Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: What's cold My opening This is Behind the Bastards, a
Speaker 2: podcast that has now introduced slightly differently. We are going
Speaker 2: to talk about a little bit of history me and
Speaker 2: Margaret Killjoy, and then we're gonna throw back to the
Speaker 2: start of the episode. Margaret, what do you know about Prussia?
Speaker 2: How do you feel about Prussia?
Speaker 3: I couldn't put it on a map because it doesn't
Speaker 3: currently exist. It's one of those things that became Germany. Right, yes,
Speaker 3: it is the center of the things that became Germany. Okay, wait,
Speaker 3: and in Bavaria is like the southern part.
Speaker 2: Bavaria is the southern part and the Bavarians and the Prussians.
Speaker 2: Most people would now just be like, well, they're all Germans.
Speaker 2: But for a very long time that would get you shot.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It was very serious and even up until like when
Speaker 2: the Franco Prussian War started, there were a lot of
Speaker 2: debates about like these you had these different army corps
Speaker 2: that would have divisions of Prussians and divisions of Bavarians,
Speaker 2: and the fact that we're fighting well side by side
Speaker 2: was the huge deal. Like that's what welded Germany into being.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of Prussians were like, well, Bavarians
Speaker 2: won't stand under fire, you know, there was a lot
Speaker 2: of debate about that, and the Prussians where it's funny,
Speaker 2: You're like, I couldn't point it out on a map. Today,
Speaker 2: I would guess Prussia is most often reference to when
Speaker 2: people misspell Russia. But like for most of the last
Speaker 2: couple of hundred years, it was a really big deal.
Speaker 2: And in fact, at the end of World War Two,
Speaker 2: one of the major Allied goals was like, we have
Speaker 2: to put a fucking end to Prussia finally, like we
Speaker 2: have to end this concept of Prussian militarism because it's
Speaker 2: been it's been such a plague in Europe and we don't.
Speaker 3: Again, the Bavarians are the good Germans and definitely not Germans, definitely,
Speaker 3: definitely not.
Speaker 2: But what I am saying is that what we now
Speaker 2: just describe as like German right is what people used
Speaker 2: to call Prussian right. It's all been kind of subsumed.
Speaker 2: But like the Prussians.
Speaker 3: Were and this is kind of who invaded like right
Speaker 3: around the time of the Paris Commune, like eighteen seventy
Speaker 3: one kind of era.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, this is exactly that. That's what it's called
Speaker 2: the Franco Prussian War because the Prussians are kind of
Speaker 2: like the leading light in this confederation of German states
Speaker 2: that becomes Germany as a result of the Franco Prussian War.
Speaker 3: And really like invading France, they tried like three times,
Speaker 3: and to be fair, like once a generation they.
Speaker 2: Started out being invaded by France. Like when the Franco
Speaker 2: Prussian War starts, if you read their justifications for like
Speaker 2: why they were doing what they were doing, it's all
Speaker 2: like they keep invading us. We have to stop the
Speaker 2: French menace and the British like there's widespread everyone is
Speaker 2: sympathetic to the Prussians and the other German states because
Speaker 2: they're like, yeah, someone got to be done about France,
Speaker 2: Like you can't let them keep bosting everybody around.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, it's the nineteenth Century're supposed to do that
Speaker 3: to other continents now, yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, which the French are doing. But they especially like
Speaker 2: under Napoleon the Third, he's like Fuson, He fucks around
Speaker 2: in Italy a bunch and like eventually he goes too far.
Speaker 2: The Prussians have this reputation for being like the great
Speaker 2: warrior people of their age. They are the Spartans of Europe,
Speaker 2: which the Spartans also are, but from a lot log brico. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Prussianism forms the core of what we come to know
Speaker 2: as Germany, and well, the Prussian nobility are often targeted
Speaker 2: by the Nazis. These guys, these junkers is what they're called.
Speaker 2: Wind up. A lot of them get killed by the Nazis.
Speaker 2: It's because they hate Hitler. But not because he's Hitler,
Speaker 2: but because he's like poor, right. They hate Hitler for
Speaker 2: class reasons. He's like a corporal who should have known
Speaker 2: his place, and he's trying to run the country. That's
Speaker 2: why these junkers hate Hitler. You know, it's not like
Speaker 2: all of the horrible crimes. It's well, but look at
Speaker 2: the of course this war is doomed. We have a
Speaker 2: corporal leading it, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you couldn't even make He tried to make living
Speaker 3: selling paintings. Instead of being born to money.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. I was born to hold a needle rifle.
Speaker 2: Prussian nationalism and militarism are a huge factor in the
Speaker 2: upbringing of the kids who grew up to fight for
Speaker 2: and lead Germany and World War Two. So again it's
Speaker 2: one of those things, like Schreber, did he cause the Nazis?
Speaker 2: Is he just like one of you know, a number
Speaker 2: of people who had similarly authoritarian ideas. And Prussianism is
Speaker 2: both an opponent of the Nazis when the Nazis are
Speaker 2: actually in place, like a lot of Prussians or opponents
Speaker 2: of the Nazis, and it's also foundational to what we
Speaker 2: recognize as Nazism. A lot of these attitudes that Prussianism
Speaker 2: inculcates and broader in all of these German territories. And
Speaker 2: one of the things about Prussianism is that it is
Speaker 2: an extremely patriarchal system. Right, you have your king, you know,
Speaker 2: this comes to be the Kaiser. He is the absolute
Speaker 2: ruler of the country. You know, it doesn't fully work
Speaker 2: out that way, but that's the idea. And likewise, the
Speaker 2: father is the absolute ruler of the household. You know, yeah,
Speaker 2: like that's how it is supposed to work. A lot
Speaker 2: of these ideas are descended from how Romans did things
Speaker 2: right in ancient Rome, the patriarch of the family, your dad,
Speaker 2: as long as he was alive, you were legally child,
Speaker 2: he could It's not a thing that often happened, but
Speaker 2: he could execute you your whole life. He had that freedom,
Speaker 2: that was a legal thing in Roman society. I didn't
Speaker 2: know that it kept going. I assumed that his ability
Speaker 2: to kill everyone he's related to stopped when those people
Speaker 2: turned eighteen. No, absolutely not. You think Rome would be
Speaker 2: that way.
Speaker 3: No, Rome, brutal.
Speaker 2: Rome never stopped at the point they should have stopped.
Speaker 2: That's what made them Rome. Ah. Welcome to Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 2: a podcast with Margaret Killjoy about why the Germans be
Speaker 2: like they do. Margaret host of cool people who did
Speaker 2: cool stuff.
Speaker 3: So good, Robert, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: We're talking about Prussianism just at the start of this episode. Again,
Speaker 2: this is an episode about a mom fluencer, the Nazi
Speaker 2: mom fluencer. But I do kind of feel like if
Speaker 2: we're talking about all these ideas about like how kids
Speaker 2: should be raised, that factor in the Nazis and that,
Speaker 2: you know, in the post Nazi era, if we don't
Speaker 2: say anything about Prussianism, we've kind of fucked up. So
Speaker 2: I felt like we had to a little bit and
Speaker 2: to give you an idea of like how patriarchal this
Speaker 2: was not in the way that the patriarchy gets talked
Speaker 2: about today. It's not that people mean a different thing,
Speaker 2: but they aren't talking about the exact same thing, right,
Speaker 2: They're talking about all these embedded attitudes of like masculine
Speaker 2: superiority and whatnot in pop culture, in the structure of
Speaker 2: our government and the structure of our society, and all
Speaker 2: of the ways in which that's harmful to both women
Speaker 2: and men. When I say that Prussian society was patriarchal,
Speaker 2: I'll give you an example. I interviewed a Prussian, elderly
Speaker 2: Prussian man once. His grandfather was one of these Prussian
Speaker 2: yunkers who was murdered by the Nazis, and he grew
Speaker 2: up in the early nineteen hundreds and told me that
Speaker 2: at family breakfasts, their regular ritual was everyone would gather
Speaker 2: around the table and watch his father eat a single egg,
Speaker 2: the only egg that their family could afford that day. Right,
Speaker 2: everyone had to watch him eat it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This was like, in a way, kind of this expression
Speaker 2: of these ideas that like, hey, you have the kaiser
Speaker 2: is the absolute center and head of this nation, and
Speaker 2: the father is the absolute despot of his family. Right,
Speaker 2: And this is a version of this. After the Kaiser
Speaker 2: goes away and you have these chaotic Weimar years where
Speaker 2: things are very progressive and men A lot of the
Speaker 2: men who become Nazis feel emasculated, right, And part of
Speaker 2: why they feel emasculated is that it is chaotic. Jobs
Speaker 2: are not as reliable, it's harder to provide for your family.
Speaker 2: Then the promise the Nazis make is that, well, we
Speaker 2: will bring back a world in which you, as the man,
Speaker 2: can be the absolute dictator of your home if you
Speaker 2: follow our furor as the absolute dictator of this nation.
Speaker 2: That is one of the very alluring promises of Nazism.
Speaker 3: I don't like the how naturally this relates to the
Speaker 3: things that are happening now and the way that the
Speaker 3: far right is talking about feeling emasculated by Nope, no,
Speaker 3: I don't like that. Could you change history a little
Speaker 3: bit so that the Nazis are a little more different
Speaker 3: than a modern American right wing so I feel a
Speaker 3: little safer.
Speaker 2: You see. I think that is the mistake people often
Speaker 2: make when they talk about figures like Schreber, who we
Speaker 2: just talked about and the lady who were talking about today,
Speaker 2: is they focused too much on them in order to
Speaker 2: talk about how the Germans were different, to allow the Nazis,
Speaker 2: and I do think it's important to talk about stuff
Speaker 2: like this, to be like, well, yeah, this is part
Speaker 2: of the appeal. Is this this shit that is both
Speaker 2: very Prussian but also very all the time everywhere.
Speaker 3: You know, no one wants to be a tradwife anymore.
Speaker 3: Why can't we just have more tradwives? Why aren't people
Speaker 3: having more children? Let's just bring back America being great,
Speaker 3: It'll be great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. So it's kind of ironic
Speaker 2: due to the fact that, like you know, the Nazis
Speaker 2: are such a patriarchal movement that they are kind of
Speaker 2: so obsessed with these ideas of traditional gender roles that
Speaker 2: the most influential expert on child wearing of the Nazi
Speaker 2: era was the walking embodiment of female empowerment in that age.
Speaker 2: Her name was Joanna Horror born Joanna barsh on October third,
Speaker 2: nineteen hundred in Bodenbach. Joanna's life began when doctor Schreber
Speaker 2: was the most influential name in German scientific child rearing practices.
