GDR children were separated from their parents in the weekly nursery. They still suffer from it

In the GDR, the daily schedule for babies could be of military strictness. A seven-month-old, for example, would be given a bottle at 6:00 in the morning, then bathed, then given a diaper change. From 8:15 to 9:15 it would sleep, then 45 minutes in the box, and then, at 10:00, porridge. Then it would be put back in the box, until 11:15, when the child had to go back to sleep. At 1pm it would get another diaper change, then, after sleep and porridge, it would get another diaper change at 5pm, then again at 9.30pm, after which the child would have to sleep.

For children in the Wochenkrippen of the GDR, the ‘week nurseries’, there was no escape from this rigid schedule. From the age of six weeks, children were handed in to day care from Monday to Saturday and cared for by their parents only on weekends.

In the GDR, between 10 and 20 percent of the children went to such a weekly nursery, an estimated number of between 100,000 and 200,000 children. The socialist dictatorship presented comprehensive shelter as an emancipatory achievement for women. But a more important reason for the shelter was that female workers were also indispensable in the shaky economy; until 1967 the East German working week was six days.

“When I was born, my mother worked as a crane driver for the Braunkohlenkombinat,” says Andrea Hlubeck. She was born in 1970 in Senftenberg, near the Polish border. Every state concern had its own childcare, including that of the lignite mine. Hlubeck was put in the Wochenkrippe when she was six weeks old so that her mother could return to work. Later, at the age of three, Hlubeck came to a Kindergarten, which also accommodated her for the whole week. It wasn’t until she was six and starting school that Hlubeck was able to move into the home. Hlubeck still feels the consequences of her childhood away from home: “The basic trust has been disturbed. If you scream and cry as a baby, but no one ever comes, you don’t develop trust.”

Emotional neglect

In recent years, more and more research has been done into the conditions in the weekly care and the consequences for the children. According to experts, the lack of personal attention, the factory-like care and the weekly farewell to the parents are forms of emotional neglect that leave deep traces at such a young age. For several years now, self-help groups have been set up in various places in the states of the former GDR for the Wochenkrippen children who want to talk about their experiences. At the end of June, a first group met in Schwerin at the initiative of Hlubeck. There have been well-attended discussion groups in Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig for some time now.

Many participants previously barely spoke about their time in the Wochenkrippen. The memories have faded, those of the early years are non-existent. “I didn’t exchange a word with my mother about this period until a few years ago,” says Hlubeck. “But no one did. Because it was considered quite normal that you were on a Wochenkrippe.”

Hlubeck lives in a wooden bungalow on a provincial road in Karstädt, in southern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. She talks over a cigarette on the porch of her house, and in her kitchen, where she shows pictures of herself, her mother, and her brother and sister who were also in a Wochenkrippe. Hlubeck says that her brother and sister also have a very difficult time with their childhood and can talk badly about it.

In 2015, Hlubeck started having panic attacks. “In therapy, I learned over time what my condition had to do with my childhood. My stress regulation is just not properly adjusted. As a baby you need someone to come when you cry, to see if you’re hungry, a dirty diaper, if you’re cold. The child’s need is acknowledged, the mother or caregiver regulates the emotions. With me and others Wochenkrippenkinder didn’t that happen.”

Since her breakdown, Hlubeck can’t handle much anymore. She works at home, as a civil servant, and takes care of her garden and the swallows in an adjoining shed. “The system left my mother no other choice,” says Hlubeck. “But I do wonder: if she had to give up her first two children, why did she take a third?”

Fastened to the bars

Historian Heike Liebsch was a Wochenkrippenkind himself and published an extensive study of childcare in the GDR at the beginning of this year. Liebsch notes, among other things, that in a Wochenkrippe in Dresden with ninety children, only a caretaker was present at night. Moreover, until the late 1960s, it was standard practice for children to be fastened to the bars of their beds at night. Bedsores were found in some children.

Liebsch writes that in the 1950s, weekly care also existed elsewhere, for example in West Germany and Czechoslovakia, but that it was quickly phased out when pedagogues in the course of the 1950s increasingly recognized the adverse consequences for the physical and emotional development of the child. children could demonstrate. That is the great injustice, says Hlubeck. “That they knew that the children did not thrive in the Wochenkrippen, but that it was continued because of economic factors.”

In the 1960s, Liebsch writes, the theme of ’emotional bonding’ was largely dropped from the pedagogical curriculum in the GDR. The importance of a secure attachment for babies and small children has been called a “reactionary topic,” quotes Liebsch psychology professor Lieselotte Ahnert, “which is directed against women’s emancipation and tells the mother to stay home with the child, behind the stove.”

