Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation [1 ed.] 0415831695, 9780415831697

Table of contents :
Contents
List of contributors
Preface and acknowledgements
Series editor’s introduction: Beyond representation: Listening to screaming silence • Jaan Valsiner
Introduction: Engaging violence: Trauma, self-reflection and knowledge • Ivana Maček
1 To work with the history of the Holocaust • Debórah Dwork
2 Life in the trenches: Hope in the midst of human tragedy • Ervin Staub
3 “Sometimes I just don’t want to go on …”: Navigating personal and collective time and space in researching and remembering genocides • Stéphane Bruchfeld
4 Identity and mutability in family stories about the Third Reich • Katherine Bischoping
5 The question of legitimacy in studying collective trauma • Johanna Ray Vollhardt
6 Intersectional traumatisation: The psychological impact of researching genocidal violence on researchers • Giorgia Doná
7 Conducting fi eldwork in Rwanda: Listening to silence and processing experiences of genocide • Anne Kubai
8 Research under duress: Resonance and distance in ethnographic fieldwork • Nerina Weiss
9 Making involuntary choices, imagining genocide and recovering trust • Ivana Maček
10 Personal and research-related links to trauma • Suzanne Kaplan
11 Vicarious traumatization in mass violence researchers: Origins and antidotes • Laurie Anne Pearlman
Index

Citation preview

Engaging Violence

This volume opens up new ground in the field of social representations research by focusing on contexts involving mass violence, rather than on relatively stable societies. Representations of violence are not only symbolic, but in the first place affective and bodily, especially when it comes to traumatic experiences. Exploring the responses of researchers, educators, students and practitioners to long-term engagement with this emotionally demanding material, the book considers how empathic knowledge can make working in this field more bearable and deepen our understanding of the Holocaust, genocide, war and mass political violence. Bringing together international contributors from a range of disciplines including anthropology, clinical psychology, history, history of ideas, religious studies, social psychology and sociology, the book explores how scholars, students and professionals engaged with violence deal with the inevitable emotional stresses and vicarious trauma they experience. Each chapter draws on personal histories, and many suggest new theoretical and methodological concepts to investigate emotional reactions to this material. The insights gained through these reflections can function protectively, enabling those who work in this field to handle adverse situations more effectively, and can yield valuable knowledge about violence itself, allowing researchers, teachers and professionals to better understand their materials and collocutors. Engaging Violence: Trauma, memory and representation will be of key value to students, scholars, psychologists, humanitarian aid workers, UN personnel, policy makers, social workers and others who are engaged, directly or indirectly, with mass political violence, war or genocide. Ivana Maþek is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden.

Cultural Dynamics of Social Representation

The series Cultural Dynamics of Social Representation is dedicated to bringing the scholarly reader new ways of representing human lives in the contemporary social sciences. It is a part of a new direction – cultural psychology – that has emerged at the intersection of developmental, dynamic and social psychologies, anthropology, education and sociology. It aims to provide cutting-edge examinations of global social processes, which for every country are becoming increasingly multi-cultural; the world is becoming one ‘global village’, with the corresponding need to know how different parts of that ‘village’ function. Therefore, social sciences need new ways of considering how to study human lives in their globalizing contexts. The focus of this series is the social representation of people, communities and – last but not least – the social sciences themselves. Symbolic Transformation: The mind in Movement through Culture and Society Edited by Brady Wagoner Trust and Conflict: Representation, Culture and Dialogue Edited by Ivana Marková and Alex Gillespie Social Representations in the ‘Social Arena’ Edited by Annamaria Silvana de Rosa Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences: Mathematical Models for Research on Cultural Dynamics Edited by Lee Rudolph Development as a Social Process: Contributions of Gerard Duveen Edited by Serge Moscovici, Sandra Jovchelovitch and Brady Wagoner Cultural Realities of Being: Abstract Ideas within Everyday Lives Edited by Nandita Chaudhary, S. Anandalakshmy and Jaan Valsiner Interaction, Communication and Development: Psychological Development as a Social Process Charis Psaltis and Anna Zapiti Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation Edited by Ivana MaĀek

