Achtung Baby Read online

  Advance praise for Achtung Baby

  ‘With intelligence, humour and a healthy dose of scepticism, Zaske details her experience mothering in Germany to present a portrait of German-style parenting that is at once entertaining, surprising and instructive. With curiosity and insight, she reveals how many of our parenting assumptions stem not from evidence but from insecurity and fear.’

  Kim Brooks, author of The Houseguest and Small Animals, and editor of Salon.com

  ‘I was completely drawn into this marvellous account of how Zaske learned to trust her children and allow them the freedoms they craved. It is the story of one family and, at the same time, of children’s and parents’ lives in two huge modern nations. I recommend it to all parents, educators, policy makers and others concerned with children’s lives and the future of our society.’

  Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn

  ‘This is a beautiful book. Zaske uses her personal experience raising her children in Berlin to reveal the differences – fundamental and trivial, serious and humorous – between German and American parenting, finding lessons in the ways Germans rear their children from birth to adolescence. Zaske probes our cultural differences and mines the hard data to offer us her pungent observations. Her insights deserve our attention.’

  Robert LeVine, author of Do Parents Matter?

  ‘If you’re wondering where to find happy, normal, un-helicoptered children these days, the answer is: Germany! Zaske looks to a land that trusts its youth, and lays out a smart, sensible path for raising resilient kids.’

  Lenore Skenazy, founder of the book, blog and movement Free-Range Kids

  Copyright

  Published by Piatkus

  ISBN: 978-0-349-41854-4

  Copyright © 2018 Sara Zaske

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.

  All German to English translations were done by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Piatkus

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Zac, Sophia, and Ozzie

  About the Author

  SARA ZASKE is an American writer who lived in Berlin for six and a half years. Her articles on her family’s experiences in Germany have appeared on Time.com, in the New York Times and in Germany’s largest Sunday paper, Bild am Sontag. She now lives in Idaho with her husband and two children.

  Contents

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ACHTUNG BABY

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION Modern Germany

  Beyond the Stereotype

  A Short Historical Update

  The Culture of Control

  Why German Parenting Matters

  1 Leaving America

  A Cold Arrival

  Everything in Order

  2 Berlin Babies

  Where Midwives Rule

  The American Disadvantage

  A Berlin Birth

  3 Attachment Problems

  German Parents and Attachment Theory

  Independent Infants

  Mother Knows Best?

  4 Small Children, Small Worries

  (Kleine Kinder, Kleine Sorgen)

  The Kindergarten East-West Legacy

  Early Kita Skills

  Quality of Care

  Child-Care Benefits

  5 The Democratic Kindergarten

  Faster or Better Learning

  Children in Charge

  Discipline

  Kita Trips

  Teaching Kita Skills in the United States

  6 Starting School

  Play School

  Educational Priorities

  Homework, Food, and Protest

  7 No Bad Weather

  America Inside

  Germans and Free Nature

  Taking Away the Toys

  8 The Freedom to Move

  Why German Children Walk Alone

  Freedom to Play

  9 Dangerous Things

  The Art of Fire

  Tools

  Adventure Play

  Necessary Dangers

  A Celebration of Fear

  10 Tough Subjects

  Death

  Religion

  11 Facing the Past

  The History of Memory

  Historic Crimes and Responsibility

  12 Big Kids, Big Worries (Grosse Kinder, Grosse Sorgen)

  The Space to Be Young

  An Extra-Long Adolescence

  The Academic Question

  Achieving Adulthood

  13 Coming Back to America

  Starting American School

  Fourth-Grade Blues

  Freedom for Kids in the Land of the Free

  EPILOGUE German Lessons

  The Rights of Children

  Freedom of Ideas

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  Modern Germany

  Few people smile on the trains in Berlin. By some unwritten rule, everyone sits silent and straight-faced on the S-Bahns and U-Bahns that run above and below the city. If you see people who are smiling, chances are they’re tourists. If they’re talking and laughing loudly, chances are they’re American.

  One gray day in Berlin, my daughter, Sophia, and I were talking and laughing loudly on an S-Bahn full of quiet German passengers. Sophia was two and a half and super chatty. We had recently arrived in Berlin, and everything was new to her. I wasn’t about to shush her as she commented on the things passing by her window: the trees, the stations, another train, the cars on the road. She saw a bus, which was her cue to launch into her favorite song, “Wheels on the Bus,” at top volume. The wheels really go round in Sophia’s version. I glanced at the old woman across from us, trying to remember the proper way to phrase an apology, when the most amazing thing happened: she smiled.

  Finally, I thought, someone appreciates how adorable my daughter is. Then, the woman opened her purse and pulled out a small piece of candy. She didn’t even look at me. She handed it directly to Sophia.