Speaker 2: Her work would owe a great deal to the foundations
Speaker 2: that he established. Like most stories of people born in
Speaker 2: nineteen hundred, reading about Joanna's life and family reminds us
Speaker 2: that dying in a World war was often preferable to
Speaker 2: living in Europe back then. Her mother this is so
Speaker 2: fucked up. Her mother is Czech, which is like the
Speaker 2: family shame because not only is her mother not properly German,
Speaker 2: but she's born at Joanna's born out of wedlock, right,
Speaker 2: so she is ostracized and isolated from her community. As
Speaker 2: a little girl, Joanna still bore the stigma of this
Speaker 2: terrible shame and recalled later to her daughter that when
Speaker 2: her mom came out to her father as pregnant, her
Speaker 2: father beat her nearly to death, like this is the
Speaker 2: culture of the time, right, this is it is not
Speaker 2: weird that this happens to her. Her father's parents died
Speaker 2: when he was ten years old, so on the upside,
Speaker 2: there was no one to beat him when he has
Speaker 2: a kid out of weblock. The downside is that he
Speaker 2: has to leave high school as soon as he gets
Speaker 2: her mom pregnant to raise his new child, and he
Speaker 2: is isolated from the rest of his family as a
Speaker 2: result of the shame that this causes. His granddaughter, Joanna's
Speaker 2: daughter later claimed in his apprenticeship he had to carry
Speaker 2: heavy loads and got a hump. He and my grandmother
Speaker 2: ran a stationary shop. Because of his disability and poor education,
Speaker 2: my grandfather felt like an underdog, developed strong anti semitism
Speaker 2: and fled to alcohol. So Joanna's father passed his anti
Speaker 2: semitism and his alcoholism onto her, which is not abnormal.
Speaker 2: What is abnormal is that he also passed on his
Speaker 2: obsessive feeling that he should have done better in his life.
Speaker 2: And this is where this guy is kind of like,
Speaker 2: he's not you expect. Okay, You've got this story about
Speaker 2: a woman who becomes very accomplished and powerful. Her dad
Speaker 2: is angry that he doesn't succeed as much as he
Speaker 2: feels like he should. He becomes an alcoholic. He's like
Speaker 2: a drunk and by our standards, abusive, But at the
Speaker 2: same time he is also The way his abuse manifest
Speaker 2: is he pushes Joanna to excel. He wants her to
Speaker 2: achieve the things that he couldn't, which is so different
Speaker 2: from how you expect this story to go. Yeah, although
Speaker 2: since you've told me about Schreber, it kind of makes sense,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, Oh, I have a hunchback, so that's
Speaker 2: why I'm gonna strap a two by four year back
Speaker 2: for his entire life, right right, And in this case,
Speaker 2: he's like, I never got to be anything because I
Speaker 2: had to, you know, be the man of the family
Speaker 2: from such a young age. But by God, you're going
Speaker 2: to make something of yourself now. Some of his obsession
Speaker 2: with this comes down to the fact that her brother
Speaker 2: and her brother's two years older than her, dies horrifically
Speaker 2: of meningitis when Joanna is eight. Joanna never really writes
Speaker 2: about her older brother's death, and when she does, she
Speaker 2: describes it clinically, without mourning or signs of pain. She
Speaker 2: claims his death inspired her to study medicine, but in
Speaker 2: a way that sort of suggests she was more fascinated
Speaker 2: by the symptoms of his illness than motivated by a
Speaker 2: wish to have saved him, which is very very much
Speaker 2: the person she is. She is not a oh, if
Speaker 2: only I could have saved my beloved brother. She is
Speaker 2: a oh the way that he's dying is very interesting.
Speaker 2: I need to study this more. She's a creepy kid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't want to know what happens in
Speaker 3: the neighborhood cats when she lives there.
Speaker 2: You know, she might have been torturing some cats. Well,
Speaker 2: never know, but it like, given the path this late
Speaker 2: and what her kids say about her, I'm going to
Speaker 2: say forty percent chance she was torturing some animals. Okay,
Speaker 2: not bad, not a low odd So losing a sibling
Speaker 2: or a child was not an uncommon experience in Germany
Speaker 2: during this period. At the start of the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: Germany had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe.
Speaker 2: This is why under the Kaiser it developed the first
Speaker 2: European national institution dedicated to lowering infant mortality. As a result,
Speaker 2: so one of the things that's happening during especially in
Speaker 2: the Weimar period, it starts under the Kaiser. But during Weimar,
Speaker 2: this attitude of like scientists are meddling in the way
Speaker 2: we're treating we're raising our children kind of becomes chronic
Speaker 2: along the right. And the reason is that, like and
Speaker 2: again this isn't a progressive thing. It starts under the Kaiser,
Speaker 2: but it's because German kids die all the time.
Speaker 3: They're like, we have a problem, we have to fix it.
Speaker 3: Let's apply the scientific method. But it's the early twentieth century,
Speaker 3: so the scientific method has more to do with like
Speaker 3: Frankenstein and doctor Jack almoster Hyde than.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, it's both a mix of a lot of
Speaker 2: what the scientists are saying isn't right, and when it is,
Speaker 2: it pisses off these people who have these contra ideas
Speaker 2: of like how you should treat children that are pretty brutal.
Speaker 2: And that's going to be part of what gives Joanna
Speaker 2: a career is the fact that there are people angry
Speaker 2: at all these doctors meddling and parents.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, So she is like, oh, she's like
Speaker 3: anti vax fucking yes.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 2: Well I don't think she's literally it. She is a doctor.
Speaker 3: She's equivalent of the modern anti vax if like, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2: Now, Joanna's own mother. She's very close to her father.
Speaker 2: Her mother is absent most of her childhood, and she
Speaker 2: will describe later that being deprived of her mother's love
Speaker 2: devastates her. Quote nothing could comfort me. She clung to
Speaker 2: her father, even though he was a wreck an alcoholic
Speaker 2: who drowned his sorrow at bars. He dragged her to
Speaker 2: and from Her earliest memories involved walking with quote my
Speaker 2: swaying father, who smelled of beer and held me by
Speaker 2: the hand as I walked through the Bodenbox streets. My
Speaker 2: shame was limitless. But while she expresses shame at her father,
Speaker 2: Alois barsh he also pushed his daughter to lean into
Speaker 2: her ambitions, which were basically unique in her area and time.
Speaker 2: She wanted to be a doctor. Now there were women
Speaker 2: doctors at this point, obviously in many countries, but they
Speaker 2: were not common. And the boarding school that she gets
Speaker 2: into to prepare her for medical school is an all
Speaker 2: boys school. Her father this is like such a mix
Speaker 2: of inspiring and fucked up. Her father picks this all
Speaker 2: boys school for her because it's the best school he
Speaker 2: can find that doesn't allow Jews. The so you've got like, oh,
Speaker 2: what a piece of shit. But then he goes to
Speaker 2: the school and is like, you won't admit girls, wait
Speaker 2: till you meet my daughter. And he introduces Joanna to
Speaker 2: the director of the school, who like has a brief
Speaker 2: conversation with her and says, we'll try it, We'll take her,
Speaker 2: you know, Like he's so, I like it's this. It's
Speaker 2: such a weird mix of like the most like feminist
Speaker 2: story of fatherhood from nineteen sixteen Germany with also like
Speaker 2: in the school Camdem and he choosing it.
Speaker 3: This is such a like I mean, this is the
Speaker 3: classic bastard set up? Is that? Like? I almost because
Speaker 3: this could be the origin story of a Mari of
Speaker 3: a lice. Yes, you know, like against the odds and
Speaker 3: her and even that her like father like cared even
Speaker 3: though he was an embarrassing failure of a drum.
Speaker 2: That this was a complicated man. He you know, he
Speaker 2: dealt with all these challenges, but he focused so much
Speaker 2: on her. But which is and all of that's true?
Speaker 2: He was also a raging anti Semite. Yeah, and so
Speaker 2: she becomes a Nazi. Yeah, So the first challenge that
Speaker 2: she faces is that. And again this goes into like
Speaker 2: the hero narrative here. Prior to joining this boarding school,
Speaker 2: because she was a girl, she had not been given
Speaker 2: any formal mathematics training. So when she starts school she
Speaker 2: has to make up for six years of lost time,
Speaker 2: and her first year at boarding school, she develops a
Speaker 2: habit of waking up at four am every morning just
Speaker 2: to study in order to like make it through this curriculum.
Speaker 2: She's excellent at this. She is very smart. She does
Speaker 2: very well in school. She graduates in nineteen twenty, right
Speaker 2: after World War One ends, and she is the only
Speaker 2: girl at this school schlosh Bieberstein.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Her performance is good enough that she is admitted to
Speaker 2: the University of Heidelberg and eventually to Gotingen and Munich
Speaker 2: as well, and she becomes a pulmonologist. She's a lung doctor.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: She receives a license to practice medicine in nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 2: and again not unique, but very rare and very rare
Speaker 2: that she goes about it in this way. Two years earlier,
Speaker 2: she had met her first husband, Helmut Wis, a pharmaceutical
Speaker 2: researcher who they It's kind of unclear exactly what happened.
Speaker 2: One story, I think, the story Joanna gave is that
Speaker 2: he cheated on her and had a child out of wedlock.
Speaker 2: It's not fully clear to me what goes down, but
Speaker 2: she divorces him. Right now, she is already she's not
Speaker 2: a member of the Nazi Party at this point. By
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty nine, she is very much into Nazi type shit.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of the far right at this
Speaker 2: point in twenty nine is bigger and broader than just Nazis.
Speaker 2: There's all sorts of groups that are eventually the way
Speaker 2: that like Bavarians and Prussians get folded into all being German,
Speaker 2: we fold them into Nazis. Now she is into a
Speaker 2: lot of extreme right wing stuff, some of which a
Speaker 2: lot of which gets folded into the Nazis at the time.