‘Engaging Violence is a bold and important contribution to understanding the realities of violence in the world today. The chapters delve into difficult issues with honesty, dignity, and responsibility, making both theoretical innovations and practical tools accessible. This original book is a welcome must-read for scholars and practitioners alike.’ — Carolyn Nordstrom, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, USA ‘I recommend that this book be read by everyone who faces the hell of violent behavior as a volunteer or professional, whether working on the other side of the city or the globe.’ — Charles Figley, Paul Henry Kurzweg Distinguished Chair in Disaster Mental Health, Graduate School of Social Work, Tulane University and Director of Tulane Traumatology Institute, USA ‘This is a book unlike any other I’ve read. Here one listens in on an extraordinarily candid and valuable transnational conversation among researchers doing psychologically demanding work. The nature of mass violence, the tools it takes to explore it, the ethical and emotional challenges involved in sustaining those explorations are here all so honestly and accessibly discussed. I enthusiastically recommend this courageous book to any scholar and any practitioner who already has, or is likely ever to try to comprehend violence.’ — Cynthia Enloe, Professor of Political Science, Clark University, USA ‘This book dares to argue that genocide and mass political violence can teach us profound lessons about society and ourselves. This is an incredible voyage into social life’s horror, terror and trauma; a voyage that emerges with insightful dawn.’ — Meir Amor, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada ‘The contributors to this timely and remarkable volume explore how it is possible to translate anxiety into method, thereby providing useful insights and strategies for teachers, clinicians and researchers engaged in the study of violence and the care of the violated.’ — Michael Jackson, Distinguished Professor of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, USA ‘Each of the essays in this volume is an exemplary teachable moment that conveys with honesty the richness and depth of human experience from the perspective of the researcher. By casting the gaze on the relationship between

their personal histories and their research and teaching in the scholarship on genocide and mass violence, the authors break new ground in this field. There are important insights in this book that will add immeasurably to our understanding of secondary traumatization.’ — Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

Engaging Violence

Trauma, memory and representation

Edited by Ivana MaĀek

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2014 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 I. MaĀek The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Engaging violence : trauma, memory and representation / edited by Ivana MaĀek. pages cm. – (Cultural dynamics of social representation) 1. Violence–Psychological aspects. I. MaĀek, Ivana, editor of compilation. BF575.A3E534 2014 155.9’35–dc23 2013042617 ISBN: 978-0-415-83169-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-49077-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Cenveo Publisher Services

Contents

List of contributors Preface and acknowledgements Series editor’s introduction: Beyond representation: Listening to screaming silence Introduction: Engaging violence: Trauma, self-reflection and knowledge

ix xi xiii

1

IVANA MAEK

1

To work with the history of the Holocaust

25

DEBÓRAH DWORK

2

Life in the trenches: Hope in the midst of human tragedy

34

ERVIN STAUB

3

“Sometimes I just don’t want to go on …”: Navigating personal and collective time and space in researching and remembering genocides

