Speaker 1: Also media, ah, I should That was not a good
Speaker 1: way to open it. I was going to try, well,
Speaker 1: I had. I had a couple of bad openings started
Speaker 1: for this, uh, most most of which had to do
Speaker 1: with pedophilia.
Speaker 2: Can we do another one of them?
Speaker 3: No? Yeah? Can we just say, but you've had better
Speaker 3: you you've had better openings?
Speaker 1: I could have just what if I'd committed to that,
Speaker 1: Sophie and just done the whole opening bit from led Zeppelins,
Speaker 1: the Immigrant song, you could have Okay, that would have.
Speaker 2: Been pretty good.
Speaker 1: That would have been pretty good. I didn't do that.
Speaker 1: I didn't do that. I chickened out halfway through. It
Speaker 1: was nothing. Margaret Yep kill Joy, Welcome to the show
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards. And when when you think of bastards, right,
Speaker 1: when you think of human evil, naturally, you're gonna think
Speaker 1: of Germany. And look, that's not entirely fair to the
Speaker 1: Germans today. But at the same time, you know, when
Speaker 1: you go through that kind of World War two shit,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's just gonna be. It's just gonna be
Speaker 1: on everybody's mind. And as a result, there's like a
Speaker 1: huge amount of history, a huge amount of like historiography
Speaker 1: that's kind of based around variations of the question why
Speaker 1: do the Germans be like that?
Speaker 3: Though?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Can I tell you my story about mistaking a German
Speaker 2: in a bad way in the middle of Oh yeah please,
Speaker 2: Oh yes, I was. I was crossing from the Czech
Speaker 2: Republic into Germany before Czech Republic was part of the
Speaker 2: Shangan area and so there was a border control. It's
Speaker 2: the middle of the night, and I'm on this bus
Speaker 2: and I wake up. You know, it's this super cheap
Speaker 2: is this like ten year ohd bus or whatever? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I wake up to a German soldier going guten
Speaker 2: dog and I just I wake up and my brain goes, oh,
Speaker 2: fucking Nazi.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly That's exactly how Poland woke up one day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just a big guten dog in their ear.
Speaker 2: So he pulled me and the other like long hair
Speaker 2: boy off the bus and searched us very carefully. Yeah anyway, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: so that's Germany in my mind.
Speaker 1: Look, this is actually getting to the point, which is
Speaker 1: that I think there's kind of a fundamental flaw in
Speaker 1: this idea of like trying to be like, what is
Speaker 1: it about the Germans that made fascism happen there, right,
Speaker 1: that made that be the country that like really did
Speaker 1: that in the biggest way. And I think that's actually
Speaker 1: kind of a it's a potentially dangerous thing to obsess in, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's nationalism, because it's because like a bunch of
Speaker 1: like yeah, exactly, because it didn't just happen there, because
Speaker 1: they're not the only people vulnerable, And kind of obsessing
Speaker 1: too much on like what is it about germanness that
Speaker 1: ensured the Nazis were able to take and hold power
Speaker 1: can kind of blind you to the vulnerabilities we all face.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it is worth acknowledging there
Speaker 1: are aspects of German culture that ensure that Nazism was
Speaker 1: the specific kind of fascism that came to We're in
Speaker 1: that country and that altered its character, Right, there are
Speaker 1: specific things about Germany that made it more vulnerable to
Speaker 1: what the Nazis were going to do. So it would
Speaker 1: also be kind of a mistake to ignore what was
Speaker 1: going on in German culture in the years leading up
Speaker 1: to the war. And when you know, historians, some of
Speaker 1: whom I think are responsible in this and some of
Speaker 1: whom are maybe not, try to do this, they inevitably
Speaker 1: wind up focusing on two areas. Primarily, one of them
Speaker 1: is child rearing. How we're like German parents raising children
Speaker 1: in the pre World War two era and like the
Speaker 1: pre Weimar in the German imperial era, and then what
Speaker 1: was sexual education like, right, And I think child rearing
Speaker 1: this is a sensible thing to get into. I think
Speaker 1: when you get into the sex stuff, this is where
Speaker 1: a lot of like the really bad historiography gets in,
Speaker 1: because there tends to be this kind of obsession with
Speaker 1: ideas about the Nazis and sex that are not necessarily accurate,
Speaker 1: and kind of as a result in the post war period,
Speaker 1: particularly in the period that starts like ten or fifteen
Speaker 1: years after the war ends, a lot of folks on
Speaker 1: like the left are going to make some really hideous
Speaker 1: mistakes when they as part of kind of an attempt
Speaker 1: to render Germany less vulnerable to fascism. And there they're
Speaker 1: both some of the most horrifying things we will ever
Speaker 1: talk about on this show. This is kind of what
Speaker 1: we're building towards us going to take us a few episodes.
Speaker 1: It's also a weird story, right, and it's this is
Speaker 1: one of those things I just know of our listeners
Speaker 1: like to wait until the series is finished. This is
Speaker 1: not entirely that kind of series. We're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about a very different set of stories this week
Speaker 1: and next week, but you kind of have to hear
Speaker 1: them to understand what comes next to because we're going
Speaker 1: to be talking a lot about the attitudes in German
Speaker 1: academia and society about like how kids should be raised.
Speaker 1: And yeah, anyway, zech does mean that this week is
Speaker 1: our fun week. Yeah, Margaret Kiljoy, host of the Cool
Speaker 1: People Who Did Cool Stuff podcast? Are you ready to
Speaker 1: get into today's bastard?
Speaker 2: Is it Nazi sex No, it's post Nazi sex crime.
Speaker 1: No, no, this is pre Nazi child rearing crimes. And as
Speaker 1: a result, I mean Nazi child It is depressing because
Speaker 1: this is child abuse. But it's also pseudoscience.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, I do like pseudoscience.
Speaker 1: So you get some of that fun like, oh, people
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds you believed wacky things about how
Speaker 1: to raise children. That's what we're talking about this week
Speaker 1: is like pseudoscience that today is like the kind of
Speaker 1: big pseudoscientific child development expert in the pre Nazi era.
Speaker 1: And then Thursday is the the momfluencer of Nazism. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna have this is the fun week. Next week
Speaker 1: is all pedophiles, So okay, enjoyant. What I'm saying is
Speaker 1: enjoy it. While at last, yep, today's guy is even
Speaker 1: pretty well meaning. He's a bastard because of like where
Speaker 1: this stuff takes him. But I don't think he was
Speaker 1: actually out to hurt kids. He just made a lot
Speaker 1: of horrible mistakes. And his name was Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber. Okay,
Speaker 1: quite a name, quite a name, extremely German name. That's
Speaker 1: a guten tug in your ear as you're woken up
Speaker 1: on the bus. Ass name?
Speaker 2: Is that a hyphen?
Speaker 1: Or?
Speaker 2: Has he got two middle names?
Speaker 1: No? No, two middle names? Two middle names?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know those kids are always trouble. So yeah.
Speaker 1: I found very little about his childhood, but it does
Speaker 1: seem to be accurate to say that he suffered from
Speaker 1: a form of mental illness that was not diagnosed at
Speaker 1: the time. There were notes found long after his death,
Speaker 1: in fact, after World War Two, at a hospital in
Speaker 1: Dresden that claimed Shrebber had suffered during his life from
Speaker 1: quote obsessional ideas with murderous impulses. Now, that is a
Speaker 1: description of this guy's mind state, written by a member
Speaker 1: of his family who was treating his son, whose Spoilers
Speaker 1: suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. This is very relevant later, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So this is this discussion that, like well, Schrebert had
Speaker 1: obsessional ideas with murderous impulses. This is not a diagnosis.
Speaker 1: This is family lore that was passed down, right.
Speaker 2: Okay, that said, so intrusive thoughts a little worse than
Speaker 2: most people.
