Bridget: The issue is on its way to you via surface mail. Meanwhile, do
check out our 1,000-page website with lots of articles and chapters on the
history of childhood.
Lloyd
>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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