I would be delighted to receive a copy of The Journal of Psychotherapy
containing your very interesting article.
My address is
Bridget Whelan
The Garden Flat
96a Hazellville Road
London N19 3NA
Thank you
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lloyd deMause" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2000 4:47 PM
Subject: German Childrearing
> I have an extra box left over of Spring 2000 issues of The Journal of
> Psychohistory with my 92-page article showing German childrearing in 1900
> and how their extremely abusive childrearing practices were later
inflicted
> upon Jews during the Holocaust. If you would like a free copy of this
> issue, just email me your postal address and I'll be pleased to send one
to
> you. A brief excerpt from the article is below.
>
> Lloyd deMause, Editor
> The Journal of Psychohistory
> [log in to unmask]
>
> "Nineteenth-century doctors condemned the practice of German mothers
> refusing to breastfeed their babies, saying the pap made of flour and
water
> or milk was "usually so thick that it has to be forced into the child and
> only becomes digestible when mixed with saliva and stomach fluids. At its
> worst it is curdled and sour." Infants were so commonly hungry that
"those
> poor worms get their mouths stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed
> bread so that they cannot scream." Ende reports that for centuries "one
> rarely encounters a German infant who is fully breastfed...Everywhere they
> got their mouths stuffed with Zulp, a small linen bag filled with
> bread...Swaddled babies could hardly get rid of these often dirty rags."
> Mothers who could afford it sent their newborn to wetnurses-commonly
called
> Engelmacherin, "angelmakers," because they were so negligent toward the
> children. The mothers complained, "Do you think I am a farmer's daughter,
> that I should bother myself with little children? That a woman of my age
> and standing should allow her very strength to be sucked dry by children?"
> While English gentry began to nurse their infants themselves during the
> seventeenth century, the mothering revolution had not yet really reached
> Germany by the end of the nineteenth century. Visitors who wrote books on
> German home life reported, "It is extremely rare for a German lady to
> nourish her own child," and "It would have been very astonishing indeed
if
> a well-to-do mother had suggested suckling her own baby." Almost all
> mothers who refused to breast-feed could have done so if they "seriously
> wanted to," according to a 1905 German medical conference. Those who did
> not gave "completely trivial reasons," such as "because it is messy,"
> because they "didn't want to ruin their figures" or because breastfeeding
> was "inconvenient. Even after their children returned from wetnurse,
> "noble ladies showed not the slightest interest in their offspring" and
> turned them over to nursemaids, governesses and tutors. The result was
that
> parents were often strangers to their children. When one German father
> asked his child whom he loved the most and the child replied, "Hanne [his
> nurse]," the father objected, "No! You must love your parents more." "But
> it is not true!" the child replied. The father promptly beat him.
> Mothers and other caretakers of newborn German babies were so
> frightened of them that they tied them up tightly for from six to nine
> months and strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep
> out the lurking evils. Two centuries after swaddling had disappeared in
> England and America, two British visitors described it as routine
> throughout Germany:
>
> A German baby is a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a
mummy
> in yards of bandages...it is never bathed...Its head is never touched with
> soap and water until it is eight or ten months old, when the fine skull
cap
> of encrusted dirt which it has by that time obtained is removed...
>
> In Germany, babies are loathsome, foetid things...offensive to the last
> degree with the excreta that are kept bound up within their swaddling
> clothes...the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the
> rind of Stilton cheese...
>
> When the children were finally removed from their swaddling bands after
six
> to twelve months, other restraint devices such as corsets with steel stays
> and backboards continued their tied-up condition to assure the parents
they
> were still in complete control. The result of all this early restraint
was
> the same production of later violence in children as that obtained by
> experimenters physically restraining rats and monkeys-marked by depletions
> of serotonin, increases in norepinephrine levels, and massive increases in
> terror, rage and eventually actual violence.
> The fear of one's own children was so widespread in German
families
> that for centuries autobiographies told of a tradition of abandonment of
> children by their parents to anyone who would take them, using the most
> flimsy of excuses. Children were given away and even sometimes sold to
> relatives, neighbors, courts, priests, foundling homes, schools, friends,
> strangers, "traveling scholars" (to be used as beggars)-anyone who would
> take them-so that for much of history only a minority of German children
> lived their entire childhoods under their family roof. Children were
> reported to be sent away to others as servants or as apprentices, "for
> disciplinary reasons," "to be drilled for hard work," "to keep them from
> idleness," because of a "domestic quarrel," "because it cried as a baby,"
> "because his uncle was childless," etc. Scheck notes from his study of
> autobiographies, "When their parents came to take them home, their
children
> usually didn't recognize them any more." Peasants gave away their
children
> so regularly that the only ones who were guaranteed to be kept were the
> first-born boys-to get the inheritance-and one of the daughters, who was
> sometimes crippled in order to prevent her from marrying and force her to
> stay permanently as a cheap helper in the parental household. After two
> children, it was said that "the parental attitude to later offspring
> noticeably deteriorated [so that] a farmer would rather lose a young child
> than a calf."
>
>
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