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ОглавлениеGRANDPA JUPP AND THE BLIND SPOTS IN THE FAMILY HISTORY
On April 25, 2011, I stumbled into the Anzac parade in Sydney, the annual commemoration for Australian and New Zealand soldiers who served their country in wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations since World War I.1 It was not something I had ever considered watching before, not even after becoming an Australian citizen in 2007. There they were, hundreds of veterans of all the recent and not so recent wars Australia had participated in, proudly marching past a cheering crowd. They were mostly men, of all ages, some in uniforms, their chests decorated with medals, grouped behind the banner of their respective army units. The younger ones had recently returned from assignments in Iraq or Afghanistan. The older ones, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam war veterans, were on crutches or in wheelchairs pushed along by their families, still smiling and shaking hands all around. There were groups of army nurses on vans waving at the spectators, and classes of schoolchildren playing the national anthem with brass instruments and bagpipes, enticing the crowd to sing along. Witnessing this celebration of patriotism and war, I felt extremely uncomfortable. In my mind I cannot associate war with anything other than senseless violence, death, and destruction. How could this be such a cheerful event? What struck me the most were the young people—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of veterans—who took part in the parade. Many of them were carrying photos and wearing the medals of their ancestors, their youthful faces lit up with pride. I could not help but wonder what it would have been like for me, as a little girl in Germany, to proudly march in a parade commemorating World War II, carrying a photo of my grandfather in the uniform of the German Wehrmacht, my chest decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class he received in 1941 for personal bravery in the battle against the Soviet Union. As for many Germans of my generation, for me this is inconceivable. There were no parades, of course. If I had walked the streets like that in the city where I grew up, people would have called me a neo-Nazi or a Holocaust denier.
When Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered on May 8, 1945, it left scenes of utter devastation: between fifty and seventy million people had perished worldwide, more than half of them civilians. It is now almost seventy-five years since the end of the war. The last war criminals are being tracked down and put on trial, and the last remaining survivors are traveling to Auschwitz and other concentration camps to commemorate the six million lives lost in the Holocaust. At least three generations have passed since Germans invaded the countries of their European neighbors. Over many of the past seven decades, the German population was trying to come to terms with the unspeakable crimes committed in their name. Books and documentaries about the Holocaust have shaped how past, current, and most likely future generations of Germans feel about themselves, their families, and their national identity. Clearly, commemoration of the past, family traditions, and transgenerational transmission mean something very different in the German context. The fact that our grandfathers participated in World War II is not a source of pride and inspiration but an enduring legacy of shame.
I have been interested in my family history all my life. Stories from the war were a topic in my conversations with all four grandparents, but particularly with my mother’s father, Josef “Jupp” Schaefer, who, in spite of heavy smoking in his earlier life and heavy drinking in his later years, lived until he was almost one hundred years old. Jupp was a soldier during World War II, stationed first in France and later sent east when Germany declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941. “We have to defeat the Russian colossus,” he wrote in his Christmas letter to the family in 1941, sitting in a bunker somewhere in Russia. One of my grandmother’s letters to him from April 1945 read, “We have to fulfill our duty until the very last moment.” The Red Army captured my grandfather before the letter could reach him. Jupp survived the Russian winters and harsh conditions in the prisoner-of-war (POW) camp. He came home, skinny and defeated, one day in May 1948, nearly ten years after he had first left. Like many teenagers of my generation, I asked my grandparents a lot of questions: “Did you support Hitler?” “Did you know about the Holocaust?” Like many others I was often frustrated when their responses seemed evasive. However, my grandmother willingly talked about everyday life during the war. Sitting in her living room, she gave me vivid descriptions of how she had to get up most nights to take the children to an air-raid shelter. How she had to push away the constant fear that she would never see my grandfather again, and how she stole potatoes and coal to feed the family after the collapse of the Nazi regime. My grandfather told lively stories from his time in the Russian POW camp, how they rolled cigarettes with Pravda paper, recited Goethe in improvised poetry clubs, and struggled to survive on thin vegetable soup and stale bread. All in all, I was pretty confident that I knew a lot about my family’s experiences during the war. Somehow, I never noticed the gaps, in particular that there were almost no stories about my grandfather’s time as a soldier.
Around 2009, my father told me about a conversation he had had with my grandfather shortly before his death. It was late at night and my grandfather, as on most nights, was drinking. The conversation turned to the war, and Jupp confessed that all his life he had felt guilty that when he was a radio operator with the Wehrmacht in Russia, he was sent away from his military unit on several occasions. Each time there was an attack by the Soviet Army, and many of his comrades who had stayed behind were wounded or killed. He survived by sheer luck. This is of course a secondhand story, but when I heard it, I was stunned. What my grandfather had shared sounded a bit like survivor’s guilt to me, a psychological phenomenon that I had only ever heard about in the context of the Holocaust. Was it possible that he had not just been a soldier and therefore one of the perpetrators of World War II’s atrocities but that he, at the same time, had also been traumatized by his war experience? It dawned on me that I had missed something crucial in our many conversations. More and more questions arose. If he was in fact traumatized, how did this affect his life and that of his family? What about all the other Germans of that generation and their experiences of active combat? Or the civilians, who lived through bombardment, death, destruction, and forced displacement? What about their children and grandchildren? Could it be that the sense of heaviness that I had observed so often in Germans of my generation was not only the result of a collective legacy of guilt and shame for the crimes committed during World War II, as I had always assumed, but also a consequence of the fact that some of the traumatic experiences of our grandparents and parents were transmitted to us? Why had none of this ever occurred to me before? The scarce results of an initial literature search on the topic led me to believe that I was not the only person who had blocked out this aspect of her family history. Even psychologists and psychoanalysts are now publicly rubbing their eyes, asking themselves how it was possible that the war had been absent from their private practices for most of the postwar years.
