Part One: The Parenting Gurus of Nazi Germany

Robert sits down with Margaret killjoy to talk about Moritz Schreber, the pseudo scientific parenting guru who strapped children into torture devices and helped prepare Germany for the Nazis.

(4 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, ah, I should That was not a good
way to open it. I was going to try, well,
I had. I had a couple of bad openings started
for this, uh, most most of which had to do
with pedophilia.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Can we do another one of them?

Speaker 3 (00:20):
No? Yeah? Can we just say, but you've had better
you you've had better openings?

Speaker 1 (00:25):
I could have just what if I'd committed to that,
Sophie and just done the whole opening bit from led Zeppelins,
the Immigrant song, you could have Okay, that would have.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Been pretty good.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
That would have been pretty good. I didn't do that.
I didn't do that. I chickened out halfway through. It
was nothing. Margaret Yep kill Joy, Welcome to the show
Behind the Bastards. And when when you think of bastards, right,
when you think of human evil, naturally, you're gonna think
of Germany. And look, that's not entirely fair to the

(00:58):
Germans today. But at the same time, you know, when
you go through that kind of World War two shit,
it's it's it's just gonna be. It's just gonna be
on everybody's mind. And as a result, there's like a
huge amount of history, a huge amount of like historiography
that's kind of based around variations of the question why
do the Germans be like that?

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Though?

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Can I tell you my story about mistaking a German
in a bad way in the middle of Oh yeah please,
Oh yes, I was. I was crossing from the Czech
Republic into Germany before Czech Republic was part of the
Shangan area and so there was a border control. It's
the middle of the night, and I'm on this bus
and I wake up. You know, it's this super cheap

(01:41):
is this like ten year ohd bus or whatever? Yeah,
and I wake up to a German soldier going guten
dog and I just I wake up and my brain goes, oh,
fucking Nazi.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Yeah, that's exactly That's exactly how Poland woke up one day. Yeah,
just a big guten dog in their ear.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
So he pulled me and the other like long hair
boy off the bus and searched us very carefully. Yeah anyway, yeah, yeah,
so that's Germany in my mind.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Look, this is actually getting to the point, which is
that I think there's kind of a fundamental flaw in
this idea of like trying to be like, what is
it about the Germans that made fascism happen there, right,
that made that be the country that like really did
that in the biggest way. And I think that's actually
kind of a it's a potentially dangerous thing to obsess in, right, Yeah,

(02:32):
because it's nationalism, because it's because like a bunch of
like yeah, exactly, because it didn't just happen there, because
they're not the only people vulnerable, And kind of obsessing
too much on like what is it about germanness that
ensured the Nazis were able to take and hold power
can kind of blind you to the vulnerabilities we all face.
But at the same time, it is worth acknowledging there

(02:54):
are aspects of German culture that ensure that Nazism was
the specific kind of fascism that came to We're in
that country and that altered its character, Right, there are
specific things about Germany that made it more vulnerable to
what the Nazis were going to do. So it would
also be kind of a mistake to ignore what was
going on in German culture in the years leading up

(03:15):
to the war. And when you know, historians, some of
whom I think are responsible in this and some of
whom are maybe not, try to do this, they inevitably
wind up focusing on two areas. Primarily, one of them
is child rearing. How we're like German parents raising children
in the pre World War two era and like the
pre Weimar in the German imperial era, and then what

(03:37):
was sexual education like, right, And I think child rearing
this is a sensible thing to get into. I think
when you get into the sex stuff, this is where
a lot of like the really bad historiography gets in,
because there tends to be this kind of obsession with
ideas about the Nazis and sex that are not necessarily accurate,
and kind of as a result in the post war period,

(03:59):
particularly in the period that starts like ten or fifteen
years after the war ends, a lot of folks on
like the left are going to make some really hideous
mistakes when they as part of kind of an attempt
to render Germany less vulnerable to fascism. And there they're
both some of the most horrifying things we will ever

(04:20):
talk about on this show. This is kind of what
we're building towards us going to take us a few episodes.
It's also a weird story, right, and it's this is
one of those things I just know of our listeners
like to wait until the series is finished. This is
not entirely that kind of series. We're going to be
talking about a very different set of stories this week
and next week, but you kind of have to hear

(04:41):
them to understand what comes next to because we're going
to be talking a lot about the attitudes in German
academia and society about like how kids should be raised.
And yeah, anyway, zech does mean that this week is
our fun week. Yeah, Margaret Kiljoy, host of the Cool

(05:05):
People Who Did Cool Stuff podcast? Are you ready to
get into today's bastard?

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Is it Nazi sex No, it's post Nazi sex crime.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
No, no, this is pre Nazi child rearing crimes. And as
a result, I mean Nazi child It is depressing because
this is child abuse. But it's also pseudoscience.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Oh okay, I do like pseudoscience.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
So you get some of that fun like, oh, people
in the eighteen hundreds you believed wacky things about how
to raise children. That's what we're talking about this week
is like pseudoscience that today is like the kind of
big pseudoscientific child development expert in the pre Nazi era.
And then Thursday is the the momfluencer of Nazism. So

(05:53):
we're gonna have this is the fun week. Next week
is all pedophiles, So okay, enjoyant. What I'm saying is
enjoy it. While at last, yep, today's guy is even
pretty well meaning. He's a bastard because of like where
this stuff takes him. But I don't think he was
actually out to hurt kids. He just made a lot

(06:14):
of horrible mistakes. And his name was Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber. Okay,
quite a name, quite a name, extremely German name. That's
a guten tug in your ear as you're woken up
on the bus. Ass name?

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Is that a hyphen?

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Or?

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Has he got two middle names?

Speaker 1 (06:31):
No? No, two middle names? Two middle names?

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, yeah, you know those kids are always trouble. So yeah.
I found very little about his childhood, but it does
seem to be accurate to say that he suffered from
a form of mental illness that was not diagnosed at
the time. There were notes found long after his death,
in fact, after World War Two, at a hospital in
Dresden that claimed Shrebber had suffered during his life from

(06:55):
quote obsessional ideas with murderous impulses. Now, that is a
description of this guy's mind state, written by a member
of his family who was treating his son, whose Spoilers
suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. This is very relevant later, right, Okay,
So this is this discussion that, like well, Schrebert had
obsessional ideas with murderous impulses. This is not a diagnosis.