42

STÉPHANE BRUCHFELD

4

Identity and mutability in family stories about the Third Reich

56

KATHERINE BISCHOPING

5

The question of legitimacy in studying collective trauma JOHANNA RAY VOLLHARDT

74

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Contents

6 Intersectional traumatisation: The psychological impact of researching genocidal violence on researchers

91

GIORGIA DONÁ

7 Conducting fieldwork in Rwanda: Listening to silence and processing experiences of genocide

111

ANNE KUBAI

8 Research under duress: Resonance and distance in ethnographic fieldwork

127

NERINA WEISS

9 Making involuntary choices, imagining genocide and recovering trust

140

IVANA MAEK

10 Personal and research-related links to trauma

159

SUZANNE KAPLAN

11 Vicarious traumatization in mass violence researchers: Origins and antidotes

171

LAURIE ANNE PEARLMAN

Index

186

Contributors

Katherine Bischoping is Associate Professor in Sociology at York University, Canada. A research methodologist, her genocide-related publications in Public Opinion Quarterly, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Contemporary Jewry focused on public opinion surveys and knowledge about the Holocaust. Since leaving genocide studies, her work has taken a turn toward cultural studies and narrative analysis methods. Stéphane Bruchfeld is PhD candidate in the History of Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden, writing on the origins and emergence of Holocaust denial in Sweden. He is co-author (with Paul Levine) of Tell Ye Your Children, nominated for the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 2001. He also studies systemic approaches to the multi-generational consequences of traumatic events. Giorgia Doná is Professor in Refugee Studies at the University of East London, UK. Her main research interests are in socio-political violence and forced migration, culture and wellbeing, children in conflict and post-conflict, and participatory research methodologies. She was awarded the Leverhulme Fellowship for her current book project Bystanders to Violence: Revisiting Genocide Narratives and Reconciliation Initiatives. Debórah Dwork is the Rose Professor of Holocaust History and founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, USA, as well as a former Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research. Her publications include Children with a Star and Flight from the Reich: Jewish Refugees. Suzanne Kaplan is a psychoanalyst and Associate Professor of Education at Uppsala University, Sweden. The coordinator in Sweden of 330 interviews for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, she has also done research in Rwanda. She received the Hayman Prize for publications on traumatized children and adults. Her most recent book is (with T. Böhm) Revenge – On the Dynamics of a Frightening Urge and Its Taming.

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Contributors

Anne Kubai is Associate Professor of World Christianity and Interreligious Studies and a researcher at the Department of Theology and the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, Sweden. She writes on religion, conflict and migration. Her research on the Rwandan genocide focuses on the use of public institutions and spiritual resources in healing, justice and reconciliation, and the individual and societal implications of living with the label of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘survivor’ of genocide. Ivana Maþek is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. A licensed psychotherapist, until 2014 she was Director of the MA Programme in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Uppsala University. Her major publication is Sarajevo under Siege: Anthropology in wartime. Her writing also addresses Swedes’ engagements in global war-zones, intergenerational transmission of experiences of war among Bosnians and anthropological methods. Laurie Anne Pearlman is a clinical psychologist based in Massachusetts, USA, and a recipient of awards from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) and the American Psychology Association’s Trauma Division for her contributions to research and professional practice. Her publications include (with K.W. Saakvitne) Trauma and the Therapist and Transforming the Pain. Her most recent co-edited book is Treating Traumatic Bereavement. She has also worked in East Africa promoting trauma recovery and preventing violence. Ervin Staub is Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the doctoral program in the Psychology of Peace and Violence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. He has received numerous awards for works on the roots of altruism, the origins of genocide and mass killing, and psychological recovery. His field projects have taken him to California after the Rodney King incident, to the Netherlands to improve Dutch–Muslim relations and to east Africa to promote reconciliation. Johanna Ray Vollhardt is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Clark University, USA and affiliated with the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The recipient of the Best Dissertation Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, she explores intergroup relations in the aftermath of collective violence. She has been working with an NGO in Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo since 2005. Nerina Weiss is Senior Researcher at Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo, Norway. She focuses on the anthropology of violence, migration and gender, and has worked in Cyprus, Norway and among Kurds in Turkey and Denmark. Weiss was Marie Curie IE Fellow at DIGNITY – Danish Institute against Torture, Copenhagen, and is co-editor of Violence Expressed: An anthropological approach.

