It is not my main concern to elicit an elusive historic truth. By its very nature, human memory is a rather unreliable source of information about past events (Assmann 2006a). It is a widely acknowledged fact in memory studies that an unfiltered account of historic events does not exist and that “the past is mediated by, rather than directly reflected in personal memory” (Radstone 2005, 135). The act of remembering is influenced by a number of factors, including the prevailing conventions of remembering and the person’s social context, beliefs, and aspirations (Freemann 2010). While the memories therefore were not to be considered true reflections of the past, it was the subjective presentation of my interiewees’ life histories at the time of the interviews and the retrospective reflections on growing up in families affected by war that I was most interested in. They form the basis of my analysis.
A few words on terminology. For reasons of simplicity I use the term Kriegsenkel for all members of this particular generation, although not all of my interviewees were familiar with the term or identified as such. As I will explain in chapter 3, technically everyone whose parents were children during World War II is a Kriegsenkel. However, only people who feel that they are suffering as a result of their upbringing tend to use this label for themselves. Also, in spite of some criticism of the concept of transgenerational transmission of trauma, I will nevertheless use it as my key term because it facilitates widespread, shared understanding of the topic. To allow for the inclusion of the aspects of nontraumatic content as well as aspects of perpetratorship, I will predominantly speak of transgenerational transmission of World War II experiences. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from German to English are mine.
AN “ANTHROPOLOGIZATION” OF SUFFERING?: ON GERMANS AS VICTIMS
Before launching into the subject matter, I would like to express one final caveat, which is of personal importance to me. In this book I will talk extensively about the wartime suffering of the majority population of Germany, as these experiences lie at the heart of the Kriegsenkel movement. However, writing about the suffering of a nation that was directly responsible for the Holocaust is still a sensitive issue. Much opening up on the topic has happened in Germany in recent decades, but some critics remain suspicious of the shift in public attention. In 2008, Jewish German journalist Henryk M. Broder said, “Everything the Germans had to go through during the war and after the war was mere discomfort compared with what the Nazis did to their victims. . . . In a world in which everyone wants to be a victim even the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the perpetrators want to stand on the right side of history” (Crossland 2008).
Historian Dan Diner (2003) criticizes recent public debates’ as “dehistorization” in favor of an “anthropologization of suffering” (“Anthropologisierung des Leidens”). He warns against the tendency to portray German wartime suffering as merely a human experience in the most general sense, thereby stripping it of its moral and political context and pushing aside the historical circumstances and responsibilities that caused the suffering in the first place.
These are important concerns. As a German brought up and socialized in the public culture of commemoration of my time, I share much of the uneasiness around the topic, and having my research perceived as an attempt to exonerate Germans of their crimes would go entirely against my personal convictions. At the same time, I also believe that all stories, including the painful and shameful ones, need to be told if we really want to come to terms with and “master the past,” as individuals and as a society more broadly. Historian Michael Rothberg (2009, 3) critiques the idea that the public sphere is a scarce resource, where different collective memories compete for preeminence in a zero-sum struggle for recognition and where the memories of one group invariably block out those of others. I believe that today it is possible to paint a more multifaceted picture of the German past, in which Germans committed unspeakable acts of violence and suffered enormous losses, without creating false equivalences and without one set of memories diminishing the other.
NOTES
1. The acronym Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. More info at https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac-day.
2. For a large collection of articles about these topics, see Yael Danieli, International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (1998); also Janine Altounian, “Putting into Words, Putting to Rest and Putting Aside the Ancestors” (1999); and Julia Dickson-Gómez, “The Sound of Barking Dogs” (2002).
3. For more information about family constellations, see Family Constellations. n.d. Hellinger sciencia. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://www.hellinger.com/en/home/family-constellation/.
4. Around half of my core participants were recruited through the two Kriegsenkel information and support websites, which allowed me to post my project information and contact details. The other half came through personal networks and snowballing. The selection of my interviewees was guided by people’s interest in exploring the topic, and it is not a representative sample of the German population. All interviewee names were changed to protect their identity unless they explicitly requested that their real name be used.
BETWEEN “MASTERING” AND “SILENCING” THE PAST
Public Commemorations of World War II
IN MARCH 2012, a group of Germans in their forties and fifties got together in the picturesque university town of Göttingen for a two-day workshop entitled “The Children of the War Children and the Long-Term Impact of the Nazi Terror.” The meeting, organized by the little-known Association for Psychohistory and Political Psychology (Gesellschaft für Psychohistorie und Politische Psychologie), appeared to be just another inconspicuous conference on a slightly convoluted topic. Yet it turned out to be surprising in a number of ways. First, there was the attendance. The annual meeting of the association usually attracts around 30 or 40 people, mainly its core membership. This time, 170 people—the majority from the general public—registered, exceeding not only all expectations but also the logistical capacity of the organizers and their venue. People were put on waiting lists, and quite a few who decided to try their luck were turned away at the door. In the end, 130 bodies were squeezed into the conference facilities at the Göttingen observatory.
Then there were the reactions from the audience. What I had expected to be a rather cerebral exchange about the long-term impact of World War II on German society unfolded into a highly emotional event. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists delivered papers on topics like “Emotional Rubble: The Postwar Generation Overshadowed by the Trauma of War,” or “Idyllic Worlds: How the War Grandchildren Unconsciously Give Up Their Own Lives,” while members of the Kriegsenkel generation—the war grandchildren—presented their life histories. The speakers vividly sketched out what it was like to grow up in a German family who had lived through World War II. They painted a depressing picture. They showed the Kriegsenkel as a generation raised by parents who were frugal and hardworking. They portrayed parents who had rebuilt their lives from the ruins, focusing all their attention on providing financial security for their children, while being emotionally absent, unable to provide warmth or show emotion. They depicted mothers who told their children to eat everything on their plate and to stop whining about their “little” problems and unpredictable fathers who could lose their temper at any given moment when something upset their painstakingly