In 2012, after having lived abroad for twenty years, I traveled to Berlin to explore these questions with other Germans of my generation. By the time I got there, a small scene of people had started to gather in a handful of self-help groups and internet forums to talk about their family histories and the impact of World War II on their own lives. They called themselves Kriegsenkel—grandchildren of war.
Meeting with people of my age in Berlin, I was struck by the level of discontent and depression that dominated many of our conversations. Many of my interviewees felt an indistinct sense of malaise overshadowing their lives, for which, up until that point, there seemed to be no convincing explanation. There was Andrea, the social worker, who had to take two years off work because of severe burnout, and Anja, whose panic attacks prevented her from leaving the house even to take her son swimming. There was Karoline, who had fallen into despair after a number of relationship breakups, and Martin, the talented artist, unable to ramp up the courage to put together an exhibition with his paintings. There was Boris, whose father had been unable to control his violent outbursts and who was now struggling to manage his own, and Katarina, who still felt so enmeshed with her depressed mother that she found it difficult to build her own independent life. Many had previously accessed psychotherapy, yet often without satisfactory results.
All of these could easily be viewed as quite generic psychological issues common in many Western societies. However, a few years earlier, two popular books with life histories of this particular generation had been published: Anne-Ev Ustorf’s (2008) Wir Kinder der Kriegskinder: Die Generation im Schatten des Krieges (We children of the war children: The generation in the shadow of the war) and Sabine Bode’s Kriegsenkel: Die Erben der vergessenen Generation (War grandchildren: The heirs of the forgotten generation), first published in 2009. The authors directly link their interviewees’ present psychological challenges to their families’ experiences during World War II.
Most Germans who are now seniors were confronted with violence, loss, death, and destruction at a young age. As children they had spent nights in shelters during air raids, fearing for their own lives and those of their families, sometimes finding their homes destroyed when they returned in the morning. Many had lost their fathers or older brothers in the war or had waited years for them to return from a POW camp after 1945. Others had fled with their families from their homes in Eastern Europe, carrying their few belongings in bags and after a long and dangerous journey arriving in Germany as unwelcome refugees. For most of the postwar years, the war generation had tried to put those memories behind them. Many established successful careers, enabled by the “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) of the 1960s in West Germany, or contributed to building a new socialist society in the eastern part of the country. On either side of the wall, people put all their effort into providing the next generation with the stability and financial security that they themselves had missed out on. They were trying to forget the past, not wanting to be reminded of the pain and the shame attached to it. Yet, looking back, many of the people I met in Berlin had sensed that there was something not quite right in their predominantly middle-class homes, without having been able to put a clear name to this perception. Joy and laughter seemed to be missing, and depression was frequently named as the dominant mood, a lack of levity and happiness that seemed to jar with the outward display of ordinariness and stability. Their parents (and often grandparents) seemed to be carrying an emotional burden. They showed behaviors and had reactions that the children could not understand. Mothers in particular were often described as cold and emotionally unavailable, with little empathy for the children’s small, everyday problems. “Stop whining. You don’t know how lucky you are” was a common response. Some fathers became violent when something interrupted their fixed routines, or they scared their families with unpredictable outbursts. Boris still vividly remembered how, when he was about six years old, his father suddenly jumped up during one particularly harmonious family dinner. He ripped the tablecloth, food, and dishes from the table and yelled at his mortified family, “This is what an air raid feels like!”.
Anne-Ev Ustorf’s and Sabine Bode’s books both argue that in this atmosphere of “pathological normalcy” (“Pathologische Normalität,” Radebold 2000), unresolved World War II experiences, predominantly traumatic memories but often mixed with aspects of perpetratorship, were passed on to the children. These experiences were seen as causing a broad range of issues, from depression, anxiety disorders, and burnout to relationship breakups and career problems. The books were groundbreaking because they brought the question of a possible transgenerational impact of World War II into the German public for the first time. Since then, a small Kriegsenkel movement has gained momentum. Growing numbers of Germans have embarked on journeys to explore the indirect impact of World War II on their lives. Interested people now meet in support groups that have formed in many German cities. Designated websites and Facebook groups provide information and networking opportunities and encourage the sharing of life histories. The media has covered the topic in newspaper articles, TV and radio programs, and talk shows. Psychotherapists offer specialized services to help alleviate the problems associated with transmitted war trauma.