Preface and acknowledgements Ivana Macˇ ek

In 2008, my Uppsala University colleagues Laura Palosuo, Stéphane Bruchfeld and I decided to start a network for professionals whose work brings them into contact with people who have experienced severe political violence, as well as those who come into contact with it through other sources. At that point, each of us had previously been on sick leave after being diagnosed with ‘burnout’ and had begun to suspect that these difficulties were connected to the topic of our research and teaching. Palosuo, a historian, was completing her PhD thesis on Jewish testimonies from Hungary before and during the Holocaust (Palosuo 2008); Bruchfeld, a historian of ideas, was writing his PhD thesis on the origins of Holocaust denial in Sweden; and I, a cultural and social anthropologist, had completed my PhD on experiences of war in Sarajevo (Maek 2000). At the same time, I was completing a degree in clinical psychotherapy after doing my practice period at the Uppsala Red Cross Centre for victims of war and torture. It was there that I first learned that working with people who have survived political violence is burdensome. Talking with Olga Klauber, my colleague at the Red Cross Centre who is a licensed psychologist and psychotherapist, we decided that it would be a good idea to gather clinicians and researchers to learn from one another’s experiences. The Uppsala Programme for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (since 2010 the Hugo Valentin Centre) at Uppsala University became the institutional base for a network on Trauma and Secondary Traumatization (TRAST). Fortunately, from the very beginning the network has enjoyed substantial institutional support, as well as support from several established Swedish clinicians and scholars. Suzanne Kaplan, a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst who wrote her PhD thesis on children who survived the Holocaust (Kaplan 2002), soon became one of the network’s cornerstones. The TRAST network gathered clinicians and researchers in regular seminars, and in 2012 we held an international symposium on Trauma and Secondary Traumatization in Work with Genocide and Mass Political Violence in Uppsala. The symposium was made possible by a grant from Riksbankens jubileumsfond (The Swedish Bank’s Tercentenary Foundation) and by the enthusiastic support and engaged participation not only of those whose chapters appear in this volume, but also of many other colleagues. Tomas Böhm

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Preface and acknowledgements

(who, sadly, did not live to see this volume in print) led the way in linking psychoanalytic understanding with engagement in contemporary social issues and was an inspiration to many of us personally. Those who deserve special thanks for sharing their insights and knowledge include Sverker Finnström, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Leena Huss, Olga Klauber and Ola Larsmo, who all made presentations, and the members of the audience who participated in the discussions. At the Hugo Valentin Centre, Satu Gröndahl and Tania Langerova were instrumental in supporting and organizing the symposium. The aim of the symposium was to investigate the ways in which working with extreme political violence affected us, not only as private individuals but in our academic research and teaching, including the effects that studying this subject had on our students and colleagues. We had noticed that several of us had decided to leave this field after overwhelming emotional experiences that were existentially intrusive and disruptive to their private lives, while others had considered doing so for the same reasons but remained caught up in it and were unable to take this step. The symposium was the first overview of the effects of research on extreme political violence on researchers and the knowledge they produced. Even more importantly, it investigated the ways in which we can learn to understand and use our emotional responses and unconscious reactions to this work in order to expand the limits of our knowledge in a field that is extremely difficult to study. At Routledge, I wish to thank Jaan Valsiner (the series editor), Jane Madeley and Clare Ashworth for their support, quick responses and understanding during the writing and editing process. I also appreciate the two anonymous readers who understood the significance of this project and wholeheartedly supported it while providing helpful feedback. Finally, we all thank the remarkable people whom we have met in our work: those who have shared their life stories and predicaments with us; the students and colleagues who have accompanied us on these journeys to the frontiers of knowledge; and our families and friends who have, for better and for worse, shared this quest with us.

References Kaplan, Suzanne (2002) Children in the Holocaust: Dealing with Affects and Memory Images in Trauma and Generational Linking. PhD Thesis. Stockholm University, Department of Education. Maek, Ivana (2000) War Within: Everyday Life in Sarajevo under Siege. PhD Thesis. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 29. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Palosuo, Laura (2008) Yellow Stars and Trouser Inspections: Jewish Testimonies from Hungary, 1920–1945. PhD thesis. Studia Historica Upsaliensia and Uppsala University Holocaust and Genocide Studies Publications. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.