(07:17):
This is family lore that was passed down, right.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Okay, that said, so intrusive thoughts a little worse than
most people.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yes, that maybe a lot worse, But that is exactly
what I thought, because I have people in my life
with OCD that manifest with intrusive thoughts, and that's what
I thought of when I read that description of Schreiber, right, yeah,
And whatever was going on, whatever he had was dealing with,
it was intense enough that again it got passed down
in family lore like one hundred or like fifty years

(07:47):
after his death, so you have to assume significant. But
also he was a very successful, functional person within his society,
so it did not stop him from functioning in society.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Right.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
He did struggle with depression throughout his life, which ended
in eighteen sixty one, because he didn't get to murder people.
He didn't get to murder people, or I.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Assume I don't know anything about maybe he did murder people,
but you know, probably we wouldn't have been depressed if
he'd been able to act. Never mind, don't listen to me.
You probably shouldn't say that on this show. Nope, I
don't know anyon he's gonna do. It's gonna be bad,
So never mind.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
So Magpie, this is not your show, cool thing, you know.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
So I got confused for a minute.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
I was like, yeah, no, So all of this is
relevant because Daniel Schraber is going to have more of
an impact on German child rearing than pretty much anyone
else in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Skrebber
got his MD and taught at the University of Leipzig.
He is often referred to as a self proclaimed child psychiatrist.
And normally when you're like someone is a self proclaimed

(08:46):
medical field, it's because they're a quack or a con man.
In this case, it's just because child psychology was new
at the time, right, Like, if you were a child psychologist,
you had declared yourself that because it wasn't a thing
people became because.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
You're the first guy, the first you're yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Very early. You know, he's doing this in the mid
eighteen hundreds. The idea that like, like prior to.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
The period nineteen ten.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Okay, no, no, this guy is in Like this guy
dies right at the start of the US Civil War
and prior to the period where he was an active academic,
if kids misbehaved or were disturbed, you just handed them
a cigarette and sent them off to the poison minds, right,
Like there was not any sort of thought that their
mental health might matter.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, So Schraber was fascinated with children's health, and particularly
he was really interested with how urbanization and the rapid
changes due to modern life had impacted child development, like
social media and stuff. Yes, like social media. He was
a real twitter head. Ye, no, he's in his case,
he's worried about like the social media of his day,

(09:49):
which is like roads and the mail and the fact
that there are tall buildings around front see trees. Yeah,
he's got these are like real issues, right, that's he's
noticing that, like this is actually changing the way in
which people are developing. His books were popular all across
the Western world. He had a lot of readers in
the US, but he was particularly popular in Germany. You

(10:10):
might think of him as like doctor Spock if you're
old enough to remember doctors, not the from Star Trek,
but like the child development doctor who was kind of huge.
I think of the eighties and nineties. I think my
parents had a doctor Spock book or two around.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah, And I never was able to disambiguate that from
Stock from Star Trek. So I never stood what was happening.
I didn't understand how there could be more than one
person named Spock.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Because I assumed doctor Spock from Star Trek would have
been a fantastic parenting advice giver, you know, oh absolutely,
it seemed like he had his shit together.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah, a little bit of emotionally detached kid would come
out of it. But you know, yeah that's some that's fine.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
You know what, Margaret, That is where this story ends.
But oh yeah, you might think of Schribber his impact,
like his kind of influence in Germany in the mid
eighteen hundreds. And this is really this is this is
when there's a bunch of fighting principalities, Right, You've got
like Russia and Bavaria kind of at each other's throats
for part of this guy's life, so they're not even
German yet, but you might compare him to if doctor

(11:07):
Spock is too old. Whatever. YouTube momfluencer is currently at
the height of her influence and hasn't yet been arrested
for accidentally murdering her kids. That I wanted to like
bring that up and then bring up like a single
case of a social media mom influencer committing a terrible crime.
But when I googled momfluencer guilty of abuse, I was

(11:28):
presented with so many different options that I had to deal.
I had like decision paralysis. How do I finish this bit?

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Like this?

Speaker 1 (11:36):
This happens so often. All of these people are fucking
child abusers.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Oh god.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
I settled eventually on Ruby Frank, a momfluencer with two
and a half million subscribers on YouTube and Instagram who
pled guilty to child abuse in December of twenty twenty three.
And this I settled on Ruby Frank because she's She's
relevant to our German discussion for a few reasons, including
the fact that prosecutors accused her and her husband of
turning their home into a concentration camp like environment to

(12:03):
control their children and use them to feed the ever
hungry YouTube parenting content mill they made. I didn't expect
this to feed so well into the theme of the episode,
but alas Ruby ensured it did so. She made videos,
and she eventually separates from her husband. He's filing for divorce.

(12:26):
I think he's probably seems like he's less involved in this,
but that's certain that he's not, or he's just.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Better because he didn't get that money for it.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
He did all as much as that sweet YouTube money.
They made videos like. One example of their contents a
video blog titled eight Passengers, which focused on punishments for kids.
One example punishment given was they banned their oldest son
from his bedroom for seven months for playing a prank
on his brother. Again, if you're doing anything to a
kid for like seven months, that's too long for a punishment,

(12:55):
that's just abuse at that point. That's an insane length
of time for a punishment. In one video, Ruby brags
about refusing to bring lunch to her kindergartener who'd forgotten
it at home. And again, she's a kindergartener, Like, what
kind of shit is supposed to have together? In another video,
she threatened to behead a doll to punish your daughter,

(13:18):
which like if you are if you are taking child
rearing tips from isis you know you've got a rye.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
I think that the parent is the one who needs
the punishment.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yes, yes, it's amazing. Again, this was all on videos,
so it's perhaps not surprising that like eventually prosecutors realized
there was something going on here. I'm going to read
a quote from NPR about what was happening in the
Frank household. That's going to be surprisingly relevant to some
of the things that come next. Frank also admitted to

(13:49):
kicking her son while wearing boots, holding his head underwater,
and smothering his mouth and nose with her hands. According
to the plea agreement. He was also told that everything
that was being done to him were acts of love.
The agree in the States Jesus, So this is you
know we're talking about with miss Frank. She is you will.
It is not uncommon to find people advocating today for