Speaker 2: But you might find that surprising, mixed with the fact
Speaker 2: that she gets a divorce, that she is the because
Speaker 2: we have this idea of Nazis as basically more extreme
Speaker 2: versions of religious conservatives right the ones that we deal
Speaker 2: with today, and they hate the idea of a woman
Speaker 2: being able to divorce her husband. That is not an
Speaker 2: accurate depiction of the Nazis. The Nazis embraced conservatives, they
Speaker 2: eventually co opted conservative parties and the political power that
Speaker 2: that gave them, But the Nazis were radicals. Their goal
Speaker 2: was to radically remake society, and the leadership of the
Speaker 2: Nazis loved the concept of divorce. Heinrich Himmler encouraged divorced
Speaker 2: and wanted it to be easy for both men and
Speaker 2: women because letting people split up from partners they disliked
Speaker 2: would encourage them to raise big families. Right, they support
Speaker 2: divorce because they think it enables more love matches that
Speaker 2: will lead to a lot of kids. The Nazis are
Speaker 2: not anti sex. They are anti homosexuality, for darn sure
Speaker 2: of particularly male homosexuality. They're a little softer on lesbians,
Speaker 2: the Nazis, but the Nazi and again, yeah, eventually, because
Speaker 2: there are a lot of homosexual Nazis in this early
Speaker 2: period that we're talking about. But the Nazis are one
Speaker 2: of the conflicts they have with the Christian Conservatives that
Speaker 2: they co opt is the Nazis are very pro sex,
Speaker 2: and not just pro having families, but pro like the
Speaker 2: female orgasm as a concept, Like there is Nazi writing
Speaker 2: on that, and like the SS digest Again, people, this
Speaker 2: very rarely gets delved into because it's really uncomfortable to
Speaker 2: look at. But the Nazis are radicals, right, and that
Speaker 2: means they are for reimagining every aspect of society.
Speaker 3: I think that it like really shows that because fascism
Speaker 3: doesn't come out of the traditional conservative right, it comes
Speaker 3: out of people with similar values to that who are
Speaker 3: looking at the strategies and the concepts of the left
Speaker 3: and are like, how do we apply that to right
Speaker 3: the right wing and nationalism instead?
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, and that is this again, this comes
Speaker 2: from like there's this this this attitude which is not
Speaker 2: morally wrong. Where're like, at a certain point, everyone just
Speaker 2: fighting under that flag was a Nazi. But if you
Speaker 2: look at like a conservative Catholic who voted for the
Speaker 2: Nazis because he thought it was the best alternative to
Speaker 2: the Communists as the same as Heinrich Himmler, you're going
Speaker 2: to miss a lot of who Himmler was and what
Speaker 2: he believed because he had a lot of disagreements with
Speaker 2: that Gatholic you know, right. Yeah, And so again, when
Speaker 2: we're talking about this period in the late twenties, the
Speaker 2: Nazis are kind of more fit. In the early thirties,
Speaker 2: the Nazis are more famous for wanting to abolish specific
Speaker 2: sexual taboos than being obsessed with them. Herbert Marcuse, a
Speaker 2: critic of the Nazis who wound up working for the OSS,
Speaker 2: listed his complaints against the Nazi ideology this way. Quote
Speaker 2: the deliberate herding of boys and girls in the training camps,
Speaker 2: the license granted to the racial elite, the facilitation of
Speaker 2: marriage and divorce, the sanctioning of illegitimate children. So you
Speaker 2: can see part of why this appeals to her. She
Speaker 2: grows up with the shame of being an illegitimate child,
Speaker 2: and a big thing that guys like Himler and Hitler
Speaker 2: say is that there is no such If you are aryan,
Speaker 2: you're legitimate. It doesn't matter if your parents weren't married,
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter if your dad was fucking around on
Speaker 2: a bunch of people. As long as you're Bloe Boodline
Speaker 2: is good, that's all we care about. It matters. Yeah,
Speaker 2: exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: Which is Schreber's ideas applied to the nation instead of
Speaker 3: the home. The like corrective force comes from not just Schreber.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, you know, a lot, a lot of
Speaker 3: this is coming together, right. Yeah, again, we're picking two people.
Speaker 3: I hope, I'm I'm repeatedly reinforcing the trends that lead
Speaker 3: to this are larger than those two people. Yeah, they're
Speaker 3: not even dominos in the chain, because there's like it's
Speaker 3: not a single chain. It's like a field of dominoes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're like individual dominoes, and a two dimensional not one
Speaker 3: dimensional domino. That's a totally useful metaphor anyway, I like it.
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty eight, the Nazis actually introduced new divorce
Speaker 2: legislation that make it legal for the first time in
Speaker 2: Germany to break up based on the grounds of emotional incompatibility.
Speaker 2: That is, that is a thing the Nazis introduced into
Speaker 2: German law. You can get divorced if you don't like
Speaker 2: each other anymore. In the book Sex after Fascism, which
Speaker 2: is an amazing book very well worth reading, Dagmar Herzog
Speaker 2: writes other grounds for divorce could be found in failure
Speaker 2: to engage in sexual intercourse and thereby fulfill one's marital duties,
Speaker 2: and the use of contraception, and in childlessness. While early
Speaker 2: on in the Third Reich, the Nazi mouthpiece Folcusho Beobacter
Speaker 2: had announced explicitly that Nazism opposed divorce, while invoking the
Speaker 2: popular phrase marriages are made in heaven. By nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 2: in the same paper was publishing articles that not only
Speaker 2: sought to help women accept the new divorce regulations, but
Speaker 2: glorified divorce and remarriage as an appropriate means of following
Speaker 2: the inner law of one's life and nature. And so again,
Speaker 2: you can find plenty of Nazis being like divorce is horrible,
Speaker 2: just like you can find Nazis saying contraceptions horrible. You
Speaker 2: can also find them like a lot of embracing these
Speaker 2: kind of conservative attitudes towards sex is done when they
Speaker 2: need the conservatives. And then these more radical attitudes that
Speaker 2: are that are argued towards expanding the size of the
Speaker 2: VULK get to come out in the late thirties where
Speaker 2: they're like, no, no, no, people should be able to
Speaker 2: split up. And also if your husband has a bunch
Speaker 2: of mistresses, mistresses, you should maybe be fine with that
Speaker 2: as long as he's having kids with them. And right, like,
Speaker 2: and it'll be the job to support these kids. We
Speaker 2: have homes for single mothers where like you can come
Speaker 2: if you get knocked up by some ss man, and
Speaker 2: the state will help you raise your children. You know,
Speaker 2: when Matters is misntimizing gun kids. Now we need so
Speaker 2: many more kids now that there's machine guns. It's you
Speaker 2: thought it was easy to kill kids in nineteen hundred,
Speaker 2: It is so easy to kill kids in the forties. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we're gonna need a lot of your children very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and I think this gets it like a
Speaker 2: mistake people will still make about modern fascists. You get
Speaker 2: some story about like Roger Stone, how he's really a
Speaker 2: swinger who does like drugs pretending to be this Christian
Speaker 2: conservative or like Trump is the opposite of the person
Speaker 2: he's evangelical followers claim to support. And you get a
Speaker 2: lot of liberals and even leftists who will like point
Speaker 2: out these elements of what they see as hypocrisy as
Speaker 2: as if it's a weakness, when it's really evidence of
Speaker 2: a strength, which is that fascists are great at making
Speaker 2: temporary alliances to gain power and lying about what they
Speaker 2: believe to gain power, and their supporters, who are like
Speaker 2: believe different things than them, and a lot of cases
Speaker 2: are much more religiously conservative, are willing to work with
Speaker 2: them to kill the people they hate. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's very frustrating to me when people look at that
Speaker 2: as like, but they're not you know, they shouldn't support
Speaker 2: this man. It's like, well, that's not looking because yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's all it's about, is power, you know.
Speaker 3: But this, like, sometimes I have a certain amount of
Speaker 3: respect for someone who's my ideological foe as long who
Speaker 3: is ideologically consistent. I'm not going to find that in
Speaker 3: the in the far right.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, like no, because that's not the kind
Speaker 2: of people that they are. Yeah, in Weimar, Germany, the
Speaker 2: Nazis made hay out of stories of drugs and homosexual
Speaker 2: debauchery in Berlin as part of their campaign to get
Speaker 2: middle of the road Protestants and Catholics to pick them
Speaker 2: over these scary atheist communists and socialists who are you know,
Speaker 2: in reality also fighting each other as often as anybody else.
Speaker 2: Once the Nazis were in power, these same Christians were
Speaker 2: often frustrated by the fact that Nazism was not very
Speaker 2: compatible with Christianity, and in fact, if you're looking at
Speaker 2: guys like Himmler, sought to kind of destroy Christianity as
Speaker 2: it existed, but by then it was too late in
Speaker 2: Joanna's case though. Now back to back to our lady Joanna,
Speaker 2: her first husband maybe cheats on her, maybe she just
Speaker 2: doesn't get along with them. Either way, they get a divorce.
Speaker 2: And it is interesting if her husband cheated on her
Speaker 2: and got a friend of hers pregnant, which is what
Speaker 2: she told her kids. That is behavior the Nazis encouraged. Right,
Speaker 2: wives are kind of advised to ignore, especially like wives
Speaker 2: in the SS. A lot of writings in the SS
Speaker 2: magazine kind of resemble fascist swinger culture where they're talking
Speaker 2: about like it's really weird to read now, but anyway,
Speaker 2: her divorce is both evidence that like, she is not
Speaker 2: fully bought in on all of the things the Nazis
Speaker 2: are going to argue for, but also there's a lot
Speaker 2: of opportunity for a woman like her in the Nazi Party, because,
Speaker 2: for one thing, they don't believe that there's any shame
Speaker 2: in being born out of wedlock, and for another thing,
Speaker 2: they don't believe that there's any shame in being a divorcee. Right, yeah,
Speaker 2: like that does not lock you out of anything in
Speaker 2: the Nazi social hierarchy. In nineteen thirty two, she got
Speaker 2: married for the second time, to a pulmonary specialist named
Speaker 2: Otto Herrr. Their daughter later described the union as one
Speaker 2: of great love for her father and a welcome anchor
Speaker 2: for Joanna. They had their first twins the next year,
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty three, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Having
Speaker 2: served as a full physician for less than ten years,
Speaker 2: Joanna had to find like, basically she has to quit
Speaker 2: her job as a doctor because work while having twins
Speaker 2: is not possible. So she quits her job, and this
Speaker 2: kind of fills her with frustration. She has been such
Speaker 2: a drifven person her entire life. She can't just switch
Speaker 2: off to caring for kids, right and doing nothing else.
Speaker 2: She is too ambitious and more to the point, she's
Speaker 2: a terrible mother. Right, she has just lost a TikTok. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2: She's one of those people who she can't continue what
Speaker 2: she had been doing when she has kids. But she's
Speaker 2: also not going to raise them and what we would
Speaker 2: recognize as raising your kids. So she has a lot
Speaker 2: of time for a side hustle. Yeah, and that side
Speaker 2: hustle is she starts putting together like articles on how
Speaker 2: to raise kids the National Socialist way. She starts your
Speaker 2: career as a writer, publishing articles for the Nazi Party newspaper,
Speaker 2: the Vulksurebeobacter. These were successful enough that she approached a publisher,
Speaker 2: Julius LeMans, to write a full book on child rearing.