  I panicked. I hadn’t yet taught Sophia not to trust strangers with candy! In America, people just don’t offer candy to children. I battled conflicting impulses: grab Sophia and storm off? Or be polite to the first stranger who had made a friendly gesture?

  Sophia turned and held the candy up to me, a huge smile on her face. I let politeness, and logic, prevail: this German grandmother was clearly not trying to kidnap my child, and there was no chance a razor blade could fit in a piece of candy that small. I took it from Sophia, unwrapped it, tried not to be too obvious about examining it, and handed it back to my daughter. She popped it into her mouth—and, amazingly, didn’t die.

  This experience taught me two things: first, Berliners didn’t know about “stranger danger,” and second, my assumption that Germans were unsmiling, unfriendly people who were harsh with children might not be entirely true.

  As I would learn over the next six and a half years in Berlin, much of what I thought I knew about Germans was wrong—especially the way they approach raising children. The parents I met were almost the polar opposite of the stereotype of the overbearing, strict German
parent. In fact, compared to today’s American parents who constantly supervise their children, they were positively relaxed.

  When my daughter turned three, we invited a family we had met in our neighborhood to a picnic at a local park. It was a sunny spring day, and the park was beautiful with long stretches of green lawn bordered by tall trees. We chose a spot close to an enclosed playground, which had a tall stone wall in front of it. Shortly after arriving, our friends’ two children asked if they could go to the playground.

  “Sure,” their mother said.

  “Can I go too?” Sophia asked. I agreed, and all three of them went running off, two three-year-old girls and a five-year-old boy. They disappeared behind the wall, out of sight. No one else moved. Their mother started arranging plates on the picnic blanket. Her husband was talking with mine as he set up the barbecue. Feeling like I was missing something, I got up. “Um … I’ll go,” I said.

  “Oh!” the other mother said. “They’ll be fine. They play here all the time.”

  “It’s just that—Sophia might need help,” I said and followed the kids.

  I remember thinking how strange it was that this couple didn’t watch their children on the playground. Then I noticed all the other unsupervised kids running around the park. Some parents were watching over babies and toddlers, but most of the adults were at picnic tables or sitting on blankets talking with each other while their children came and went.

  This was normal behavior in Berlin. Parents didn’t hover over their children on playgrounds, many of which feature large structures like giant wooden boats and towering pyramids made of rope and metal—way more dangerous than the typical American playground of plastic and padded foam. In Berlin, school-age kids also walk to school, parks, and stores alone, or with only their peers as company. Adults rarely interfere in their children’s play, not even their fights, preferring to let them work it out themselves.

  It’s part of the cultural value of selbständigkeit, or self-reliance. In America, we might call this “free range” parenting, but in Germany, it’s normal parenting. German parents believe that independence is good for children, that handling risk is a necessary part of growing up. This means they trust their children with more tasks as they grow older and supervise them less. Children are also assumed to be capable of making some decisions for themselves even at a young age, including whether or not to take a piece of candy from a nice lady on a train.

  Beyond the Stereotype

  Whenever I tell my American friends and family about how much freedom German parents give their children, they react with surprise and disbelief. I usually end up reminding them how long it has been since the end of World War II. Because it is true that German parents were strict and authoritarian—in the 1940s. They have changed quite a bit since then.

  Many Americans’ idea of Germany is still fixed at World War II. The conflict has become somewhat of an obsession in the United States, judging by the sheer volume of books and movies we’ve produced around the war and the Holocaust. Some historians have even argued that there has been an “Americanization” of German history, which oversimplifies the Nazi years and culturally appropriates the Holocaust. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote in 1999 about this tendency, recounting how American tourists were disappointed to find out there weren’t gas chambers at the Buchenwald concentration camp. “Before, people did not want to see the truth,” said Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald memorial. “Now they want to see what they expect to see, and we have to disappoint them and show how rich and complicated history is.”

  Another persistent, oversimplified American idea is that our country was the lone rescuing hero of Europe during World War II, even though historical facts don’t support this interpretation. We conveniently forget that it was the Soviet Army, not American forces, that took Berlin and forced Hitler from power. According to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, more than 8.8 million Soviet soldiers lost their lives fighting in World War II, a number that dwarfs American and British military casualties, which numbered closer to 400,000 each. This fact should not diminish the sacrifice of our soldiers; rather, we should expand our concept of victory to include the significant contributions of our allies at the time.

  Blame it on poor history education, exaggerated patriotism, or inaccurate Hollywood movies, but some Americans can’t be swayed from this heroic vision even when presented with evidence to the contrary. A friend of mine who works as a tour guide in Berlin told me that the American tourists she takes to World War II monuments and museums remain convinced that it was the United States that won the war. British and Russian tourists, of course, have other opinions.