Read also: Fuss: how comfortable was life in the ‘cool’ GDR?

East German educational methods also had repercussions in West Germany. The high percentage of working women (around 90 percent) in the GDR, and the extensive shelter, often led the West German citizen to speak of the degenerate mothers on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The conditions in the Wochenkrippen, but also in ordinary GDR crèches, where the children also had to use the potty collectively at set times, were presented in the old Federal Republic, if possible, even more dramatically than they actually were. In response to this, a traditional division of roles was pursued in West Germany – at least it was not socialist. Women often stayed home with the children; in 1984 only 3 percent of children went to childcare before the age of four, and a minority of women worked.

It is still unusual in western Germany to take a child to childcare before his first birthday; that is about 30 percent, in the former East Germany it is more than double. And in terms of the percentage of women who do a university study, the West German states are at the bottom of Europe: almost everywhere in Europe more women than men attend university, except in the former West Germany, where 5 to 10 percent more men follow an academic education, according to data from 2019.

In the GDR, the focus was not on secure attachment, but on the benefits of a state-owned education for a totalitarian society. The children had to be brought up with a ‘socialist attitude’. The daily schedule for small children had to resemble the average working day in the socialist Boeren- en Arbeidersstaat, with an emphasis on order and independence.

Lush park

A week after the first meeting of the self-help group in Schwerin, Andrea Thebud opens the front door invitingly. Thebud lives in a bright town house in the center of Schwerin, close to the park, the castle and the lake in the middle of the capital of Mecklenburg.

Thebud (1972) says that she does not necessarily experience psychological complaints from her time in the Wochenkrippe, but that it is important to her to better place that period, of which she has no memory. Therefore, she attended the first group meeting. Some participants, she says, only spoke about the situation for the first time in their first years of life. For those, the meeting was very emotional.

“When I was born, my parents were still studying. My mother studied economics in Dresden, my father elsewhere. I ended up in a Wochenkrippe in Potsdam [op 200 kilometer afstand van Dresden, red.]”, says Thebud. “My mother says that there was no room in the shelter in Dresden. But I don’t understand why she couldn’t put me up with my grandparents. They could have picked me up from the nursery, couldn’t they? I tell myself that my mother didn’t want that, because my grandfather was quite a staunch socialist, he was high up in the party. Maybe she didn’t want me to come into contact with that? No, that’s not a convincing statement. But it does me good to find such a reason.”

Thebud finds it especially hard to accept that her mother just renounced her. “I’m trying to understand how a mother could do something like that to a child,” she says, raising her legs on the corner sofa. To her questions, Thebud’s mother reacts defensively. “She just says: there was no other option. She doesn’t see it wasn’t good for me, she doesn’t say ‘it hurt me to give you away’.” To save herself, Thebud prefers not to know exactly what the conditions were like in her shelter. “If I were to hear now that there were only two caregivers for 40 children, it would not do me any good.”

In the self-help group, Thebud noticed that many of her peers experienced similar things to her. “As a child I always thought I was adopted. ‘You aren’t my real parents, are you?’, I would say. Because I saw how other parents interacted with their children, hugged or kissed them. That was never the case with us.” Many in the group agreed to recognize that feeling, says Thebud. She still has no special bond with her mother.

Both Andrea Hlubeck and Andrea Thebud refer only to her mother as the one responsible for choosing the weekly care. Both fathers played marginal roles in their lives; they bore neither responsibility nor guilt. It confirms the double role often attributed to the ’emancipated woman’ in East Germany: women were allowed to work and earn money, they could easily divorce their husbands if they wanted, but at the same time they had to fulfill all the traditional roles. Climbing higher in a state group or in the party, the SED, was not an option, however. According to recent research, women in East Germany are still much more likely to work full-time than in West Germany, but they are also much more likely to be largely solely responsible for household and parenting.

Thebud consciously treats her two children differently than her parents do, she says. “My daughter sometimes says, when I hug her, ‘now he can go again’”, she smiles. Her eldest will soon be leaving home, her younger son is a gifted goalkeeper. The large regional club, FC Hansa Rostock, already wants to include him in the talent program. He must then intern at a school for top athletes. The representation of this still makes her nervous, “but I am slowly trying to get used to the idea”.

Floor: about the traces left by the GDR. ‘In our heads the Wall is still standing’ (2019)

A version of this article also appeared in the August 19, 2023 newspaper.