Friedrich Wieck practice, however, he might not always have lived up to the ideals he described in the book "Piano and Song: How to Teach, How To Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of Musical Performances." When Robert Schumann was living and studying in the Wieck household, he reported seeing Wieck punishing his nine-year-old son, Alwyn, for playing the violin poorly, tearing at his hair and yelling, "You wretch, you scoundrel, is this the way you try to please your father?" Clara seemed unconcerned at the violent scene. Shocked, Schumann wrote in his diary, "Am I among human beings?" Besides the
Michael Wieck from the Nazi racist categories of half-, quarter- or smaller fractions of Jewishness. Following promulgation of the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, Wieck and his sister were categorized, not as Mischlinge (mixed race), but as "Geltungsjuden" ("persons considered to be Jewish"), who in some cases were spared from the Holocaust. After Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933 the Wiecks experienced the gradual ramping-up of anti-Semitic discrimination and oppression. First they were ejected from public schools and sent to Jewish schools. Later they were later forbidden to attend classes at all. In 1938 Miriam was sent to a boarding school