Im Westen nichts Neues
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another... if only he can come out of the war alive.
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- Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
- „Be not content - A subterranean journal“ is pretty eternal for me. So is „On the road“. Or take „Middlesex“. Why, they tell the story about a different life. If you want to spend the rest of your life miserable then „Im Westen nichts Neues“ (All quiet on the western front).
Love those Ask HN lists, btw!!
- I will only do things from memory, you can use Google yourself.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
"The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in a wheelchair, I think while they play in a collapsing old industrial building.
* Faust I
Maybe the most famous German book from v.Goethe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One Old professor Faust makes a deal with the devil that he can take his soul, if he is able to provide him with true joy. Professor gets young again, parties, seduces a flawless faithful girl, makes her kill her mother, she ends up in prison being pregnant, devil proposes to save here if she ditches god, she refuses. Faust flees, huge cliff hanger until v.Goethe gets to write Faust II at the end of his live.
* Antigone
Famous greek drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone
* Die Räuber
Famous play from the other famous German poet Schiller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robbers
* Hamlet
Shakespeare, original available in English
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
"The visit of the old Lady" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(play) The old (now rich) lady visits her home town, which has seen better times and demands the death of her youth lover for a huge amount of money for the town. In the beginning all swear loyalty to the guy, in the end all demand his death, inviting the international press. In between the slow transition is described being framed by the protagonists as the most ethical thing ever.
* Im Westen nichts Neues
"No news from the West (front)" describes the trauma of soldiers in the first world war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front
* Woyzeck
Soldier Woyzeck gets exploited by both his superior and his doctor. The doctor puts him on a only beans diet, he becomes crazy. The doctor comments his mental struggles with "Very interesting, very good, should also try this ..." Ends up killing his spouse due to jealousy and later maybe himself. Never got completed by the original author, and the order of the acts is disputed, which makes for a quite different ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck
- I am well aware of that, and have read Im Westen Nichts Neues a number of times. This doesn't affect my point: Huge numbers volunteered for slaughtering and being slaughtered, many with gusto and in great haste.
- I was once where you are now. My kids are not yet grown up, but both are older than your six-month old, so I can offer a bit of perspective. I will stick with my eldest here and will detail some of his life at the moment for perspective on what we did. I see this as giving you the benefit of learning from our experience and perhaps (hopefully) improving upon it. Our son is doing a lot better than many children his age, but I am sure there are others who are doing better than he. I, myself, wish I had accomplished half of what he has done by the time I was his age.
My eldest is 8 years old. He knows the basics of computer programming already, but he taught it to himself. Where we are native English speakers, he reads and speaks German without an accent. He also understands some French and a smattering of other languages. He reads at a 10 year old reading level, and has mathematics skills at the same level. His writing level is a bit lower. He is also one of the most affable children in his class, known and loved by all, and is generally thought of as conducting himself well, better than many of his peers. He has a solid grasp of the solar system and the fundamentals of astronomy; last year he found the four Galilean moons of Jupiter himself. On his own, he built his own electronics switch when he was barely six and still plays with electronics. He also has recently finished reading about WW1 and WW2, touching upon the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression along the way. And these were not little kid readings. He read "Im Westen nichts neues" - the German original of "All Quiet on the Western Front" - as well as "The Diary of Anne Frank" and several other works from various angles. I am already getting books for him out of the local university library. I say all this to illustrate that he is pretty far ahead of the game in many ways, and he has enjoyed all of it.
Now this is the tack that we have taken. First, we are big fans of the Mozart Effect on children. So we played Mozart a LOT when he was in utero and when he was a baby. We tended to play one of the major composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach) more often than other types of music until he was seven. We took to heart Hitler's observation about the importance the influences up to seven play. Therefore, we specifically kept from him any music that came out prior to about 1965. After that point, the lyrics and music start to become more complicated as protests and the civil strife of the time enter the music and then become "free love" and all that. We will now let him hear some of that, but not until he had a foundation from which to understand it.
One of our major guiding principles is to avoid something that might be abusive. "Abusive" is here defined as allowing something to enter your child's world for which s/he has no or very little framework for understanding it. So we were at pains to give him a framework and help him understand things in life as he encountered them early on.
Finally, we try our best not to say "no" when he wants to explore something. Rather, we do our best to find a way that he can safely delve in. For example, he found out the sixth graders at school were studying WW2. He wanted to learn, too, but the school wouldn't let him because he was in third grade. He approached me, and I cobbled together a reading list and a list of films that he could use to work through WW2. As WW2 makes no sense without WW1, he started there. So the point here is to never, ever, EVER limit your child but to take their curiosity as an invitation to find a way to help them interact with the world in a safe way.
We started playing and speaking French with him when he was two. When he was three, he caught a whiff of German and decided that he would rather learn German than French, so we switched (I speak both). We used Early Advantage's Muzzy program and cannot recommend it enough. It is an award-winning program that was developed by the BBC for teaching foreign languages to children. Combined with doing it at home, we also sought out speakers of the target language to help him learn. Today, my son reads full length novels in German and is yet to watch Apollo 13 in English. When I ask him what they said on Apollo 13, his first reply is "Houston, wir haben ein Problem!"
Finally, we encourage his learning to fight and staying physically fit through judo. This has helped a lot, and my son has consequently taken to reading Sun Tzu and thinking about strategy.
So, to sum it up, don't worry about tech. If you take care of the building blocks of logic and language and foster your child's natural desire to explore, there is no end to what they will do and where they will go.
