Daddy and Mommy beat their children. “Mommy hits with the wooden spoon. Daddy strikes with the carpet beater.” Daddy and Mommy put their trust in “The German Mother and Her First Child.” This guidebook by Nazi-era parenting icon Johanna Haarer, first published in 1934, remained tragically a bestseller well into the 1980s and shaped the childhood of millions of German children.
Marie-Elisabeth Lüdde recounts how this played out in practice. She draws on two parenting diaries she found among her parents’ belongings after their deaths. Daddy and Mommy documented their orgies of beatings in writing. Through numerous quotations, the author weaves these scandalous diaries into her own narrative. To trace the roots of this violence, she also sketches her parents’ earlier history. A panorama of 20th-century Germany unfolds. A haunting voice in the culture of remembrance.

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