Why are people who were born in the 1960s and 1970s suddenly discovering the war as a determining influence on their lives? Why are they asking those questions only now? Why do they understand their suffering in this particular way? How do they address it and with what result? This book explores these questions. Drawing on extensive ethnographic interviews and participant observation and engaging with a broad range of scholarship from the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, the book traces how the Kriegsenkel movement emerged at the nexus between public and familial silences about World War II. It critically discusses how this new collective identity is constructed and addressed entirely within the framework of psychological discourses and Western therapeutic culture. It is based on insights into the subjective experiences of the descendants of German families who lived through World War II, and it weighs in on the broader international debate about the construction of second-generation survivor identities. It is also a case study of how descendants manage emotional suffering resulting from a war in which their country was the main perpetrator.
APPROACHES TO TRANSGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA
Today it is widely accepted that traumatic experiences such as war, violence, or mass loss can have a lasting impact on generations born long after the actual events. Anthropologists Fassin and Rechtman (2009, xi) note, “Trauma has become a major signifier of our age. It is our normal means of relating present suffering to past violence. It is the scar that a tragic event leaves on an individual victim or on a witness—sometimes even on the perpetrator. It is also the collective imprint on a group of a historical experience that may have occurred decades, generations, or even centuries ago.”
How survivors pass on traumatic experiences to their families has been explored across a number of different disciplines, such as memory studies (Hirsch 2008; Hirsch and Spitzer 2006), anthropology (Argenti and Schramm 2010; Crapanzano 2011; Feuchtwang 2011; Kidron 2003, 2009a, 2009b, 2012), and neurobiology (Yehuda 2006; Yehuda and Bierer 2007). However, the so-called “psy sciences”—psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry—have contributed the most comprehensive body of research under labels such as transgenerational, intergenerational, multigenerational, or cross-generational transmission of trauma, or secondary traumatization.
A common understanding is that if the eyewitness generation does not work through their trauma, preferably in therapy, they will likely pass it down to their children, affecting the descendants’ mental, emotional, and physical health. The often cited “conspiracy of silence” (Danieli 1998, 4) between the survivors and the societies in which they live is perceived as impeding the process of mourning and the psychological integration of trauma. It is furthermore claimed that the chain of transgenerational transmission can only be broken if the person to whom trauma has been passed gains an awareness of these influences and can remove them from the psyche (Volkan, Ast, and Greer 2002).
Researchers working with Holocaust survivor families were the first to raise questions about the long-term psychological impact of extreme traumatization. In the 1960s children of survivors started to seek psychological treatment in Canada and later in the United States and Israel. By 2000, clinicians and researchers had described and debated the intergenerational influence of the Holocaust in more than five hundred books and articles (Kellermann 2008). Findings were mixed and ultimately remained inconclusive. While clinical studies often reported a range of symptoms transmitted over the generations, empirical research often found no evidence that children of Holocaust survivors were more prone to psychopathology than the rest of the population. However, they were showing an increased vulnerability to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and several other psychiatric illnesses, and those who were adversely affected by their emotional legacy were found to suffer more deeply than their peers (Danieli 2007). Kellermann (2008) points to a clinical subgroup of descendants who were afflicted with severe “second-generation syndrome.” Identified symptoms include not only a predisposition to develop PTSD but also difficulties separating from the parents, personality disorders or neurotic conflicts, bouts of anxiety and depression during times of crisis, and more or less impaired occupational, social, and emotional functioning. In countries such as the United States and Israel, descendants themselves gathered around an identity as second-generation Holocaust survivors with a sense of shared psychological distress.
In the 1980s and 1990s, investigations into the intergenerational effects of trauma were extended to other contexts, such as war, genocide, repressive regimes, suppression of indigenous populations, domestic violence, and infectious diseases.2 Despite a lack of evidence for a pathological “second-generation syndrome,” empirical research based on mental health practitioner accounts reported a range of complaints commonly observed in patients from families who had lived through war and violence. These included children of Vietnam veterans in the United States (Rosenheck and Nathan 1985; Rosenheck and Fontana 1994), of Dutch collaborators with the Nazi regime (Lindt 1998), and of World War II survivors from the Dutch East Indies (Aarts 1998). While such studies do not claim to present an authoritative list of common psychological symptoms, they do point to the existence of a second-generation profile—a similar way in which descendants in their respective countries tend to struggle as a result of their parents’ trauma. This may also, as in the case of the Dutch collaborators with the Nazi regime, include difficulties resulting from a family history linked to perpetratorship. (I will come back to this in more detail in chap. 3.)
In Germany research on the intergenerational impact of World War II on the non-Jewish majority population has only recently started to emerge. Yet similarly, psychotherapists have observed that certain issues are commonly found in members of the Kriegsenkel generation. The list includes a deep-seated sense of loneliness, a depressed view of the world, negative attitudes toward life, and problems with self-worth (Alberti 2010); difficulties with separation and individuation from parents (Bachofen 2012); and an insecure sense of identity and higher levels of anxiety (Lamparter and Holstein 2013).
