Echoes of Trauma and Shame in German Families. Lina Jakob

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