Speaker 1: Yes, that maybe a lot worse, But that is exactly
Speaker 1: what I thought, because I have people in my life
Speaker 1: with OCD that manifest with intrusive thoughts, and that's what
Speaker 1: I thought of when I read that description of Schreiber, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And whatever was going on, whatever he had was dealing with,
Speaker 1: it was intense enough that again it got passed down
Speaker 1: in family lore like one hundred or like fifty years
Speaker 1: after his death, so you have to assume significant. But
Speaker 1: also he was a very successful, functional person within his society,
Speaker 1: so it did not stop him from functioning in society.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He did struggle with depression throughout his life, which ended
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty one, because he didn't get to murder people.
Speaker 1: He didn't get to murder people, or I.
Speaker 2: Assume I don't know anything about maybe he did murder people,
Speaker 2: but you know, probably we wouldn't have been depressed if
Speaker 2: he'd been able to act. Never mind, don't listen to me.
Speaker 2: You probably shouldn't say that on this show. Nope, I
Speaker 2: don't know anyon he's gonna do. It's gonna be bad,
Speaker 2: So never mind.
Speaker 3: So Magpie, this is not your show, cool thing, you know.
Speaker 2: So I got confused for a minute.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, no, So all of this is
Speaker 1: relevant because Daniel Schraber is going to have more of
Speaker 1: an impact on German child rearing than pretty much anyone
Speaker 1: else in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Skrebber
Speaker 1: got his MD and taught at the University of Leipzig.
Speaker 1: He is often referred to as a self proclaimed child psychiatrist.
Speaker 1: And normally when you're like someone is a self proclaimed
Speaker 1: medical field, it's because they're a quack or a con man.
Speaker 1: In this case, it's just because child psychology was new
Speaker 1: at the time, right, Like, if you were a child psychologist,
Speaker 1: you had declared yourself that because it wasn't a thing
Speaker 1: people became because.
Speaker 2: You're the first guy, the first you're yeah.
Speaker 1: Very early. You know, he's doing this in the mid
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. The idea that like, like prior to.
Speaker 2: The period nineteen ten.
Speaker 1: Okay, no, no, this guy is in Like this guy
Speaker 1: dies right at the start of the US Civil War
Speaker 1: and prior to the period where he was an active academic,
Speaker 1: if kids misbehaved or were disturbed, you just handed them
Speaker 1: a cigarette and sent them off to the poison minds, right,
Speaker 1: Like there was not any sort of thought that their
Speaker 1: mental health might matter.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Schraber was fascinated with children's health, and particularly
Speaker 1: he was really interested with how urbanization and the rapid
Speaker 1: changes due to modern life had impacted child development, like
Speaker 1: social media and stuff. Yes, like social media. He was
Speaker 1: a real twitter head. Ye, no, he's in his case,
Speaker 1: he's worried about like the social media of his day,
Speaker 1: which is like roads and the mail and the fact
Speaker 1: that there are tall buildings around front see trees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got these are like real issues, right, that's he's
Speaker 1: noticing that, like this is actually changing the way in
Speaker 1: which people are developing. His books were popular all across
Speaker 1: the Western world. He had a lot of readers in
Speaker 1: the US, but he was particularly popular in Germany. You
Speaker 1: might think of him as like doctor Spock if you're
Speaker 1: old enough to remember doctors, not the from Star Trek,
Speaker 1: but like the child development doctor who was kind of huge.
Speaker 1: I think of the eighties and nineties. I think my
Speaker 1: parents had a doctor Spock book or two around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I never was able to disambiguate that from
Speaker 2: Stock from Star Trek. So I never stood what was happening.
Speaker 2: I didn't understand how there could be more than one
Speaker 2: person named Spock.
Speaker 1: Because I assumed doctor Spock from Star Trek would have
Speaker 1: been a fantastic parenting advice giver, you know, oh absolutely,
Speaker 1: it seemed like he had his shit together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little bit of emotionally detached kid would come
Speaker 2: out of it. But you know, yeah that's some that's fine.
Speaker 1: You know what, Margaret, That is where this story ends.
Speaker 1: But oh yeah, you might think of Schribber his impact,
Speaker 1: like his kind of influence in Germany in the mid
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. And this is really this is this is
Speaker 1: when there's a bunch of fighting principalities, Right, You've got
Speaker 1: like Russia and Bavaria kind of at each other's throats
Speaker 1: for part of this guy's life, so they're not even
Speaker 1: German yet, but you might compare him to if doctor
Speaker 1: Spock is too old. Whatever. YouTube momfluencer is currently at
Speaker 1: the height of her influence and hasn't yet been arrested
Speaker 1: for accidentally murdering her kids. That I wanted to like
Speaker 1: bring that up and then bring up like a single
Speaker 1: case of a social media mom influencer committing a terrible crime.
Speaker 1: But when I googled momfluencer guilty of abuse, I was
Speaker 1: presented with so many different options that I had to deal.
Speaker 1: I had like decision paralysis. How do I finish this bit?
Speaker 2: Like this?
Speaker 1: This happens so often. All of these people are fucking
Speaker 1: child abusers.
Speaker 2: Oh god.
Speaker 1: I settled eventually on Ruby Frank, a momfluencer with two
Speaker 1: and a half million subscribers on YouTube and Instagram who
Speaker 1: pled guilty to child abuse in December of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: And this I settled on Ruby Frank because she's She's
Speaker 1: relevant to our German discussion for a few reasons, including
Speaker 1: the fact that prosecutors accused her and her husband of
Speaker 1: turning their home into a concentration camp like environment to
Speaker 1: control their children and use them to feed the ever
Speaker 1: hungry YouTube parenting content mill they made. I didn't expect
Speaker 1: this to feed so well into the theme of the episode,
Speaker 1: but alas Ruby ensured it did so. She made videos,
Speaker 1: and she eventually separates from her husband. He's filing for divorce.
Speaker 1: I think he's probably seems like he's less involved in this,
Speaker 1: but that's certain that he's not, or he's just.
Speaker 2: Better because he didn't get that money for it.
Speaker 1: He did all as much as that sweet YouTube money.
Speaker 1: They made videos like. One example of their contents a
Speaker 1: video blog titled eight Passengers, which focused on punishments for kids.
Speaker 1: One example punishment given was they banned their oldest son
Speaker 1: from his bedroom for seven months for playing a prank
Speaker 1: on his brother. Again, if you're doing anything to a
Speaker 1: kid for like seven months, that's too long for a punishment,
Speaker 1: that's just abuse at that point. That's an insane length
Speaker 1: of time for a punishment. In one video, Ruby brags
Speaker 1: about refusing to bring lunch to her kindergartener who'd forgotten
Speaker 1: it at home. And again, she's a kindergartener, Like, what
Speaker 1: kind of shit is supposed to have together? In another video,
Speaker 1: she threatened to behead a doll to punish your daughter,
Speaker 1: which like if you are if you are taking child
Speaker 1: rearing tips from isis you know you've got a rye.
Speaker 2: I think that the parent is the one who needs
Speaker 2: the punishment.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, it's amazing. Again, this was all on videos,
Speaker 1: so it's perhaps not surprising that like eventually prosecutors realized
Speaker 1: there was something going on here. I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a quote from NPR about what was happening in the
Speaker 1: Frank household. That's going to be surprisingly relevant to some
Speaker 1: of the things that come next. Frank also admitted to
Speaker 1: kicking her son while wearing boots, holding his head underwater,
Speaker 1: and smothering his mouth and nose with her hands. According
Speaker 1: to the plea agreement. He was also told that everything
Speaker 1: that was being done to him were acts of love.
Speaker 1: The agree in the States Jesus, So this is you
Speaker 1: know we're talking about with miss Frank. She is you will.
Speaker 1: It is not uncommon to find people advocating today for
Speaker 1: this kind of like tough love practice towards raising children.
