Parents force their children to bear not just the little package of weights and burdens that result from family life but also to carry out, above and beyond these, an immense number of socially allotted tasks.
A certain protest, albeit a seemingly impotent one, against the compulsion to perform all these tasks is to be found in the work of Hugo Ball: “But we are not, in the end, on a treadmill! One is not in the world simply in order to sweat and strain oneself to death!” (Hugo Ball, Flametti oder Vom Dandysmus der Armen). The protest seems impotent because the guilty parties here are not named by their actual name.
