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