Speaker 1: There's a very popular book among the Christian right called
Speaker 1: to Train Up a Child, and the basis of it
Speaker 1: is you should when children are infants do stuff like
Speaker 1: lay them down on a mat, and if they like
Speaker 1: wiggle to such a point that any part of their
Speaker 1: body is off of it, you like whip them basically,
Speaker 1: like you like beat them. There's a lot of discussion
Speaker 1: of like, you know, what kind of things you should
Speaker 1: hit children with and win. But the idea is that
Speaker 1: any tiny act of what it terms is like, you know,
Speaker 1: misbehavior or disobedience, right, which we would just call well,
Speaker 1: kids aren't fully in control of themselves to their bodies
Speaker 1: because there's they're developing still, you know that that's an
Speaker 1: act of like willfulness against not just the parent but
Speaker 1: against God. Right, And that attitude again, which is still
Speaker 1: super with a us, is very much in the intellectual
Speaker 1: chain of custody that it doesn't I wouldn't say it
Speaker 1: starts with doctor Shreber. It probably starts much earlier than that.
Speaker 1: I'm sure parents have been doing this for forever in
Speaker 1: various ways. But the kind of the intellectualizing of that
Speaker 1: impulse that bad parents have always had to like, if
Speaker 1: my kid does anything that I don't want them doing
Speaker 1: in the moment, I need to respond with pain.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Schreber is one of the first people to kind of
Speaker 1: try and medicalize that attitude, right, and again he's a
Speaker 1: lot less hateful about it. I don't think he's coming
Speaker 1: from a place of wanting to hurt kids. I think
Speaker 1: he's coming from a place of like he kind of
Speaker 1: has obsessional OCD, and so he obsesses on like little
Speaker 1: movements from kids, and it bothers him, and so he
Speaker 1: develops all this kind of like scientific theory around how
Speaker 1: you should treat the small ways children move that are
Speaker 1: again in reality, due to the fact that they're not
Speaker 1: fully in control of their bodies.
Speaker 2: Baby muscle phrenology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of what's going on here.
Speaker 1: And I want to read a passage from a German
Speaker 1: author named j elk Erdle about kind of what doctor
Speaker 1: Schrebber focused his intellectual efforts on in regards to child rearing. Quote,
Speaker 1: Schreber aimed at creating obedient children from the day the
Speaker 1: baby is born. Harsh discipline started with cold baths. The
Speaker 1: child's comfort and self esteem whenever considerations and stroking, cuddling,
Speaker 1: and kissing were forbidden. As a result, generations of Germans
Speaker 1: went without direct loving contact with their parents. Now Rdle, again,
Speaker 1: this is a German writer writing about her attitude towards
Speaker 1: Shrebber's impact on Germany. It's not fully his fault. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of other child development experts and intellectual experts
Speaker 1: who are a part of this, like lack of loving
Speaker 1: contact between German babies and their parents. But it's not
Speaker 1: uncommon to find people with Eardle's attitude that Schreber basically
Speaker 1: paves the way for Nazism. He has been described as
Speaker 1: the spiritual precursor of Nazism, and again it's not totally
Speaker 1: fair to say that, but there is no denying that
Speaker 1: he influenced the cultural environment in which Nazism grew.
Speaker 2: As soon as you said that, I was like, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: Like no, okay, a whole like you know, four generations
Speaker 2: of kids who weren't allowed to talk to like touch
Speaker 2: their parents. Yeah, no, I could see how that could
Speaker 2: lead to some monstrosity.
Speaker 1: The more accurate thing to say would be that, like,
Speaker 1: Shreber popularized the kind of intellectual argument for abusing your
Speaker 1: children in this way, and that provided a lot of
Speaker 1: space for other intellectuals in the decades to come to
Speaker 1: make similar arguments and extensions of his arguments and.
Speaker 2: Put them into the political or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, exactly, and that is part of what's going
Speaker 1: on in Germany.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, one thing that really again fucks me up about
Speaker 1: this is that, unlike basically everyone else we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about Schreber's teachings, while they end in a bad place,
Speaker 1: they start from a pretty good place, which is he's
Speaker 1: recognizing we have cities now. Most kids are growing up
Speaker 1: in cities now, and kids who grow up in cities
Speaker 1: don't exert themselves outdoors as much as children probably have
Speaker 1: throughout most of history, and we need to make accounting
Speaker 1: for that in how we raise them. Right, that they're
Speaker 1: not getting the kind of outdoor exposure that they're that
Speaker 1: they evolve to get. Right, that's not wrong. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: that is a that is like a thing about urban
Speaker 1: life that you do need to take into account when
Speaker 1: raising children. Is that, like, if you're not careful, they
Speaker 1: will not get enough time to move their bodies around. Right.
Speaker 1: That's that's like a problem with modern Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's like the like modern parenting thing where like
Speaker 2: or the generation about a half generation older than me
Speaker 2: is like what the hell, just kick your kids out
Speaker 2: of the house and make it right to run around
Speaker 2: and play outside. Kids these days don't play outside.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, exactly he is. He is one of the
Speaker 1: first people kind of start, and he's starting on the
Speaker 1: reasonable end of that. Where it gets unreasonable is that
Speaker 1: he kind of comes to the conclusion that the issue
Speaker 1: of kids having all this energy should be remedied not
Speaker 1: with them running around outside, but with systematic remedial exercise.
Speaker 1: Now that sounds on the surface like, oh, maybe he's
Speaker 1: like suggesting a PE program, right, which I'm sure you
Speaker 1: and I have both had our issues with different physical
Speaker 1: education programs.
Speaker 2: Is he putting them in the minds?
Speaker 1: No, it's worse than that. The minds would have been
Speaker 1: better than this. So the term remedial is key here.
Speaker 1: Schreber didn't just believe kids needed exercise to get rid
Speaker 1: of excess energy or to stay healthy. He felt that
Speaker 1: they should be subjected to specific exercises repetitively to stop
Speaker 1: them from engaging in behaviors like slouching and masturbation. Now, again,
Speaker 1: some of what he's doing is reasonable. He believes that
Speaker 1: you can sharpen a child's eyes by periodically forcing them
Speaker 1: to estimate the sizes of objects at varying distances. Right,
Speaker 1: how big do you think that is? How far do
Speaker 1: you think that is? That doesn't actually sharpen your eyes,
Speaker 1: But that is good exercise for a kid. Will help them,
Speaker 1: you know, like if you do that with your child
Speaker 1: from a young age, it will kind of help them
Speaker 1: focus on things in the world. That's not a useless
Speaker 1: thing to do with it.
Speaker 2: They can them scouts in the army at that point
Speaker 2: right right right, which how many are how many troops
Speaker 2: are there? How far away? What's the composition?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so some of it's fine, But he's also obsessed
Speaker 1: with posture, he writes in his very popular eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: five book quote, One must see to it that children
Speaker 1: always sit straight and even sided on both buttocks at once,
Speaker 1: leaning either to the right or left side. As soon
Speaker 1: as they start to lean back or bend their backs,
Speaker 1: the time has come to exchange at least for a
Speaker 1: few minutes, the seated position for the absolutely still supine one.
Speaker 1: If this is not done, the backbones will be deformed.
Speaker 1: Half resting and lying or wallowing positions should not be allowed.
Speaker 1: If children are awake, they should be alert and hold
Speaker 1: themselves in straight active positions, and be busy in general.
Speaker 1: Each thing which could lead towards laziness and softness. For example,
Speaker 1: the sofa in the children's room should be kept away
Speaker 1: from their circle of activity.
Speaker 2: So both Sofia and I sat up straight while telling
Speaker 2: that I'm willing to bet most of the listeners have
Speaker 2: adjusted their postures. Do you say that even though we
Speaker 2: know it's a bad person saying.
Speaker 1: Yes, and he is he is, he's so. I think
Speaker 1: we all had this version of the adult in our
Speaker 1: lives who was like, straighten up, straighten up, your posture's bad, right,
Speaker 1: Maybe more than one shrimper. He isn't just doing that
Speaker 1: when kids are awake. He thinks that they're like sleeping
Speaker 1: too lazily. They should only be allowed to sleep in
Speaker 1: a straight position, flat on their backs or else this
Speaker 1: laxity will spawn moral lapses and render them unfit for
Speaker 1: the life of discipline that German society demanded.
Speaker 2: Even so, they had to like sleep with their arms
Speaker 2: crossed like vampires.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they do, they kind of do. Even infants have
Speaker 1: to lay prone and like straight, otherwise it's going to
Speaker 1: like start them on the road to sin. Like newborn
Speaker 1: you have to like police how your newborn baby lies down,
Speaker 1: or they're not going to grow up German enough to
Speaker 1: conquer France, not.