Speaker 2: They accepted even though she had no pediatric training and
Speaker 2: that their grounds are basically, well, she's a mom, right,
Speaker 2: that's all she should need to be able to write
Speaker 2: a book. This is This is literally what the publisher
Speaker 2: wrote later. The fortunate circumstance that this physician was also
Speaker 2: a wife and young mother who had not simply gained
Speaker 2: her experiences as a physician, but with her own children
Speaker 2: that gave her books qualities which others did not have.
Speaker 3: I mean, this would be true right now if you
Speaker 3: were like, I have a PhD and a child, they'd
Speaker 3: be like, of course you can write a book. You're
Speaker 3: also a little correct political party.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it would only be easier to be this lady today.
Speaker 2: And that's why there's like a million of her, one
Speaker 2: of whom just pled guilty to child abuse. Right That
Speaker 2: is kind of why I started this episode with that story.
Speaker 2: But you know who never repleat Wow, shit, Margaret, how's
Speaker 2: some ads sound? Do that sound good to you? I
Speaker 2: love that about child abuse.
Speaker 3: I think it's so excited every time I get an
Speaker 3: opportunity to learn about a new product or service.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that's where I am. Baby, we're back.
Speaker 3: So now that we're back, if you just you're just
Speaker 3: here for the ads, just press forward a bunch of
Speaker 3: times until you get to the bumper music and then
Speaker 3: you can hear the ads.
Speaker 2: If you listen to the for like the four minutes
Speaker 2: of ads in every single episode. That's what you do
Speaker 2: in every week yeah, because I mean the number of
Speaker 2: people who listen to that has to be one person
Speaker 2: who's like, ah, well they get through these fucking history stories,
Speaker 2: so I can hear an ad Yeah, I want to
Speaker 2: know about Chumba. Goddamnit.
Speaker 3: That was the one that was in my mind too.
Speaker 2: So she's been some time first year or so that
Speaker 2: she's got kids writing articles for this, you know, the
Speaker 2: big Nazi party paper about child rearing, and then she decides,
Speaker 2: and this is always a bad idea to write a book.
Speaker 2: It's a particularly bad idea in her case because the
Speaker 2: book that she decided to write wasn't a really good
Speaker 2: work of fiction like your book The Sapling Cage Mark.
Speaker 2: It was a real stinker of a tone with the
Speaker 2: snoozeworthy title The German Mother and her First Child. Oh shit,
Speaker 2: was that the title of the sequel? Because you might need.
Speaker 3: To change No, No, it's okay, yeah, no, I because
Speaker 3: you didn't say in the original German and my sequel
Speaker 3: is going to be in German.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all German. Yes, you're using chatchypet for that entirely.
Speaker 3: It's gonna yeah, totally. This is this is the equivalent
Speaker 3: of spreading a rumor that someone has murdered someone, as
Speaker 3: if you spread rumors that I use arpeicial intelligence for
Speaker 3: fiction for German.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, just to translate it, just.
Speaker 3: To translate it totally. Yeah, only my German works are easily.
Speaker 2: Joanna was essentially a career woman who had been forced
Speaker 2: to curtail her career to raise kids. Her conclusion as
Speaker 2: a result of this was that children, This is what
Speaker 2: her book is about. Children are distractions. They are petty
Speaker 2: irritants and even tyrants that need to have their will
Speaker 2: broken so that they can be molded to more conveniently
Speaker 2: fit into society. And one, you know, it's this lady
Speaker 2: is so Shrebber is such a complex figure and you
Speaker 2: have to like have it. She is just the worst
Speaker 2: person who ever lived.
Speaker 3: She just shouldn't have had children. She didn't want them,
Speaker 3: she shouldn't have It's fine. Abortions, well no, not well,
Speaker 3: actually the Nazis were pro abortion for certain people.
Speaker 2: Yes, they sure were very pro for certain people. You
Speaker 2: can't box them in simply there.
Speaker 3: No, you can put them in the Nazi box. You
Speaker 3: Nazis were pro abortion. Someone would think for five minutes
Speaker 3: and be like, not for white people, you know, I.
Speaker 2: Do just to go back to an earlier thing. I
Speaker 2: do support looking at Nazis as two boxes. Nazis of
Speaker 2: convenience because you wanted something at Nazis because being a
Speaker 2: Nazi was your Again, the hip like Himmler is the
Speaker 2: perfect example of the Nazis because Nazism, right, Yeah, Himmler
Speaker 2: had a bunch of really weird specific shit he believed,
Speaker 2: you know, as opposed to like again some of some
Speaker 2: of these like religious conservatives who didn't agree with a
Speaker 2: lot of these other weird Nazi idea. Yeah, I think
Speaker 2: that's kind of worth it. And Joanna is a Himmler Nazi.
Speaker 2: She is a weird specific, fucking Nazi. And in one
Speaker 2: chapter of her books she urges quote the child is
Speaker 2: to be fed bait and dry it off. Apart from that,
Speaker 2: left completely alone. This is here talking about like the
Speaker 2: contact you should have with your child as a as
Speaker 2: a parent. You feed them, you bathe them, you dry
Speaker 2: them off. You never touch them. Otherwise, they do not
Speaker 2: have physical contact with the adults in their life other
Speaker 2: than that. This process of total physical separation from their
Speaker 2: parents was to begin immediately after birth, as soon as
Speaker 2: the umbilical cord was cut. She recommended that infants be
Speaker 2: left isolated for the first twenty four hours after birth,
Speaker 2: locked alone in a room. Oh my god, it's like
Speaker 2: the most you see again with Schreber, you see like, oh,
Speaker 2: this guy was dealing with struggling with some of these compulsions,
Speaker 2: and he's trying to solve these real problems. With Joanna,
Speaker 2: you're like, oh, you just hated kids.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you just hatred of a marginalized group. Only your
Speaker 3: marginalized group is children.
Speaker 2: Yeah, your own children are marginalized, which is kind of
Speaker 2: the Nazi story writ large in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: Totally, the greatest mess has got a lot of white
Speaker 3: Germans killed.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, more than almost anyone. The greatest mistake, in
Speaker 2: Joanna's eyes, that a parent could make would be to
Speaker 2: pay any attention at all to their children's tears. If
Speaker 2: you react to a baby when it cries, quote, the
Speaker 2: child will quickly understand that all he needs to do
Speaker 2: is cry in order to attract a sympathetic soul and
Speaker 2: become the object of caring. Within a short time, he
Speaker 2: will demand this service as a right, leave you no
Speaker 2: peace until he is carried again, cradled, or stroked, And
Speaker 2: with that, a tiny but implacable house tyrant is formed.
Speaker 3: I really I want to to write a children's book
Speaker 3: called The Tiny Implacable House Tyrants. But it's a pro
Speaker 3: the two year old.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, you see where the there's a kernel
Speaker 2: of truth here every parent that sometimes the little kid
Speaker 2: is like, oh my god, they've turned into a little tyrant. Right,
Speaker 2: And like very young children, younger than you would expect,
Speaker 2: learn how to like fake cry to get attention. Right,
Speaker 2: they're learning because they need attention. Is this is you
Speaker 2: can call it manipulation. That's literally what it is. It's
Speaker 2: not abnormal or a sign that a child is unhealthy.
Speaker 2: It's a sign that they are learning how to communicate
Speaker 2: and what it means to be a person. And like
Speaker 2: decent parents understand that, Like, well, if you're if your
Speaker 2: kid is fate crying for attention, you don't want to
Speaker 2: give them the same attention that they get when they
Speaker 2: are actually crying. But you don't just ignore them or
Speaker 2: lock them alone in a room, because that's child abuse, right,
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: Adults they don't in front of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can nicely say, like I know that that's
Speaker 2: not real. You didn't really hit yourself, you like fell
Speaker 2: down and stop yourself from hitting yourself. And now you're
Speaker 2: fate crying and like I can see that that's fake. Like,
Speaker 2: come on, let's go do something else. Right, You don't
Speaker 2: lock them alone in a room and never touch them
Speaker 2: for eighteen years. You know, there there are a wide variety.
Speaker 2: I'll say this, I think there's a variety of ways
Speaker 2: to deal with this behavior from children. None of them
Speaker 2: how Joanna teaches people how to do this.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, totally, because it's like, very rarely is lock
Speaker 3: anyone into a room by themselves, right for more than
Speaker 3: like fifteen minutes a solution to anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Like I lock myself in a room sometimes
Speaker 2: away from people. But yeah, that's that's a matter of
Speaker 2: personal choice. Ye. Yes, I have been described in such
Speaker 2: a way. Sigrid Chamberlain, who analyzed Herr's book and detail
Speaker 2: in a book of her own, summarized Joanna's attitude towards
Speaker 2: child rearing this way. So from the first minute of life,
Speaker 2: everything was done to encourage the inability to have a relationship.
Speaker 2: Everything that promoted relationships was forbidden because the main goal
Speaker 2: was not to let the relationship between the mother or
Speaker 2: parents and the child arise. In the first place. This
Speaker 2: is also the purpose of Harror's demands not to spend
Speaker 2: any time together except for feeding, changing diapers, getting dressed,
Speaker 2: in bathing. For this, however, exact periods of time were given.
Speaker 2: Bottle feeding should never take longer than ten minutes, breastfeeding
Speaker 2: no longer than twenty minutes. If the child strolls or dottles,
Speaker 2: feeding or breastfeeding should be stopped. There is no food
Speaker 2: again until the next scheduled meal. If the child is
Speaker 2: hungry by then, firstly, it serves him well, and secondly,
Speaker 2: he learns that he will have to hurry up next time.
Speaker 2: That's such a bad way to be a parrot. I
Speaker 2: probably don't need to say. Keep in mind, this lady's
Speaker 2: a Nazi, right, It's not hard to but I should
Speaker 2: emphasize her book also includes a great deal of what
Speaker 2: you might call social Darwinian child wearing philosophy. Adults are
Speaker 2: put him in the trenches and see if they survive
Speaker 2: mustard gas. Yeah, yes, see if they're immune to the
Speaker 2: machine guns yet, if we bred that into him yet?
Speaker 2: No yet, next generation, keep them coming. Eventually we'll build
Speaker 2: the German that's immune to Russian bullets.
Speaker 3: I can feel it.
Speaker 2: We're close. Yeah. So in one of the ways in
Speaker 2: which this manifested is that adults Joanna encourages like parents
Speaker 2: and adults around children to point out anytime a child
Speaker 2: makes a mistake or exhibits a weakness in an area.
