attention to it. Whereas if he had just stayed like you by calling it miracles and demons
I mean it made people paint him as crazy. Yeah
Because he was experiencing reality differently than other people but it yeah
It's it's it's shocking enough to bring it out as compared to being like I have this chart describing exactly how much my pain
Feels different every day. on what my father did.
You know?
Yes. Yes.
And speaking of what our fathers did,
what our fathers would all do if they were here right now
is tell us to buy the products and services
that support this podcast.
Unless you have a bad relationship with your dad,
then your dad will be angry if you buy the products
and services that support this podcast.
Stick it to your dad.
Stick it to the man or make him proud,
whichever is more profitable to us.
Hey, girlfriends, it's me, Carol Fisher.
I'm so excited to tell you about the brand new series
of The Girlfriends.
In season one, we told you about the murder of Gail Katz
at the hands of my ex-boyfriend Bob.
At one point, a woman's torso washed up on Staten Island
and was misidentified as Gail.
She spent nine years in Gail's grave,
and then she just disappeared.
It's almost like it's become this moral obligation
to find her.
And that's what we're going to do,
find this missing girlfriend and tell her story.
With the help of some of your favorite girlfriends from season one,
like my producer, Anna.
Oh my God.
My friend, Dr. Mindy Shapiro.
Hi, it's Dr. Shapiro,
and I'd like to speak with the deputy medical examiner.
And of course, Gail's sister, Elaine Katz.
Having no closure, it kills you. And of course, Gail's sister Elaine Katz.
Having no closure, it kills you.
Join us as we try to solve a 35-year-old cold case.
It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be one hell of a ride.
What?
I can't believe this.
Listen to Season 2 of The Girlfriends, our lost sister on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry.
We're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to
process alone.
We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into holistic personal development,
and just building your mindset
to have a happier, healthier life.
We're going to be talking with some of my best friends.
I didn't know we were going to go there on this.
I know, I know, that's because this is us.
People that I admire.
When we say listen to your body,
really tune in to what's going on.
Authors of books that have changed my life.
Now you're talking about sympathy,
which is different than empathy, right? And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right?
And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy thing we call life.
I already believe in myself. I already see myself.
And so when people give me an opportunity, I'm just like, oh, great, you see me too.
We'll laugh together, we'll cry together and find a way through all of our emotions.
Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one.
Listen to A Really Good Cry with Radhie Dev Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Everyone in our country has a voice.
It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are.
Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts
and a celebration of the hosts in
journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced and dynamic
as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black
Stories, Black Truths on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back. So in recent years, decades, really, there have been attempts to rehabilitate Dr.
Schreber. And again, there's not that's not wholly irrational because like the
Schreber gardens, that's fucking great.
His attitudes towards like kindergartens, some of what he says is valuable
when it comes to the harm that his techniques, particularly these machines, cause generations
of children and particularly how his philosophy of child rearing contributed to the birth
of Nazism, I think it's a mistake to correlate his teachings too strongly with the coming
of fascism.
Right?
Right.
And there's a good, one of the people who's kind of made this point is a writer named V. Lothain writing in a 1994 issue of the New York Review of Books, quote,
the generation that became the German army or the SS Corps in World War II, born around
1910, was unlikely to have been raised on Moritz Schreiber's books, forgotten by that
time.
That's a little inaccurate.
According to Walter Havernick's 1964 monograph, Beating is Punishment, in the post-World War I years there was a decline in household beating and an increase in school
beating, ages 9 to 14, correlated with fallen fathers, not to mention the harsh and cruel
training practices in the German army. It is character assassination to apply the label
totalitarianism to the Schrebers household or books, considering the complex causes of
Nazi antisemitism, militarism, totalitarianism,
and the results for Jews and others."
And I quibble with bits of that.
I agree with his ultimate point, which is that you shouldn't say, this is the guy who
made the Nazis possible because of his chowder.
There's so much more to it than that.
And move it into the schools.
That seems now society is your abusive father that you now have to owe your life to.
And some of that is just because so many men died,
but some of it certainly is that Schreber's teachings
made their way,
worm their way very deeply into society's understanding
of how children should be raised, right?
That you should have this,
you should very strictly enforce physical discipline
because that leads to moral discipline.
You have to do it from an extremely young age, right?
Schreber helps to reinforce and scientificize or whatever,
those attitudes in German society.
And he is one of the, he is part of the DNA of Nazism
as a result of that, right?
But you also shouldn't, you can't,
you don't want to exaggerate or minimize his role
in the Nazi equation, right?
Because his methods are still being taught.
Zvi is wrong when he says that kids were not being taught based on Moritz Schreber's books
in 1910.
They absolutely will.
One of the kids who in fact is being taught based on the Schreber method around the time
that the Nazis come to power is a guy we're going to be talking about next week, Helmut
Kintler.