Speaker 2: To invade Russia. It would have worked out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I mean we're so far ahead of that.
Speaker 1: Like we're trying to get kids ready for the idea
Speaker 1: of breechloading cannons, and by god he does all right.
Speaker 1: Speaking of breech loading cannons, you know who else loads
Speaker 1: their new Krupstahl cannons from the breach Margaret?
Speaker 2: The products and service rights and support the show right.
Speaker 1: Arms industry, Yeah, the arms industry specifically in eighteen seventy Europe.
Speaker 1: That is the primary sponsor of our show, Margaret. Have
Speaker 1: you ever heard of the Mitrelieu?
Speaker 2: I have not.
Speaker 1: It's an early French machine gun and it's not good
Speaker 1: at doing what we use machine guns for today, which
Speaker 1: is sweeping broad arcs of fire in order to contain areas.
Speaker 1: But it's really good at shooting one guy a bunch
Speaker 1: of times. So you know, if you need a metralieu
Speaker 1: in your life. They don't legally count as machine guns
Speaker 1: for reasons that are complicated to explain, but very much
Speaker 1: true anyway.
Speaker 2: And gatling guns not technically basically why yeah, because you
Speaker 2: have to turn Yeah, the ATF.
Speaker 1: The ATF.
Speaker 2: Everyone worked really well in World War One, well, not
Speaker 2: World War one so much.
Speaker 1: It works.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I'm just thinking of My knowledge of the
Speaker 2: history of machine guns is that they were used colonially
Speaker 2: by the Western forces and then the but then the
Speaker 2: first time that they were used against other white people
Speaker 2: was in World War One, and that's when everyone realized
Speaker 2: how fucking what nightmare they had created.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's when people really fucked it up. The mittrulieu
Speaker 1: was a little more complicated. The French had it, and
Speaker 1: it was like actually pretty effective in a couple of battles,
Speaker 1: but they never actually deployed it, right, They thought of
Speaker 1: it more as a piece of artillery rather than support
Speaker 1: for the infantry. So anyway, they lost that war pretty badly.
Speaker 1: But you don't have to, you know, you can. You
Speaker 1: can use your crank operated machine gun for what God
Speaker 1: wants you to use it for, just cranking.
Speaker 2: Our hero of today wouldn't want you to, no.
Speaker 1: He sho wouldn't. We're back, Margaret and I both have
Speaker 1: are crank operated, not technically machine guns. That's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: as I hope all of you do. You know, anyway,
Speaker 1: unless you're in Germany, where I think that probably is illegal,
Speaker 1: because I'm sure they wrote their laws more like less
Speaker 1: like Americans, shall we say so, Yeah, we're talking about Shraber,
Speaker 1: and his whole attitude is that like if kids slouch,
Speaker 1: if they like, you know, when they're laying down, they
Speaker 1: flop around, if they're not basically straight while standing or
Speaker 1: straight wall prone at all times, they're going to get
Speaker 1: started on the road to moral ruin. So since children
Speaker 1: would naturally curl or lean on their bodies at some point,
Speaker 1: it wasn't enough for him to say he's not just
Speaker 1: the kind of guy who is like maybe that adult
Speaker 1: most of us had who was like, you should straighten up.
Speaker 1: You got to care about your posture, right. He developed
Speaker 1: corrective treatments to revert the damage. His attitude was like, well,
Speaker 1: unless people have been applying my teachings to their infants
Speaker 1: from birth, those kids probably have bad habits, and so
Speaker 1: we need medical orthotic devices to correct their bad posture.
Speaker 1: Now some of at his back brace. He yes, he
Speaker 1: kind of did, actually, but worse. Yeah, Now, one of
Speaker 1: his first creations was the bridge, and this didn't require
Speaker 1: any new devices. This is when to correct a child's posture,
Speaker 1: you suspend them in the air by chairs underneath their
Speaker 1: head and feet and they kind of like keep themselves straight.
Speaker 1: This is like a hardware CrossFit exercise today and he thanks,
Speaker 1: if your four year old slouchest, this is what you do.
Speaker 1: Sobey's going to show you a picture from his textbook
Speaker 1: and he wanted you to do this to apply the
Speaker 1: bridge to children if you caught them walking with a
Speaker 1: quote forward slump, which he defined as an expression of weakness, dumbness,
Speaker 1: and cowardice.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm looking at a picture of I mean,
Speaker 2: it's a there's two chairs. A man is sitting not
Speaker 2: with his shoulders on the top chair, but literally his head,
Speaker 2: his head, his neck is doing a lot of work.
Speaker 1: His neck is going to be ruined for life. I
Speaker 1: love the idea that like, oh yeah, I don't one
Speaker 1: can do this dumb coward stuff. No, it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like that's not like the way he's It's specific because
Speaker 1: there is an exercise, a plank exercise that kind of
Speaker 1: looks like this, but all of the all of the
Speaker 1: weight is being placed in the child's neck in this picture.
Speaker 1: Oh we love to see it, Margaret.
Speaker 2: Now this guy's a vampire.
Speaker 1: He that would have been a lot less harmful to
Speaker 1: the kids.
Speaker 2: That is my theory about almost everything that happened in
Speaker 2: Europe in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: So oh you see, I was going to say, my
Speaker 1: theory is that most of the problems with kids is
Speaker 1: that they have too much blood. But similar, similar.
Speaker 2: To that actually could be the solution of the problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So bad posture is not the only
Speaker 1: thing that Shavers sought to eliminate, writing an eight teen
Speaker 1: fifty eight that parents had to quote suppress everything in
Speaker 1: the child. Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.
Speaker 1: That's such a telling phrase. Yes, the seed of being
Speaker 1: able to love your parents has to be suffocated through
Speaker 1: constant discipline.
Speaker 2: The point of life, I like genuinely wonder, like what a.
Speaker 1: Point that the point of life is for the German
Speaker 1: principalities to form a unified block to defeat France, Margaret
Speaker 1: get together.
Speaker 2: France is just over there, like being France, and I
Speaker 2: understand that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Hey, they've been fucking around a lot by the
Speaker 1: mid eighteen hundreds. You know this guy, this guy is
Speaker 1: born at the start of the eighteen hundreds. To be fair,
Speaker 1: his childhood has a lot of French fuckery going on
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, some would call them the Germans of
Speaker 1: their era. Uh, it's it's it's fine, everybody were where.
Speaker 1: You can't tell European history and have a good time
Speaker 1: without being unfair to France, Germany or the UK, and
Speaker 1: I choose all three. I'm also going to give some
Speaker 1: shit to Belgium. Don't worry so again. Here just parents
Speaker 1: to apply his methods as early as possible, because children
Speaker 1: who are older will develop harmful habits that are more
Speaker 1: deeply rooted. For these unfortunate souls, he developed orthotic methods.
Speaker 1: One was a shoulder band. It's basically a figure eight
Speaker 1: shaped leather belt that you wrap around a child's shoulders,
Speaker 1: kind of like the Holsters movie detectives where and then
Speaker 1: you tighten it to the point that it ties a
Speaker 1: child's arms and shoulders back straight behind them.
Speaker 2: I gotta advertise these on Instagrams right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yes you could, Yes, you could doctor approved orthot
Speaker 1: X for your child if the slouch. Yeah. Shreber instructed
Speaker 1: parents to make sure their kids wore these things all day,
Speaker 1: every day until their posture was fixed, and throughout the
Speaker 1: mid eighteen hundreds is he's writing his books, he designs
Speaker 1: this spree of child torture gadgets, my favorite of which
Speaker 1: is the shrebersh Gerald Holder. The literal translation of that
Speaker 1: name is Scheber's straightholder. In an article for the journal
Speaker 1: Selma Gundy Morton Schatzman Wrights describes it as quote an
Speaker 1: iron crossbar fastened to the table at which the child
Speaker 1: sat to reader write. The bar pressed against the collar
Speaker 1: boats in the front of the shoulders to prevent forward
Speaker 1: movements or crooked posture. He says, the child could not
Speaker 1: lean for log against the bar because of the pressure
Speaker 1: of the hard object against the bones and the consequent discomfort.
