The „Well-Meant” Push into Life

Source: SS Leitheft, Year 7, Issue 10 b

A Chapter about Hardness - Even in The Sphere of Living Beings

„Too good is the woman, I have often thought to myself...” Full of thought, yet with a clouded brow, Unterscharführer Heiner Pittmann gazed at the letter he had probably read three times before this moan. The others in the low room listened up. What strange things was he saying?

„Man, Heiner, how can a woman be too good to you? Nothing worse than that should happen to me!” Willem, the youngest, laughed a bit embarrassed. He is the softest of them all, full of sentimental feelings, but precisely for that reason he does not like to talk about such things, especially regarding women...

Heiner looks up. He notices that he had spoken too loud. He laughs.

„It is not about me, you milk face! I am just annoyed that my wife cannot handle the children. We already have three, but she still has not figured out the formula, the right middle between love and hardness.”

„Heiner, why always such harsh words? Why shouldn’t they have it good in life? And why shouldn’t a mother be good to her children, for all I care even too good? Must there always be struggle and war in life? Just look around at the animal world, back home, when the mother animal cares for her offspring! How is all of that full of love and care, really an example for us humans!”

The Well-Meant Push into Life

„Yes, we should seek our examples in the animal kingdom.” Heiner nods robustly, but he smiles a bit. For all I care, even among animal mothers. There you find the right balance between love and hardness. How lovely does it look to us, a duck with flock of young ducks swimming around their mother. And yet - do you know that each of these ducklings has already had to look death in the eye and the mother herself puts her little ones to this test?... Let me explain: Many breeds of duck often make their nests in the stumps and holes of old trees. Ducks flee nests; nature gives them all the necessary equipment from the start, except that they cannot yet fly. Nonetheless, the old duck does not wait long. Hardly have the eggs hatched when she - coarse and heartless, it may seem to a tender heart - pushes her children down from the height. Spalt, the little ones lie in the grass, and not all of them remain uninjured. But the mother takes the others to the duck’s life element, the water. How else is she supposed to do it? This hardness is in reality the only possible care. The birds, especially the auks, of the Nordic bird islands are even rougher with their young. Those cliffs are much higher than trees, often more than a hundred meters. But still, at the right time the young auks get their „well-meant” push into life, which after the long fall leads straight into the sea. Whoever does not survive it, would have perished anyway. And great mother nature concerns itself little with the individual, when the whole is at stake. We humans should learn from that, who out of pure „humanity” have become soft, cowardly and hence unnatural!”...

Raven Parents, those are the best parents!

The comrades are somewhat astonished. They ponder how nature reveals itself to be so „reasonable” in a small, dumb animal. But Willem offers an objection: „Certainly, I understand, for such water animals a forced ‘take off is sometimes necessary. But that is an exception. Such raven parents don’t exist otherwise.”

„You say it yourself, with ravens and storks. And with birds of prey, indeed with all the birds we esteem due to their great

‘love of their young’.”

„What, raven parents, who are downright infamous for their cruelty!” Willem is visibly excited, it’s about his issue.

„Yes indeed, the ravens, as well as cranes, jackdaws and magpies do it right in terms of raising their young: they devoutly feed their young, who must huddle in the nest blind and naked until they can fly. Each tidbit is stuffed into their mouth. But only - and now comes the command of a higher authority - only so long and so soon as the young open their peaks when the parents arrive. But they can only do that when they are healthy, strong and eager for life. If a young animal becomes seriously ill, it lies exhausted in the nest and no longer seeks food. And it does not get anymore food, not among any species of bird. Among most, the sick little birds soon pushed out of the nest by the siblings or the parents. Sensitive souls with the sentimental love for all and even love for the enemy find such young ravens dead under the colony trees and furiously look up at the nests of the squawking „raven parents” and do not know that these animals had already died in the nest and could have never remained alive. Those were perhaps the same „noble people” who simply avoided their duty to have many children. Next to and around them they can see hundreds of good children from poor circles suffer and hunger, and they get indignant over any adjustment for family burdens.”

„Yes, stop, Heiner”, Willem has a new objection. „You speak of family adjustment. That is a welfare measure of the state. An act of love, one could call it. How does that fit with your affirmation of hardness?”

Not love alone, hardness, too, is wanted by life!

„It fits very well, for genuine life and above all human life must contain both: love and hardness. The mother and father would indeed be „raven parents”, if they did not care for their suckling with all their might and in the event of its illness strive for its recovery with all medical means. But in the course of development come occasions where it must be shown whether the strength, the care and the traits really suffice for the demands of existence.

Such a test is imposed, for example, on all the prairie animals, young horses, young gazelles, antelopes, giraffes and ostriches the first time a predator forces the herd and the mother to flee. The mother can lick the young so tenderly and suckle it, but at the moment of danger she joins the common flight and the young animal must come along, even if the thin legs are still so clumsy.

Parents and ever so concerned parents cannot protect their children from such tests. These tests come, and they are always just so hard that a healthy human can pass them. What does not cast us down, as the saying goes, makes us stronger. That is why it is a false love by mothers and aunts, teachers and educators, to avoid such tests and to eliminate any hardness from the life field of children.

Children who grow up that way also later flee from the real face of life and its hardness, withdraw from all tests and would love most of all to believe in a kingdom of eternal love on this battle-tom earth. Every struggle is a horrible experience for them and every hard fate brings them to the edge of desperation. 

„Tell me then, Heiner”, Willem smiles a little embarrassed, „by that you probably mean me? After all, all of you know how hard it was for me - back in July and August of last year when we became acquainted with the first Bolshevist atrocities - to draw the necessary conclusions. I was also raised wrong. During the French campaign I did not feel as acutely how my upbringing would produce inner conflict with being a soldier. The fighting back then was more like a game of chess; the enemy would give up when he saw a superior force opposing and sur-rounding him. But when we moved east and experienced the sub-humanity here, then you saw yourselves, how everything in my body and soul churned when it came down to repaying hardness with hardness, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But today, and I have Heiner to thank for it, I have had a finalizing hour of instruction, which clarifies for me inside where love and goodness have their place and where pitiless hardness is necessary”.