Speaker 2: If they like exhibit that they're weak or flawed in
Speaker 2: an area, you point it out in front of everyone,
Speaker 2: and you mock it in public every time. It happens.
Speaker 2: Every time. Yeah, every parent should be a gym teacher.
Speaker 2: That is the Joanna Harrr method. That is how the
Speaker 2: Nazi society works. Yeah. The primary job Herro describes the
Speaker 2: primary job of a good teacher as being to make
Speaker 2: fun of kids, basically for being wrong about things, not
Speaker 2: to teach them, but to make them shamed of their ignorance.
Speaker 2: Super funny. Harrr describes her teachings as modern and scientific,
Speaker 2: and Adolf Hitler himself agreed. He personally recommends her book
Speaker 2: to German parents like she is the Hitler approved mom
Speaker 2: fluencer of the Third Reich. The op Hitler is. Hitler
Speaker 2: is the Oprah of Germany and this period He's got
Speaker 2: a lot of oprahsque quality. A captivating narrator look we
Speaker 2: can say it. Yeah, and he's rout of cars. He
Speaker 2: did give everyone go oh my god, Margaret the greater
Speaker 2: Oprah theory of Nazism scanning a lot of traction. And
Speaker 2: like Oprah, he's really good at selling books because he
Speaker 2: recommends her book to the whole German Reich and it
Speaker 2: sells more than one point two million copies, which is
Speaker 2: pretty good for now. That's a lot back then. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's like three days of deaths on the Eastern Front,
Speaker 2: you know. So if you're wondering how this kind of
Speaker 2: parenting might impact a child, so did Klaus Grossman, who
Speaker 2: is a he's a modern day researcher. He's actually retired now,
Speaker 2: but during the latter half of the twentieth century was
Speaker 2: a leading researcher on mother child attachment from the University
Speaker 2: at Regensburg. He told Scientific American quote Juanna Herr's view,
Speaker 2: it is important to deny caring when a child asks
Speaker 2: for it, but each refusal means rejection. Grossman explains. The
Speaker 2: only means of communication open to a newborn or facial
Speaker 2: expression in gestures. He adds, if no response is forthcoming,
Speaker 2: children learn that nothing they try to communicate means anything. Moreover,
Speaker 2: infants experience existential fear when they are alone and hungry
Speaker 2: and receive no comfort from their attachment figure. In the
Speaker 2: worst case, such experiences lead to a form of insecure
Speaker 2: attachment that makes it difficult to enter into relationships with
Speaker 2: other people in later life. That is not It seems obvious,
Speaker 2: but again this is very controversial amongst Nazis.
Speaker 3: That like, it's a it's a self fulfilling freud Yes,
Speaker 3: it's like you create people with Freudian style attachment problems
Speaker 3: by raising them in this way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by very purposefully going about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I started episode one of this series by referencing
Speaker 2: a recently disgraced momfluencer. And while that was kind of
Speaker 2: a joke for doctor Schreber comparing him to a mo influencer,
Speaker 2: Juanna Horror is literally her generation social media mommy guru.
Speaker 2: She even writes a Nazi children's book, mother tell me
Speaker 2: about Adolf Hitler. She does christ, It's so fun. The
Speaker 2: implacable child. Yeah, the implacable child. Oh tell me about
Speaker 2: Adolf Hitler. You shouldn't be surprised to hear that this
Speaker 2: is a racist book. Time Magazine. German Time Magazine notes
Speaker 2: that in the book quote Jews creep like cats, so
Speaker 2: that the dogs strike. The Jew should be chased away.
Speaker 2: He is foreign to us, he doesn't concern us, and
Speaker 2: always just wanted to harm us. God the book ends
Speaker 2: sent us a leader like the world has never seen him.
Speaker 2: We want to believe him, trust him, follow him wherever
Speaker 2: he leads, now and always. This is again published in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty. I have found some pictures of this book
Speaker 2: on auction websites, and it mostly looks like a normal
Speaker 2: child's book for the era, with black and white illustrations
Speaker 2: every couple of pages. But I found a list of
Speaker 2: the table of contents that gives you an idea of
Speaker 2: the thrust of the story. Chapter one, from the Great War,
Speaker 2: How the War ended. From Adolf Hitler's homeland, Adolf Hitler
Speaker 2: starts his fight. Adolf Hitler wants to help Germany. How
Speaker 2: he was betrayed from Germany's worst time. Adolf Hitler starts
Speaker 2: fighting again. Doctor Gerbels fights for Berlin. Adolf Hitler becomes
Speaker 2: our furor and reich Chancellor. Adolf Hitler provides working bread.
Speaker 2: Adolf Hitler alleviates the misery in Germany. Adolf Hitler creates
Speaker 2: the German Wehrmacht. Adolf Hitler continues to build the Third
Speaker 2: Reich to shame. The book stops right before the Hitler
Speaker 2: story gets good. She's like, right at the cusp of
Speaker 2: things getting interesting, Adolf Hitler alone in the bunker. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Adolf Hitler with a thirty eight or thirty two. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Adolf Hitler gets all of the German boys raised on
Speaker 2: Joanna's books killed outside of Stalingrat.
Speaker 3: Adol Hitler finally learns perspective, and his paintings just kidding,
Speaker 3: could never happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, he absolutely doesn't get that shit right.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite things in the world is when
Speaker 3: every now and then, some like Nazi on Twitter is like, see, look,
Speaker 3: isn't he an amazing painter, And it's just like, no, man,
Speaker 3: this isn't the thing that I want to argue about
Speaker 3: Hitler about No, but no, the answer is no.
Speaker 2: But like, if he was an eighth grader, I'd say
Speaker 2: he's got promise he.
Speaker 3: Could have He could could have become a decent painter
Speaker 3: if he'd continued to if he learned perspective. And I
Speaker 3: think people.
Speaker 2: Who were like he could have been like a middle
Speaker 2: class architect and made houses and probably been okay at something. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but that was not what was going to make Hitler happy.
Speaker 2: Nothing actually made Hitler happy. He was a pretty fundamentally
Speaker 2: unhappy man. But that's a story for several other days
Speaker 2: that we've talked about at length.
Speaker 3: No one really talks about Hitler. That's the thing, is, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the thing. Podcasters never really bring that man up.
Speaker 3: They're afraid to. Yeah, they hitting only people who are
Speaker 3: brave enough to go on a tangent about Hitler.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, yeah, only this podcast. That's why they call
Speaker 2: him Hitler, the man who failed to launch a thousand podcasts.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So anyway, I bet you're wondering believing all these things
Speaker 2: that she does and preaching them to other Nazis. What
Speaker 2: was Joanna like as a mother? Did she actually abide
Speaker 2: by her own teachings? And unfortunately, yes, just for the sake, Yeah,
Speaker 2: just for the sake of her daughters. You'd wish she
Speaker 2: had been a hypocrite, but she is not. Joanna's diather,
Speaker 2: Gertrude would later claim to Time magazine that her mother
Speaker 2: strictly abided by the parenting teaching she believed in. This
Speaker 2: led Gertrude to be desperate for affection and deeply cut
Speaker 2: off from her parents, but physically tough. She later recalled this.
Speaker 2: I broke my arm during a bike trip with my
Speaker 2: sister in a fall, but we drove on to a
Speaker 2: forest spent the day there. Although my arm grew thicker
Speaker 2: and thicker, I could only drive back with one hand.
Speaker 2: We still went to an ice cream parlor on Leopold Strasa.
Speaker 2: The bright madness but typical. I was even proud that
Speaker 2: I endured the pain and was tough, And that is
Speaker 2: she has. That's horrible. A child should not fight through
Speaker 2: the pain of breaking her own arm on a bicycle.
Speaker 2: She should go receive medical attention. But this is what
Speaker 2: the Nazis wanted. We're going to talk a little bit
Speaker 2: more about this later, but she, Gertrude is a little girl.
Speaker 2: Is the kind of kid that Joanna and Hitler are
Speaker 2: aiming to create. Now that whole interview with Gertrude is translated,
Speaker 2: I did like an automatic Google translate, much like we
Speaker 2: were joking about earlier, from German into English. So I
Speaker 2: noticed that that Gertrude repeatedly referred to Joanna not as
Speaker 2: my mother but as the mother, and I was like, Oh,
Speaker 2: that's probably some sort of like translation fuck up. But
Speaker 2: then later in the interview, the interview was like, you
Speaker 2: only refer to your mom as the mother, not as
Speaker 2: my mother. That's kind of weird, and Gertrude clarifies that's
Speaker 2: how she saw. She was never my mother. She was
Speaker 2: the mother, that was her title, but she was not
Speaker 2: my mom quoto. She was always the mother. There was distance.
Speaker 2: The mother was the highest authority. And that is so
Speaker 2: profoundly fucked damn like that is I hope not the daughter.
Speaker 2: I hope the mom finds a way to somehow die
Speaker 2: in the war. Alas, No, the good news is that
Speaker 2: neither of her daughters are Nazis, and in fact both
Speaker 2: thoroughly reject their mother.
Speaker 3: They make some hard ass partisans. I gotta say, they
Speaker 3: wouldn't have to be able to go all day without
Speaker 3: with a broken arm if you're gonna be a partisan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, Alas, they are too young to have
Speaker 2: gotten to do that, but fair enough they become the
Speaker 2: moral equivalent as adults, a celebrity in the Third Reich.
Speaker 2: The first seven or so years that Hitler's in power
Speaker 2: are great for Joanna and her family. They get very wealthy.
Speaker 2: She deliberately cultivates a career within the Nazi Party, and
Speaker 2: not just as an author and a doctor. From an
Speaker 2: article in the Journal of German History quote from nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty five until at least nineteen thirty nine, she thus
Speaker 2: worked as a regional specialist for racial policies for the
Speaker 2: Munich National Socialist Women's League and the Racial Policy Office.
Speaker 2: She also worked for the Mother and Child Relief Agency,
Speaker 2: an agency set up in nineteen thirty four by the
Speaker 2: National Socialist People's Welfare Organization, which had as its aim
Speaker 2: to stand by a German mother in physical, spiritual or
Speaker 2: emotional need and to help an hereditarily healthy child to
Speaker 2: healthy development. So she's doing the worst thing that she
Speaker 2: could be doing, which is giving other moms direct advice
Speaker 2: and also directing Nazi policy for welfare from mothers. Right,
Speaker 2: she is helping the establishment of what are called mutter schools,
Speaker 2: which are like the mother's schools. This is German schools
Speaker 2: where especially if you're like a single mom. It's not
Speaker 2: just single moms, but like you can go to learn
Speaker 2: how to be a mother and get help raising your kid, you.
