Education: Germany’s Children

Tall, black-haired Erika Mann, 32, is the oldest and most intrepid of Novelist Thomas Mann’s six children. She has traveled round the world, once won an automobile driving contest, driving 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) a day. In her teens she decided not to follow the family trade of writing, instead became an actress under Max Reinhardt. When the Nazis came into power, although no Jewess, she was divorced from her Nazi husband (Gustaf Gründgens, now head of the Berlin State Theatre), and produced a satirical political revue, Peppermill, in Munich, her birthplace. For this piece of audacity she had to flee Germany and her citizenship was revoked by Adolf Hitler. She met and married Britain’s Poet W.H. Auden, like her a zealous antifascist. At the risk of her life, she returned secretly to Germany to get some of her father’s manuscripts. Last year she arrived in Manhattan, applied for U.S. citizenship. Today she is engaged in the same trade as her father. Her angriest book, School for Barbarians, with a preface by her father, was published last week.* Miss Mann’s book is about Germany’s children. Other investigators have reported what has happened under the Nazis to Germany’s once-great educational system but none has reported so scathingly as Erika Mann what has happened to Germany’s youngsters. Her sensational but thoroughly documented description:

> Every child says “Heil Hitler!” from 50 to 150 times a day, is taught to venerate: Horst Wessel, a pimp; Poet Dietrich Eckart, a drug addict; Leo Schlageter, a railroad wrecker. (Minister of Education Bernhard Rust has frequently been confined in a sanatorium during violent attacks of insanity.)

> Arithmetic pupils in Nazi schools calculate problems in bombing; art pupils draw pictures of air raids. History pupils are told that Austria’s late Chancellor Dollfuss was murdered not by Nazis but in a Marxist uprising.

> The few Jewish children remaining in Nazi schools are used as object lessons. A teacher calls a little Jewish girl to the front of a class, asks other pupils: “What do you see in this face?” They answer obediently: “A gigantic nose, Negroid lips, inferior frizzy hair.” The teacher adds: “You see, besides, a cowardly and disloyal facial expression.”

> Obscenity, with which Nazis smear Jews and priests, is part of the curriculum. “The Stunner, which writes almost exclusively about sexual outrages, bedroom gossip and scandal, is read in the schools to children between 6 and 14.” Copies hang on classroom walls. Result: “Pupils have become possessed by pathological sexual aberrations.” Nazi children are taught that motherhood is a duty, even of unmarried women, and “the number of illegitimate pregnancies and births among the members of the State Youth is tremendous.” There is even a standard form for applications by youthful fathers to be declared of age so they can marry their mistresses.

> For military training, children begin long marches at the age of 10. and 15-year-olds are expected to march 13∧ miles a day with an eleven-pound load. Result: an abnormal increase in the prevalence of fiat feet, a trait Nazis attribute to non-Aryans. Of youths conscripted in 1936. some 38% were found unfit for military service for this reason.

> René, a refugee to the U. S., tells about an incident in Nazi youths’ night rifle practice. One night Rene and his friends. August and Gert, had to hold flashlights for a youth leader to shoot at. August was hit in the knee. The leader swore. “Then it was Gert’s turn. He was good and afraid. . . . The leader was a little afraid, too, I guess. He shot to the left, and that was where Gert’s forehead was.” The leader was transferred to another group. Gert’s father sent to a concentration camp for complaining.

When her book was published last week, emotional Erika Mann was in Prague, ready to fight with the Czechs against Adolf Hitler.

* Modern Age Books, New York City