Series editor’s introduction Beyond representation: Listening to screaming silence

For most of us, words like holocaust and genocide have no deep meaning. We hear these words used in public discourse, at times join in and discuss how horrible they were, and make plans for how to prevent them in the future. Yet we do not understand what we talk about – the horrors of total elimination of whole groups of fellow human beings, in cold blood, remain incomprehensible. But these have happened. True – not all the time, but episodically. And are likely to happen again, under some circumstances. Our expressions of horror and disgust, and our rational talk about building prevention plans are good examples of our well-meant humane sentiment. Humanity, however, does not govern the World. The gun, the tank and the drone do. We are helpless, but navely optimistic that no sane government would allow such kinds of atrocities to happen again, anywhere. Governments may seem to be sane at the time, but there are no guarantees they will stay that way. Of course there are two kinds of people who are not naïve about the horrors that these two social representations entail. They are, first of all, the actual victims of the Holocaust and genocides, if still alive. They need not be too eager to talk about their life experiences, and at times we may find some of them – at first glance surprisingly – ready to forgive their torturers. The complexities of human minds are without bounds. After the worst of horrors, human beings find ways to live on. Horrors can traumatize – and they can also make the survivors more resilient. And mostly they remain silent. The horrors are too much to remember, even less to recall – and life that remains needs to be lived as well as it can. The second group of people who are not naïve – or not naïve any more – are the researchers who have made it their life (and career) goals to get to the depth of understanding the deep meanings of the Holocaust and genocides. For them, step by step, these social representations stop being merely abstract meanings that could be easily discussed in mass media and at gatherings of social scientists. They become increasingly personal – vicarious tortures for the non-tortured souls. Every new encounter with yet another survivor who brings her- or himself to tell his or her personal story, and every other visit to the places where mass murders once took place, makes the understanding of these representations deeper – and personally increasingly painful. The researchers – being caught between the silent

xiv

Series editor’s introduction

phenomena of the realities of the past events, and the ephemeral journalistic talk so characteristic of our consumer society eager to turn the horrible into some kind of dark entertainment – are ready to scream. Their research is filled with a need to reach out to fellow human beings – How can you pass by the horrors humankind has lived through?! This idea is deeply disquieting. This book is a remarkable testimony to the impact of the topic of study on the researchers. It is filled with personal stories of the researchers’ coping with their research object. It is a book that brings their silent screams collectively out into the open. That is its major function for the social sciences, as well as for a general interested readership. It tells the story of personal sacrifices that researchers make when studying deeply abhorrent phenomena. Genocides are perhaps the most extreme example of these – even given the fact that the study happens post factum, and is therefore at least somewhat distanced from the direct horrors of reality. As Suzanne Kaplan (Chapter 10, p. 164) points out ‘research is not traumatic in itself but it evokes strong emotional and cognitive impressions, impressions that also create associative links to trauma in the researcher’. Researchers are human beings first – and hence open to all ordinary aspects of affectivity. The social sciences need to be reminded of that – especially under social conditions where research in academic contexts is often turned into a bureaucratic academic exercise of mindless evaluations of trivial aspects of ‘research productivity’ (see Maek, Chapter 9). We need to remind ourselves that knowledge of deeply human phenomena can be hazardous to our psyche, and not representable in the form of a ‘citation index’ or ‘impact factor’. Interest in the ways in which researchers themselves are the impacted by their own research activities is of course not new in any science. Medical scientists who have tried to find ways to cure an infectious disease – and fallen ill with the same infection – are many. So have nuclear physicists experimenting with radiation succumbed to the effects of the invisible destroying rays by the end of their lives. In the social sciences the impacts of research practices are less dramatic. Researchers studying higher primates may themselves take on some features of the animal skills in relating with the environment, or cultural anthropologists may ‘go native’ and become members of the communities that they study. In the mildest version, the development of the researchers themselves involves the issues of how to enter the field to work with the phenomena to be studied, how to maintain relevant ‘distance of safety’ while they carry out the study, and how to make their obtained knowledge public in settings that are rarely uniformly benevolent and accepting of the new knowledge. The reader of this volume will go through an initiation rite of a sort – into the realities of how genocide researchers have been personally coping with the hazards of their work. There is a bigger lesson to learn here than just getting a glimpse into the ways how people working with traumatic materials operate. Processes of researchers’ own adaptation are applicable to basically any field of research with human beings. The reader will gain a new look at the real research ethics – not the one that is currently trivialized by the ‘human ethics committees’

