The Kentler experiment

December 9, 2022 6:21 AM

Rachel Aviv: The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles (SLTNY) CW: child abuse
posted by kmt (27 comments total)

I read this story last year and it has haunted me since.

The two figures my mind returns to are the Samir, who keeps his abuser’s ashes in an urn in his apartment, and Marco’s parents, who had their child stolen from them by the German state. In a story with so much horror and tragedy, somehow their fates have stuck with me as especially horrific and tragic.
posted by Kattullus at 6:54 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Monstrosity bred of monstrosity, breeding monstrosity for decades to come. Marco, at least, had the strength and insight to break free for himself.

I know that no one in the field takes "psychohistory" seriously, but I feel like there has to be something in the concept. Like the kid who said "there has to be a pony here somewhere," maybe, but stories like this ...

I am a little surprised that right-wingers here haven't translated the story and shoved it down all our throats as the secret gay agenda. Maybe they will, but then, they've never needed any help from overseas, at least outside of electioneering.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:03 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Well, it has been all over conservative reddit this week. But I kind of got the impression that it was an anti-Germany campaign coming from the Russian apparatus. Could be both though.
posted by Horkus at 7:10 AM on December 9, 2022

Near as I can tell the conservatives think this is an example of "experts are opinionated idiots who think this sort of idea sounds good and are shocked when abuse results", not that this is an example of an evil conspiracy working as intended.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 7:29 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

This was a horrific example of abuse, but I do find the timing of the reporting a little sus, as the young people say.
posted by praemunire at 7:50 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've only read two-thirds of it, and have so many thoughts I probably won't be able to compile them into a mefi comment in a reasonable amount of time. But this part stood out to me because it echos our current world:

"The trials of twenty-two former Auschwitz officers had revealed a common personality type: ordinary, conservative, sexually inhibited, and preoccupied with bourgeois morality."

The word "ordinary" strikes me hard. They weren't ordinary, they were fucking Nazis working at fucking Auschwitz. They were monsters who committed monstrosities. Directly, even.

But yes, I'm sure they were typical, mainstream, and we're fully capable of being polite when they wanted to be.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:36 AM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think that's the banality of evil right there.

this story is horrific. I used to work with children from similar situations and oh boy...I have thoughts and feelings. its tragic that a reaction against Nazism itself led to such evil and harm.
posted by supermedusa at 8:41 AM on December 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Alice Miller, author of For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), argues convincingly that child abuse was rampant in German families by 1900. Germans were already known for their unusually harsh parenting practices, but these practices became far harsher under the influence of such pedagogues as Dr Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, whose tracts flooded the region during the mid-nineteenth century. A strict authoritarian, Schreber taught parents to break their children's spirits immediately after birth. For example, he instructed them to physically punish babies for crying, assuring parents that "such a procedure is only necessary once, or at most twice, and then one is the master of the child for all time. From then on, one look, one single threatening gesture will suffice to subjugate the child."

(link to the article).

The slide into fascism is multi-generational, which is why I think the fights for seats in school boards and curricula control is so crucial right now. I did some research on Schreber — his story and the story of the effects on his son are horrifying.
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:56 AM on December 9, 2022 [23 favorites]

This was a horrific example of abuse, but I do find the timing of the reporting a little sus, as the young people say.

Can’t speak to its current revival but this article is from July last year.
posted by atoxyl at 9:04 AM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

The experiment was in the late sixties, so how is this relevent to anything but generalized negativity about Germany?
posted by Oyéah at 9:08 AM on December 9, 2022

The first anecdote is about someone who was with the abusive foster parent until 2003.
posted by latkes at 9:21 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Starting in the 1970s psychology professor Helmut Kentler conducted his "experiment." Homeless children in West Berlin were intentionally placed with pedophile men. These men would make especially loving foster parents, Kentler argued.

