Until that time, psychotherapists did not ask their patients about the war or National Socialism at all (Ermann 2007; Heimannsberg and Schmidt 1992; Radebold 2012). Psychiatrist Philipp Kuwert, who offers therapy to German seniors suffering from war trauma, commented in 2008: “We’re only now able to examine the suffering and listen to what people here went through without being suspected of trivializing the Holocaust . . . If I had done this work 20 years ago I would probably have needed a bodyguard” (in Crossland 2008). Historians, psychologists, and other social scientists began to investigate the issue of war childhoods—often their own. The growing interest culminated in the 2005 war children convention in Frankfurt am Main. Around six hundred people attended to discuss their findings and share personal stories. The meeting marked the beginning of the Kriegskinder’s emergence as a distinctive and recognized generation (Wierling 2010). A wealth of studies on the topic emerged in the following years (for example, Ermann 2007; Grundmann, Hoffmeister, and Knoth 2009; Hondrich 2011; Janus 2006; Radebold 2000, 2004, 2005; Seegers and Reulecke 2009). The overarching claim is that, largely unnoticed until that time, the difficult experiences of World War II had a major and lasting impact on a person’s biography. These war children are the parents of my interviewees, the mothers and fathers of my generation. How growing up with them affected the generation of the Kriegsenkel—the war grandchildren—was the question raised in a subsequent wave of psychological exploration.
As mentioned in the introduction, journalists Anne-Ev Ustorf and Sabine Bode published the first popular books about the Kriegsenkel generation in 2008 and 2009. They introduce the life histories of Germans born roughly between 1955 and 1975 to parents and grandparents who experienced the war firsthand. The authors portray them in their struggles to find a clear direction in life and a sense of identity and belonging. They suffer from depression, burnout, and anxiety disorders; some feel blocked in their careers, and others have a general sense of going through life with the hand brake on. Their problems are set in direct relation to their families’ unresolved war experiences, which are implied to be at the root of these psychological issues. Ustorf’s and Bode’s books were the first to raise the topic of the transgenerational impact of World War II, and a number of newspaper articles and radio programs covered the issue while I was in Berlin. Since then a small war grandchildren movement has gained some momentum. Interested people now meet in support groups that have formed in many German cities, while websites and Facebook groups provide information and networking opportunities. A number of therapists have gathered around the scene, offering weekend workshops and individual therapy to alleviate the problems resulting from a perceived transgenerational transmission of war experiences.
GERMANY IN 2012: THE END OF ALL TABOOS?
The Germany that I encountered in 2012 was noticeably more relaxed with its history and national identity than the country I had left twenty years earlier. That summer during the UEFA European Football Championship, Berlin was drowning in a sea of German flags. They were everywhere: on T-shirts, scarves, and hats; stuck to cars, trucks, and bicycles; and painted on people’s faces. Hundreds of thousands gathered around big public screens to cheer on the national team. President Joachim Gauck said in a newspaper interview that coming generations would be less burdened by the guilt of their forefathers and that it had now become possible again to feel pride in Germany’s political achievements (Hildebrandt and Di Lorenzo 2012). Stand-up comedians no longer shied away from impersonating Hitler to mock German tidiness and obsession with rules and regulations, and a store even had a comic book entitled Hipster Hitler on display. Timur Vermes (2012) published his best-selling satirical novel Er ist wieder da (Look who’s back). It features Adolf Hitler waking up on a park bench in modern-day Berlin, his clothes still drenched with the gasoline used to burn his body in 1945. Hitler becomes a star on TV and YouTube while, to everyone’s amusement, promoting very much the same ideas as in his last incarnation. All of the above would have been unthinkable two decades ago. None of the activists of the war grandchildren scene or the authors I interviewed were criticized for bringing the topic of transgenerational transmission of war trauma into the public sphere. Nor were there any attempts to instrumentalize their views to equate the suffering of the majority population with that of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Yet there were also signs that the reluctance to publicly speak about German victimhood had not completely disappeared and that the issue of how to “correctly” talk about the war was still emotionally charged. People still chose their words carefully in public, and a deeply engrained sense of discomfort remained. Journalist Merle Hilbk called it a kind of “knee-jerk reaction” that makes Germans automatically pull away from the subject.9
In addition, while it had become more acceptable to discuss German wartime suffering, the culture of commemoration as such had not changed. In 2010, historian Ulrike Jureit and sociologist Christian Schneider found that the past and in particular the Holocaust have to be remembered according to a rigid formula that is not open for debate, which they call “prescriptive remembering” (“Normiertes Erinnern,” Jureit and Schneider 2010, 33). This way of remembering, the authors claim, does not capture the entire range and complexity of experiences during the time of National Socialism and World War II, as it still excludes certain aspects of the past. For example, it prohibits the sharing of positive memories that some older people still have of everyday life under National Socialism. Jureit and Schneider conclude that the culture of commemoration is still inflexible, with sanctions imposed on those who deviate from the narrowly defined path.
At the same time, when I returned to Berlin in summer 2013, large posters with a photo of Auschwitz and the slogan “Late. But not too late! Operation Last Chance” accompanied me on my walks through the boiling hot city. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem was offering rewards of up to 25,000 euros for information that would help track down the last surviving war criminals so they could be put on trial before their deaths.10 The posters were a stark reminder that, close to seventy years after the end of World War II, many Holocaust victims were still waiting for the murderers of their families to be brought to justice.
The Germans I met were only slowly adapting to the new openness. They still felt more comfortable sharing their family stories in private or in the safe space of a support group rather than under the scrutiny of the public eye. However, in the more diverse public culture of 2012–13, the space had opened up wide enough to enable my interviewees to look back on their lives through new eyes, and to allow for experiences of wartime suffering and trauma to be discussed and integrated into their family histories. It was the first time that many of them had looked at their families from this angle: “It would never have occurred to me that my parents and grandparents were traumatized,” one woman said in an interview with Bremen’s Weserkurier, “and that had a lot to do with shame, because they belonged to the generation of the perpetrators” (Müller 2013). While some of my interviewees mentioned the long exclusion of German suffering from public discourses in passing, it was accepted as a moral necessity without any complaints or openly voiced resentment.
It may not be the end of all taboos. However, because of the passage of time and the changed political situation of a reunited Germany and Europe, many of the silences—from “humiliated silence” and “desire to forget” to “repressive erasure” (Connerton 2008)—that have characterized the public debates in Germany at different times in the postwar years have been revoked or softened. The last members of the eyewitness generation are encouraged to overcome their “desire to forget,” to break their “humiliated silence,” and share their memories of World War II with an interested public. While some restrictions in the culture of commemoration remain, the “repressive erasure” of German wartime suffering has been lifted.
The next chapter moves to the space of the German family to explore how the intergenerational communication about the war was shaped. It will show how public silences around German victimhood were compounded by silences in the private realm.
NOTES
1. Sönke Wortmann’s 2004 movie Das