The main purpose of this body of work, situated in the realm of the “psy sciences,” is to ascertain a causal link between the parental trauma and the children’s psychological problems, to capture symptoms, and to suggest interventions to alleviate the descendants’ emotional suffering. As an anthropologist, I take a different route. My research is built around the descendants’ subjective experiences of growing up in families that lived through World War II. My aim is to understand why the German Kriegsenkel explain their emotional suffering in this way and to what effect. Rather than using them as diagnostic tools, I take psychological models of transgenerational transmission as narratives, and they form part of my analysis.
Transgenerational Transmission as the Cornerstone of a Kriegsenkel Identity
Until around 2000, the war did not commonly feature as a topic in German psychotherapeutic practices. Psychoanalyst Hartmut Radebold speaks of “therapy without history,” which did not consider the historical context to be of any importance in the treatment of mental illness (Radebold 2012). Since then, a number of studies on the occurrence of PTSD in German seniors have been published, and post-traumatic stress disorder is available as a psychiatric diagnosis for the war generation. However, in 2012–13, there was no equivalent when it came to their children and grandchildren. Being a Kriegsenkel was not linked to any clearly defined symptoms or a recognized mental health condition. My interviewees’ claim that the roots of their problems stretched all the way back to the war was still frequently dismissed as far-fetched or as the grievance of middle-class complainers looking for yet another therapeutic concept to let them blame their families for their failures in life. With psychological research, therapeutic practices, and broad public acknowledgment still lagging, my book explores how the Kriegsenkel took matters into their own hands to legitimize their suffering by “diagnosing” themselves as sufferers of transmitted war trauma (chap. 3). In particular, the popular Kriegsenkel books advanced to something akin to informal diagnostic manuals. Any problems described in the life histories were pointed to as belonging to a collective Kriegsenkel profile and, ultimately, a “shared illness identity.” Anthropologist Kristin Barker (2002, 284) defines this term as “an understanding of self, and affiliation with others, on the basis of a shared experience of symptoms and suffering.” As was observed for cases of contested or emerging illnesses for which the status as a legitimate condition is still controversial, a self-help community gathered to confer legitimacy and validation and offer emotional support. Kriegsenkel met in self-help groups, workshops, and weekend seminars or on Facebook and designated websites to share their family histories and to compare their psychological difficulties with those of their peers. I believe that through this process of sharing and comparing, a cluster of symptoms for a new psychological profile was slowly being negotiated and associated with a Kriegsenkel identity. Although the continuous broadening of categories of mental illness and the constant creation of new disorders and syndromes have been criticized as “pathologizing” and “medicalizing” the problems of everyday life (Furedi 2004; Kutchins and Kirk 1997), it was clear that Kriegsenkel framed their struggles as an emerging mental health condition. The main driving force behind their push toward medicalization was more than just a validation of suffering. With a clear diagnosis and a shared illness identity also comes a promise for healing. “I am grateful that I finally found out why I am having such difficulties in my life and why everything was so strange at home. I hope that now I will finally be able to work through all of this,” one woman shared.
I would like to stress that I am not trying to prove or dispute that a Kriegsenkel identity exists or whether it should be recognized as a psychological condition. My research merely seeks to describe the construction of this identity and explore why some people take on and choose to wear this particular mantle. This does not mean that I see my interviewees’ psychological problems as imagined or made up. I share Leslie Irvine’s (1999) view that, while narratives of suffering are socially constructed, suffering itself is always real for the person experiencing it.
Kriegsenkel Identities and Therapeutic Culture
A typical Kriegsenkel journey always starts from a state of psychological suffering. Often, after previous attempts to identify the root of their emotional issues and address them with a therapist, my interviewees discovered the Kriegsenkel books or a feature on the topic in a magazine or on TV. For most, this caused an extremely emotional “eureka moment” as the link between their own problems and the war was established. Next, they commonly looked around for others, yearning to connect with like-minded peers. The activities of the emerging self-help community helped break through social isolation and affirmed the newly found Kriegsenkel identity. Psychotherapists and other healers offered specialized therapy sessions and workshops to help people work through their inherited emotional burden. Many Kriegsenkel tried approaches that extended beyond traditional psychotherapy to hypnosis, creative writing, artistic expression, genealogy, and family constellation seminars.3 The expressed goal was to come to terms with the emotional legacy of World War II, to find a sense of acceptance and closure, and to move toward a happier and emotionally healthier future for themselves and their children. All of these elements firmly link the German Kriegsenkel into the framework of contemporary Western therapeutic culture. In chapter 4, I draw on sociologist Eva Illouz’s (2008) work to show how Kriegsenkel identities are constructed, explored, performed, and managed entirely in accordance with the norms of therapeutic discourses and self-help culture.
