I.ngo wants to remain anonymous. He reports on the primal experience that has accompanied him throughout his life. But he doesn’t show his face. “There was my cot. I sat in the corner and breathed. A dull feeling, my mother was gone. ”This is how he remembers his early childhood. “I’m lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. Be alone and look at the ceiling. Until there was food. “
Ingo was one of at least a hundred thousand children – research is not sure about the exact number – who attended a “weeklong day care center” in the GDR. He was delivered on Mondays and was only allowed to return home on Friday. “The week is over, mummy is picking up her darling,” it says happily in the GDR propaganda film. The voice of socialist construction does not tell what this means for the “darlings”. But the film “Die Tränen der Kinder” by Katja Aischmann and Steffen Hengst (director: Volker Schmidt-Sondermann), which the first ARD program is showing at midnight today, was produced for MDR. The authors speak to former crèche children who are now in their fifties, a mother who gave her child, an ethicist, a child psychologist, and a social scientist to demonstrate the consequences of early childhood mass placement. In doing so, you are not only making a television report about coming to terms with the GDR’s history, but also give a hint for the present. They show what becomes of children whose first experience is that they are separated from their parents.
Father and mother in production
In the young GDR, state doctrine wants it that way. The workers-and-peasants state wants to be built up. Father and mother have to go into production. The “housewife” is seen as a parasite, that men help out in the household and that everyday family life can be dealt with together is – still – unthinkable. In addition, we hear the director of the Institute for Hygiene of Children and Adolescents in Berlin, Eva Schmidt-Kolmer, say that parents lack the professional qualifications to shape children into “new people”, of whom “ Communist Manifesto “is the issue. In truth, Eva Schmidt-Kolmer knew better. In the mid-1950s she investigated crèche education. She took 1,800 children under observation, including 440 crèche children. The result was alarming. The children from the week nurseries showed great developmental deficits and were often sick. What conclusion did crèche pedagogy draw from this? To condition the children, in the sense of the behavioral scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. The daily routine followed an iron scheme, experiences were only possible in groups, sleeping and eating together, sitting on the potty together. At night some of the children were restrained in their beds with leather straps. The Czech film “Children without Love” from 1963 described what that meant. It was never shown in the GDR. And while the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians said goodbye to the week nurseries, the GDR expanded them to 40,000 places. The last week nurseries did not close until 1992.
Why did her mother do this?
Andrea understands why her mother did this to her. She tries to talk to her mother and older siblings, but is blocked. That is the general experience, says Heike Liebsch, who researches the week nurseries: Those affected should be silent. Nobody wants to hear what they have to say, because it is inevitably also about the feeling of personal guilt.
It is important to appreciate the circumstances. This calls on the very old Christa, who gave her child to the week nursery and reports on the time in which women were played off against women and the propaganda of the SED state asked: “Who is the better mother?” The working socialism power woman, of course . The children were a minor matter to be dealt with. “The smallest citizens of the republic who could not defend themselves” were not heard and are still not heard, says Heike Liebsch.
The film “The Tears of the Children” does not only have a reference character with a view to this blind spot in our socio-political debates, which are often determined by the sensitivities of major minorities. It also shows how important it is that politics, society and economy and individuals understand how inhuman it is to see family and children and work as opposites, as spheres, one of which has to be subordinate to the other. The calm, haunting film was funded by the Federal Foundation for Coming to terms with the SED dictatorship. One is really happy that something like this is still on public television at all.
The children’s tears, in the night from Monday to Tuesday at 0.05 a.m. on the first. Then in the media library.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/documentary-the-tears-of-the-children-there-was-my-cot-mother-was-gone/
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