  America as the hero of World War II is so entrenched in our culture that perhaps it is hard to let the other side of that equation, the enemy, Nazi Germany, become a thing of the past. To change our idea of modern Germans, we might also have to change our idea of ourselves.

  A Short Historical Update

  Most Germans alive today were not born by the time World War II ended. That’s not to say they haven’t been affected by it—quite the opposite. Learning about the country’s role in the war and the Holocaust is part of every German’s education. As a result, the culture at large has undergone a major transformation, which was highlighted by the German response to the recent refugee crisis in Europe.

  In 2015, while other European countries tried to block the influx of immigrants fleeing conflicts in places such as Syria and Iraq, Germany welcomed them. Average citizens came out in droves to greet the incoming refugees at train stations. They donated money, food, and clothing—so much that police in Munich had to ask them to stop. Some people even opened their homes to refugee families.

  At the start of the crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that any Syrian entering the country would be granted asylum. “Germany is a strong country,” she said in August 2015. “We have already accomplished so much. We can do it!”

  That year Germany took in nearly 1 million refugees alone, more than 1 percent of the country’s population of 82 million. To compare, if the United States with its population of roughly 319 million had done the same, we would have taken in more than 3 million refugees. Instead President Obama offered to raise the limit of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States to 10,000, and even that amount was met with opposition.

  The newly elected President Trump went even further and tried to stop all incoming refugees by implementing a contested immigration ban his first week in office.

  In Germany, assimilating such a large refugee group has not gone smoothly, and the influx stoked fears of terrorism and helped fuel the rise of an anti-immigrant political party, the AfD (Alternative for Germany). However, the initial German response to the refugee crisis was remarkable and, many thought, uncharacteristic. Germany has also so far resisted the wave of right-wing populism that caused the United Kingdom to exit the European Union and propelled Donald Trump into power in the United States. Some have even called Germany the last defender of liberal democracy and its chancellor the new leader of the free world—in a stunning twist of history. Yet Germany’s relative openness to refugees and resistance to right-wing demagoguery shouldn’t be all that surprising—if we had paid much attention to the changes in German culture post–World War II.

  At the end of the war, an estimated 14 million Germans were refugees themselves. Many were expelled from eastern parts of Europe or fled the advance of the Soviet army. Postwar Germany was divided up and occupied by foreign powers, one of which didn’t leave for more than forty years. East Germans continued to flee to the West long after the war had ended: an estimated 1.65 million had left the East by the time the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. All this means that a sizable portion of modern Germans remember being refugees themselves or heard about the experience from older friends and relatives.

  The “economic miracle” that followed World War II in the 1950s rebuilt the West German economy and the country’s optimism, shaped
in no small part by America’s financial and political influence. Historian Hagen Schulze notes that in 1957, the Christian Democrat Party (the forerunner of the CDU party that Merkel now leads) successfully campaigned with a slogan that meant “Affluence for everybody,” based on a belief that anyone who worked hard should be able to succeed—a sentiment that should sound familiar to American ears. This period also marked the beginning of the “de-Nazification” of Germany, an effort that was not considered completely successful by many of the generation that followed. The new government also established an agency for civic education, now called the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BPB), which is specifically designed to “educate the German people about democratic principles and prevent any moves to re-establish a totalitarian regime.”

  The youth movement of the 1960s sought to make a more dramatic break with the Nazi past. Like their peers in the United States, West German students took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War, but their rebellion against their parents’ generation went even further. The German youth saw their elders as responsible for the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. They rejected almost everything their parents represented: their authority, their government, and their values, including how they raised their children.

  In the meantime, East Germans were dealing with an oppressive Soviet-controlled government that spied on its own people, restricted their movements, and limited their choices. The power plays between the United States and Soviet Union ultimately freed East Germany, but as Schulze points out, it was the East Germans themselves whose protests in 1989 tipped the balance and brought down the Berlin Wall. While Germany has been reunified for more than twenty-five years, many of today’s influential modern Germans grew up in the East, including Chancellor Merkel, and they took the lessons from that time to heart.

  All these political and cultural events have affected how Germans raise their children.

  The youth protest movement of the 1960s brought anti-authoritarian ideas to child care. In Frankfurt, Monika Seifert started kinderläden, day care centers, which emphasized “repression-free” education, a philosophy that deliberately set itself against the old “German virtues of obedience, diligence, modesty, and cleanliness.” Seifert’s anti-authoritarian theory basically held that children should rule themselves—or run wild, depending on your perspective.