There is a broad consensus that therapeutic culture has exerted an unparalleled influence on modern Western (and increasingly global) societies. Psychological thinking has long transcended the relationship between an individual and a therapist, spilling over into almost every aspect of private and public life. Illouz (2008, 7) explains that therapeutic discourse “has come to constitute one of the major codes with which to express, shape, and guide selfhood.” Sociologists have critiqued the rise of counseling and therapy culture as fostering moral collapse (Furedi 2004; Lasch 1991; Rieff 1966), as encouraging extreme individualism (Lasch 1991), and as creating a “new faith” (Moskowitz 2001) to fill a need that was once addressed by religion. Some authors claim that, rather than alleviating emotional suffering, therapeutic culture ends up creating or perpetuating the very pain it is trying to cure, either by fostering a culture of emotional vulnerability and victimhood vis-à-vis the challenges of modern life (Furedi 2004) or by setting vague benchmarks of emotional health, self-actualization, and happiness against which individuals invariably find themselves falling short (Illouz 2008). From my observations among my German interviewees, I would agree that having been socialized to understand one’s problems in therapeutic terms reinforces a sense of victimhood rather than strengthens aspects of resilience and agency. Many of the Kriegsenkel I spoke to understood themselves to be the emotional casualties of their dysfunctional families, and they would wholeheartedly subscribe to concepts of the self as fragile and constantly at risk of being traumatized. Yet at the same time, making the Kriegsenkel journey was experienced as unequivocally positive. Therapeutic culture was seen as offering the tools to understand and overcome suffering, which was subjectively experienced as effective and empowering. For the German Kriegsenkel there was never a question, critique, or alternative: therapeutic culture is just how you do things!
A Broad Approach to Transgenerational Transmission
An important goal of this book is the search for a broader understanding of the processes of transgenerational transmission of trauma. A number of different models can help explain how these processes occur (these will be explained in more detail in chap. 5). Psychoanalytical approaches, for example, claim that traumatic experiences are unconsciously passed on from one generation to the next: “Transgenerational transmission is when an older person unconsciously externalizes his traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality. A child then becomes a reservoir for the unwanted, troublesome parts of an older generation. . . . It becomes the child’s task to mourn, to reverse the humiliation and feeling of helplessness pertaining to the trauma of his forebears” (Volkan 1997, 43).
Sociocultural and socialization approaches, on the other hand, emphasize the conscious and direct influence parents have by modeling behavior and raising children with their views of the world. Julia Dickson-Gómez (2002, 417) found traces of a “traumatized world view” in the children of campesinos who survived the civil war that raged in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992. Although they were born long after the event, the children still showed a fundamental mistrust of the police, neighbors, and politicians. Furthermore, family systems models account for the fact that both conscious and unconscious transmission of trauma always take place in a particular family dynamic. Holocaust survivor families, for example, were said to behave like “tight little islands,” as highly closed systems where the parents were very focused on their children. The children in turn were deeply concerned with their parents’ welfare, leading to problems regarding separation and individuation (Kellermann 2001b, 260). Lastly, biological and epigenetic research traces the physical changes that trauma leaves behind in the eyewitness generation and in their offspring. Parental trauma can create a genetic or biochemical predisposition in the children, making them more vulnerable to stress and PTSD (Yehuda 2006; Yehuda et al., “Vulnerability to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,”1998; Yehuda and Bierer 2007). Mainstreamed by therapeutic culture, these models provided the basic concepts and vocabulary into which the Kriegsenkel tapped to explain why and how their parents’ and grandparents’ war experiences affected them.
I do not claim to be an expert in the extensive literature on traumatology. Like my German interviewees, I understand these models mainly in their simplified form, condensed to their basic structure and “truth rules” (Irvine 1999, 85). Yet, as we delved deeper into their life histories, many aspects of the stories they shared did not seem to neatly fit. Or rather, the subjective perceptions of growing up in German families that lived through World War II were messier than these models seem to account for. My interviews suggest that transmission is not always a linear process, handing experiences neatly down from generation to generation. While the parents were always described as the main source of the inherited difficulties, the grandparents (and sometimes members of the extended family) also often had an important and direct influence on the lives of the Kriegsenkel. Secondly, the effects of past trauma in descendants can also not necessarily be traced back to a distinct source in the family or to a distinct event, as overlapping traumas can affect the same family. There is also no clear demarcation between traumatic and nontraumatic aspects of World War II experiences, with only the “unresolved” ones handed down the family line as was often assumed. Even parents who were described as having adjusted well after the war raised their children on the basis of experiences formed during that time and passed on their attitudes and worldviews.
I suggest in chapter 5 that an approach derived from affect theory may present an alternative way to conceptualize how a difficult past affects families. Teresa Brennan (2004) explains that affect theory understands human beings as fundamentally open systems, constantly interacting with and being influenced by other people and the environment around them. Rather than pathologizing the interaction between the generations, this approach would understand as natural and unavoidable that all affects, positive and negative, flow between any people who live in close physical proximity. Instead of separating traumatized (or unhealthy) and normal (or healthy) content, I propose that the transmitted affects from the war should be normalized as an integral part of the overall transfer that invariably happens as part of child-rearing.
Following the psychoanalytical model, my German interviewees furthermore tended to picture their problems as an unwanted parcel of undigested experiences left over from the war, handed down by their families and weighing heavily on their present lives. Yet, as we explored their perceptions in more depth, many of the examples that were brought forward revolved around a sense of lack or gap. Many people were feeling pain because of what had not been transmitted by their family, or what was more broadly felt to be missing as a result of World War II. Chapter 6 traces the dynamic role of these gaps and absences in Kriegsenkel narratives. I focus in particular on experiences of forced migration and the absence of a Heimat (homeland) and also on the breaks and gaps in family relationships that come with having a high-level Nazi perpetrator in the family. Commenting on concepts from the Anthropology of Absence (Bille, Hastrup, and Sørensen 2010a), I explore how places and people that are not present are still felt to have a major impact on a person’s life and how the Kriegsenkel are ultimately able to exert agency over what is missing.
