As adults, we cannot know exactly how children experience this world. But in places where childhood has been destroyed – in ghettos, camps or war zones – children display a vital resilience that occasionally leads them out of the darkness of violence. At the beginning of the 20th century, Polish doctor Janusz Korczak founded a children's republic in his orphanage in Warsaw, which was entirely self-governed by the children. He never left the side of the children entrusted to his care, not even when they were deported to the Treblinka camp. In the summer of 1945, Marie Paneth encouraged Jewish children in an English reception camp to paint their experiences. The pictures impressively show their experience of the Shoah. The anarchic kindness of the surviving children from the Theresienstadt ghetto, whom Anna Freud took into her care, also testifies to an unconditional brotherhood and sisterhood without direct kinship. And this experience of the camps would change psychiatric institutions forever: with Fernand Deligny and Maud Mannoni, the anti-psychiatric movement created new institutions and forms of democratic participation for children.
In four case studies, Iris Därmann allows children to appear in their wounded subjectivity and in a mode of radical brotherhood that shatters our infantilising conception of childhood. Their children's perspectives form a critical stimulus for a coming democracy.
Awards
Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose 2022
Non-fiction
Iris Därmann, born in Witten in 1963, is Professor of Cultural Theory and Cultural Aesthetics at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her non-fiction books Underserviceability, A History of Violence and of Political Philosophy (2020) and Sadism With and Without Sade (2023) have been translated into Spanish.
