Roberto: The child whose past was erased and who was turned into another’s weapon

In episode 72 of Monster, the anime adaptation (Madhouse, 2004-2005) of Naoki Urasawa’s manga (1994-2001), Inspector Lunge tracks Roberto down to a hotel room in Ruhenheim, the German town where Johan Liebert has set off a massacre, and the two men shoot it out until both are wounded. Roberto is dying, but in the next episode he still has the strength for one last shot: he brings down Franz Bonaparta, the old man who was about to kill Johan, in front of Dr Kenzo Tenma. His final act is to protect his master. Roberto comes from Kinderheim 511, an East Berlin orphanage where the services of the German Democratic Republic experimented on children. The aim was to create perfect people in the service of the state: they were stripped of their identity, their memories were erased and their behavior shaped by a regime of rewards, punishments and deprivation. The program ended in a massacre in which the children killed one another, and many survivors were scarred for life. As an adult, Roberto is an imposing, cold man who acts as Johan’s bodyguard and hitman. He handles the killings that require force, pursues Tenma and those who investigate Johan and protects his secret with absolute loyalty. A man who obeys to the death a single person is the kind of product operant conditioning theory helps to read.

// The theoryShaping behavior

B. F. Skinner developed operant conditioning in the mid-twentieth century: an organism’s behavior depends on its consequences. Behaviours followed by reinforcement, something pleasant or the removal of something unpleasant, tend to be repeated; those followed by punishment tend to disappear. Through shaping, the reinforcement of successive approximations, complex behaviors can be taught. Skinner believed these principles could be used to design a better society, and set this out in his utopian novel Walden Two (1948). His critics warned that the same techniques could serve to manufacture obedience.

// The subjectA man without a past

What makes Roberto frightening is his emptiness. He speaks little, shows no emotion and acts with mechanical efficiency. Urasawa presents him as what the Kinderheim wanted to produce: an instrument. Not even a gunshot changes him. Tenma wounds him and leaves his right arm almost useless, and Roberto returns to Johan’s service under a new identity, that of a lawyer called Alfred Baul. The instrument is repaired and goes back to work.

The series gives him a possible past, never confirmed. Karel Lanke, a former captain of the Czechoslovak secret police, searches for the nephew whom he himself handed over to the orphanage, a boy named Adolf Reinhart, who may be Roberto. That the only trace of his origin should be a doubtful name and a bureaucratic signature is the result the Kinderheim was after: a man nobody can claim. His loyalty to Johan is at once the most human and the most destructive thing about him, the one bond the program left him and the one that leads him to die in Ruhenheim.

// The crackSkinner was not the Kinderheim

Using Roberto to illustrate operant conditioning risks confusing a theory of learning with its abuse. Skinner opposed punishment as an educational tool, considering it ineffective and harmful, and championed positive reinforcement. Monster’s Kinderheim 511 resembles the brainwashing techniques Robert Lifton studied in Chinese prisons more than any of Skinner’s laboratories.

Moreover, operant conditioning explains how behaviors are acquired and maintained, not how an identity is erased. The destruction of memory and self described in the series belongs more to fiction than to science: research with children who suffered extreme deprivation, such as the Romanian orphans, shows deep damage but also a remarkable capacity for recovery when they receive care.