From Hitler’s love of young adult fiction to Saddam Hussein's shameful romance novels, this podcast sheds new, weird light on history's monsters. The host, Robert Evans, is a journalist at Bellingcat, a former editor at Cracked.com and author of the books 'A Brief History of Vice' and 'After the Revolution'. BtB is one of the shows within the 'Cool Zone Media' podcast network. You can contact the Cool Zone Media team with tips and suggestions at coolzonemedia.com/contact/
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Not the musical. The play, written by Frank Wedekind. It was actually called SPRING AWAKENING: A CHILDREN’S TRAGEDY and came out in 1891.
Wedekind was an extremely famous, well-respected celebrity playwright. He couldn’t see the Nazis coming in 1942, but he clearly saw where these parenting methods were going, and was screaming in warning.
I mean, the plan is way more tragic than the musical. Wedekind is like “look! You’ve got a 13-year-old raping his crush because neither of them understands what sex is! She literally doesn’t know how she got pregnant! You’ve got a daughter whose mother lets her dad rape her because she can’t speak about it! You got a. 15-year-old complete sociopath whose walls are covered in forbidden art talking about the dark cruel fall of society coming and is basically a proto-Nazi! Child suicide and the dad doesn’t care! Do you think we might have a problem?????”.
The play was, of course, band and censored. But like a lot of really good and clever, artists across time, Wedekind saw what society was leading to and created really beautiful art to try and earn people and maybe change things.
Anyway, the series is a little past 1891 now, but if Robert hasn’t written the script for episode three, I really need him to bring the play up, because it’s such a perfect example of what he’s talking about and how even at the time, people saw where it could lead.
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Fully agree with you. That anecdote about the father eating the only breakfast egg while his family watches gave me ENORMOUS Spring Awakening vibes. Not to mention the insane parenting advice of Moritz Schreber. I was a little disappointed that Spring Awakening never came up as backlash against this kind of parental advice.