Speaker 1: The child will return on his own to a straight position,
Speaker 1: he added excitedly, I had a Jared holder manufactured which
Speaker 1: proved itself to be suitable after multiple tests on my
Speaker 1: own children.
Speaker 2: You're sort of inverse crucifying your children, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're building devices to correct your kids. He is like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you love that kind of self or experimentation on your
Speaker 1: own brood. At least it's the responsible, it's not responsible,
Speaker 1: that's how he does it. Yeah, So one look at
Speaker 1: a picture of a pair of schoolgirls using this device
Speaker 1: makes one of its uses very clear, which is that
Speaker 1: it stops kids from crossing their legs. This is good
Speaker 1: because Shrimmer felt cross legs were immoral. The Gerald Halter
Speaker 1: was such as, Yeah, he didn't like kids like I
Speaker 1: think particularly it might have been that like if boys
Speaker 1: did it, he felt like they were rubbing their genitals.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but he was like girls expected to
Speaker 2: cross their legs because if you don't, you're a bad
Speaker 2: There's like a little rhyme and school that we all.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want anything going on at all movement wise
Speaker 1: there right. He wants he wants, he wants that those
Speaker 1: legs straight and children unable to move deviate from the
Speaker 1: position they are set in their chair without iron bars and.
Speaker 2: Arms while saluting. You need to keep your absolute straight
Speaker 2: while you're saluting.
Speaker 1: No, otherwise you're not going to defeat Napoleon the third.
Speaker 1: So the Jared Halter was a huge success, very popular
Speaker 1: in his day, and it's such a s that he
Speaker 1: follows it up quickly with a new device, which is
Speaker 1: essentially a belt tied to a child's bed that ran
Speaker 1: across their chest to force them to lay straight on
Speaker 1: their back while sleeping. The diagrams for this are really
Speaker 1: quite upsetting, Margaret. It looks like a dead kid in
Speaker 1: a bed. It looks like one of those.
Speaker 2: It's like vampires. There's vampires everywhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're just preparing the kid to get fucking feasted on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's just a picture of a girl
Speaker 2: lying in a bed.
Speaker 1: Wide open eyes, clearly like strapped so tight into that
Speaker 1: bed that she cannot sleep.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Great, I'm sure this never goes badly.
Speaker 1: No, no, no. Generations of kids are healthier as a
Speaker 1: result of it.
Speaker 2: Somewhere there's someone in a kink scene who's like, oh,
Speaker 2: the blah blah blah belt.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm sorry that leather manufacturers
Speaker 1: in this day charge a lot more than they did
Speaker 1: back in Shrebber's day. So the last device we'll talk about,
Speaker 1: but by no means the last device Shrebber created was
Speaker 1: the kop Falter or headholder, which was a strap to
Speaker 1: hold a child's head in place while they were at
Speaker 1: a desk. Shatsman writes quote, the cup folter was a
Speaker 1: strap clamped at one end to the child's hair and
Speaker 1: at the other to his underwear, so it pulled his
Speaker 1: head if he did not hold his head straight. It
Speaker 1: served as a reminder to keep the head straight, and
Speaker 1: this is this is a shrebber. The consciousness that the
Speaker 1: head cannot be lowered past a certain point soon becomes
Speaker 1: a habit. He admits it was apt to produce a
Speaker 1: certain stiffening effect upon the head, and should therefore be
Speaker 1: used only one or two hours a day.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's progressive of him.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: After you like, do permanent damage to your child's muscula chair,
Speaker 1: you should. You should limit the amount of permanent damage
Speaker 1: you do.
Speaker 2: I want to I want to build a time machine
Speaker 2: to bring him to the present and show him kids
Speaker 2: looking at cell phones. Oh man, oh god, My torture for.
Speaker 1: Him, that that is his hell is just watch modern
Speaker 1: kids play video games, just shreaking at us from the
Speaker 1: astral plane. Yeah uh now, again, the goal of all
Speaker 1: of these physical interventions was to improve moral character by
Speaker 1: altering the physical attributes of children. The goal was to
Speaker 1: create a better class of person. And it's not hard
Speaker 1: to see the spiritual echoes of Nazism here. Again, people
Speaker 1: often mistake what the Nazis believed. Is like, they thought
Speaker 1: that they were the uber mension, right, that they they
Speaker 1: were superhumans, you know, because they were areas. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: They thought that they could create people who were closer
Speaker 1: to the original Aryans through a mixture of selective breeding
Speaker 1: and like different rearing techniques. Right, they didn't think they
Speaker 1: were there yet they wanted to build it. That's a
Speaker 1: crucial distinction, right, that they were trying to create this,
Speaker 1: this better kind of person, not.
Speaker 2: That they were trying to do what they were the
Speaker 2: ornx or the org someone's gonna be really mad.
Speaker 1: A yes, or the giant the giant cow things.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that they wanted to just krows and giant
Speaker 2: Nazi men.
Speaker 1: They're not wrong about wanting giant cows. Everything else I
Speaker 1: don't see, but I do think we should have bigger cows.
Speaker 2: I would fully support a Jurassic Park project.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you know, honestly, I would support a Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: that ended exactly the way the one in the movie did,
Speaker 1: and I would go to that park. I will take
Speaker 1: the risk to absolutely.
Speaker 2: I'd be a little disappointed if they didn't break free
Speaker 2: and start forming the imagine a normal park.
Speaker 1: Or like getting ready to leave, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: it just feels like something's missing.
Speaker 2: I feel like it'd be like something more honest, where
Speaker 2: you like, you know, you kiss your husband goodbye and
Speaker 2: you head out to work, and you look both ways
Speaker 2: and run to your car before a velociraptor gets you.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, like Muldoon. We should all commute to work
Speaker 1: exactly like Muldoon commuted across briefly across a street and
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park that one time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, when
Speaker 1: we're looking at like a guy whose goal is to
Speaker 1: improve the moral character by altering physical acc tributes of children,
Speaker 1: it's not hard to see spiritual echoes to Nazism here.
Speaker 1: As writer Rachel Aviv notes in an article for The
Speaker 1: New Yorker, Shreber outlined principles of child rearing that would
Speaker 1: create a stronger race of men, ridding them of cowardice, laziness,
Speaker 1: and unwanted displays of vulnerability and desire. Now, doctor Schreber's
Speaker 1: books were so popular and influential that his book on
Speaker 1: children's Posture and Corrective Exercises went through more than forty printings.
Speaker 1: Late in his career, he seems to have acknowledged that
Speaker 1: some of his physical corrections did not produce the intended
Speaker 1: moral results, and he actually, again, this is why this
Speaker 1: guy's not fully I can't really call him a bastard. He,
Speaker 1: because of his peculiarities, posits a lot of ideas that
Speaker 1: cause tremendous harm to children. There are like parenting groups
Speaker 1: that are not insignificant size to the middle of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century that are using aspects of schreber tactics. But
Speaker 1: also he recognizes that like, oh you know what, this
Speaker 1: stuff isn't working the way I thought it would, And
Speaker 1: kind of late in his life he comes around to
Speaker 1: from more playgrounds and cities to give children a place
Speaker 1: to exercise, and his most well regarded achievement to this
Speaker 1: day is the establishment of what are called Shraper gardens,
Speaker 1: which are all around Germany today. These are community gardens
Speaker 1: in urban areas meant to provide children and parents with
Speaker 1: healthy outdoor activity. So, Gibbs, that's.
Speaker 2: Kind of hold that's them.
Speaker 1: That's nice. That's good. He started from like strapping children
Speaker 1: into torture cages, but he ended up in community gardens.
Speaker 1: It's okay, oh yeah, okay, good work Shraper. Yeah. You
Speaker 1: have to be fair to the guy. He's not like.