He's born in 1928 and his parents are Dr. Schreber fans, again, in the late 1920s.
Kintler is ultimately the bastard that we are building to with this series, but I want
to read this quote about his upbringing by Rachel Aviv and the New Yorker so you know
how Schreber's teachings were being used popularly around the time that the Third Reich
rose to power.
Quote, when Kintler misbehaved, his father threatened to buy a contraption invented by
Shreiber 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 Kintler talked out of turn, his father slammed his fist on the table and shouted, When the father talks, the children must be silent.
And, you know, I want to end on that. We will be talking a lot about Kintler next week. He is by
far the worst person we're talking about in this series. But it's important to know both that like
the primary method by which Schreiber influences the Nazis is kind of deeper
than a straight line, but there are still kids
and Hitler's dad is a Nazi officer.
He's a member of the military high command in Berlin.
They are still raising their kids based on
a not insignificant number of people
during the time that Hitler is rising to power.
So that's important, worth noting.
And in part two, Margaret, we're going to talk about the guy, well, the lady that comes
after Schreber, the momfluencer who is like the celebrity mom expert of the Nazi era.
And I'm excited to tell you about her.
But first, Margaret, will you tell our listeners where they can find you on the internet.com?
Well, if you go to the internet.com, I have no idea what happens if you type the internet.com
into your website.
That's probably bad.
Someone's bought it.
It's probably a scam.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is where you can find me is at whatever website you find there.
Or I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff where I tell people positive stories.
It's kind of a lie. I tell people positive stories. It's kind of a lie.
I tell people positive stories but it's usually goes really badly in the end because it's
about the struggle for justice and we don't always win that one.
I also have a book that is going to be kick-started in June starting June 10th and the pre-launch
page so you can sign up for information about it should be live around when this episode
drops and I wrote a teen YA book without any bad things. for information about it should be live around when this episode drops.
And I wrote a teen YA book without any bad things.
Of course there's bad things. It's a novel. Bad things have to happen in a novel.
Called The Sapling Cage.
And you can go...
And it's great, by the way.
Yeah, Robert actually wrote it.
Yeah, it is my favorite piece of your writing so far.
Thank you.
It's excellent. It's the kind of book I wish I had had to read as a kid.
Might have helped me get a couple of things straight earlier than I wound up doing. So,
yeah. The Sapling Cage. Read it, folks.
You can sign up for the Kickstarter now. Or you can sign up to be told about the Kickstarter
now by using Google.
It's got witches and knights and a wide variety of lovingly described melee weaponry.
So it's a Marker Killjoy classic.
I was pretty into, when I was writing this book
was when I was doing the most going out every week
with foam weapons and fighting with my friends.
Yeah.
And I really like spears and that comes across. Look, you can tell who you can tell who actually knows their medieval weaponry by who prefers
a sword to a spear. Right? Yeah. I don't want to be near that fucker.
No, no, no, no, no. Distance, baby. It's really the same with all weapons. The ideal weapon
system is the one that keeps you furthest away from the enemy I know mm-hmm this is why they call artillery the king of battle
Or used to before air strikes got really good
Anyway, if you want an air strike of content into your ear Jamie's new podcast
16th minute of fame will hit like a 500 no okay. It's a good podcast
It's about what happens to people
who are like the internet's main character
after that all fades.
What it's like being focused on by the eye of Sauron
that is our culture's ability to suddenly divert
hundreds of millions of eyes to one person.
And then what it's like after that, it's great shit.
Check out 16th minute of fame.
Is she gonna cover the 30 to 50 Feral Hogs guy?
Oh yeah, I would doubt if you can find him.
Actually, she was at my house
and we had a bunch of people over
and we were watching a movie and it's like midnight
I look over at Jamie's screen
and she has like 500 notes about 30 to 50 Feral Hogs.
It's like a present to me.
Yes, yes.
The rightest man.
The internet did him dirty, but by God he was right.
He tried to warn us.
He tried so hard.
Yeah.
Anyway, part two, more Nazis.
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, girlfriends.
It's me, Carol Fisher, back with another season of the global number one podcast, The Girlfriends. Last time we investigated the murder of Gail Katz.
This time we're uncovering the identity of the woman who was buried in Gail's
grave for a decade before she disappeared. Join me and the rest of the
club as we tell her story. Listen to season two of The Girlfriends, our lost
sister on the iHeart Radio app, Apple
podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in
my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends.
I didn't know we were going to go there. People that I admire. When we say listen to your
body, really tune in to what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life.
Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right?
Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one.
Listen to A Really Good Cry with Rali Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Everyone in our country has a voice.
It's something that says not just where you come from,
but who you are.
Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths,
a collection of podcasts and a celebration
of the hosts in journalism
who've always spoken truth to power.
Our voices are as varied, nuanced and dynamic
as the black experience,
and stories should never be about us without us.
Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.