In previous years, the waiting rooms of the psychotherapists presenting at the conference had started to fill with people who were struggling to find their path in life, in spite of the fact that they had grown up in times of peace, stability, and (mostly) prosperity. They were wrestling with emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, or a general sense of hopelessness and lack of belonging. They had difficulty separating themselves from their parents and starting their own lives. They were struggling to build committed relationships and successful careers. For many of these issues, therapists were unable to clearly identify the cause of suffering, and therapeutic interventions often failed to produce the desired results. The psychologists were starting to look for potential sources further back in the family history—all the way to the events of World War II. Could it be, the psychologists were now asking, that what their patients’ parents and grandparents had witnessed in World War II had left them damaged or even traumatized? Had the bombardment of German cities, the nights spent in air-raid shelters, the deaths of family members, and the loss of homes and belongings left much bigger psychological scars in these generations than was previously known or even suspected? Had these scars and the “emotional rubble” (Seelische Trümmer, Alberti 2010), pushed aside by the intense effort of economic reconstruction after 1945 and buried under a sense of guilt and shame about the crimes that Germans had committed, affected not only the mental health of the eyewitnesses but also the emotional well-being of their children and grandchildren? Had the survivors inadvertently and unconsciously passed down their unresolved emotional baggage, and could this be an explanation for the psychological problems of the Kriegsenkel?
The audience listened in teary silence as memories of their childhoods came back to life. Question times were dominated by expressions of relief and empathy and by listeners’ own stories. Again and again someone would stand up and, choking with emotion, say something like, “I have never ever looked at myself and my family in this way before. Now, finally, I understand why my parents were the way they were and why I have been struggling all my life. I always felt that there was something wrong with me. Now, I can see where it all came from, and that there are other people out there who are just like me. For the first time, I don’t feel alone anymore.” Each time, 130 people clapped in support.
Sunday afternoon, on the train back to Berlin, exhausted and overwhelmed by the intensity of the previous two days, I pondered on what I had just witnessed. One thing was obvious: what had made the event so emotional was that this was a new topic for the audience, one that had come as a big revelation. It offered a fresh lens through which people reconsidered not only their own lives but also those of their parents and grandparents. The memory of the war had always been there—as a constant presence in public commemorations, history lessons at school, and TV documentaries. Yet its psychological impact had somehow been blocked from view. They had not been able to grasp it. Having grown up in Germany, I intuitively understood why the conference participants were so surprised by the sudden discovery of the connection between World War II and their own emotional issues. Up until that moment, Germans (not only of this particular generation) related to the war in two distinct ways: either as a historical event that had little or no impact on their own lives or as a national and familial legacy of perpetratorship, guilt, and shame. It had never before been considered that not only had the eyewitness generation participated in or condoned the crimes of the Nazi regime but the war had also psychologically scarred them, creating lasting emotional damage that they then passed on to their children and grandchildren.
Why did it take more than sixty years before Germans started to even think about these issues? Three main factors may help explain. First, for different ideological reasons, the culture of commemoration in East and West (and later the reunited) Germany largely excluded the suffering of the non-Jewish majority population from public discourses about World War II. In the West the emphasis was on the responsibility for the Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust, while the East German regime focused on building a socialist future rather than looking back to the past. Without the stimulation of a broader public discussion, the aspect of the German losses in World War II history did not feature prominently in people’s awareness, and so they were not systematically considered.
Second, conversations between the different generations in German families tended to be dominated by silences, disjointed anecdotes, accusations, and denials. This disrupted communication left the younger generations with only sketchy knowledge about what had happened to their family during the war, and it did not allow them to understand how they may have been affected later on.
Lastly, the mainstreaming of psychological knowledge about the multigenerational impact of traumatic events is a very recent development. This knowledge is a crucial element for the construction of Kriegsenkel life histories and the understanding of the enduring emotional legacy of World War II more broadly. While they may have experienced suffering, the German eyewitness generation of World War II did not consider themselves traumatized after the war, and research on the effects on their children and grandchildren is only just starting to emerge.
The culture of commemoration of a country—the way a nation remembers, describes, and relates to its past—is relayed in public policies and political debates, memorials and museums, rituals of commemoration, and the media (Moller 2003). The construction of any national history is invariably a selective representation of the past, emphasizing certain aspects while simultaneously omitting and “silencing” (Trouillot 1995) others. Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper (2000, 7) point out that the commemoration of war in particular is often a key element used by the state “for binding its citizens into a collective national identity.” What makes the German case complicated in this regard is the fact that Nazi Germany had started World War II and was directly responsible for an enormous loss of human life worldwide. Consequently, there were no victories or heroes to celebrate (although East Germany did to a degree, as I will explain). Both German states had to find a way to break with the past and distance themselves from the actions of the Nazi regime.
The public mourning of Germany’s losses consequently (and rightly, I believe) had to take a large step back behind the consideration for the crimes committed. At times it disappeared almost entirely from public view. Journalist Sabine Bode suggested in 2006 (271) that the only dignified way to publicly remember and mourn the destruction of German cities and the loss of life was for the population to gather on the night of May 8 and stand in silence. She observed that all too often local politicians still could not find the appropriate words to say. Using anthropologist Paul Connerton’s (2008) “seven types of forgetting,” this chapter highlights the shifting and often contradictory ways in which Germans publicly talked about World War II. It traces the tension between the responsibility for the Holocaust on the one hand and the wartime suffering of the civilian population on the other.
FROM THE “DESIRE TO FORGET” TO THE SINGULARITY OF THE HOLOCAUST: THE WAR IN WEST GERMAN PUBLIC DISCOURSES BEFORE 1990
After the capitulation of the National Socialist regime in May 1945, Allied and Soviet forces occupied Germany. In 1949 two separate states were founded, the German Federal Republic (FRG) in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), ruled by the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), in the East. Until Germany’s reunification in 1990, the two states had very different ways of coming to terms with and “mastering the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Herf 1997, 8).
The Postwar Years: Between the “Desire to Forget” and “Humiliated Silence”
From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, as it focused strongly on rebuilding the country, the West German government assumed political responsibility for the war and committed to reparations to the Jewish victims and the state of Israel. In 1945 and 1946, Allied tribunals sentenced many of the most prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the Nazi regime at the Nuremberg trials.
At the same time, public policy, commemoration, and the media also drew attention to two groups of Germans who were experiencing the consequences