Speaker 3: Know, which is pretty easy. It's just a bunch of
Speaker 3: rooms and there's one room per kid, and you throw
Speaker 3: the kid in the room and there's nothing to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just lock them alone in a room. Simple, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the Nazi method of parenting. Joanna was constantly in demand
Speaker 2: as a speaker and a writer, publishing article after article
Speaker 2: on the on the parenting methods that young Germans needed
Speaker 2: to make their children fit for Hitler's command to be
Speaker 2: hard as Krupstahl. This is important to understand again. This
Speaker 2: makes her not complaining about her broken armstrong. Hitler's literal
Speaker 2: command was I want children who were as hard as
Speaker 2: the metal from which we make our guns. When you
Speaker 2: refer to Krupstahl, you're not just referring to like industrial steel.
Speaker 2: You're specifically referring to the steel we use for cannons.
Speaker 2: That's what our children need to be, right, okay, And
Speaker 2: that is what Joanna is helping parents create. Speaking of
Speaker 2: making your children harder than Crup steel. Margaret Killjoy, do
Speaker 2: you know what? This podcast is sponsored by? Gun Steel,
Speaker 2: the Tyson Crup company who today makes all of our elevators.
Speaker 2: It's fine, don't look into it. Also submarines, it's fine,
Speaker 2: don't look into it. I'm pro submarines for rich people.
Speaker 2: Now you know what I've come around. Maybe CRUPP could
Speaker 2: solve some problems for us, although they might build good
Speaker 2: ones and so I actually should stay out of that.
Speaker 2: I think they mostly build functional ones for like the
Speaker 2: Egyptian Navy. I haven't heard of the Egyptian Navy doing
Speaker 2: much with submarines, but they're probably not up to anything
Speaker 2: good with them. Most navies aren't with their submarines.
Speaker 3: As a general rule.
Speaker 2: We made the transition at some point from like submarines
Speaker 2: are to be to allow nations to interdict shipping and
Speaker 2: destroy battleships to submarines contain world ending death weapons. They're
Speaker 2: what we used to end all life if we have to.
Speaker 3: That's true. My grandfather was a torpedo, torpedo and submarine
Speaker 3: in the South Pacific and World War Two, but I
Speaker 3: don't think he had nuclear capability.
Speaker 2: No, no, It's one of my favorite stories is that
Speaker 2: like the French, who have nukes, you know, they have
Speaker 2: their nuclear subs, Like the British, they always have some
Speaker 2: subs out with nukes so that if something happens they
Speaker 2: can contribute to ending all life on Earth. And when
Speaker 2: COVID hit they had to like not tell anyone aboard
Speaker 2: for like the last two months, like the first two
Speaker 2: months of the pandemic, they were just locking everyone down
Speaker 2: from outside contact because they were like, well, if everyone
Speaker 2: loses their minds in here, that maybe their relatives are
Speaker 2: dying of the plague above. Like they've got all these nukes.
Speaker 2: We got to be really careful with what we tell
Speaker 2: these people until they surface.
Speaker 3: Except then you're like, you know, we've cut off communication.
Speaker 3: They're like they must be like, we've lost communication with
Speaker 3: the whole land. We better nuke Russia.
Speaker 2: I think it's one of those things they regularly are like,
Speaker 2: no one's going to talk to you for two months
Speaker 2: your submarine. People deal with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: My guess is that that's just kind of a thing
Speaker 2: you get people use. It's like making them hardest.
Speaker 3: Crubstall I think of my grandfather as as hard as Crubstall,
Speaker 3: because he would just go and into a coffin, into
Speaker 3: a war zone and be like and like one day
Speaker 3: he like filled out a little form and went off
Speaker 3: to college and then is like the next mission or something,
Speaker 3: or maybe two missions later, his his submarine didn't come back. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So because they send him to school for engineering and
Speaker 3: he didn't die in a call survived.
Speaker 2: God. Yeah. I have a friend who was a sub
Speaker 2: pilot during like the Cold War. There's a book called
Speaker 2: blind Man's Bluff about the ky but it was like
Speaker 2: Soviet and American subs basically playing chicken to try to
Speaker 2: force the ether to surface. And so he has all
Speaker 2: these stories about like I am standing in a very
Speaker 2: crowded room doing math in my head as quickly as possible,
Speaker 2: and if I or anyone else fucks up, we might
Speaker 2: all die in a crack like and maybe everybody dies,
Speaker 2: you know, because.
Speaker 3: By the way, is the best ad transition anyone has
Speaker 3: ever done on a podcast.
Speaker 2: Submarines, they're real fucked up folks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're back and we're thinking about the concept of
Speaker 4: submarines being I mean, when you raise children the way
Speaker 4: that Joanna Harror did, it does make it easier to
Speaker 4: lock them into a metal death tube.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Look, it'll be over soon. You're in a submarine. It's
Speaker 2: not gonna last very long. My granddad was a hobo
Speaker 2: before that.
Speaker 3: He wrote freight trains around and stuff like, you know,
Speaker 3: it was used to being in a scary metal box.
Speaker 3: It was that I popped freight trains and I'm not
Speaker 3: getting into a submarine.
Speaker 2: No, it used to be this is my this all
Speaker 2: when I write my my Momfluencer book, Margaret, Everything's going
Speaker 2: to come down to the fact that it used to
Speaker 2: get easier, to be easier to get kids on submarines,
Speaker 2: and it's hard now, and that's why our culture's sick.
Speaker 2: You can't force kids to die underwater as easily.
Speaker 3: A generation afraid of submarines causes the world to go.
Speaker 2: Soft cowardice, cowardice. We need to all be like the
Speaker 2: people in the TV show Sques DSV starring Roy Scheider,
Speaker 2: the drunk sheriff from Jaws, as basically Captain Picard been
Speaker 2: at a big submarine. It's a good show. That was Dolphin.
Speaker 3: We do need to all be like that.
Speaker 2: There's an episode where William Shatner plays Slowbod on Thelossovic.
Speaker 2: It's quite a series. Anyway, back to.
Speaker 3: The Nazira.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Joanna sees yourself not just as an academic,
Speaker 2: but as a racial soldier preparing the future armies of
Speaker 2: Germany in a forward to her book on parenting, written
Speaker 2: in nineteen forty. It gets another edition at the start
Speaker 2: of the war. She wrote, quote, today we are witnessing
Speaker 2: a large scale campaign by our government in which the
Speaker 2: healthy genome and the racially valuable are defended against everything
Speaker 2: sick and declining. She expresses praise against the anti Semitic
Speaker 2: Nuremberg laws pleads for the four child marriage in order
Speaker 2: to counter the quote huge danger of popular death, which
Speaker 2: is how like the German got translated. I don't know
Speaker 2: how to better translate that, but I think that means basically,
Speaker 2: we're about to be feeding a lot of our boys
Speaker 2: to machine guns. You need to make more of them. Oh,
Speaker 2: I just think it was like a great replacement type thing.
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, no, no, no, like we the Nazis
Speaker 2: are about to get rid of a lot of these kids.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, now.
Speaker 2: This is all pretty dark. But there's a darker corollary here,
Speaker 2: which is that, since the Reich needed large families to
Speaker 2: counter all of the deaths they were about to cause
Speaker 2: for their children, kids who refuse to be raised into
Speaker 2: obedient Nazis are in the same spectrum as race traders. Right,
Speaker 2: this is not just this is how you have to
Speaker 2: raise your kid. If your kid is not perfectly obedient,
Speaker 2: your kid is a race trader, and they have to
Speaker 2: be broken until they fit the mold gutrn Haher's own
Speaker 2: sister was disobedient, and this is how she recalls her
Speaker 2: mother reacting quote, she wanted to break my sister's will.
Speaker 2: When I think of it, I always have in mind
Speaker 2: how to break apart a flexible young hazel nut. So
Speaker 2: the inns are split in the air.
Speaker 3: The future belongs to me. I'm not saying that song.
Speaker 3: Never mind me, no, no, it's not so. The response
Speaker 3: within Nazi Germany to Harirr's ideas was massive. Thousands of
Speaker 3: mothers even wrote the publisher letters thanking them for the
Speaker 3: invaluable service of providing a work of national socialist parenting advice.
Speaker 3: Now it's worth acknowledging Joanna is not an iconoclast within
Speaker 3: the budding field of child development experts in the United States.
Speaker 3: John Watson, the American founder of behavioralism, recommended that parents
Speaker 3: not let children sit on their lap and that they
Speaker 3: not kiss their children.
Speaker 2: A lot of and he's not the only one. A
Speaker 2: lot of prominent parenting influencers, I guess of the time academics,
Speaker 2: particularly talking about parenting, did recommend against is, particularly the
Speaker 2: level of physical contact between parents and kids that we
Speaker 2: know is healthy today, Like we have a deep understanding
Speaker 2: of how necessary that is.
Speaker 3: But the kissing your kids thing, when you watch like
Speaker 3: old movies and read old books, it's like uncomfortable because
Speaker 3: parents like kiss their children sometimes on the mouth, and
Speaker 3: that's like not normal, and modern society is this when
Speaker 3: that goes away, this.
Speaker 2: Is part like that is some people are pushing against that, right.
Speaker 2: This is again the world thennis as complicated as the
Speaker 2: world today, a bit smaller because the population was. But
Speaker 2: even within German society, these attitudes towards parenting and within
Speaker 2: American society, these attitudes towards parenting are not universal. And
Speaker 2: I find what Gertrude Horror writes in Time here kind
Speaker 2: of valuable and kind of trying to determine. Okay, so
Speaker 2: other people were taught. We're talking in similar ways about like, well,
Speaker 2: maybe you shouldn't kiss your kids, you shouldn't touch your kids.
Speaker 2: As much to what Joanna was saying, what made her
Speaker 2: methods of child rearing unique, And this is what her
Speaker 2: daughter writes, there is a German peculiarity. In the Nazi era,
Speaker 2: these concepts did not remain an expert discourse, but reached
Speaker 2: the base the parents, especially through Joanna Harrer's books. They
Speaker 2: were so hugely popular because a mother spoke to mothers
Speaker 2: in them. Because in Germany the mothers may have been
Speaker 2: more receptive to horror as authoritarian determination, because their principles
Speaker 2: fit so perfectly with the Nazi ideology that wanted their
Speaker 2: youth as hard as krupshtall, and because the Nazis made
Speaker 2: their books of standard works in mother schools. So again,
Speaker 2: what Gertrude is saying is that sure, you can say
Speaker 2: John Watson is saying some similar things in America about
Speaker 2: how you shouldn't kiss your kids. There are you know,
Speaker 2: British and other in other parts of the West, there
Speaker 2: are child development experts that are urging less contact between
Speaker 2: parents and kids, but they are doctors and experts. Joanna
Speaker 2: was a mother and that is why her work has
Speaker 2: much more influence in Germany than some similar ideas have
Speaker 2: in other countries, because it's coming from a mom.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just they're like being a popular author thing.