(14:11):
this kind of like tough love practice towards raising children.
There's a very popular book among the Christian right called
to Train Up a Child, and the basis of it
is you should when children are infants do stuff like
lay them down on a mat, and if they like
wiggle to such a point that any part of their
body is off of it, you like whip them basically,
like you like beat them. There's a lot of discussion

(14:33):
of like, you know, what kind of things you should
hit children with and win. But the idea is that
any tiny act of what it terms is like, you know,
misbehavior or disobedience, right, which we would just call well,
kids aren't fully in control of themselves to their bodies
because there's they're developing still, you know that that's an
act of like willfulness against not just the parent but

(14:54):
against God. Right, And that attitude again, which is still
super with a us, is very much in the intellectual
chain of custody that it doesn't I wouldn't say it
starts with doctor Shreber. It probably starts much earlier than that.
I'm sure parents have been doing this for forever in
various ways. But the kind of the intellectualizing of that

(15:15):
impulse that bad parents have always had to like, if
my kid does anything that I don't want them doing
in the moment, I need to respond with pain.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Right.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
Schreber is one of the first people to kind of
try and medicalize that attitude, right, and again he's a
lot less hateful about it. I don't think he's coming
from a place of wanting to hurt kids. I think
he's coming from a place of like he kind of
has obsessional OCD, and so he obsesses on like little
movements from kids, and it bothers him, and so he

(15:48):
develops all this kind of like scientific theory around how
you should treat the small ways children move that are
again in reality, due to the fact that they're not
fully in control of their bodies.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
Baby muscle phrenology.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of what's going on here.
And I want to read a passage from a German
author named j elk Erdle about kind of what doctor
Schrebber focused his intellectual efforts on in regards to child rearing. Quote,
Schreber aimed at creating obedient children from the day the
baby is born. Harsh discipline started with cold baths. The

(16:24):
child's comfort and self esteem whenever considerations and stroking, cuddling,
and kissing were forbidden. As a result, generations of Germans
went without direct loving contact with their parents. Now Rdle, again,
this is a German writer writing about her attitude towards
Shrebber's impact on Germany. It's not fully his fault. There's

(16:45):
a lot of other child development experts and intellectual experts
who are a part of this, like lack of loving
contact between German babies and their parents. But it's not
uncommon to find people with Eardle's attitude that Schreber basically
paves the way for Nazism. He has been described as
the spiritual precursor of Nazism, and again it's not totally

(17:07):
fair to say that, but there is no denying that
he influenced the cultural environment in which Nazism grew.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
As soon as you said that, I was like, oh yeah,
Like no, okay, a whole like you know, four generations
of kids who weren't allowed to talk to like touch
their parents. Yeah, no, I could see how that could
lead to some monstrosity.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
The more accurate thing to say would be that, like,
Shreber popularized the kind of intellectual argument for abusing your
children in this way, and that provided a lot of
space for other intellectuals in the decades to come to
make similar arguments and extensions of his arguments and.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Put them into the political or whatever.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yes, yeah, exactly, and that is part of what's going
on in Germany.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
Now, one thing that really again fucks me up about
this is that, unlike basically everyone else we're going to
talk about Schreber's teachings, while they end in a bad place,
they start from a pretty good place, which is he's
recognizing we have cities now. Most kids are growing up
in cities now, and kids who grow up in cities
don't exert themselves outdoors as much as children probably have

(18:11):
throughout most of history, and we need to make accounting
for that in how we raise them. Right, that they're
not getting the kind of outdoor exposure that they're that
they evolve to get. Right, that's not wrong. Yeah, Like
that is a that is like a thing about urban
life that you do need to take into account when

(18:31):
raising children. Is that, like, if you're not careful, they
will not get enough time to move their bodies around. Right.
That's that's like a problem with modern Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
So it's like the like modern parenting thing where like
or the generation about a half generation older than me
is like what the hell, just kick your kids out
of the house and make it right to run around
and play outside. Kids these days don't play outside.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yes, yes, exactly he is. He is one of the
first people kind of start, and he's starting on the
reasonable end of that. Where it gets unreasonable is that
he kind of comes to the conclusion that the issue
of kids having all this energy should be remedied not
with them running around outside, but with systematic remedial exercise.
Now that sounds on the surface like, oh, maybe he's

(19:13):
like suggesting a PE program, right, which I'm sure you
and I have both had our issues with different physical
education programs.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Is he putting them in the minds?

Speaker 1 (19:22):
No, it's worse than that. The minds would have been
better than this. So the term remedial is key here.
Schreber didn't just believe kids needed exercise to get rid
of excess energy or to stay healthy. He felt that
they should be subjected to specific exercises repetitively to stop
them from engaging in behaviors like slouching and masturbation. Now, again,

(19:45):
some of what he's doing is reasonable. He believes that
you can sharpen a child's eyes by periodically forcing them
to estimate the sizes of objects at varying distances. Right,
how big do you think that is? How far do
you think that is? That doesn't actually sharpen your eyes,
But that is good exercise for a kid. Will help them,
you know, like if you do that with your child
from a young age, it will kind of help them
focus on things in the world. That's not a useless

(20:07):
thing to do with it.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
They can them scouts in the army at that point
right right right, which how many are how many troops
are there? How far away? What's the composition?

Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah, so some of it's fine, But he's also obsessed
with posture, he writes in his very popular eighteen fifty
five book quote, One must see to it that children
always sit straight and even sided on both buttocks at once,
leaning either to the right or left side. As soon
as they start to lean back or bend their backs,
the time has come to exchange at least for a
few minutes, the seated position for the absolutely still supine one.

(20:38):
If this is not done, the backbones will be deformed.
Half resting and lying or wallowing positions should not be allowed.
If children are awake, they should be alert and hold
themselves in straight active positions, and be busy in general.
Each thing which could lead towards laziness and softness. For example,
the sofa in the children's room should be kept away
from their circle of activity.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
So both Sofia and I sat up straight while telling
that I'm willing to bet most of the listeners have
adjusted their postures. Do you say that even though we
know it's a bad person saying.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yes, and he is he is, he's so. I think
we all had this version of the adult in our
lives who was like, straighten up, straighten up, your posture's bad, right,
Maybe more than one shrimper. He isn't just doing that
when kids are awake. He thinks that they're like sleeping
too lazily. They should only be allowed to sleep in
a straight position, flat on their backs or else this
laxity will spawn moral lapses and render them unfit for

(21:35):
the life of discipline that German society demanded.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Even so, they had to like sleep with their arms
crossed like vampires.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, they do, they kind of do. Even infants have
to lay prone and like straight, otherwise it's going to
like start them on the road to sin. Like newborn
you have to like police how your newborn baby lies down,
or they're not going to grow up German enough to
conquer France, not.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
To invade Russia. It would have worked out.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, No, I mean we're so far ahead of that.
Like we're trying to get kids ready for the idea
of breechloading cannons, and by god he does all right.
Speaking of breech loading cannons, you know who else loads
their new Krupstahl cannons from the breach Margaret?