Speaker 1: I don't think he is a bad faith. I don't
Speaker 1: think he's wanting to hurt kids. I think this is
Speaker 1: just he's kind of a weird dude who obsesses about
Speaker 1: certain things and that leads him to doing causing to
Speaker 1: coming up with some harmful ideas about how children should
Speaker 1: be treated.
Speaker 2: I honestly, I have a weird sympathy towards this where
Speaker 2: he had an idea where he was like, Okay, I
Speaker 2: want to try and improve people, and it didn't work,
Speaker 2: and he was like, okay, I'll try something different. Like
Speaker 2: I think about I like, I wish I had been
Speaker 2: taught to stand equally on both my feet more.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I guess I have.
Speaker 2: My sciatica exists in part because and I actually blame
Speaker 2: I took like art classes, right, and they taught me
Speaker 2: about contrapasta, where they were like, this is the way
Speaker 2: people normally stand. And it's like because all the old
Speaker 2: Greek statues are like someone standing on one leg with
Speaker 2: other on one leg, and so I thought that was
Speaker 2: like the normal way to stand. So I did that
Speaker 2: all the time, and now I have, like, you know,
Speaker 2: twenty years later, it caused some problems in my life
Speaker 2: and I'm like, yeah, I wish they put my weight
Speaker 2: on both feet.
Speaker 1: He's acknowledging his solutions are because he's growing up in
Speaker 1: mid century Europe. He's a child of the Napoleonic Wars.
Speaker 1: His solutions are nightmarish, but he's like, well, kids are
Speaker 1: living in cities, they're not feeling enough exercise. We have
Speaker 1: to do something to torimedy this problem. And he does.
Speaker 1: I think he lands ultimately pretty close to the right answer,
Speaker 1: which is like, give kids playgrounds, make sure they have
Speaker 1: access to nature through stuff like gardens.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I still think that's basically the best answer to this
Speaker 1: problem today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and tell people like, well, if you don't stand
Speaker 2: up straight, it'll cause problems further down the line. And
Speaker 2: it's your body.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's your body.
Speaker 2: Make your own decision.
Speaker 1: Again, don't strap them into Yeah. The problem is that
Speaker 1: people follow his teachings well into the twentieth century, and
Speaker 1: after he can kind of see, yeah, after he gives
Speaker 1: up on aspects of them. Now, that's not like he's
Speaker 1: not like one to eighty. He's not like the Alfa
Speaker 1: wolf guy. No, no, no, no, no, okay. His kids
Speaker 1: do not grow up to be what you would call
Speaker 1: straight backed moral paragons. Not that they're bad people, but
Speaker 1: you can kind of see how flawed his methods are
Speaker 1: by what happens to his two sons, in particular, his
Speaker 1: eldest son commits suicide in eighteen seventy seven, and it
Speaker 1: seems as if mental illness is pretty common in his family. Again,
Speaker 1: he seems to suffer from it, but it's his son,
Speaker 1: Daniel who's going to become famous for it. And this
Speaker 1: is like one of the most famous cases in the
Speaker 1: history of like psych cology of a particularly of someone
Speaker 1: with paranoid schizophrenia. His son is a guy named Daniel
Speaker 1: Paul Schraper. He is subjected again. His dad writes about
Speaker 1: testing his methods, testing these different torture devices on his
Speaker 1: kids when they're little kids. So Daniel is subjected to
Speaker 1: his father's strict discipline and these physical torture devices constantly
Speaker 1: as a young child, and for a time he seems
Speaker 1: to have grown into exactly the kind of disciplined, functional
Speaker 1: adult that doctor Schraper wanted to create. He is appointed
Speaker 1: a judge by the Ministry of Justice in eighteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: He is a judge for more than a decade through
Speaker 1: the establishment of the German Empire, and in eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: four he runs for a seat in the Reichstag. So
Speaker 1: so far, we're like, well, this seems like the kind
Speaker 1: of ultra productive, efficient German citizen that Schreber was seeking
Speaker 1: to create through these methods.
Speaker 2: Orders of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the aorrox of people. But when Daniel loses that
Speaker 1: Reichstag election, he has a mental breakdown which causes him
Speaker 1: to take he has to go spend six months in
Speaker 1: an asylum. Now psychiatrists have since diagnosed what he was
Speaker 1: likely suffering from as dementia, praecox, or paranoid schizophrenia. Essentially,
Speaker 1: he had a psychotic break, right, Like, that's what went down.
Speaker 1: He lost this election and he had a psychotic break.
Speaker 1: At the time, it was assumed to be an isolated
Speaker 1: incident and he did return to work. But a few
Speaker 1: years later, after he became a presiding judge, his wife
Speaker 1: had a stillbirth and he experienced another psychotic break. This
Speaker 1: one did not get better, and he spent years institutionalized,
Speaker 1: only being released in eighteen ninety nine, at which point
Speaker 1: he wrote a memoir about his nervous illness. This is
Speaker 1: one of the most influential texts in our early history
Speaker 1: of understanding psychiatric illnesses, because Schreber is not just a
Speaker 1: guy who's dealing with paranoid schizophrenia, before. It is something
Speaker 1: that medical literature is fully described, has fully described. Schreber
Speaker 1: is an educated man who is aware of the extent
Speaker 1: of the delusions that he's suffering from and writes about
Speaker 1: them in detail. And so this is an influential Yes,
Speaker 1: it's very interesting, and it's oddly enough, Actually, Kurt Vonneget's,
Speaker 1: one of his kids does something kind of similar. But
Speaker 1: as a result of the fact that he writes this memoir,
Speaker 1: we get this look inside of the head of someone
Speaker 1: who has a thing that a lot of people struggle with.
Speaker 1: Most of the people who struggle with it do not
Speaker 1: have the advantage of this guy's education or social position,
Speaker 1: so he is not just not only is he able
Speaker 1: to write about what he's experiencing, but people pay attention
Speaker 1: to it because this is a judge and they want
Speaker 1: to know what happened to this very functional man.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Freud writes a pretty noteworthy review of Schreber's memoirs, and
Speaker 1: in true Freud fashion, he blames Daniel's disturbances and paranoia
Speaker 1: on repressed homosexuality. Specifically, Freud is like, he wanted to
Speaker 1: fuck his dad as a kid, then he wanted to
Speaker 1: fuck his brother, and he couldn't you know he does
Speaker 1: the Freud thing, right, Uh huh. This is kind of silly,
Speaker 1: because Schriber does experience paranoid sexual fantasies, but not that kind.
Speaker 1: Specifically writes that he woke up one morning with the
Speaker 1: thought that it might be fun to quote succumb to
Speaker 1: sex as a woman, right, And that is a pretty
Speaker 1: normal thought, like a lot of people have thoughts about, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it might be fun to experience this the other way,
Speaker 1: Maybe that means that he was repressed and homosexual. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's just a normal thought that a lot of people have.
Speaker 1: But either way, Freud tides this directly to his schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: which I don't think is accurate. It just seems like
Speaker 1: a thing a person would experience. But Shatzman, who we've
Speaker 1: quoted from before, pointed out that the delusions Schreber suffered
Speaker 1: from that he describes in his book coincide directly with
Speaker 1: the kind of experiments carried out by his father. And again,
Speaker 1: I don't think what Judge Schreber does doesn't cause paranoid schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: You can't cause that that way. But the nature of
Speaker 1: the delusions that Judge Schreber suffers from are very much
Speaker 1: influenced by what his father does to him as a child.
Speaker 1: So in his book, Judge Shrubber uses the term miracles
Speaker 1: to describe these kind of delusions that he is experiencing.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to explain why he chooses the term miracle,
Speaker 1: but that's not really important. What you need to understand
Speaker 1: is that when he is talking about the term miracle,
Speaker 1: he's essentially talking about a hallucinatory fantasy. And many of
Speaker 1: these fantasies that he is gripped by as an adult
Speaker 1: are based on his real childhood experiences. For example, he
Speaker 1: describes the miracle of head compression with some regularity, which
Speaker 1: he imagines as a gang of little devils that are
Speaker 1: inside his head compressing it as though it's in a
Speaker 1: vice by turning a screw right. He has these kind
Speaker 1: of like fantasies of devils screwing his head in a vice.