A study conducted by the University of Hildesheim has found that authorities in Berlin condoned this practice for almost 30 years. The pedophile foster fathers even received a regular care allowance.

Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles (Deutsche Welle, 2020), emphasis not in the original.
posted by kmt at 9:38 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Nentwig had assumed that Kentler’s experiment ended in the nineteen-seventies. But Marco told her he had lived in his foster home until 2003, when he was twenty-one. “I was totally shocked,” she said. She remembers Marco saying several times, “You are the first person I’ve told—this is the first time I’ve told my story.”"

It's a long piece, but this literally in the fifth paragraph.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:44 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oyéah: how is this relevent to anything but generalized negativity about Germany?

That seems rather cold. Consider the human angle. This is not about Germany, it's about people.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:16 AM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

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"

...

Kentler inserted himself into a movement that was urgently working to undo the sexual legacy of Fascism but struggling to differentiate among various taboos.

This is a really interesting article and about a lot more than just Kentler's experiment... but also, it's no wonder conservatives like this article, because Kentler was openly gay, and they love to draw that connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.
posted by subdee at 10:16 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

And there it is, the right-wing connection:

[Scweer] worked for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s right-wing party, as an adviser for education and cultural policy. The Party was recently investigated by Germany’s domestic-intelligence agency for undermining democracy by, among other things, minimizing the crimes of the Nazis...

Schweer had “offered help from the AfD,” Marco told me. “I immediately said, ‘Not for political purposes, only because I want help.’ ”

From the perspective of an AfD politician, Marco’s life story was expedient, a tale about the ways in which the German left had got sexual politics wrong. At meetings of the German parliament, members of the AfD (which won more than twelve per cent of the vote in the last national election, becoming Germany’s third-largest party) rallied around the Kentler case as a way of forcing left-wing politicians to address history that did not reflect well on their parties, but also as a barely disguised vehicle for impugning homosexuality. An advocacy group affiliated with the AfD held “Stop Kentler’s sex education” rallies, to protest the way that sexuality is currently taught in German schools. “Kentler’s criminal pedophile spirit lives on unbroken in today’s sex education,” a brochure printed by the organization explained.
posted by subdee at 10:35 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oyéah: how is this relevent to anything but generalized negativity about Germany?

That seems rather cold. Consider the human angle. This is not about Germany, it's about people.

I might be misunderstanding but I think Oyeah was referring to the relevant usefulness of the story as right wing propaganda, not to the relevance of the story itself.
posted by Zumbador at 10:51 AM on December 9, 2022

The case was picked up by the German right-wing political party to push their pro-traditional family, anti-gay, anti-sex-education agenda and make the Berlin Senate look bad and it was a case of horrific abuse against specifically the most vulnerable foster children and the Berlin Senate went along with because a lot of prominent academics were pedophiles while others just saw it as a convenient way to get the problem kids off the the streets.

Also this story about Kentler's late-90s disavowal of his earlier "sexual love between parents and children does not harm the children" beliefs after his favorite son* committed suicide is pretty interesting too. Shit's complicated.

*That he'd had a thirteen-year affair with, starting from when the son was thirteen
posted by subdee at 11:00 AM on December 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

A chilling story. I think it’s important for leftists/progressives to recognize the darker elements of our own history — progressive intellectuals outside of Germany defended pedophilia, too — instead of just sweeping them under the rug because they provide fodder for conservatives. Leftists have not been on “the right side of history” about everything, which should encourage us to always maintain a critical eye towards ourselves.
posted by vanitas at 11:27 AM on December 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

This is such an intense story...and so well written. I feel like this is the New Yorker style at it's best: a story with complex and disparate elements: the rise of the German far right, the mistakes of the sexual liberation movement, entrenched power and systemic abuse, the way children and the poor are treated as worthless, an individual's arc of processing his own life. I'm going to read more Rachel Aviv. She also wrote something quite subtle and provocative about Elizabeth Loftus that I think of often - it haunts me.
posted by latkes at 11:39 AM on December 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

>They weren't ordinary, they were fucking Nazis working at fucking Auschwitz. They were monsters who committed monstrosities. Directly, even.

