The New Yorker has been promoting this story on Twitter:
The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles
With the approval of the government, a renowned sexologist ran a dangerous program. How could this happen?
and it's an interesting read, especially for the part that explains post War German theorising about how to have less authoritarian friendly personalities ever again. I'm not sure I have ever heard of this in such detail before.
I won't extract too much, but it notes that the sexologist in question, Kentler, was a gay man who had father issues - Dad was a domineering jerk, following earlier ideas about how to raise kids, especially boys:
Kentler’s parents followed the teachings of Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, a best-selling German authority on child care who has been described as a “spiritual precursor of Nazism.” Schreber 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. “Suppress everything in the child,” Schreber wrote, in 1858. “Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.”
Then, according to this article, in the immediate post War years, sexual propriety was culturally significant as a type of "penance":
The postwar years in West Germany were marked by an intense preoccupation with sexual propriety, as if decorum could solve the nation’s moral crisis and cleanse it of guilt. “One’s own offspring did penance for Auschwitz,” the German poet Olav Münzberg wrote, “with ethics and morality forcefully jammed into them.” Women’s reproductive rights were severely restricted, and the policing of homosexual encounters, a hallmark of Nazism, persisted; in the two decades after the war, roughly a hundred thousand men were prosecuted for this crime. Kentler was attracted to men and felt as if he “always had one leg in prison,” because of the risks involved in consummating his desires. He found solace in the book “Corydon,” by André Gide, a series of Socratic dialogues about the naturalness of queer love.
Kentler went on to promote a laissez faire attitude to sex as the solution (a idea which did have a very 70's, countercultural, type of vibe):
He earned a doctorate in social education from the University of Hanover, publishing his dissertation, a guidebook called “Parents Learn Sex Education,” in 1975. He was inspired by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who had argued that the free flow of sexual energy was essential to building a new kind of society. Kentler’s dissertation urged parents to teach their children that they should never be ashamed of their desires. “Once the first feelings of shame exist, they multiply easily and expand into all areas of life,” he wrote.
OK, here's the key part about theories about sexual repression and fascism:
Like many of his contemporaries, Kentler came to believe that sexual repression was key to understanding the Fascist consciousness. In 1977, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit published “Male Fantasies,” a two-volume book that drew on the diaries of German paramilitary fighters and concluded that their inhibited drives—along with a fear of anything gooey, gushing, or smelly—had been channelled into a new outlet: destruction. When Kentler read “Male Fantasies,” he could see Schreber, the child-care author whose principles his parents had followed, “at work everywhere,” he wrote. Kentler argued that ideas like Schreber’s (he had been so widely read that one book went through forty editions) had poisoned three generations of Germans, creating “authoritarian personalities who have to identify with a ‘great man’ around them to feel great themselves.” Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”
The trials of twenty-two former Auschwitz officers had revealed a common personality type: ordinary, conservative, sexually inhibited, and preoccupied with bourgeois morality. “I do think that in a society that was more free about sexuality, Auschwitz could not have happened,” the German legal scholar Herbert Jäger said. Sexual emancipation was integral to student movements throughout Western Europe, but the pleas were more pitched in Germany, where the memory of genocide had become inextricably—if not entirely accurately—linked with sexual primness. In “Sex After Fascism,” the historian Dagmar Herzog describes how, in Germany, conflicts over sexual mores became “an important site for managing the memory of Nazism.” But, she adds, it was also a way “to redirect moral debate away from the problem of complicity in mass murder and toward a narrowed conception of morality as solely concerned with sex.”
Suddenly, it seemed as if all relationship structures could—and must—be reconfigured, if there was any hope of producing a generation less damaged than the previous one. In the late sixties, educators in more than thirty German cities and towns began establishing experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies. “There is no question that they were trying (in a desperate sort of neo-Rousseauian authoritarian antiauthoritarianism) to remake German/human nature,” Herzog writes. Kentler inserted himself into a movement that was urgently working to undo the sexual legacy of Fascism but struggling to differentiate among various taboos. In 1976, the magazine Das Blatt argued that forbidden sexual desire, such as that for children, was the “revolutionary event that turns our everyday life on its head, that lets feelings break out and that shatters the basis of our thinking.” A few years later, Germany’s newly established Green Party, which brought together antiwar protesters, environmental activists, and veterans of the student movement, tried to address the “oppression of children’s sexuality.” Members of the Party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults.
The only thing I am unsure about is that I am not sure how it fits in with Germany having a reputation for sexual liberation in the early part of the 20th century. Or was that just a city thing, eschewed by clean living country folk? Here's a couple of extraordinary paragraphs out of the (rather specific!) Wikipedia entry European Sexuality leading up to and during World War 2:
Within Germany in the 1930s, many German Protestants and Catholics shared the view that Jewish people were responsible for the sexual immorality that pervaded Weimar Culture. Many church leaders supported the Nazis, welcoming radical measures against “public immorality” that included shutting down brothels, gay and lesbian bars, and nudist organizations.[2] The initial support of the leadership of both the Catholic and Protestant churches was based on the belief that the Nazis would purify German sexual mores and reinstitute respect for family values.[3]
In the early 1900s, Germany, and particularly Berlin, developed a reputation for relaxed sexual mores; as Dagmar Herzog writes in Sexuality In Europe: A Twentieth Century History, “There was more detailed discussion of the best techniques for enhancing female orgasm under Nazism than there would be in the far more conservative decade of the 1950s.”[4] The flipside to liberalization for some was crackdowns on others.[5] By the 1930s, Nazi leadership was increasingly anxious about being perceived as “queer”.[6] In 1934, Hitler facilitated the murder of a friend and leader of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, an openly gay man, Ernst Röhm. Until that time, many bars frequented by members of the Sturmabteilung were well known as gay bars, and there was no perceived tension between activism espousing greater rights for homosexuals and right-wing politics.[7] The prevalence of same-sex institutions like Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls fostered suspicions of homoeroticism, and subsequently the regime tried to prove its straightness. All of that would change, however, when the virulently homophobic Heinrich Himmler became one of the most powerful people in the Reich.[8] In 1935, Nazis strengthened laws on the books that criminalized male (but not female) homosexuality. Not only mutual masturbation but parallel individual masturbation and even “erotic” glances fell under the purview of the law.[9] Penalties for homosexual behavior escalated considerably by 1937. By the end of the war, approximately 100,000 men had been prosecuted for same-sex behavior. Close to half had been convicted, sent to labor camps, prisons, or penitentiaries, subjected to medical experiments, or forced to have sex with female prostitutes.[10] Many Jewish people who were held captive would realize a similar fate.[11]
Gee. Germany sure has a special, kinda weirdo, place in sexual cultural history.