Speaker 2: And this is really interesting to me because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm really interested in when metaphor is a better way
Speaker 2: to understand things, yes than other ways of describing it.
Speaker 2: And so even the calling it miracle sort of ties
Speaker 2: into that. In my mind, I don't understand, you know,
Speaker 2: I haven't read this piece but no, this is because
Speaker 2: we're looking at the period in which modern conceptions of
Speaker 2: reality start developing, is the nineteen and early twentieth century,
Speaker 2: and even the like a repressed homosexuality thing to be
Speaker 2: a man who desires to experience sex like a woman
Speaker 2: would have been essentially homosexual at that time in terms
Speaker 2: of not just because it would have been a man
Speaker 2: doing it to you, but like transness was not distinct
Speaker 2: from oh no, homosexuality in the late Victorian like pre
Speaker 2: nineteen ten or so.
Speaker 1: Era, absolutely not. And there's there's you know this is
Speaker 1: this is also it's kind of worth noting all considered
Speaker 1: mental illness at the time too, totally, so like it
Speaker 1: gets it all gets conflated together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so of course being like, oh, there's just
Speaker 2: demons that do this thing to me, but it's like
Speaker 2: not wrong. That's what's so interesting about there were demons
Speaker 2: doing this to him.
Speaker 1: And I think an aspect of like why he describes
Speaker 1: these as miracles is that his dad, who is doing
Speaker 1: this to him, kind of describes as like, I'm doing
Speaker 1: this to help you, right, much like that mom fluencer
Speaker 1: we talked about, right, like where you know you're abusing
Speaker 1: the kid and telling them that I'm doing this because
Speaker 1: I love you. Right, Doctor Shreber legitimately does think he's helping.
Speaker 1: But what he's doing, like the fact that he fantasizes
Speaker 1: about this gang of devil screwing his head and avice, well,
Speaker 1: his dad is tying his head into a device that
Speaker 1: causes it to like pull against his fucking like this
Speaker 1: like bar strapped to his underpants or whatever whenever he
Speaker 1: leans forward in shit. Right, My guess is that part
Speaker 1: of what's happening here is that the different devices that
Speaker 1: are used on him as a kid cause some lifelong pain,
Speaker 1: and when he experiences that pain, he has kind of
Speaker 1: a hallucinatory fantasy that attributes the pain to something not
Speaker 1: all that different from its likely cause you know, that's
Speaker 1: what I see is happening here.
Speaker 2: Kind of that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: This is all debatable, but I think it makes sense.
Speaker 1: And his paper Paranoia or Persecution The Case of Schreber,
Speaker 1: published in the journal Salmagundi Morton Schatzman right quote. Why
Speaker 1: did Shreber turn memories into miracles? My hypothesis is that
Speaker 1: his father had forbidden him to see the truth about
Speaker 1: his past. His father had demanded that children love, honor,
Speaker 1: and obey their parents. As I illustrate later, he taught
Speaker 1: parents a method explicitly designed to force children not to
Speaker 1: feel bitterness or anger towards their parents, even where such
Speaker 1: feelings might be justified. He wished to rid children of
Speaker 1: dangerous feelings. Shreber, in order to link his suffering with
Speaker 1: his father, would have had to consider his father's behavior
Speaker 1: towards him as bad. This I infer his father had
Speaker 1: forbidden him to do. He is enable or unwilling to
Speaker 1: violate his father's view of what his view of his
Speaker 1: father should be. Prohibited from seeing the true origin of
Speaker 1: his torments, he calls them miracles. As a result, he
Speaker 1: is considered crazy. Now again, Shatzman is writing here in
Speaker 1: like the eighties, and he is also not talking about
Speaker 1: any of this in a way that is contemporary to
Speaker 1: our understanding of the actual medical science. Here also, Shreber
Speaker 1: is considered crazy because he has paranoid schizophrenia, right, that's
Speaker 1: the it's the kind of It's not that because he
Speaker 1: describes these hallucinations as miracles, because he's having them in
Speaker 1: the first place, that he is institutionalized and the like.
Speaker 1: But I do think Shatsman is accurate in sort of
Speaker 1: laying out that the form and nature of what delusions
Speaker 1: Schreber faces are part are like influenced heavily by his
Speaker 1: father's teaching techniques. And I, yeah, what I think is
Speaker 1: most interesting about this is this idea. And again I
Speaker 1: think this is kind of where Shatsman makes some mistakes,
Speaker 1: but he's like, well, Schreber's technique, he wanted to make
Speaker 1: it basically impossible for kids to like blame their parents
Speaker 1: or feel bad like these were some of the bitterness
Speaker 1: and angerness towards parents. These were some of the bad
Speaker 1: feelings that he thought he could kind of smother in
Speaker 1: an embryonic stage if you established in a physical discipline.
Speaker 2: Which they would just call this exorcism. Yeah, a couple
Speaker 2: hundred years earlier, but he has some masket in science
Speaker 2: as if it's the same fucking thing.
Speaker 1: But also, you know, as we talked about, Schreber is
Speaker 1: not a mode uns. He's a guy who is trying
Speaker 1: to actually help kids and who changes throughout it and
Speaker 1: who comes up with some very positive things. And so
Speaker 1: I think that Shatsman is kind of over applying well
Speaker 1: because of his father's teachings. His son couldn't see the
Speaker 1: harm that he had done. I think part of it
Speaker 1: is that because of the good attributes of his father,
Speaker 1: the son is unable to fully see the harm that
Speaker 1: he did too, which is like, actually not a thing
Speaker 1: that's even related to paranoid schizophrenia. That's something all of
Speaker 1: us deal with, basically, like trying to separate the things
Speaker 1: that our parents did that were flawed and bad and
Speaker 1: even related to the fact that they are products of
Speaker 1: their time from the things that they did out of
Speaker 1: you know, love, out of self sacrifice that are good. Like,
Speaker 1: that's a lifelong process for a lot of us, and
Speaker 1: shatsmen doing this thing that a lot of people do
Speaker 1: when they analyze cases of mental illness is kind of
Speaker 1: wrapping it all up in the paranoid schizophrenia, where when
Speaker 1: I read this, I'm like, oh, yeah, Schreber was like
Speaker 1: grappling with the fact that his dad had a complicated legacy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he was also had paranoid schizophrenia, So he did
Speaker 1: it in a different way than most people do. But
Speaker 1: I don't see that as being like, I think it's
Speaker 1: a pretty rational thing to struggle with.
Speaker 2: Actually, what it almost like puts him in a position
Speaker 2: where he can see things, explain things in ways that
Speaker 2: are like shocking. Yeah, that like still draw attention to it,
Speaker 2: whereas if he had just stayed like by calling it
Speaker 2: miracles and demons. I mean it made people pain him
Speaker 2: as crazy, yeah, because he was experiencing reality differently than
Speaker 2: other people. But yeah, it's it's it's shocking enough to
Speaker 2: bring it out as compared to being like, I have
Speaker 2: this chart describing exactly how much my pain feels different
Speaker 2: every day. But yeah, some what my father did you know?
Speaker 1: Yes? Yes, And speaking of what our fathers did, what
Speaker 1: our fathers would all do if they were here right
Speaker 1: now is tell us to buy the products and services
Speaker 1: that support this podcast. Unless you have a bad relationship
Speaker 1: with your dad, then your dad will be angry. If
Speaker 1: you buy the products and services that support this podcast,
Speaker 1: your stick it to the man or make him proud,
Speaker 1: whichever is more profitable to us. We're back. So in
Speaker 1: recent years, decades, really, there have been attempts to rehabilitate
Speaker 1: doctor Schreber. And again that's not wholly irrational because like
Speaker 1: the Schreber gardens, that's fucking great. His attitudes towards like kindergartens.