Speaker 2 (22:18):
The products and service rights and support the show right.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Arms industry, Yeah, the arms industry specifically in eighteen seventy Europe.
That is the primary sponsor of our show, Margaret. Have
you ever heard of the Mitrelieu?

Speaker 2 (22:34):
I have not.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
It's an early French machine gun and it's not good
at doing what we use machine guns for today, which
is sweeping broad arcs of fire in order to contain areas.
But it's really good at shooting one guy a bunch
of times. So you know, if you need a metralieu
in your life. They don't legally count as machine guns
for reasons that are complicated to explain, but very much

(22:57):
true anyway.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
And gatling guns not technically basically why yeah, because you
have to turn Yeah, the ATF.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
The ATF.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Everyone worked really well in World War One, well, not
World War one so much.

Speaker 1 (23:16):
It works.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
Oh no, I'm just thinking of My knowledge of the
history of machine guns is that they were used colonially
by the Western forces and then the but then the
first time that they were used against other white people
was in World War One, and that's when everyone realized
how fucking what nightmare they had created.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, that's when people really fucked it up. The mittrulieu
was a little more complicated. The French had it, and
it was like actually pretty effective in a couple of battles,
but they never actually deployed it, right, They thought of
it more as a piece of artillery rather than support
for the infantry. So anyway, they lost that war pretty badly.
But you don't have to, you know, you can. You
can use your crank operated machine gun for what God

(23:52):
wants you to use it for, just cranking.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
Our hero of today wouldn't want you to, no.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
He sho wouldn't. We're back, Margaret and I both have
are crank operated, not technically machine guns. That's right, Yeah,
as I hope all of you do. You know, anyway,
unless you're in Germany, where I think that probably is illegal,
because I'm sure they wrote their laws more like less

(24:24):
like Americans, shall we say so, Yeah, we're talking about Shraber,
and his whole attitude is that like if kids slouch,
if they like, you know, when they're laying down, they
flop around, if they're not basically straight while standing or
straight wall prone at all times, they're going to get
started on the road to moral ruin. So since children

(24:45):
would naturally curl or lean on their bodies at some point,
it wasn't enough for him to say he's not just
the kind of guy who is like maybe that adult
most of us had who was like, you should straighten up.
You got to care about your posture, right. He developed
corrective treatments to revert the damage. His attitude was like, well,
unless people have been applying my teachings to their infants

(25:06):
from birth, those kids probably have bad habits, and so
we need medical orthotic devices to correct their bad posture.
Now some of at his back brace. He yes, he
kind of did, actually, but worse. Yeah, Now, one of
his first creations was the bridge, and this didn't require
any new devices. This is when to correct a child's posture,

(25:27):
you suspend them in the air by chairs underneath their
head and feet and they kind of like keep themselves straight.
This is like a hardware CrossFit exercise today and he thanks,
if your four year old slouchest, this is what you do.
Sobey's going to show you a picture from his textbook
and he wanted you to do this to apply the

(25:47):
bridge to children if you caught them walking with a
quote forward slump, which he defined as an expression of weakness, dumbness,
and cowardice.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Okay, so I'm looking at a picture of I mean,
it's a there's two chairs. A man is sitting not
with his shoulders on the top chair, but literally his head,
his head, his neck is doing a lot of work.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
His neck is going to be ruined for life. I
love the idea that like, oh yeah, I don't one
can do this dumb coward stuff. No, it doesn't seem
like that's not like the way he's It's specific because
there is an exercise, a plank exercise that kind of
looks like this, but all of the all of the
weight is being placed in the child's neck in this picture.

(26:31):
Oh we love to see it, Margaret.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Now this guy's a vampire.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
He that would have been a lot less harmful to
the kids.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
That is my theory about almost everything that happened in
Europe in the nineteenth century.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
So oh you see, I was going to say, my
theory is that most of the problems with kids is
that they have too much blood. But similar, similar.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
To that actually could be the solution of the problem.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So bad posture is not the only
thing that Shavers sought to eliminate, writing an eight teen
fifty eight that parents had to quote suppress everything in
the child. Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.
That's such a telling phrase. Yes, the seed of being
able to love your parents has to be suffocated through

(27:15):
constant discipline.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
The point of life, I like genuinely wonder, like what a.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Point that the point of life is for the German
principalities to form a unified block to defeat France, Margaret
get together.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
France is just over there, like being France, and I
understand that.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, Hey, they've been fucking around a lot by the
mid eighteen hundreds. You know this guy, this guy is
born at the start of the eighteen hundreds. To be fair,
his childhood has a lot of French fuckery going on
in it. Yeah, some would call them the Germans of
their era. Uh, it's it's it's fine, everybody were where.

(27:56):
You can't tell European history and have a good time
without being unfair to France, Germany or the UK, and
I choose all three. I'm also going to give some
shit to Belgium. Don't worry so again. Here just parents
to apply his methods as early as possible, because children
who are older will develop harmful habits that are more
deeply rooted. For these unfortunate souls, he developed orthotic methods.

(28:19):
One was a shoulder band. It's basically a figure eight
shaped leather belt that you wrap around a child's shoulders,
kind of like the Holsters movie detectives where and then
you tighten it to the point that it ties a
child's arms and shoulders back straight behind them.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
I gotta advertise these on Instagrams right now?

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, Yes you could, Yes, you could doctor approved orthot
X for your child if the slouch. Yeah. Shreber instructed
parents to make sure their kids wore these things all day,
every day until their posture was fixed, and throughout the
mid eighteen hundreds is he's writing his books, he designs
this spree of child torture gadgets, my favorite of which

(28:58):
is the shrebersh Gerald Holder. The literal translation of that
name is Scheber's straightholder. In an article for the journal
Selma Gundy Morton Schatzman Wrights describes it as quote an
iron crossbar fastened to the table at which the child
sat to reader write. The bar pressed against the collar
boats in the front of the shoulders to prevent forward

(29:20):
movements or crooked posture. He says, the child could not
lean for log against the bar because of the pressure
of the hard object against the bones and the consequent discomfort.
The child will return on his own to a straight position,
he added excitedly, I had a Jared holder manufactured which
proved itself to be suitable after multiple tests on my
own children.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
You're sort of inverse crucifying your children, and.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, you're building devices to correct your kids. He is like, Yeah,
you love that kind of self or experimentation on your
own brood. At least it's the responsible, it's not responsible,
that's how he does it. Yeah, So one look at
a picture of a pair of schoolgirls using this device
makes one of its uses very clear, which is that

(30:07):
it stops kids from crossing their legs. This is good
because Shrimmer felt cross legs were immoral. The Gerald Halter
was such as, Yeah, he didn't like kids like I
think particularly it might have been that like if boys
did it, he felt like they were rubbing their genitals.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
I don't know, but he was like girls expected to
cross their legs because if you don't, you're a bad
There's like a little rhyme and school that we all.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
He doesn't want anything going on at all movement wise
there right. He wants he wants, he wants that those
legs straight and children unable to move deviate from the
position they are set in their chair without iron bars and.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Arms while saluting. You need to keep your absolute straight
while you're saluting.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
No, otherwise you're not going to defeat Napoleon the third.
So the Jared Halter was a huge success, very popular
in his day, and it's such a s that he
follows it up quickly with a new device, which is
essentially a belt tied to a child's bed that ran
across their chest to force them to lay straight on
their back while sleeping. The diagrams for this are really

(31:12):
quite upsetting, Margaret. It looks like a dead kid in
a bed. It looks like one of those.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
It's like vampires. There's vampires everywhere.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, you're just preparing the kid to get fucking feasted on.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah, I mean, it's just a picture of a girl
lying in a bed.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Wide open eyes, clearly like strapped so tight into that
bed that she cannot sleep.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Yeah. Great, I'm sure this never goes badly.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
No, no, no. Generations of kids are healthier as a
result of it.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Somewhere there's someone in a kink scene who's like, oh,
the blah blah blah belt.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm sorry that leather manufacturers
in this day charge a lot more than they did
back in Shrebber's day. So the last device we'll talk about,
but by no means the last device Shrebber created was
the kop Falter or headholder, which was a strap to
hold a child's head in place while they were at
a desk. Shatsman writes quote, the cup folter was a

(32:14):
strap clamped at one end to the child's hair and
at the other to his underwear, so it pulled his
head if he did not hold his head straight. It
served as a reminder to keep the head straight, and
this is this is a shrebber. The consciousness that the
head cannot be lowered past a certain point soon becomes
a habit. He admits it was apt to produce a
certain stiffening effect upon the head, and should therefore be

(32:37):
used only one or two hours a day.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Oh, it's progressive of him.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
After you like, do permanent damage to your child's muscula chair,
you should. You should limit the amount of permanent damage
you do.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
I want to I want to build a time machine
to bring him to the present and show him kids
looking at cell phones. Oh man, oh god, My torture for.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
Him, that that is his hell is just watch modern
kids play video games, just shreaking at us from the
astral plane. Yeah uh now, again, the goal of all
of these physical interventions was to improve moral character by
altering the physical attributes of children. The goal was to
create a better class of person. And it's not hard

(33:20):
to see the spiritual echoes of Nazism here. Again, people
often mistake what the Nazis believed. Is like, they thought
that they were the uber mension, right, that they they
were superhumans, you know, because they were areas. No, no, no,
They thought that they could create people who were closer
to the original Aryans through a mixture of selective breeding
and like different rearing techniques. Right, they didn't think they

(33:41):
were there yet they wanted to build it. That's a
crucial distinction, right, that they were trying to create this,
this better kind of person, not.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
That they were trying to do what they were the
ornx or the org someone's gonna be really mad.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
A yes, or the giant the giant cow things.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
Yes, yeah, that they wanted to just krows and giant
Nazi men.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
They're not wrong about wanting giant cows. Everything else I
don't see, but I do think we should have bigger cows.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
I would fully support a Jurassic Park project.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Absolutely, you know, honestly, I would support a Jurassic Park
that ended exactly the way the one in the movie did,
and I would go to that park. I will take
the risk to absolutely.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
I'd be a little disappointed if they didn't break free
and start forming the imagine a normal park.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
Or like getting ready to leave, like I don't know,
it just feels like something's missing.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
I feel like it'd be like something more honest, where
you like, you know, you kiss your husband goodbye and
you head out to work, and you look both ways
and run to your car before a velociraptor gets you.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
Yes, Yes, like Muldoon. We should all commute to work
exactly like Muldoon commuted across briefly across a street and
Jurassic Park that one time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, when
we're looking at like a guy whose goal is to
improve the moral character by altering physical acc tributes of children,

(35:01):
it's not hard to see spiritual echoes to Nazism here.
As writer Rachel Aviv notes in an article for The
New Yorker, Shreber outlined principles of child rearing that would
create a stronger race of men, ridding them of cowardice, laziness,
and unwanted displays of vulnerability and desire. Now, doctor Schreber's
books were so popular and influential that his book on

(35:22):
children's Posture and Corrective Exercises went through more than forty printings.
Late in his career, he seems to have acknowledged that
some of his physical corrections did not produce the intended
moral results, and he actually, again, this is why this
guy's not fully I can't really call him a bastard. He,
because of his peculiarities, posits a lot of ideas that

(35:43):
cause tremendous harm to children. There are like parenting groups
that are not insignificant size to the middle of the
nineteenth century that are using aspects of schreber tactics. But
also he recognizes that like, oh you know what, this
stuff isn't working the way I thought it would, And
kind of late in his life he comes around to
from more playgrounds and cities to give children a place

(36:03):
to exercise, and his most well regarded achievement to this
day is the establishment of what are called Shraper gardens,
which are all around Germany today. These are community gardens
in urban areas meant to provide children and parents with
healthy outdoor activity. So, Gibbs, that's.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
Kind of hold that's them.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
That's nice. That's good. He started from like strapping children
into torture cages, but he ended up in community gardens.
It's okay, oh yeah, okay, good work Shraper. Yeah. You
have to be fair to the guy. He's not like.
I don't think he is a bad faith. I don't
think he's wanting to hurt kids. I think this is

(36:39):
just he's kind of a weird dude who obsesses about
certain things and that leads him to doing causing to
coming up with some harmful ideas about how children should
be treated.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
I honestly, I have a weird sympathy towards this where
he had an idea where he was like, Okay, I
want to try and improve people, and it didn't work,
and he was like, okay, I'll try something different. Like
I think about I like, I wish I had been
taught to stand equally on both my feet more.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Oh yeah, yeah, I guess I have.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
My sciatica exists in part because and I actually blame
I took like art classes, right, and they taught me
about contrapasta, where they were like, this is the way
people normally stand. And it's like because all the old
Greek statues are like someone standing on one leg with
other on one leg, and so I thought that was
like the normal way to stand. So I did that
all the time, and now I have, like, you know,

(37:29):
twenty years later, it caused some problems in my life
and I'm like, yeah, I wish they put my weight
on both feet.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
He's acknowledging his solutions are because he's growing up in
mid century Europe. He's a child of the Napoleonic Wars.
His solutions are nightmarish, but he's like, well, kids are
living in cities, they're not feeling enough exercise. We have
to do something to torimedy this problem. And he does.
I think he lands ultimately pretty close to the right answer,

(37:55):
which is like, give kids playgrounds, make sure they have
access to nature through stuff like gardens.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
I still think that's basically the best answer to this
problem today.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, and tell people like, well, if you don't stand
up straight, it'll cause problems further down the line. And
it's your body.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah, it's your body.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
Make your own decision.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
Again, don't strap them into Yeah. The problem is that
people follow his teachings well into the twentieth century, and
after he can kind of see, yeah, after he gives
up on aspects of them. Now, that's not like he's
not like one to eighty. He's not like the Alfa
wolf guy. No, no, no, no, no, okay. His kids

(38:32):
do not grow up to be what you would call
straight backed moral paragons. Not that they're bad people, but
you can kind of see how flawed his methods are
by what happens to his two sons, in particular, his
eldest son commits suicide in eighteen seventy seven, and it
seems as if mental illness is pretty common in his family. Again,
he seems to suffer from it, but it's his son,

(38:53):
Daniel who's going to become famous for it. And this
is like one of the most famous cases in the
history of like psych cology of a particularly of someone
with paranoid schizophrenia. His son is a guy named Daniel
Paul Schraper. He is subjected again. His dad writes about
testing his methods, testing these different torture devices on his
kids when they're little kids. So Daniel is subjected to

(39:16):
his father's strict discipline and these physical torture devices constantly
as a young child, and for a time he seems
to have grown into exactly the kind of disciplined, functional
adult that doctor Schraper wanted to create. He is appointed
a judge by the Ministry of Justice in eighteen sixty seven.
He is a judge for more than a decade through

(39:36):
the establishment of the German Empire, and in eighteen eighty
four he runs for a seat in the Reichstag. So
so far, we're like, well, this seems like the kind
of ultra productive, efficient German citizen that Schreber was seeking
to create through these methods.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
Orders of people.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, the aorrox of people. But when Daniel loses that
Reichstag election, he has a mental breakdown which causes him
to take he has to go spend six months in
an asylum. Now psychiatrists have since diagnosed what he was
likely suffering from as dementia, praecox, or paranoid schizophrenia. Essentially,
he had a psychotic break, right, Like, that's what went down.

(40:15):
He lost this election and he had a psychotic break.
At the time, it was assumed to be an isolated
incident and he did return to work. But a few
years later, after he became a presiding judge, his wife
had a stillbirth and he experienced another psychotic break. This
one did not get better, and he spent years institutionalized,
only being released in eighteen ninety nine, at which point

(40:35):
he wrote a memoir about his nervous illness. This is
one of the most influential texts in our early history
of understanding psychiatric illnesses, because Schreber is not just a
guy who's dealing with paranoid schizophrenia, before. It is something
that medical literature is fully described, has fully described. Schreber
is an educated man who is aware of the extent

(40:57):
of the delusions that he's suffering from and writes about
them in detail. And so this is an influential Yes,
it's very interesting, and it's oddly enough, Actually, Kurt Vonneget's,
one of his kids does something kind of similar. But
as a result of the fact that he writes this memoir,
we get this look inside of the head of someone
who has a thing that a lot of people struggle with.

(41:18):
Most of the people who struggle with it do not
have the advantage of this guy's education or social position,
so he is not just not only is he able
to write about what he's experiencing, but people pay attention
to it because this is a judge and they want
to know what happened to this very functional man.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
Freud writes a pretty noteworthy review of Schreber's memoirs, and
in true Freud fashion, he blames Daniel's disturbances and paranoia
on repressed homosexuality. Specifically, Freud is like, he wanted to
fuck his dad as a kid, then he wanted to
fuck his brother, and he couldn't you know he does
the Freud thing, right, Uh huh. This is kind of silly,

(41:55):
because Schriber does experience paranoid sexual fantasies, but not that kind.
Specifically writes that he woke up one morning with the
thought that it might be fun to quote succumb to
sex as a woman, right, And that is a pretty
normal thought, like a lot of people have thoughts about, like, oh,
it might be fun to experience this the other way,

(42:15):
Maybe that means that he was repressed and homosexual. Maybe
it's just a normal thought that a lot of people have.
But either way, Freud tides this directly to his schizophrenia,
which I don't think is accurate. It just seems like
a thing a person would experience. But Shatzman, who we've
quoted from before, pointed out that the delusions Schreber suffered

(42:36):
from that he describes in his book coincide directly with
the kind of experiments carried out by his father. And again,
I don't think what Judge Schreber does doesn't cause paranoid schizophrenia.
You can't cause that that way. But the nature of
the delusions that Judge Schreber suffers from are very much

(42:57):
influenced by what his father does to him as a child.
So in his book, Judge Shrubber uses the term miracles
to describe these kind of delusions that he is experiencing.
And it's hard to explain why he chooses the term miracle,
but that's not really important. What you need to understand
is that when he is talking about the term miracle,
he's essentially talking about a hallucinatory fantasy. And many of