Speaker 3: It's just like, yes, screaming popular is then like sells
Speaker 3: a lot of books, although that's part of it, but
Speaker 3: like literally like populism popular.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, that is also very important, and it
Speaker 2: is important to note that like she is not just,
Speaker 2: she is specifically advocating her attitude towards national socialist mothering
Speaker 2: right in the post war era. This distinction gets lost
Speaker 2: Joanna's book I told you, it's sold one point two
Speaker 2: million copies. Half of those are after the Nazis fall.
Speaker 2: They like edit the book to cut out some of
Speaker 2: the Hitler stuff, and it stays. It continues to be popular, right,
Speaker 2: and so it kind of gets it gets sort of
Speaker 2: marked down as just being well. She was one of
Speaker 2: many authoritarian parenting experts, but Sigrid Chamberlain describes Herror as
Speaker 2: not just an authoritarian parenting guru, but a national socialist
Speaker 2: parenting guru. And I want to quote now from an
Speaker 2: article by Katherina Rowold in the Journal of German History.
Speaker 2: At the heart of her analysis of Herr's manuals lies
Speaker 2: the contention that this childcare expert promoted ways of caring
Speaker 2: for babies that consciously sought to prevent the formation of
Speaker 2: secure attachment between mother and child. Chamberlain sees an initial
Speaker 2: lack of attachment leading to an inability to form other
Speaker 2: attachments later in life as the distinguishing factor of a
Speaker 2: national socialist upbringing. Considering herself to have experienced such an upbringing,
Speaker 2: Chamberlain is primarily concerned with understanding the psychological repercussions of
Speaker 2: this early childhood socialization, even though the Third Reich existed
Speaker 2: for only twelve years. She explains this upbringing created particular
Speaker 2: damage a million times. Okay, now there's a lot of
Speaker 2: debate over this. This is a period of significant historical contention,
Speaker 2: Herror's work. How to see it? Is this authoritarian parenting?
Speaker 2: Is it national socialist parenting? How should we look at this?
Speaker 2: I am sympathetic with how Chamberlain analyzes this, but will
Speaker 2: there's disagreement with that substantially. There's debate over like whether
Speaker 2: or not you should because there is evidence, particularly that
Speaker 2: this lack of attachment in in German culture between mothers
Speaker 2: and children goes back further than Joanne, and it definitely does.
Speaker 2: You can find evidence of this in Prussia, in Imperial Germany.
Speaker 2: There's some even some data on like attachment issues in
Speaker 2: different German regions being higher than in other parts of Europe.
Speaker 2: And I think it's kind of hard to lock down
Speaker 2: how much of this is like, well, Joanna's teachings were
Speaker 2: able to get so much more purchase in Nazi Germany
Speaker 2: because it was already kind of fertile terrain for them, right,
Speaker 2: And that's also part of why Nazism was able to build,
Speaker 2: is because these attachment issues make it easier to make
Speaker 2: people in the good fascists, and these were more common,
Speaker 2: always more common in Germany, you know, starting with kind
Speaker 2: of like Prussia. But you know, I think that if
Speaker 2: you want to answer the question what kind of children
Speaker 2: did Joanna Horror's advice help to create? Specifically, that is
Speaker 2: difficult to do because you will be by definition looking
Speaker 2: at the generation of Germans born during and right after
Speaker 2: the war, which is the kids who are born when
Speaker 2: her advice on parenting is really popular, and the children
Speaker 2: who were born during and after World War Two are
Speaker 2: often emotionally stunted and traumatized because of World War Two? Right,
Speaker 2: So how do you or at least that's a factor.
Speaker 2: So how do you determine how much of it was
Speaker 2: her teachings and how much of it was the fact
Speaker 2: that they grew up being bombed and dressed in right,
Speaker 2: how do you separate those things that actually makes analyzing
Speaker 2: the impact of Horror's teachings difficult because there's also this war.
Speaker 2: It can found.
Speaker 3: Something and her own kids are opposed to this ideology
Speaker 3: even though they were raised under it.
Speaker 2: You know, yes, yes, I think that's one of the
Speaker 2: things that's kind of helpful in analyzing like what this does.
Speaker 2: But there have been some academics who have tried to
Speaker 2: account for, like what was unique about Joanna's teaching methods
Speaker 2: and how did it uniquely affect German kids outside of
Speaker 2: the damage that was done to all kids who were
Speaker 2: involved in World War Two. One of the ways that
Speaker 2: this has been accounted for Rowold, in that article for
Speaker 2: the Journal of German History, compared Herr's child rearing manuals
Speaker 2: to popular advice on what was called mother craft in
Speaker 2: the UK during the same period. And some of the
Speaker 2: logic was that, well, these kids in the UK, a
Speaker 2: lot of them get bombed too, you know, they have
Speaker 2: these same searing or similar searing experiences. So let's look
Speaker 2: at these different parenting gurus and see kind of the
Speaker 2: different ways in which like kids who were raised and
Speaker 2: these methods turned out when we know that they both
Speaker 2: had these kind of searing war experiences and the guru
Speaker 2: that Rowold compares Herror to that. The her UK counterpart
Speaker 2: is a doctor named Frederick Truby King. Like Herr King
Speaker 2: was an you know, it was a doctor, but unlike
Speaker 2: herr King was a doctor who specialized in children. He's
Speaker 2: a pediatrician. And one way in which their books differ
Speaker 2: is that Truby King advised a scientific approach to motherhood,
Speaker 2: utilizing rigorous research done into the causes of infant mortality
Speaker 2: and sickness to ensure outcomes for children. Harror counseled obedience
Speaker 2: to state services, particularly New Reich departmentsablished to encourage racial health,
Speaker 2: but she also attacked experts who, during the Weimar years
Speaker 2: had told German mothers to do things like drink pasteurized
Speaker 2: milk and hug their kids. Right. She was like, these doctors,
Speaker 2: they don't know what they're doing. As a mother, you
Speaker 2: have instincts, and those instincts are that you want to
Speaker 2: be as far away from your kids as possible. Lean
Speaker 2: into those instincts. That's literally, She's like, too much bookish
Speaker 2: knowledge will hurt your kids. You just need to ignore them. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: row Old rights of her teachings fathers were mostly absent
Speaker 2: in all the manuals. For Harror, it was clear that
Speaker 2: mothers ought to be caring for young children. To be
Speaker 2: a good mother, a woman needed specific characteristics. She had
Speaker 2: to be a dutiful, highly principled woman with common sense
Speaker 2: who had a sense of order, regularity, punctuality, and cleanliness.
Speaker 2: Her manuals concurred with Nazi ideology regarding Aryan women, which
Speaker 2: stressed their reproductive role in saw their place in the
Speaker 2: domestic sphere. It also emphasized the Nazi importance given to blood,
Speaker 2: the central metaphor for a mystical conception of race and inheritance.
Speaker 2: According to Herr, it was the blood relationship between the
Speaker 2: mother and child that made her the best person to
Speaker 2: raise her children. This relationship meant that mothers belonged to
Speaker 2: their children inseparably faithfully. A mother knew the smallest peculiarities
Speaker 2: and could understand her child because it was blood of
Speaker 2: her blood. Children. However, despite the blood bond, started to
Speaker 2: form an emotional bond with the mother only at the
Speaker 2: age of about two and a half. According to Harror,
Speaker 2: while mothers were but in the best position to raise
Speaker 2: their babies and their young children, these were indifferent as
Speaker 2: to who looked after them until that age. And this
Speaker 2: again fits into a lot of these Nazi teachings about
Speaker 2: you don't need to have a family unit. You going
Speaker 2: to have a dad fertilize a bunch of women, and
Speaker 2: for the first two years, it doesn't even matter who
Speaker 2: looks after that kid. You can keep them alone in
Speaker 2: a room as long as you feed them and clean
Speaker 2: the shit off of them. And then you know, the
Speaker 2: mother is their real blood and that's who needs to
Speaker 2: raise them. The father's going to be off dying. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's cool stuff.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because it seems like overall, yeah, and maybe
Speaker 3: this is just the conception I came in with it.
Speaker 3: It's like we have all of these different ideas about
Speaker 3: like nature versus nurture, but I think sometimes it's just neither.
Speaker 3: It's just like most of the time, most kids kind
Speaker 3: of turn out okay, like despite what happens to them.
Speaker 3: Like people should try, right, people should try to raise
Speaker 3: their kids good, you know, but like overall, it's like
Speaker 3: kids are resilient on some level, you know, Like.
Speaker 2: Like the whole reason why there's hope in humanity is
Speaker 2: that even when you try to raise a whole generation
Speaker 2: this way, it doesn't work out the way that you want,
Speaker 2: but they there has been they have done some research. Again,
Speaker 2: it's hard to isolate the war from the impact on
Speaker 2: some of these different child rearing experiments. There's a study
Speaker 2: by Ilka Quindo of Frankfurt University on the generation born
Speaker 2: during the war, and it was initially to study the
Speaker 2: long term impacts of bombing raids on child development. But
Speaker 2: after these initial sort of interviews, the researchers were like,
Speaker 2: these people keep talking about like their family experiences, so
Speaker 2: we should probably alter the studies to like interview them
Speaker 2: more about how they were raised to as children. And
Speaker 2: they concluded that a lot of the former kids they
Speaker 2: interviewed had a pattern of strong loyalty to their parents
Speaker 2: and a refusal to admit any conflicts with them that
Speaker 2: was like severe enough to be a relational disorder, which
Speaker 2: is huh. Quindo is noticing something similar to what Shatzman
Speaker 2: noted about Schreber's son, right, that he cannot see his
Speaker 2: father's having made a mistake even though his parent did
Speaker 2: something very bad to hurt him, right, right, And that's
Speaker 2: this whole generation of kids like raised under the bombs
Speaker 2: have trouble adequately blaming their like like seeing their parents
Speaker 2: in some ways they have like this sense of loyalty
Speaker 2: to them that is kind of like noted, it's there's
Speaker 2: a lot of like I don't want to get too
Speaker 2: much into like the psychology here, because it's all pretty
Speaker 2: wonky and controversial. Quindau has pointed out that Germany is
Speaker 2: the only country in Europe where what happened and to
Speaker 2: the children of the war has been so broadly discussed,
Speaker 2: even though like destruction and bombings you know, occurred in
Speaker 2: a lot of other countries, Like German kids were not
Speaker 2: by far the ones who suffered the most, but they
Speaker 2: have been like the impact of the war on them
Speaker 2: has been studied the most. And she's also noted that
Speaker 2: psychoanalyst Anna Freud found that children with a healthy attachment
Speaker 2: to their parents were less traumatized by things like war
Speaker 2: and violence than those with a less solid attachment. Putting
Speaker 2: everything together, Quindo concludes from the interviews that she conducted
Speaker 2: about bombings that basically a lot of German children were
Speaker 2: still after the war dealing with deep grieving because they
Speaker 2: had had like they had not been prepared by their
Speaker 2: upbringing to heal from the experience of war. But maybe
Speaker 2: that was Like, the more most direct consequence of Joanna's
Speaker 2: parenting style is that it raised kids who could not
Speaker 2: effectively heal and learn from the violence they experienced in
Speaker 2: a way they would have been able to if they'd
Speaker 2: had more direct attachment to their parents. And that's going
Speaker 2: to be really relevant to what we have to talk
Speaker 2: about next week, which is what the generations after the
Speaker 2: war start to believe about child rearing.
