Historian and journalist Miriam Gebhardt of the University of Konstanz begins the preface of her monograph by wondering why all debates in Germany about education are so marked by anxiety. This anxiety, Gebhardt notes, is not simply universally shared anxiety about the child but fear of the child. And the consequences of such fear include inordinate German emphasis over time on parental authority and discipline. At this early juncture the reader fears for a moment that the book will argue for a German Sonderweg of patriarchal authoritarianism leading to Hitler. This fear is ungrounded. Gebhardt's analysis is properly nuanced in arguing for a “specific German face” (p. 8) on a bourgeois trajectory in modern German history. For Gebhardt the problem of Hitler is not one of a German character formed in infancy and childhood, but rather of the experiences of generations of children and parents in an evolving society undergoing peculiarly severe stresses during the first half of the twentieth century.

Gebhardt's focus is on the “dominant discourse of early child socialization in the twentieth century” (p. 17) and the “cultural constructions concerning ideas about the nature of the child” (p. 23). This history begins with eighteenth-century developments that spawned nineteenth-century science and pedagogy and it ends in the 1980s. During the twentieth century there was an ebb and flow of models of childhood socialization theory and practice in Germany between the poles of “classical bourgeois education” (p. 63) based on authority and a newer emphasis on nurture. Much of Gebhardt's exposition is necessarily of the “top-down” variety in its study of “expert discourse” (p. 67). But it is another virtue of this book that it includes the “bottom-up” perspective of “parental diaries” that both reflect and challenge the prevailing—though not exclusive—emphasis in German education on parental authority over the child. Gebhardt quotes liberally from seventy-three such Elterntagebücher to document the dominance of bourgeois culture in Germany during the modern era. One reflection of the German master narrative concerning child rearing lies in the very nomenclature of this parental means of recording the “education” of the child. In the United States they were—and are—known as “baby books,” which reflects the emphasis on the development of the autonomous infant and child in an atmosphere of tolerance, understanding, and indulgence. The term “parental diaries,” on the other hand, carries with it the German stress on control and authority over infant and child. Progressive ideas about the raising of children became firmly established in the United States with the publication of Babies are Human Beings in 1938. Gebhardt argues that the widespread production and popularization of such ideas in Germany lay far in the future.

These competing and converging theories and practices were both continuous and discontinuous over time in Germany during the twentieth century. That Germany was “decades away” (p. 83) from rejection of discipline, authority, fear, and repression as means of child rearing in, of all years, 1938 only underscores Gebhardt's point that National Socialism represented “a caesura” (p. 118) in the history of parents and children in modern German history. The Third Reich spelled the end (or, perhaps better, visibility) of the largely psychoanalytic school of early child socialization that was itself well advanced in Germany and Austria. At the same time, however, Nazism in power meant that traditional German practices based on authority and control were now “militarized” in service to the new racial state. Elsewhere theory and practice increasingly devoted itself to promoting the affectionate and nurturing tie between parent (mother) and child. In Nazi Germany the old insistence on strict regulation of sleeping, nursing, and eliminating was promoted. There was to be no deep emotional relationship between parent and child since the child was to find a closer, more durable, and more useful tie to the racial community. The old view that the infant and child should not be spared the learning experience of pain was now elevated into the “hardening” so prized by the Nazis.

And yet, Gebhardt observes, it was even more complicated than this. While the postwar era began the process of bringing Germany (back) into the age of modern “progressive” child-rearing practices (especially in altered form in East Germany), significant continuities in the old style of regulation still remained. The most popular child-rearing guide in the Nazi years, Johanna Haarer's Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind (1934), remained a best seller in West Germany through three more editions from 1961 to 1987. And these practices linked up with other modern practices such as the rationalized, systemized care that was also characteristic of the “high industrial era” (p. 81). Nazi Germany was thus not just a caesura in the history of Germany or of the west. As Robert Proctor has argued, there were aspects to Nazi mobilization of science and medicine such as the promotion of “natural health” and a campaign against smoking that would have been “progressive” in the context of a modern liberal society.

One might question whether middle-class fillers-out of parental diaries is a sufficient base on which to build an argument for a particular trajectory for society as a whole. Most parents in Germany did not use such aids, and consideration of the experiences of other social classes would be a welcome addition to Gebhardt's excellent study. Still, the bourgeoisie was socially and economically triumphant in Germany, and their ideals, perceptions, and practices were therefore pervasive and to some extent definitive for the culture as a whole. An even broader emphasis on experience would, however, offer even greater insight into the larger and deeper social and cultural dynamics of Germany poised between tradition and modernity.