The whole of education should be designed so as to occupy a boy’s free time in profitable cultivation of his body. He has no right during those years to loaf about idly and make disturbances in the streets and picture houses, but after his day’s work is done he ought to harden his young body, so that life may not find him soft when he enters it. To prepare for this and to carry it out is the function of youthful education, and not merely to pump in so-called knowledge. It must rid itself of the notion that management of the body is the business of the individual alone. No one should be free to sin at the expense of posterity, that is, of the race.
The fight against the poisoning of the soul must be waged in company with cultivation of the body. To-day all our life in public is like a forcing-bed for sexual ideas and attractions. Look at the bill of fare offered by the cinemas, playhouses and variety theatres, and you can hardly deny that this is not the right food, especially for the young. Hoardings and advertisement kiosks unite in drawing the public’s attention in the vulgarest ways. Anyone who has not lost the capacity for entering into the souls of the young will realize that it must lead to their very grave injury.
MY STRUGGLE IX3 The life of the people must be freed from the asphyxiating perfume of our modern eroticism, as it must be from unmanly and prudish refusal to face facts. In all these things the aim and the method must be governed by the thought of preserving our nation’s health both in body and soul. The right to personal freedom comes second in importance to the duty of maintaining the race.
Similar unhealthiness was observable in almost every domain of art and Kultur. It was a sad sign of our internal decadence that it was impossible to let young people visit most of the so-called “homes of art”
(Kunststatte), considering what was shamelessly exposed to public view with the warning—universal in the Panoptica—“For adults only”.