Speaker 1: Some of what he says, is valuable when it comes
Speaker 1: to the harm that his techniques, particularly these machines, caused
Speaker 1: generations of children, and particularly how his philosophy of child
Speaker 1: rearing contributed to the birth of Nazism. You know, I
Speaker 1: think it's a mistake to correlate his teachings too strongly
Speaker 1: with the coming of fascism, right, And there's a good
Speaker 1: you know, one of the people who's kind of made
Speaker 1: this point is a writer, Nam's v. Lothan, writing in
Speaker 1: a nineteen ninety four issue of The New York Review
Speaker 1: of Books, quote, the generation that became the German Army
Speaker 1: or the SS Corps in World War Two, born around
Speaker 1: nineteen ten was unlikely to have been raised on more
Speaker 1: at Schaever's books forgotten by that time. That's a little inaccurate.
Speaker 1: According to Walter Havrnick's nineteen sixty four monograph Beating His Punishment,
Speaker 1: in the post World War One years, there was a
Speaker 1: decline in household beating and an increase in school beating
Speaker 1: ages nine to fourteen, correlated with fallen fathers. Not to
Speaker 1: mention the harsh and cruel training practices in the German Army.
Speaker 1: It is character assassination to apply the label to talitarianism
Speaker 1: to the Schaber's household or books, considering the complex causes
Speaker 1: of Nazi, anti Semitism, militarism, totalitarianism, and the results for
Speaker 1: Jews and others, and I quipple with bits of that.
Speaker 1: I agree with his ultimate point, which is that you
Speaker 1: shouldn't say this is the guy who made the Nazis
Speaker 1: possible because of his child. There's so much more to
Speaker 1: it than that.
Speaker 2: And it is the schools that right seems now society
Speaker 2: is your abusive father that you now have to owe
Speaker 2: your life to. And some of that is just because
Speaker 2: so many men died, but some of it certainly is
Speaker 2: that Schaber's teachings made their way worm their way very
Speaker 2: deeply into society's understanding of how children should be raised. Right,
Speaker 2: that you should have this, You should very strictly enforce
Speaker 2: physical discipline because that leads to moral discipline. You have
Speaker 2: to do it from an extremely young age. Right, Schreber
Speaker 2: helps to reinforce in scientific eyes or whatever those attitudes
Speaker 2: in German society, and he is one of the is.
Speaker 2: He is part of the DNA of Nazism as a
Speaker 2: result of that. Right, but you also shouldn't you can't.
Speaker 1: Can't. You don't want to exaggerate or minimize his role
Speaker 1: in the Nazi equation, right because his methods are still
Speaker 1: being taught. ZV is wrong when he says that like
Speaker 1: kids were not being taught based on more at Schreber's
Speaker 1: books in nineteen ten, they absolutely will. One of the
Speaker 1: kids who in fact is being taught based on the
Speaker 1: Schreber method around the time that the Nazis come to
Speaker 1: power is a guy we're going to be talking about
Speaker 1: next week, Helmut Kintler. He's born in nineteen twenty eight
Speaker 1: and his parents are doctor Schreber fans again in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen twenties. Yeah, Kintler is ultimately the bastard that
Speaker 1: we are building to with this series. But I want
Speaker 1: to read this quote about his upbringing by Rachel Levive
Speaker 1: and the New Yorkers so you know how Shreber's teachings
Speaker 1: were being used popularly around the time that the third
Speaker 1: Reich rose to power. Quote. When Kinler misbehaved, his father
Speaker 1: threatened to buy a contraption invented by Shreber to promote
Speaker 1: children's posture and compliance, shoulder bands to prevent slouching, a
Speaker 1: belt that held their chest in place while they slept,
Speaker 1: an iron bar pressed to their collarbones so they'd sit
Speaker 1: up straight at the table. If Kentler talked out of turn,
Speaker 1: his father slammed his fist on the table and shouted.
Speaker 1: When the father talks, the children must be silent. And
Speaker 1: you know, I want to end on that. We will
Speaker 1: be talking a lot about Kentler next week. He is
Speaker 1: by far the worst person we're talking about in this series.
Speaker 1: But it's important to know both that like the primary
Speaker 1: method by which Shrebber influences the Nazis is kind of
Speaker 1: deeper than a straight line. But there are still kids,
Speaker 1: and Kintler's dad is a Nazi officer. He's a member
Speaker 1: of the military High Command in Berlin, Lyn. They are
Speaker 1: still raising their kids based on a not insignificant number
Speaker 1: of people during the time that Hitler is rising to power,
Speaker 1: So that's important worth noting. And in part two, Margaret,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the guy, well, the lady
Speaker 1: that comes after Schreber, the mom fluencer, who is like
Speaker 1: the celebrity mom expert of the Nazi era, and I
Speaker 1: am excited to tell you about her. But first, Margaret,
Speaker 1: will you tell our listeners where they can find you
Speaker 1: on the Internet dot com.
Speaker 2: Well, if you go to the Internet doc I have
Speaker 2: no idea. What if it happens if you type the
Speaker 2: Internet dot com into your website.
Speaker 1: Someone's bought. It's probably a scam.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is where you can find me, is
Speaker 2: at whatever website you find there. Or I have a
Speaker 2: podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I tell
Speaker 2: people positive stuff. It's kind of a lie. I tell
Speaker 2: people have positive stories, but it's usually be goes really
Speaker 2: badly in the end because it's about the struggle for
Speaker 2: justice and we don't always win that one. I also
Speaker 2: have a book that is going to be kickstarted in
Speaker 2: June starting June tenth, and the pre launch page so
Speaker 2: you can sign up for information about it should be
Speaker 2: live around when this episode drops. And I wrote a
Speaker 2: teen ya book without any bad things. Of course there's
Speaker 2: bad things. It's a novel. Bad things have to happen
Speaker 2: in a novel called The Sapling Cage. And it's great,
Speaker 2: by the way, Yeah, Robert actually got it.
Speaker 1: It is my favorite piece of your writing so far.
Speaker 1: It's kid. It's the kind of book I wish I
Speaker 1: had had to read as a kid, might have helped
Speaker 1: me get a couple of things straight earlier than I
Speaker 1: wound up doing. So, Yeah, the Sapling Cage reading books.
Speaker 2: You can sign up for the Kickstarter now, or you
Speaker 2: can sign up to be told about the Kickstarter Now
Speaker 2: by using Google.
Speaker 1: It's got witches and knights and a wide variety of
Speaker 1: lovingly described melee weaponry. So it's a classic.
Speaker 2: I was pretty into when I was writing this book.
Speaker 2: Was when I was doing the most, going out every
Speaker 2: week with foam weapons and fighting yeah my friends. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I really like spears and that it comes across.
Speaker 1: Look, you can tell who. You can tell who actually
Speaker 1: knows their medieval weaponry by who prefers the sword to
Speaker 1: a spear, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to be near that fucker.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no distance baby. Yeah. It's really
Speaker 1: the same with all weapons. The ideal weapons system is
Speaker 1: the one that keeps you furthest away from the enemy.
Speaker 1: You know. This is why they call artillery the king
Speaker 1: of battle, or used to before air strikes got really good. Anyway,
Speaker 1: if you want an air strike of content into your ear,
Speaker 1: Jamie's new podcast, sixteenth Minute of Fame will hit like
Speaker 1: a five hundred. Nope, okay, it's a good podcast. It's
Speaker 1: about what happens to people who are like the Internet's
Speaker 1: main character after you know that all fades. What it's
Speaker 1: like being like focused on by the eye of souron.
Speaker 1: That is our culture's ability to like suddenly divert hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of eyes to one person, and then what
Speaker 1: it's like after that. It's great shit. Check out sixteenth
Speaker 1: minute of fame.
Speaker 2: Is she gonna cover the thirty to fifty faral hogs? Guy?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, you can find it.
Speaker 3: Actually, yeah, Actually she was at my house and we
Speaker 3: had a bunch of people over or we're watching a
Speaker 3: movie and I look and it's like midnight.
Speaker 2: I look over at JB's screen.
Speaker 3: And she has like five hundred notes about thirty to
Speaker 3: fifty fars.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, the rightest man. The Internet did him dirty,
Speaker 1: but by he was right. He tried to warn us.
Speaker 2: He tried so hard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, Part two more.
Speaker 3: Nazis Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 3: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm