I do not claim to be an expert in the extensive literature on traumatology. Like my German interviewees, I understand these models mainly in their simplified form, condensed to their basic structure and “truth rules” (Irvine 1999, 85). Yet, as we delved deeper into their life histories, many aspects of the stories they shared did not seem to neatly fit. Or rather, the subjective perceptions of growing up in German families that lived through World War II were messier than these models seem to account for. My interviews suggest that transmission is not always a linear process, handing experiences neatly down from generation to generation. While the parents were always described as the main source of the inherited difficulties, the grandparents (and sometimes members of the extended family) also often had an important and direct influence on the lives of the Kriegsenkel. Secondly, the effects of past trauma in descendants can also not necessarily be traced back to a distinct source in the family or to a distinct event, as overlapping traumas can affect the same family. There is also no clear demarcation between traumatic and nontraumatic aspects of World War II experiences, with only the “unresolved” ones handed down the family line as was often assumed. Even parents who were described as having adjusted well after the war raised their children on the basis of experiences formed during that time and passed on their attitudes and worldviews.
I suggest in chapter 5 that an approach derived from affect theory may present an alternative way to conceptualize how a difficult past affects families. Teresa Brennan (2004) explains that affect theory understands human beings as fundamentally open systems, constantly interacting with and being influenced by other people and the environment around them. Rather than pathologizing the interaction between the generations, this approach would understand as natural and unavoidable that all affects, positive and negative, flow between any people who live in close physical proximity. Instead of separating traumatized (or unhealthy) and normal (or healthy) content, I propose that the transmitted affects from the war should be normalized as an integral part of the overall transfer that invariably happens as part of child-rearing.
Following the psychoanalytical model, my German interviewees furthermore tended to picture their problems as an unwanted parcel of undigested experiences left over from the war, handed down by their families and weighing heavily on their present lives. Yet, as we explored their perceptions in more depth, many of the examples that were brought forward revolved around a sense of lack or gap. Many people were feeling pain because of what had not been transmitted by their family, or what was more broadly felt to be missing as a result of World War II. Chapter 6 traces the dynamic role of these gaps and absences in Kriegsenkel narratives. I focus in particular on experiences of forced migration and the absence of a Heimat (homeland) and also on the breaks and gaps in family relationships that come with having a high-level Nazi perpetrator in the family. Commenting on concepts from the Anthropology of Absence (Bille, Hastrup, and Sørensen 2010a), I explore how places and people that are not present are still felt to have a major impact on a person’s life and how the Kriegsenkel are ultimately able to exert agency over what is missing.
As a final point, psychological models tend to conceptualize and treat transgenerational transmission of trauma as a collection of symptoms of psychological distress. My research, on the other hand, highlights how the broader sociopolitical environment crucially influences whether and how suffering is constructed, experienced, and addressed. Germany, as a “perpetrator” country, provides a particularly good case study for this.
NAVIGATING WARTIME SUFFERING IN A “PERPETRATOR COUNTRY”
How does a society manage the psychological damage resulting from a war for which their country was directly responsible? The first part of the book traces how Germany tried to come to terms with the responsibility for the war and the Holocaust as well as with its own losses. As discussed in chapter 1, until the reunification in 1990, both German states excluded most aspects of wartime suffering of the majority population from their respective culture of public commemoration, for different ideological reasons. The socialist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) understood itself as the heir of the communist resistance against Hitler and therefore as belonging to the “victors of history” rather than to the perpetrators. It consequently rejected all accountability for Hitler’s rise to power and the crimes committed in the German name. The memory of the brave communists who had died in the antifascist resistance took center stage in commemorative practices. West Germany (and from 1990 the reunited country), on the other hand, accepted historical responsibility for the crimes committed under the Nazi regime. In particular since the 1960s, official commemorations stressed the need to remember the Holocaust and to ensure that history would never repeat itself. “All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it,” former president Richard von Weizsäcker said in his programmatic speech on May 8, 1985. For most of the postwar years, publicly speaking of German victimhood was largely considered a moral taboo. Up until around 2000, when a flood of memories of wartime suffering suddenly swept into the public sphere, the German population was coming to terms with its losses in private. From a moral perspective, this “humiliated silence” (Connerton 2008) was without a doubt the only appropriate response out of respect for the millions of victims of the German aggression. From a psychological perspective, on the other hand, societal silences come at a cost. Public recognition is deemed essential in helping populations deal with consequences of war and mass loss (Danieli 1998). Regarding the case of the Soviet Union, where any mention of the massive loss of life during the Stalin era was systematically excluded from public narratives, historian Catherine Merridale (1999, 75) observed: “Personal grief had no wider framework, no mirror, in which to observe itself gradually diminishing.”
It is sometimes argued that parents and grandparents felt less constraint in sharing their stories of wartime suffering and hardship in the safety of the family home. However, as chapter 2 explains, in the majority of Germany families I heard about, the war was not much of a topic around the dinner table either. While there was rarely complete silence, information and stories about the past tended to be patchy, fragmented, and unreliable. Taboos, secrets, and an unwillingness to openly talk about painful or shameful memories left the younger generation without a clear sense of the familial history. The public culture of commemoration reached into the private sphere, shaping family conversations. In West Germany in particular, discussions at home tended to focus on the older generations’ attitudes toward the Hitler regime, while the difficult or traumatic aspects of their experiences were played down or blocked out altogether. Overlapping layers of silences, gaps, and blind spots contributed to a situation where questions of the long-term influence of World War II on the mental health of the German majority population remained hidden from both public and private awareness. This helps explain why the subject matter was taken up with such surprise and emotional intensity.
The center part of the book, chapters 3, 4, and 5, illuminates how the topic of the intergenerational impact of the war, once it had moved into public view, was explored entirely within the framework of psychological discourses and funneled into the realm of therapeutic culture to be worked through. A common critique of therapeutic culture is that by defining problems as individual and personal it fosters a “narcissistic over occupation with the self” (Lasch 1991, xv), while at the same time discouraging social and political action (Moskowitz 2001). My exploration shows that the Kriegsenkel indeed understood “being affected by World War II experiences” as an entirely personal problem. It was traced back to the childhood family and addressed in private therapy or explored with groups of peers. A striking characteristic of the Kriegsenkel