SOS Children's Villages — Hermann Gmeiner and the Abyss of "Good Authority"

After the war, Hermann Gmeiner satisfied the longing for a reign of the good. But can the good rule?

So now Hermann Gmeiner. The deceased founder of SOS Children's Villages is also accused of inappropriate treatment. He is alleged to have committed "inappropriate conduct and inappropriate treatment" against at least eight minor boys. The allegations are apparently so credible that the organization could no longer avoid publishing the internally long-known accusations. The new leadership, fighting for credibility and reputation, changed strategy — when there was no other choice — from covering up to publishing.

It was Falter that was the first to uncover cases of inappropriate conduct by educators in SOS Children's Villages. The swamp that was thereby exposed proved to be ever deeper. Until it also reached the one celebrated by the whole world as a "great friend of children."

After the war, when Gmeiner had founded the villages for children in need, the need for such a figure was probably great. After the experiences with a fascist authority that appeared good inwardly because it was cruel outwardly, and the disaster that followed, there was probably a great longing for something else.

The longing for authority had not vanished — but it was now to be a good authority. A pure humanism — even if still hierarchically structured — seemed to ideally satisfy this. The founding figure of the Children's Villages offered not only the rebirth of a family image from the ruins of the world war — he also offered himself as a good father. Not only the orphans, the entire society needed such a one. One who should again guarantee a good world, a purified society, an intact family. An authority without abysses. The reign of the good. But can the good rule?

The humanism on the front stage merely displaced the unspoken transgressions to the back stage. And thus it proves — once again — that authority always has a flip side. The Freudian primal father appears behind the image of the "great friend of children" (who took his credo of creating an environment of a quasi "biological" family a bit too literally). That primal father who combines power with ruthless enjoyment.

With all figures of the "good" father, precisely this ambivalence repeats itself and drags departures and hopes into the dirt again and again.

One of the pioneers of reform pedagogy, the director of the famous Odenwaldschule Gerold Becker, carried this out in secret. So even the departure from authority, the anti-authoritarian education, produced the same pattern where it created outstanding figures — the inappropriate treatment of students.

Today, by contrast, where all the arsenals of hope are exhausted, where all concepts seem discredited, something else is taking place: the emergence of a domineering father who openly, shamelessly, and unveiledly demands his enjoyment and stages it publicly — like the notorious Donald Trump. Slavoj Žižek calls this the rise of the "obscene masters."

The new managing director of SOS Children's Villages is now trying an entirely different principle: that of "contemporary structures," of a "modern child protection," of "flat hierarchies" — thus the organization instead of a supreme personality. She promises not only complete investigation of the past but also transparency for the future.

But isn't something creeping in there? Doesn't the latter mean that one also expects such inappropriate conduct in the future?