Speaker 3: Bet it'll be good because this is the show about.
Speaker 2: The show about good stuff.
Speaker 3: Flowers in the cracks of the pavement is the name
Speaker 3: of this show.
Speaker 2: It's good stuff. So again, as I said, like Herr's
Speaker 2: book Shorten of some of its worst Nazi dialogue gets
Speaker 2: re released after the war and remains a bestseller, and
Speaker 2: that's going to be a meaningful part of the story
Speaker 2: we tell next week, right, her work kind of helps
Speaker 2: prepare a generation of Germans to accept some truly unacceptable things,
Speaker 2: or at least makes it more difficult for the war
Speaker 2: generation to heal. The fact that a lot of kids
Speaker 2: are raised according to Joanna's principles is going to have
Speaker 2: echoes that go on long after the war. But before
Speaker 2: we get to that, I want to end this week
Speaker 2: by concluding Joanna's story. As a prominent Nazi with membership
Speaker 2: in several party organizations as well as the NSDAP, Joanna
Speaker 2: was someone who had good reason to fear Allied victory.
Speaker 2: And in fact, when the Americans come and like she's
Speaker 2: afraid of getting arrested. Leads to the only instance in
Speaker 2: Gertrude's childhood where she recalls her mom being physically affectionate
Speaker 2: to her and oh, it's so much worse than you
Speaker 2: might guess. Quote. Only once in my memory did she
Speaker 2: hold me in her arms. That was in the war.
Speaker 2: During the evacuation, I must have been two years old.
Speaker 2: Our father had stayed in Munich with my mother's parents.
Speaker 2: He had not been drafted because he was a lung
Speaker 2: specialist in Upper Bavaria. We children were evacuated with the
Speaker 2: mother in the Hague and Upper Bavaria in an Inn.
Speaker 2: When the Americans approached, my mother should talk to them
Speaker 2: because she spoke German very well. And then she hugged
Speaker 2: me because she knew that the Americans were fond of
Speaker 2: children's That's the only instance of physical affection I know
Speaker 2: Americans like kids, So I'm going to pretend to like
Speaker 2: my kids to get better treatment right on time. This
Speaker 2: girl's mom holds her.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I was hoping. She just suddenly volunteer
Speaker 3: for the inventory, and they created an all women's unit
Speaker 3: and they all.
Speaker 2: Got no kill. It's not nearly that nice. It is
Speaker 2: kind of nice that her attitude is like Americans, the
Speaker 2: people who like children. I know it speaks well of us. Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: they don't hate their kids. I'd better pretend to like mine.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Joanna does get interned after the war, as is her husband,
Speaker 2: and he is so desperate by the trauma of the
Speaker 2: war's ending, of defeat, of being interned, of the loss
Speaker 2: of his own hopes for the future, that he commits suicide.
Speaker 2: He like flings himself into a river, and Joanna hates
Speaker 2: him for it. Shit talks her husband to her daughters
Speaker 2: for the rest of their lives for his weakness. Her
Speaker 2: like her mother's strongest recollection of her mom and dad,
Speaker 2: as her mother repeatedly calling her father a coward because
Speaker 2: he's afraid to get arrested by the Allies. Such a
Speaker 2: piece of shit. Well, Joanna would write summaries of her
Speaker 2: own life in the future for professional purposes, she would
Speaker 2: spend the rest of her life basically leaving out the
Speaker 2: years from nineteen thirty two to forty five. Gertrude did
Speaker 2: not learn anything about the Nazi period until age fourteen.
Speaker 2: And this is amazing. She's in high school and they're
Speaker 2: like having a debate in history class, and Gertrude speaks
Speaker 2: up in the debate and I don't know what she said,
Speaker 2: but her history teacher snaps at her, given what your
Speaker 2: mom did, maybe you should keep your mouth shut during
Speaker 2: this time, which is damn Even with this experience, Gertrude
Speaker 2: is never able to talk to her mom about Nazism.
Speaker 2: She just says it would have been impossible to talk
Speaker 2: to her about this, and I don't think she's wrong.
Speaker 2: Gertrude does say my mom was an unrepentant Nazi until
Speaker 2: the end. Her sister Anne concurred with this view, telling
Speaker 2: an interviewer. Until her death, no one could talk to
Speaker 2: her about the Third Reich. All children had to suffer
Speaker 2: from the mother's cold feeling while problems within the family
Speaker 2: were solved with violence. Joanna was not allowed to practice
Speaker 2: medicine under the new federal Republic, but she worked in
Speaker 2: health departments in Germany until retiring in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: The only rather she was a doctor than a bureaucrat.
Speaker 2: God, yes, at least a pull monologist. You assume there's
Speaker 2: only so much damage a lovely doctor can do. The
Speaker 2: only evidence that she suffered at all from her convictions
Speaker 2: was the fact that she grew increasingly addicted to alcohol
Speaker 2: and pills at some point as she aged, eventually forcing
Speaker 2: her daughters to care for her, and Gertrude describes at
Speaker 2: some point her the mother grows frail and broken enough
Speaker 2: that Gertrude starts seeing her as my mother, And this
Speaker 2: happened shortly before Joanna dies on April thirtieth, nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 2: She like becomes weak and pitiful enough that Gertrude is
Speaker 2: able to view her not as this figure of the mother,
Speaker 2: but as my mom.
Speaker 3: WHOA, there's so much going on there, I know, and
Speaker 3: I'm like going through my own Like I try not
Speaker 3: to be like a vengeance girl, but like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: struggling with some empathy here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no empathy to have for Joanna, like for Gertrude. Sure,
Speaker 2: for Gertrude n no, my god, like what across to
Speaker 2: bear this lady being your mom? Yeah, but no Joanna.
Speaker 1: Who do you think would have survived in a room Joanna?
Speaker 1: Or the mother god lady that turned silver?
Speaker 2: Oh no, Joanna. Joanna would fucking cut that lady.
Speaker 3: Oh, I just figure how you're talking about. I assume
Speaker 3: you're talking about some weird mythical goddess that was silver
Speaker 3: of those people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, where her like cult members kept her dead
Speaker 1: body for so many days, so many days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that lady was like very different attitude Joanna. Joanna
Speaker 2: could have been a cult leader, but she would have
Speaker 2: been like the hitting kind of cult leader.
Speaker 3: She would have loved scientology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she would have been. She would have fit in
Speaker 2: there very well. That that would have That would have
Speaker 2: offered her a place as well. She she could have
Speaker 2: been disappearing people for l Ron Hubbard if she'd been
Speaker 2: born in a slightly different period, actually around the same
Speaker 2: period of time. It just shows in different things.
Speaker 1: I think that a right time, wrong place.
Speaker 3: I don't know that she could have I think she
Speaker 3: was I think she only could haveditioned it out. I
Speaker 3: don't think she could have broken her arm and kept camping.
Speaker 2: Yeah, You're probably right about that because like her dad
Speaker 2: is ultimately like she has such a supportive parrot figure,
Speaker 2: which is her it's not her mom. She like that
Speaker 2: probably explains some of her feeling that mothers shouldn't be
Speaker 2: connected to their kids. But like everything she has is
Speaker 2: kind of rooted in the fact that her dad is
Speaker 2: willing to stand up for her as a kid. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is interesting. Yeah. Anyway, well we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about the aftershocks of these two people and like what
Speaker 2: what the generation raised under Joanna's tactics and you know,
Speaker 2: the generation right after that one, the during the war
Speaker 2: and the immediately post war children of Germany. Some of
Speaker 2: the things some of them come to believe about how
Speaker 2: you should raise kids as a response to the Nazi
Speaker 2: era and a response to people like Joanna and spoilers, Margaret,
Speaker 2: it's not very good either. Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, you've already explained that this was the fun week.
Speaker 3: This is the fun week, This is the good week.
Speaker 3: Next week, baby, it's pedophiles all the way down. Yeah,
Speaker 3: not even a good band.
Speaker 2: It's not a bit. That's just an accurate description of
Speaker 2: next week's episodes. There is no joke there. I'm just
Speaker 2: laughing because it was I had to write twelve thousand
Speaker 2: words about that and it was not pleasant. I wrote
Speaker 2: them while I was in the ICU with my dad
Speaker 2: and it was, you know, still a notably unpleasant part
Speaker 2: of that experience.
Speaker 3: It was an interesting because, like, the work that you
Speaker 3: do with Behind the Bastards is like explo some of
Speaker 3: the bad things that humans are capable of, and I
Speaker 3: think it's very useful. But then the format of the
Speaker 3: show is that you also have to like we have
Speaker 3: to keep it entertaining, right, gotta have some bits. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I wonder how you can pull this off. Next week
Speaker 3: on En the Me, I.
Speaker 2: Was going to open an episode with variations of my
Speaker 2: what's exing, my whys, and the word pedophiles. But there's
Speaker 2: no way to do that, and that'll be okay. There's
Speaker 2: absolutely no way.
Speaker 3: To killing pedophiles.
Speaker 2: My sure, what's killing but people? And my pedophiles is
Speaker 2: probably a bad ITEA. I don't, I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't allow that.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Well, what you'll get to hear what we come up with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna be spending a week figuring out to
Speaker 2: introduce next week's episodes.
Speaker 1: My me, but we record them tomorrow, so really, you
Speaker 1: only have twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: All right, fuck fuck fuck.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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