(43:21):
these fantasies that he is gripped by as an adult
are based on his real childhood experiences. For example, he
describes the miracle of head compression with some regularity, which
he imagines as a gang of little devils that are
inside his head compressing it as though it's in a
vice by turning a screw right. He has these kind
of like fantasies of devils screwing his head in a vice.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
And this is really interesting to me because it's like, yeah,
I'm really interested in when metaphor is a better way
to understand things, yes than other ways of describing it.
And so even the calling it miracle sort of ties
into that. In my mind, I don't understand, you know,
I haven't read this piece but no, this is because
we're looking at the period in which modern conceptions of

(44:06):
reality start developing, is the nineteen and early twentieth century,
and even the like a repressed homosexuality thing to be
a man who desires to experience sex like a woman
would have been essentially homosexual at that time in terms
of not just because it would have been a man
doing it to you, but like transness was not distinct

(44:26):
from oh no, homosexuality in the late Victorian like pre
nineteen ten or so.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Era, absolutely not. And there's there's you know this is
this is also it's kind of worth noting all considered
mental illness at the time too, totally, so like it
gets it all gets conflated together.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Yeah, and so of course being like, oh, there's just
demons that do this thing to me, but it's like
not wrong. That's what's so interesting about there were demons
doing this to him.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
And I think an aspect of like why he describes
these as miracles is that his dad, who is doing
this to him, kind of describes as like, I'm doing
this to help you, right, much like that mom fluencer
we talked about, right, like where you know you're abusing
the kid and telling them that I'm doing this because
I love you. Right, Doctor Shreber legitimately does think he's helping.
But what he's doing, like the fact that he fantasizes

(45:14):
about this gang of devil screwing his head and avice, well,
his dad is tying his head into a device that
causes it to like pull against his fucking like this
like bar strapped to his underpants or whatever whenever he
leans forward in shit. Right, My guess is that part
of what's happening here is that the different devices that
are used on him as a kid cause some lifelong pain,

(45:36):
and when he experiences that pain, he has kind of
a hallucinatory fantasy that attributes the pain to something not
all that different from its likely cause you know, that's
what I see is happening here.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Kind of that makes sense to me.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
This is all debatable, but I think it makes sense.
And his paper Paranoia or Persecution The Case of Schreber,
published in the journal Salmagundi Morton Schatzman right quote. Why
did Shreber turn memories into miracles? My hypothesis is that
his father had forbidden him to see the truth about
his past. His father had demanded that children love, honor,
and obey their parents. As I illustrate later, he taught

(46:12):
parents a method explicitly designed to force children not to
feel bitterness or anger towards their parents, even where such
feelings might be justified. He wished to rid children of
dangerous feelings. Shreber, in order to link his suffering with
his father, would have had to consider his father's behavior
towards him as bad. This I infer his father had
forbidden him to do. He is enable or unwilling to

(46:32):
violate his father's view of what his view of his
father should be. Prohibited from seeing the true origin of
his torments, he calls them miracles. As a result, he
is considered crazy. Now again, Shatzman is writing here in
like the eighties, and he is also not talking about
any of this in a way that is contemporary to
our understanding of the actual medical science. Here also, Shreber

(46:55):
is considered crazy because he has paranoid schizophrenia, right, that's
the it's the kind of It's not that because he
describes these hallucinations as miracles, because he's having them in
the first place, that he is institutionalized and the like.
But I do think Shatsman is accurate in sort of
laying out that the form and nature of what delusions

(47:17):
Schreber faces are part are like influenced heavily by his
father's teaching techniques. And I, yeah, what I think is
most interesting about this is this idea. And again I
think this is kind of where Shatsman makes some mistakes,
but he's like, well, Schreber's technique, he wanted to make
it basically impossible for kids to like blame their parents
or feel bad like these were some of the bitterness

(47:40):
and angerness towards parents. These were some of the bad
feelings that he thought he could kind of smother in
an embryonic stage if you established in a physical discipline.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Which they would just call this exorcism. Yeah, a couple
hundred years earlier, but he has some masket in science
as if it's the same fucking thing.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
But also, you know, as we talked about, Schreber is
not a mode uns. He's a guy who is trying
to actually help kids and who changes throughout it and
who comes up with some very positive things. And so
I think that Shatsman is kind of over applying well
because of his father's teachings. His son couldn't see the
harm that he had done. I think part of it

(48:17):
is that because of the good attributes of his father,
the son is unable to fully see the harm that
he did too, which is like, actually not a thing
that's even related to paranoid schizophrenia. That's something all of
us deal with, basically, like trying to separate the things
that our parents did that were flawed and bad and
even related to the fact that they are products of

(48:38):
their time from the things that they did out of
you know, love, out of self sacrifice that are good. Like,
that's a lifelong process for a lot of us, and
shatsmen doing this thing that a lot of people do
when they analyze cases of mental illness is kind of
wrapping it all up in the paranoid schizophrenia, where when
I read this, I'm like, oh, yeah, Schreber was like
grappling with the fact that his dad had a complicated legacy. Yeah,

(49:02):
and he was also had paranoid schizophrenia, So he did
it in a different way than most people do. But
I don't see that as being like, I think it's
a pretty rational thing to struggle with.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Actually, what it almost like puts him in a position
where he can see things, explain things in ways that
are like shocking. Yeah, that like still draw attention to it,
whereas if he had just stayed like by calling it
miracles and demons. I mean it made people pain him
as crazy, yeah, because he was experiencing reality differently than

(49:32):
other people. But yeah, it's it's it's shocking enough to
bring it out as compared to being like, I have
this chart describing exactly how much my pain feels different
every day. But yeah, some what my father did you know?