As a final point, psychological models tend to conceptualize and treat transgenerational transmission of trauma as a collection of symptoms of psychological distress. My research, on the other hand, highlights how the broader sociopolitical environment crucially influences whether and how suffering is constructed, experienced, and addressed. Germany, as a “perpetrator” country, provides a particularly good case study for this.
NAVIGATING WARTIME SUFFERING IN A “PERPETRATOR COUNTRY”
How does a society manage the psychological damage resulting from a war for which their country was directly responsible? The first part of the book traces how Germany tried to come to terms with the responsibility for the war and the Holocaust as well as with its own losses. As discussed in chapter 1, until the reunification in 1990, both German states excluded most aspects of wartime suffering of the majority population from their respective culture of public commemoration, for different ideological reasons. The socialist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) understood itself as the heir of the communist resistance against Hitler and therefore as belonging to the “victors of history” rather than to the perpetrators. It consequently rejected all accountability for Hitler’s rise to power and the crimes committed in the German name. The memory of the brave communists who had died in the antifascist resistance took center stage in commemorative practices. West Germany (and from 1990 the reunited country), on the other hand, accepted historical responsibility for the crimes committed under the Nazi regime. In particular since the 1960s, official commemorations stressed the need to remember the Holocaust and to ensure that history would never repeat itself. “All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it,” former president Richard von Weizsäcker said in his programmatic speech on May 8, 1985. For most of the postwar years, publicly speaking of German victimhood was largely considered a moral taboo. Up until around 2000, when a flood of memories of wartime suffering suddenly swept into the public sphere, the German population was coming to terms with its losses in private. From a moral perspective, this “humiliated silence” (Connerton 2008) was without a doubt the only appropriate response out of respect for the millions of victims of the German aggression. From a psychological perspective, on the other hand, societal silences come at a cost. Public recognition is deemed essential in helping populations deal with consequences of war and mass loss (Danieli 1998). Regarding the case of the Soviet Union, where any mention of the massive loss of life during the Stalin era was systematically excluded from public narratives, historian Catherine Merridale (1999, 75) observed: “Personal grief had no wider framework, no mirror, in which to observe itself gradually diminishing.”
It is sometimes argued that parents and grandparents felt less constraint in sharing their stories of wartime suffering and hardship in the safety of the family home. However, as chapter 2 explains, in the majority of Germany families I heard about, the war was not much of a topic around the dinner table either. While there was rarely complete silence, information and stories about the past tended to be patchy, fragmented, and unreliable. Taboos, secrets, and an unwillingness to openly talk about painful or shameful memories left the younger generation without a clear sense of the familial history. The public culture of commemoration reached into the private sphere, shaping family conversations. In West Germany in particular, discussions at home tended to focus on the older generations’ attitudes toward the Hitler regime, while the difficult or traumatic aspects of their experiences were played down or blocked out altogether. Overlapping layers of silences, gaps, and blind spots contributed to a situation where questions of the long-term influence of World War II on the mental health of the German majority population remained hidden from both public and private awareness. This helps explain why the subject matter was taken up with such surprise and emotional intensity.
The center part of the book, chapters 3, 4, and 5, illuminates how the topic of the intergenerational impact of the war, once it had moved into public view, was explored entirely within the framework of psychological discourses and funneled into the realm of therapeutic culture to be worked through. A common critique of therapeutic culture is that by defining problems as individual and personal it fosters a “narcissistic over occupation with the self” (Lasch 1991, xv), while at the same time discouraging social and political action (Moskowitz 2001). My exploration shows that the Kriegsenkel indeed understood “being affected by World War II experiences” as an entirely personal problem. It was traced back to the childhood family and addressed in private therapy or explored with groups of peers. A striking characteristic of the Kriegsenkel movement is its complete absence of any broader social goals and ambitions. All of this could well be viewed as political disengagement and narcissistic self-concern. However, framing problems as psychological is also a strategy to navigate a political environment where the issues in question are still considered sensitive. By choosing to define their suffering as a shared illness identity, the Kriegsenkel were able to stay clear of the controversies around German victimhood and Holocaust memory. Therapeutic culture and practices provided safe spaces where concerns could be explored without fear of repercussions.
Chapter 6 brings the focus back even more sharply to how Germany’s changing sociopolitical environment affects the perception of emotional suffering. In Charlotte’s story, I trace how each of the three generations of the same family experienced the loss of their Heimat—their ancestral home—at the end of the war. For Charlotte’s grandparents, the new postwar borders made a return to their old houses impossible, and the notion of home for them was surrounded by nostalgia, pain, sadness, and longing. For her parents, Heimat turned into a dirty word, an unwelcome reminder of the Nazi “blood and soil” ideology and the aggressive territorial expansion of the Lebensraum (living space) for the German ethnic community. Rather than a painful lack, the disconnection from their ancestral homeland was accepted as a political necessity. For most of her life, Charlotte had no awareness that something was missing at all. Only after reading the Kriegsenkel books did she notice diffuse feelings of homelessness and lack of attachment, and she started to feel a painful yearning for a sense of rootedness and belonging. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of more positive attitudes toward German national identity allowed her to search for a reconnection with the “lost home.” By making the journey into the regions where her grandparents had once lived, Charlotte was able to transform the absence into a kind of presence and find a home inside herself that filled the void.
Lastly, Germany’s responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust also directly affects family relationships. Rainer and Paula (chap. 6) were both trying to find a way to come to terms with the fact that their grandfathers were well-known Nazi officials and war criminals. As the grandson of the commander of Auschwitz, Rainer was terrified that he may have inherited his grandfather’s “evil genes.” He broke with his family and publicly denounced his grandfather’s crimes. Accepting the moral responsibility imparted by the German culture of commemoration, he devoted his life to ensuring that the Holocaust will never be forgotten. Paula, on the other hand, was cautiously trying to look for a new connection with her deceased grandfather, acutely aware of the taboos she was breaking and conducting her exploration largely in secret. While these were extreme examples, many Kriegsenkel were also haunted by the (known or suspected) crimes of their grandparents and often their parents’ denial. This led to varying degrees of separation, and sometimes ties were severed altogether. Kurt, one particularly angry man, explained, “You can’t just sit down with these people on a Sunday and play cards, and the next day you ask them about the war, and they just tell you some bullshit lies.”
A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY
This book draws on more than eighty life-history interviews with fifty-four Germans of the Kriegsenkel generation undertaken over thirteen months in 2012 and 2013 in Berlin. In addition, I collected information through participant observation among the emerging Kriegsenkel support community as well as in interviews with book authors, psychotherapists, and organizers of the Kriegsenkel support groups and websites.
My interviewees were predominantly well-educated professionals in their forties and early fifties (most of them having been born in the 1960s and 1970s), with a strong representation of therapeutic, social, and administrative professions. Of these interviewees, 63 percent (34) were women and 37 percent (20) men, 67 percent (36) were born in West Germany and 33 percent (18) in the East. Some of their grandparents had been actively involved with the Nazis, and many (to their grandchildren’s knowledge) belonged to the group of so-called “bystanders,” neither actively supporting nor actively resisting the Hitler regime. Two people from families of victims of the Third Reich also participated (the story of one of them, Kerstin, will be told in chap. 4). People volunteered for my project for different reasons.4 Some had been interested in their familial history for most of their lives and were keen to share their experiences or frustrations about their attempts to break through their families’ silence. Others had only recently discovered the topic through the Kriegsenkel books or an article in the media and wanted to explore in more depth how World War II still affected them today. Eight were the siblings of my primary participants. They often had a fascinatingly different view about growing up in the same family. I conducted the biographical interviews in a semistructured format, with open-ended questions. They lasted between ninety minutes and two hours, roughly following a list of topics I tried to cover with each person (see the appendix for a more detailed interview structure and sample questions). I met more regularly with around a dozen people, first in 2012 and then again in 2013. We went to support group meetings and other Kriegsenkel activities together and stayed in touch by email or telephone between catch-ups. I was able to track their exploration of the topic over eighteen months, fascinated to see their attitudes and stories evolve over time. Many of the case studies told in more detail in my later chapters belong to this core group.
During our interviews, we often covered a person’s whole life span from childhood and adolescence to the present day. In this process of retelling and analyzing the family history, complex and diverse layers of memories were drawn together to explain current emotional struggles. Some explanations were based on direct observations of the family’s behavior, closer to the present or retrieved further back from childhood and adolescence. The main point of reference, however—World War II—lay well before the times of their births. All were at least secondhand narrations of events, with some stories being even more steps removed, where the grandparents’ war experiences had been retold by the parents at some point. In many cases there was not enough openly shared information, and what happened to the family during the war could only be sensed and inferred. I was often surprised when someone seamlessly drew together as “historic truth” facts they had learned from their family or a historical archive with what they found out during a family constellation workshop or a session with a hypnotherapist.
In addition, my interviewees had only recently come to consider the psychological impact of the war on their families and by extension themselves. They had previously attributed their emotional problems to other causes. They were “re-writing the past,” as Ian Hacking (1995) described in the context of multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder): they were superimposing new ideas and creating new causal connections between past events that were not experienced in that way at the time. Today trauma is a widely accepted term to express the long-term scarring of the psyche following catastrophic events. Yet Germans who experienced World War II directly did not conceive of themselves as “traumatized” at the time. The common understanding was that “war was just what happened to everyone” (Radebold 2008, 49) and that people would simply get over it with time. Trauma was not widely used as a concept in postwar Germany, not even by psychiatrists. Historian Svenja Goltermann (2010) presents a fascinating analysis of 450 medical files of returned Wehrmacht soldiers who had sought psychiatric help in the late 1940s and 1950s. Many patients reported extreme anxiety, unsettledness, a sense of guilt, and fear of punishment because they had killed other human beings. Yet their doctors viewed this as a passing state of mind, which they expected to disappear after a few weeks or months. Psychiatrists shared a widely held belief that a mental illness could not be triggered by external events, provided there was no physical damage, and that if a war veteran remained troubled longer term, it was only a reflection of bad character.
The idea that traumatic experiences can be transmitted to the next generation is also a relatively new concept. Kriegsenkel might have felt that something was not quite right with their families, but it is only now that they have begun to reexamine their childhood memories through the lens of transgenerational transmission of trauma. These were new concepts imposed on past events and memories, providing a new template to renarrate biographies that would have been told differently only a few years ago. At the point of each interview, my interviewees presented a complex, richly textured, multilayered matrix of memories varying in temporality and factuality, drawn together under new psychological labels. The interviews were produced in “joint production” with an active role played by myself as the interviewer (Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett 2008, 100). My questions and probing contributed to the crafting of the narrative and sometimes led to new insights for my interviewees.
It is not my main concern to elicit an elusive historic truth. By its very nature, human memory is a rather unreliable source of information about past events (Assmann 2006a). It is a widely acknowledged fact in memory studies that an unfiltered account of historic events does not exist and that “the past is mediated by, rather than directly reflected in personal memory” (Radstone 2005, 135). The act of remembering is influenced by a number of factors, including the prevailing conventions of remembering and the person’s social context, beliefs, and aspirations (Freemann 2010). While the memories therefore were not to be considered true reflections of the past, it was the subjective presentation of my interiewees’ life histories at the time of the interviews and the retrospective reflections on growing up in families affected by war that I was most interested in. They form the basis of my analysis.
A few words on terminology. For reasons of simplicity I use the term Kriegsenkel for all members of this particular generation, although not all of my interviewees were familiar with the term or identified as such. As I will explain in chapter 3, technically everyone whose parents were children during World War II is a Kriegsenkel. However, only people who feel that they are suffering as a result of their upbringing tend to use this label for themselves. Also, in spite of some criticism of the concept of transgenerational transmission of trauma, I will nevertheless use it as my key term because it facilitates widespread, shared understanding of the topic. To allow for the inclusion of the aspects of nontraumatic content as well as aspects of perpetratorship, I will predominantly speak of transgenerational transmission of World War II experiences. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from German to English are mine.
AN “ANTHROPOLOGIZATION” OF SUFFERING?: ON GERMANS AS VICTIMS
Before launching into the subject matter, I would like to express one final caveat, which is of personal importance to me. In this book I will talk extensively about the wartime suffering of the majority population of Germany, as these experiences lie at the heart of the Kriegsenkel movement. However, writing about the suffering of a nation that was directly responsible for the Holocaust is still a sensitive issue. Much opening up on the topic has happened in Germany in recent decades, but some critics remain suspicious of the shift in public attention. In 2008, Jewish German journalist Henryk M. Broder said, “Everything the Germans had to go through during the war and after the war was mere discomfort compared with what the Nazis did to their victims. . . . In a world in which everyone wants to be a victim even the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the perpetrators want to stand on the right side of history” (Crossland 2008).
Historian Dan Diner (2003) criticizes recent public debates’ as “dehistorization” in favor of an “anthropologization of suffering” (“Anthropologisierung des Leidens”). He warns against the tendency to portray German wartime suffering as merely a human experience in the most general sense, thereby stripping it of its moral and political context and pushing aside the historical circumstances and responsibilities that caused the suffering in the first place.
These are important concerns. As a German brought up and socialized in the public culture of commemoration of my time, I share much of the uneasiness around the topic, and having my research perceived as an attempt to exonerate Germans of their crimes would go entirely against my personal convictions. At the same time, I also believe that all stories, including the painful and shameful ones, need to be told if we really want to come to terms with and “master the past,” as individuals and as a society more broadly. Historian Michael Rothberg (2009, 3) critiques the idea that the public sphere is a scarce resource, where different collective memories compete for preeminence in a zero-sum struggle for recognition and where the memories of one group invariably block out those of others. I believe that today it is possible to paint a more multifaceted picture of the German past, in which Germans committed unspeakable acts of violence and suffered enormous losses, without creating false equivalences and without one set of memories diminishing the other.
NOTES
1. The acronym Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. More info at https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac-day.
2. For a large collection of articles about these topics, see Yael Danieli, International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (1998); also Janine Altounian, “Putting into Words, Putting to Rest and Putting Aside the Ancestors” (1999); and Julia Dickson-Gómez, “The Sound of Barking Dogs” (2002).
3. For more information about family constellations, see Family Constellations. n.d. Hellinger sciencia. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://www.hellinger.com/en/home/family-constellation/.
4. Around half of my core participants were recruited through the two Kriegsenkel information and support websites, which allowed me to post my project information and contact details. The other half came through personal networks and snowballing. The selection of my interviewees was guided by people’s interest in exploring the topic, and it is not a representative sample of the German population. All interviewee names were changed to protect their identity unless they explicitly requested that their real name be used.