They were totally ordinary. Human monsters barely exist and typically are totally ordinary. Our culture loves to focus on the "big bad wolf" types but that's not who's doing most of the harm out there. The numbers on sexual abuse and sexual assault are VERY VERY high and it's not "monsters" doing it.

I personally know 6 men who, from very credible anecdotes their victims have shared with me, plus my own observations about their attitudes towards women, I am 100% sure are r@pists. I've heard credible anecdotes from 2 separate families that a local judo instructor probably molested their children. I saw my highschool track coach molest a student with my own eyes, and his notorious reputation suggested he had at least 25 other victims. But none of them are "monsters". They're all middle class, charming, clever, attractive, well-educated professional white men with white collars, out there making witty banter and doing bad shit... with the support of authority figures all around them - principles, judo school owners, friends. I've tried to raise the alarm on two men and been told that "these are very serious allegations and what I've heard isn't enough to risk their careers over". I haven't spread the stories I know about several others because I don't want to out their victims... who are protecting them. EVERYONE PROTECTS THESE GUYS BECAUSE THEY SEEM SO NORMAL.

I bet DOZENS of people knew what these German pedos were up to, but who would ever risk disgracing a doctor in a nice white shirt?

We need to recognize that "monsters" often have nice haircuts and are pretty good at chitchat (aka grooming their victims and anyone else who might notice their actions). If we had a keener eye we could maybe stop some of it.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 12:36 PM on December 9, 2022 [30 favorites]

I bet DOZENS of people knew what these German pedos were up to, but who would ever risk disgracing a doctor in a nice white shirt?

I think you’re missing the point. The study was intentionally placing the children with pedophiles specifically to foster a sexual relationship between the two and measure the impact on the child’s development.

At least that was my understanding.
posted by hwyengr at 2:41 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

How I read it was, these kids, because they were children of immigrants and poor people, or because they were disabled, were perceived/framed as unloveable and a burden on society, and that men who desired to have sex with them were a framed as good candidates for foster parents because it was a 'fair trade' for them to get sex in exchange for housing the kids - with the implication that the framing of the kids as unloveable was a sort of post-hoc rationalization to find some excuse to give these men access to children to have sex with. I don't know which comes first: hating children, the poor, people with disabilities, immigrants, or wanting to justify and enable child sexual abuse, but the two weave together in this story. A completely unhinged equation with so many repugnant perspectives built into it
posted by latkes at 4:10 PM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

*That he'd had a thirteen-year affair with, starting from when the son was thirteen

Er, "affair" seems a very bad way to phrase that. "That he had sexually abused starting at age 13" is more like it.
posted by tavella at 8:10 PM on December 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

Well, yes. "Affair" is how Kentler phrased it but we all know it can't be that when one person is thirteen and the minor dependent of the other.
posted by subdee at 4:47 PM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

I like New Yorker cartoons as much as anyone, but there are just some stories where they are jarringly out of place.
posted by TedW at 6:39 AM on December 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

They weren't ordinary, they were fucking Nazis working at fucking Auschwitz. They were monsters who committed monstrosities. Directly, even.

I thought the big lesson we were supposed to learn from WWII and the Nazis is that anyone can be a monster, and they're ordinary.

Calling them monsters and out-of-the-ordinary makes it easier to "Other" them, easier to assume it could never be you and your neighbors because you're just ordinary people. Almost everyone who worked as Auschwitz was an ordinary person who just got up and went to work and then came home to their family. They were all very ordinary.

The point is for us to have the bravery not to be ordinary, to be the extraordinary one who speaks out and recognizes the monstrosity for what it is.
posted by LizBoBiz at 4:09 AM on December 13, 2022 [1 favorite]