Chapter 6 brings the focus back even more sharply to how Germany’s changing sociopolitical environment affects the perception of emotional suffering. In Charlotte’s story, I trace how each of the three generations of the same family experienced the loss of their Heimat—their ancestral home—at the end of the war. For Charlotte’s grandparents, the new postwar borders made a return to their old houses impossible, and the notion of home for them was surrounded by nostalgia, pain, sadness, and longing. For her parents, Heimat turned into a dirty word, an unwelcome reminder of the Nazi “blood and soil” ideology and the aggressive territorial expansion of the Lebensraum (living space) for the German ethnic community. Rather than a painful lack, the disconnection from their ancestral homeland was accepted as a political necessity. For most of her life, Charlotte had no awareness that something was missing at all. Only after reading the Kriegsenkel books did she notice diffuse feelings of homelessness and lack of attachment, and she started to feel a painful yearning for a sense of rootedness and belonging. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of more positive attitudes toward German national identity allowed her to search for a reconnection with the “lost home.” By making the journey into the regions where her grandparents had once lived, Charlotte was able to transform the absence into a kind of presence and find a home inside herself that filled the void.
Lastly, Germany’s responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust also directly affects family relationships. Rainer and Paula (chap. 6) were both trying to find a way to come to terms with the fact that their grandfathers were well-known Nazi officials and war criminals. As the grandson of the commander of Auschwitz, Rainer was terrified that he may have inherited his grandfather’s “evil genes.” He broke with his family and publicly denounced his grandfather’s crimes. Accepting the moral responsibility imparted by the German culture of commemoration, he devoted his life to ensuring that the Holocaust will never be forgotten. Paula, on the other hand, was cautiously trying to look for a new connection with her deceased grandfather, acutely aware of the taboos she was breaking and conducting her exploration largely in secret. While these were extreme examples, many Kriegsenkel were also haunted by the (known or suspected) crimes of their grandparents and often their parents’ denial. This led to varying degrees of separation, and sometimes ties were severed altogether. Kurt, one particularly angry man, explained, “You can’t just sit down with these people on a Sunday and play cards, and the next day you ask them about the war, and they just tell you some bullshit lies.”
A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY
This book draws on more than eighty life-history interviews with fifty-four Germans of the Kriegsenkel generation undertaken over thirteen months in 2012 and 2013 in Berlin. In addition, I collected information through participant observation among the emerging Kriegsenkel support community as well as in interviews with book authors, psychotherapists, and organizers of the Kriegsenkel support groups and websites.
My interviewees were predominantly well-educated professionals in their forties and early fifties (most of them having been born in the 1960s and 1970s), with a strong representation of therapeutic, social, and administrative professions. Of these interviewees, 63 percent (34) were women and 37 percent (20) men, 67 percent (36) were born in West Germany and 33 percent (18) in the East. Some of their grandparents had been actively involved with the Nazis, and many (to their grandchildren’s knowledge) belonged to the group of so-called “bystanders,” neither actively supporting nor actively resisting the Hitler regime. Two people from families of victims of the Third Reich also participated (the story of one of them, Kerstin, will be told in chap. 4). People volunteered for my project for different reasons.4 Some had been interested in their familial history for most of their lives and were keen to share their experiences or frustrations about their attempts to break through their families’ silence. Others had only recently discovered the topic through the Kriegsenkel books or an article in the media and wanted to explore in more depth how World War II still affected them today. Eight were the siblings of my primary participants. They often had a fascinatingly different view about growing up in the same family. I conducted the biographical interviews in a semistructured format, with open-ended questions. They lasted between ninety minutes and two hours, roughly following a list of topics I tried to cover with each person (see the appendix for a more detailed interview structure and sample questions). I met more regularly with around a dozen people, first in 2012 and then again in 2013. We went to support group meetings and other Kriegsenkel activities together and stayed in touch by email or telephone between catch-ups. I was able to track their exploration of the topic over eighteen months, fascinated to see their attitudes and stories evolve over time. Many of the case studies told in more detail in my later chapters belong to this core group.
During our interviews, we often covered a person’s whole life span from childhood and adolescence to the present day. In this process of retelling and analyzing the family history, complex and diverse layers of memories were drawn together to explain current emotional struggles. Some explanations were based on direct observations of the family’s behavior, closer to the present or retrieved further back from childhood and adolescence. The main point of reference, however—World War II—lay well before the times of their births. All were at least secondhand narrations of events, with some stories being even more steps removed, where the grandparents’ war experiences had been retold by the parents at some point. In many cases there was not enough openly shared information, and what happened to the family during the war could only be sensed and inferred. I was often surprised when someone seamlessly drew together as “historic truth” facts they had learned from their family or a historical archive with what they found out during a family constellation workshop or a session with a hypnotherapist.
In addition, my interviewees had only recently come to consider the psychological impact of the war on their families and by extension themselves. They had previously attributed their emotional problems to other causes. They were “re-writing the past,” as Ian Hacking (1995) described in the context of multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder): they were superimposing new ideas and creating new causal connections between past events that were not experienced in that way at the time. Today trauma is a widely accepted term to express the long-term scarring of the psyche following catastrophic events. Yet Germans who experienced World War II directly did not conceive of themselves as “traumatized” at the time. The common understanding was that “war was just what happened to everyone” (Radebold 2008, 49) and that people would simply get over it with time. Trauma was not widely used as a concept in postwar Germany, not even by psychiatrists. Historian Svenja Goltermann (2010) presents a fascinating analysis of 450 medical files of returned Wehrmacht soldiers who had sought psychiatric help in the late 1940s and 1950s. Many patients reported extreme anxiety, unsettledness, a sense of guilt, and fear of punishment because they had killed other human beings. Yet their doctors viewed this as a passing state of mind, which they expected to disappear after a few weeks or months. Psychiatrists shared a widely held belief that a mental illness could not be triggered by external events, provided there was no physical damage, and that if a war veteran remained troubled longer term, it was only a reflection of bad character.
The idea that traumatic experiences can be transmitted to the next generation is also a relatively new concept. Kriegsenkel might have felt that something was not quite right with their families, but it is only now that they have begun to reexamine their childhood memories through the lens of transgenerational transmission of trauma. These were new concepts imposed on past events and memories, providing a new template to renarrate biographies that would have been told differently only a few years ago. At the point of each interview, my interviewees