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Yes? Yes, And speaking of what our fathers did, what
our fathers would all do if they were here right
now is tell us to buy the products and services
that support this podcast. Unless you have a bad relationship
with your dad, then your dad will be angry. If
you buy the products and services that support this podcast,
your stick it to the man or make him proud,
whichever is more profitable to us. We're back. So in

(50:13):
recent years, decades, really, there have been attempts to rehabilitate
doctor Schreber. And again that's not wholly irrational because like
the Schreber gardens, that's fucking great. His attitudes towards like kindergartens.
Some of what he says, is valuable when it comes
to the harm that his techniques, particularly these machines, caused
generations of children, and particularly how his philosophy of child

(50:36):
rearing contributed to the birth of Nazism. You know, I
think it's a mistake to correlate his teachings too strongly
with the coming of fascism, right, And there's a good
you know, one of the people who's kind of made
this point is a writer, Nam's v. Lothan, writing in
a nineteen ninety four issue of The New York Review
of Books, quote, the generation that became the German Army

(50:57):
or the SS Corps in World War Two, born around
nineteen ten was unlikely to have been raised on more
at Schaever's books forgotten by that time. That's a little inaccurate.
According to Walter Havrnick's nineteen sixty four monograph Beating His Punishment,
in the post World War One years, there was a
decline in household beating and an increase in school beating
ages nine to fourteen, correlated with fallen fathers. Not to

(51:17):
mention the harsh and cruel training practices in the German Army.
It is character assassination to apply the label to talitarianism
to the Schaber's household or books, considering the complex causes
of Nazi, anti Semitism, militarism, totalitarianism, and the results for
Jews and others, and I quipple with bits of that.
I agree with his ultimate point, which is that you
shouldn't say this is the guy who made the Nazis

(51:39):
possible because of his child. There's so much more to
it than that.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
And it is the schools that right seems now society
is your abusive father that you now have to owe
your life to. And some of that is just because
so many men died, but some of it certainly is
that Schaber's teachings made their way worm their way very
deeply into society's understanding of how children should be raised. Right,
that you should have this, You should very strictly enforce

(52:04):
physical discipline because that leads to moral discipline. You have
to do it from an extremely young age. Right, Schreber
helps to reinforce in scientific eyes or whatever those attitudes
in German society, and he is one of the is.
He is part of the DNA of Nazism as a
result of that. Right, but you also shouldn't you can't.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
Can't. You don't want to exaggerate or minimize his role
in the Nazi equation, right because his methods are still
being taught. ZV is wrong when he says that like
kids were not being taught based on more at Schreber's
books in nineteen ten, they absolutely will. One of the
kids who in fact is being taught based on the
Schreber method around the time that the Nazis come to

(52:45):
power is a guy we're going to be talking about
next week, Helmut Kintler. He's born in nineteen twenty eight
and his parents are doctor Schreber fans again in the
late nineteen twenties. Yeah, Kintler is ultimately the bastard that
we are building to with this series. But I want
to read this quote about his upbringing by Rachel Levive
and the New Yorkers so you know how Shreber's teachings

(53:06):
were being used popularly around the time that the third
Reich rose to power. Quote. When Kinler misbehaved, his father
threatened to buy a contraption invented by Shreber to promote
children's posture and compliance, shoulder bands to prevent slouching, a
belt that held their chest in place while they slept,
an iron bar pressed to their collarbones so they'd sit
up straight at the table. If Kentler talked out of turn,

(53:26):
his father slammed his fist on the table and shouted.
When the father talks, the children must be silent. And
you know, I want to end on that. We will
be talking a lot about Kentler next week. He is
by far the worst person we're talking about in this series.
But it's important to know both that like the primary

(53:48):
method by which Shrebber influences the Nazis is kind of
deeper than a straight line. But there are still kids,
and Kintler's dad is a Nazi officer. He's a member
of the military High Command in Berlin, Lyn. They are
still raising their kids based on a not insignificant number
of people during the time that Hitler is rising to power,
So that's important worth noting. And in part two, Margaret,

(54:11):
we're going to talk about the guy, well, the lady
that comes after Schreber, the mom fluencer, who is like
the celebrity mom expert of the Nazi era, and I
am excited to tell you about her. But first, Margaret,
will you tell our listeners where they can find you
on the Internet dot com.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
Well, if you go to the Internet doc I have
no idea. What if it happens if you type the
Internet dot com into your website.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
Someone's bought. It's probably a scam.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
Yeah, yeah, that is where you can find me, is
at whatever website you find there. Or I have a
podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, where I tell
people positive stuff. It's kind of a lie. I tell
people have positive stories, but it's usually be goes really
badly in the end because it's about the struggle for
justice and we don't always win that one. I also
have a book that is going to be kickstarted in

(55:01):
June starting June tenth, and the pre launch page so
you can sign up for information about it should be
live around when this episode drops. And I wrote a
teen ya book without any bad things. Of course there's
bad things. It's a novel. Bad things have to happen
in a novel called The Sapling Cage. And it's great,
by the way, Yeah, Robert actually got it.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
It is my favorite piece of your writing so far.
It's kid. It's the kind of book I wish I
had had to read as a kid, might have helped
me get a couple of things straight earlier than I
wound up doing. So, Yeah, the Sapling Cage reading books.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
You can sign up for the Kickstarter now, or you
can sign up to be told about the Kickstarter Now
by using Google.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
It's got witches and knights and a wide variety of
lovingly described melee weaponry. So it's a classic.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
I was pretty into when I was writing this book.
Was when I was doing the most, going out every
week with foam weapons and fighting yeah my friends. Yeah,
and I really like spears and that it comes across.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
Look, you can tell who. You can tell who actually
knows their medieval weaponry by who prefers the sword to
a spear, right.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Yeah, I don't want to be near that fucker.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
No, no, no, no, no distance baby. Yeah. It's really
the same with all weapons. The ideal weapons system is
the one that keeps you furthest away from the enemy.
You know. This is why they call artillery the king
of battle, or used to before air strikes got really good. Anyway,
if you want an air strike of content into your ear,

(56:42):
Jamie's new podcast, sixteenth Minute of Fame will hit like
a five hundred. Nope, okay, it's a good podcast. It's
about what happens to people who are like the Internet's
main character after you know that all fades. What it's
like being like focused on by the eye of souron.
That is our culture's ability to like suddenly divert hundreds

(57:03):
of millions of eyes to one person, and then what
it's like after that. It's great shit. Check out sixteenth
minute of fame.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Is she gonna cover the thirty to fifty faral hogs? Guy?

Speaker 3 (57:13):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (57:13):
Yeah, oh yeah, you can find it.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
Actually, yeah, Actually she was at my house and we
had a bunch of people over or we're watching a
movie and I look and it's like midnight.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
I look over at JB's screen.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
And she has like five hundred notes about thirty to
fifty fars.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
Yes, yes, yes, the rightest man. The Internet did him dirty,
but by he was right. He tried to warn us.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
He tried so hard.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
Yeah, anyway, Part two more.

Speaker 3 (57:44):
Nazis Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 1 (58:01):
Mm hmmm