Sexo y escuela en la Alemania del 68

Me han pasado este artículo de Der Spiegel que recomiendo leer con frialdad crítica, porque recoge un capítulo que no debe ser olvidado de la reciente historia de la pedagogía europea. Está firmado por Jan Fleischhauer y Wiebke Hollersen y se titula "The Sexual Revolution and Children. How the Left Took Things Too Far".

(...)
In the spring of 1970, Ursula Besser found an unfamiliar briefcase in front of her apartment door. It wasn't that unusual, in those days, for people to leave things at her door or drop smaller items into her letter slot. She was, after all, a member of the Berlin state parliament for the conservative Christian Democrats.

(...)
"The briefcase contained a stack of paper -- the typewritten daily reports on educational work at an after-school center in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, where up to 15 children aged 8 to 14 were taken care of during the afternoon. The first report was dated Aug. 13, 1969, and the last one was written on Jan. 14, 1970.

"Even a cursory review of the material revealed that the educational work at the Rote Freiheit ("Red Freedom") after-school center was unorthodox. The goal of the center was to shape the students into "socialist personalities," and its educational mission went well beyond supervised play. The center's agenda included "agitprop" on the situation in Vietnam and "street fighting," in which the children were divided into "students" and "cops."

"The educators' notes indicate that they placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

"According to the records, a "sex exercise" was conducted on Dec. 11 and a "fucking hour" on Jan. 14. An entry made on Nov. 26 reads: "In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendoes, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us."

"The material introduced the broader public to a byproduct of the student movement for the first time: the sexual liberation of children. Besser passed on the reports to an editor at the West Berlin newspaper Der Abend, who published excerpts of the material. On April 7, 1970, the Berlin state parliament discussed the Rote Freiheit after-school center. As it turned out, the Psychology Institute at the Free University of Berlin was behind the center. In fact, the institute had established the facility and provided the educators who worked there. Besser now believes that it was a concerned employee who dropped off the reports at her door.

"A few days later, Besser paid a visit to the Psychology Institute in Berlin's Dahlem neighborhood, "to take a look at the place," as she says. In the basement, Besser found two rooms that were separated by a large, one-way mirror. There was a mattress in one of the rooms, as well as a sink on the wall and a row of colorful washcloths hanging next to it. When asked, an institute employee told Besser that the basement was used as an "observation station" to study sexual behavior in children.

"It has since faded into obscurity, but the members of the 1968 movement and their successors were caught up in a strange obsession about childhood sexuality. It is a chapter of the movement's history which is never mentioned in the more glowing accounts of the era. On this issue, the veterans of the late '60s student movement seem to have succumbed to acute amnesia; an analysis of this aspect of the student revolution would certainly be worthwhile.

(...)
"The incidents at the Odenwald School in the western state of Hesse -- a boarding school with no religious affiliation -- showed that there was a connection between calls for reform and the removal of inhibition. The case of Klaus Rainer Röhl, the former publisher of the leftist magazine Konkret, also makes little sense without its historical context. The articles in Konkret that openly advocated sex with minors are at least as disturbing as the accusations of Röhl's daughters Anja and Bettina that he molested them, which Röhl denies.

"The left has its own history of abuse, and it is more complicated than it would seem at first glance. When leaders of the student movement of the late 1960s are asked about it, they offer hesitant or evasive answers. "At the core of the movement of 1968, there was in fact a lack of respect for the necessary boundaries between children and adults. The extent to which this endangerment led to abuse cases is unclear," Wolfgang Kraushaar, a political scientist and chronicler of the movement, writes in retrospect.

"A lack of respect for boundaries is putting it mildly. One could also say that the boundaries were violently torn open.

"Sexual liberation was at the top of the agenda of the young revolutionaries who, in 1967, began turning society upside down. The control of sexual desire was seen as an instrument of domination, which bourgeois society used to uphold its power. Everything that the innovators perceived as wrong and harmful has its origins in this concept: man's aggression, greed and desire to own things, as well as his willingness to submit to authority. The student radicals believed that only those who liberated themselves from sexual repression could be truly free.

"To them, it seemed obvious that liberation should begin at an early age (...).

"For instance, "Revolution der Erziehung" ("The Revolution in Education"), a work published by Rowohlt in 1971, which quickly became a bestseller, addresses sexuality as follows: "The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation -- as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system."

"Issue 17 of the cultural magazine Kursbuch, published in June 1969, described the revolutionaries' position in practical terms. Published by German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the issue contained a report by the members of Commune 2 in Berlin, titled "Educating Children in the Commune." In the summer of 1967, three women and four men moved into an apartment in an old building on Giesebrechtstrasse, together with two small children, a three-year-old girl, Grischa, and a four-year-old boy, Nessim. For the residents, the cohabitation experiment was an attempt to overcome all bourgeois constraints, which included everything from separate bank accounts and closed bathroom doors to fidelity within couples and the development of feelings of shame. The two children were raised by the group, which often meant that no one paid much attention to them. Because the adults had made it their goal to not just "tolerate but in fact affirm child sexuality," they were not satisfied to simply act as passive observers.

