Echoes of Trauma and Shame in German Families. Lina Jakob

to probe deeper into the family history were typically brushed off with sentences such as “You children don’t understand,” or “Why do you need to dig around in the past?” Elise (born in 1961) wanted to know more about her parents’ biography, but her curiosity was smothered with the categorical statement “You are much too small to understand these things.” She was amazed that, even at fifteen or sixteen, she was still considered “too small” to be trusted with a more elaborate response. At some point, she just stopped asking. Similar to Wajnryb’s (2001) findings among second-generation Holocaust survivors, information about World War II in non-Jewish German families often remained fragmented, patchy, and disjointed. Stories were “leaking out” (Wajnryb 2001, 178) over time, pieced together bit by bit over years of tedious questioning or inferred from obscure remarks and charged reactions. The piecemeal nature of the available information and the remaining gaps meant that in many cases these fragments never amounted to a complete story. Many of my interviewees expressed a deeply felt frustration about their families’ unwillingness to share stories from the past. The process of continuous questioning was experienced as tiresome and aggravating. Some people felt that family secrets and taboos swallowed up their life-force like black holes and prevented them from letting go of the past and focusing on their own lives.¹

      “Eat Up, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are”: Dicta and Life Lessons

      Another common way to refer to the war came in the form of dicta and life lessons. More than 40 percent of my interviewees remembered their parents and grandparents making selective references to past times of hardship when disciplining their children or attempting to impart to them certain moral values and behaviors. Members of the war generation tended to display certain fixations that showed in everyday life. They often compulsively hoarded food and other household items like candles and oil in preparation for a possible crisis. Many refused to throw out food even long after the expiration date and forced their children to eat everything on their plates. “Food cannot be wasted” was the abiding truth. Anna’s father went to the extreme to force his children to eat apple cores he had pulled out from the garbage to teach them that they “don’t know what it means to go hungry.” The past was woven into daily family life through those short references, purposely invoked whenever the situation called for it. “We always had to be grateful,” Brigitta said, “because we had so much more than they did at the time.” Complaints about what parents saw as minor inconveniences of a comfortable childhood in times of peace and prosperity were often not tolerated. Most Kriegsenkel recalled their parents telling them to “stop whining” and get on with whatever was expected of them.

      Another set of common and very powerful dicta specific to German families revolved around the horrors of war. Statements like “Nie wieder Krieg” (“No more war”) and “War is the worst thing that can happen to people” were repeated over and over again. All through their childhood and adolescence, the Kriegsenkel witnessed their parents being terrified of a third world war, from the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s to the nuclear arms race of the 1980s. It deeply affected their developing psyches. Brigitta is a typical example. She and her siblings were raised in a strictly pacifist spirit, not allowed to play cowboys and Indians or have toy weapons. She vividly remembered her mother’s uncharacteristic bout of rage and scolding when she once caught her kids aiming at each other with the neighboring children’s water guns. The fear of another war shaped the political views of both generations. Many Kriegsenkel objected to joining the Bundeswehr (the German Army), which was still compulsory at the time they finished school. A strong antiwar movement culminated at the time of the first Iraq war in the early 1990s and extended to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002, which 70 percent of all Germans opposed (Bode 2006, 119–22). The generation who had lived through the hardship and horrors of war imparted peace as the highest ideal, and many Kriegsenkel I spoke to still adhered to this belief.