I shall also check the website but would also appreciate a copy of the Journal-
Professor Geoffey Sherington
Dean
Faculty of Education
University of Sydney
New SOuth Wales
AUSTRLALIA 2006
At 04:25 PM 5/29/00 -0500, you wrote:
>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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