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.