"The members of this commune also felt compelled to write down their experiences, which explains why some of the incidents that occurred were reliably documented. On April 4, 1968, Eberhard Schultz describes how he is lying in bed with little Grischa, and how she begins to stroke him, first in the face, then on the stomach and buttocks, and finally on his penis, until he becomes "very excited" and his "cock gets hard." The little girl pulls down her tights and asks Schultz to "stick it in," to which he responds that his penis is "probably too big." Then he strokes the girl's vagina.

(...)
"It is tempting to dismiss the "love play" in the commune as an exception, as a radical excess of a revolutionary project, if so many leftist parents hadn't modeled their own lives on the educational experiments on Giesebrechtstrasse. For these contemporaries, Commune 2 was a pilot project in anti-authoritarian education that was quickly followed by private kindergartens in which parents applied the new ideas to raising their children, first in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg and Stuttgart, and eventually in smaller cities like Giessen and Nuremberg.

"Initially, the parents addressed practical issues, such as whether to take their children with them to protest marches. But the agenda eventually turned to sex education. In these anti-authoritarian kindergartens and daycare centers, known as Kinderladen, no other subject was discussed at such length as sex, says Alexander Schuller, one of the pioneers of the movement.

(...)
"In 1969 Schuller, a sociologist, was one of the founders of a Kinderladen in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood. Like Schuller, the other parents were academics, journalists or university employees -- a decidedly upper middle-class lot. Schuller's two sons, four and five years old at the time, grew up without the customary rules and punishments of a government-run daycare facility.

"But the adults were soon divided over the issue of sex. Some were determined to encourage their children to show and touch their genitalia, while the others were horrified by the idea.
"It was never addressed quite that directly, but it was clear that in the end, sex with the two female teachers was considered," says Schuller. "I found it incredibly difficult to take a stance. I felt that what we were trying to do was fundamentally correct, but when it came to this issue, I thought: This is crazy, it just isn't right. But then I felt ashamed of thinking that way. I think many were in the same position."

"After a year of grueling discussion, the more prudish group prevailed, and the parents decided that there would be no sex in the Kinderladen.

"(...) According to the "Handbook of Positive Child Indoctrination," published in 1971. "Children can learn to appreciate eroticism and sexual intercourse long before they are capable of understanding how a child is conceived. It is valuable for children to cuddle with adults. It is no less valuable for sexual intercourse to occur during cuddling."

"The self-deception of these supposedly enlightened parents began when they tried to force an uninhibited relationship with sex on the children. In theory, their goal was to enable the children to act on their sexual needs. But because children are not spontaneously inclined to become sexually active in front of adults, they had to be stimulated to do so. The parents were constantly telling sex jokes and using words like "cock," "butt" and "vagina." "Actually, my sons really liked going to the Kinderladen," says Schuller, "but they thought the constant chatter about sex was horrible."

(...)
"In his 1975 autobiographical book "Der grosse Basar" ("The Great Bazaar"), Green Party politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit describes his experiences as a teacher in a Frankfurt Kinderladen. When the children entrusted to his care opened his fly and began stroking his penis, he writes, "I was usually quite taken aback. My reactions varied, depending on the circumstances."

(...)
"Here, too, the distinctions become blurred. How should we react when Cohn-Bendit writes, in his memoirs, about "little, five-year-old girls who had already learned to proposition me?" It wasn't the only time the Green politician raved about his experiences with children. In a largely unnoticed appearance on French television on April 23, 1982, Cohn-Bendit, a member of the European Parliament today, said the following:
"At nine in the morning, I join my eight little toddlers between the ages of 16 months and 2 years. I wash their butts, I tickle them, they tickle me and we cuddle. … You know, a child's sexuality is a fantastic thing. You have to be honest and sincere. With the very young kids, it isn't the same as it is with the four-to-six-year-olds. When a little, five-year-old girl starts undressing, it's great, because it's a game. It's an incredibly erotic game."

"Cohn-Bendit later claimed that his portrayals in the book were meant as a provocation. Whether or not one believes his assertions, the development of the Greens in the 1980s shows that their nonchalant talk about sex with young children eventually attracted real pedophiles.

(...)
"The Greens were not long immune to the argument that the government should not limit the sexuality of children. At its convention in Lüdenscheid in 1985, the Greens' state organization in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia argued that "nonviolent sexuality" between children and adults should generally be allowed, without any age restrictions. "Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalized," the "Children and Youth" task force of the Green Party in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper at about the same time. Public protests forced the party to remove the statement from the document.

(...)
"One of the few leaders of the left who staunchly opposed the pedophile movement early on was social scientist Günter Amendt. "There is no equitable sexuality between children and adults," Amendt said, expressing his outrage over the movement. Alice Schwarzer, the founder of the political women's magazine Emma, also spoke out against the downplaying of sex with children and defined it as what it really was: outright abuse.

"Amendt recalls how he was disparaged as a reactionary in flyers and articles. "There was an outright campaign against Alice and me at the time," he says.

(...)