Series editor’s introduction

xv

or ‘institutional review boards’ that increasingly are summoned to administratively censor the activities of researchers. Genocide is too traumatic a phenomenon – both for its victims and its researchers – to consider approval or disapproval by some anonymous committee to be binding on how to develop new understanding. The real research ethics remains within the depth of the humanity of the researcher as a person – courageous and vulnerable at the same time. This book is a testimony to both – and hence – a deeply humane look into the realities of research. Jaan Valsiner Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology Aalborg October, 2013

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Introduction

Engaging violence Trauma, self-reflection and knowledge Ivana Macˇ ek

“Engaging violence” can be understood in two ways that capture the double purpose of this volume. Most straightforwardly, it means “engagement with violence,” that is, the ways in which researchers, teachers, and clinical practitioners engage with war, genocide, and extreme political violence, either in specific projects or over a long career. More subtly, it means “violence that engages” those who hear about it, either directly from those who have experienced it or indirectly by reading survivors’ accounts and studying those horrific events. How does this deep level of engagement affect those who work in this troubling but crucially important field, and how does it shape their research, writing, and teaching? Doing research on incidents of massive political violence has emotional and bodily effects that scholars do not always understand but which nonetheless preoccupy their semi-conscious life and influence their professional choices. This book explores the responses of researchers, educators, students, and practitioners to long-term or in-depth contact with this emotionally demanding material. Contributors who have studied mass political violence in times and places ranging from the Holocaust and Armenia to Rwanda and Sarajevo have been asked to reflect on why they do this work, how they have dealt with the stresses that seem to be its inevitable accompaniment, and how becoming more aware of its psychological and somatic ramifications has helped them. Emotional or empathic knowledge can be used to make engagement in this intensely challenging field less difficult, or at least more sustainable, and ultimately to enrich the understanding that is gained. The analysis offered here integrates experiences and theoretical concepts from scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds who have dedicated their professional lives to research and teaching in this field but are at different stages in their careers. The personal stories they tell and the reflections they share suggest both the variety of their individual experiences and perspectives and the common difficulties they have encountered and the broader insights they have attained. The contributors were trained in history, social psychology, anthropology, sociology, and clinical psychology, but draw upon concepts and insights that come from other disciplines as well. Taken together, these chapters suggest new theoretical and methodological approaches that may yield new types of knowledge.

2

Ivana Macˇek

For researchers, educators, students studying such matters, and others engaged in efforts at prevention and reconciliation in violent and post-conflict situations, becoming aware of our emotional and bodily reactions to the events we work with has significant value. Connecting these responses to our own personal history can lead to insights that can protect us from being overwhelmed by the pain and vicarious trauma these experiences tend to create. Integrating the emotional impact of these events and experiences and the insights that awareness creates into our work can open the doors to new levels of understanding of mass political violence. Deeper, more reflexive comprehension can lead to greater empathy with and compassion for the people whose situations we study, give us a more complete knowledge of the phenomena we examine, and enable us to remain fully engaged in the field. The problem of the heavy emotional demands working with violence entails has been observed and discussed where professional contact with traumatized people is most intense, that is, in clinical psychotherapy and in fieldwork-based anthropology.1 In this volume, Laurie Pearlman gives an overview of current literature in psychotherapeutic work, while Nerina Weiss and Ivana Maek both consider existing anthropological work on this matter. There are no psychological studies of the consequences of this emotionally difficult work for researchers and teachers in this field. The title of one book—Secondary Traumatic Stress: Selfcare Issues for Clinicians, Researchers, and Educators—promises to do so, but its contents do not (Stamm 1999). Many books and articles consider the hardships of psychotherapy (see, for example, Figley 1995; Pearlman and Saakvitne 1995; Saakvitne and Pearlman 1996), and some of the literature on humanitarian aid explores its effects on those who deliver it (Smith et al. 1996). Yet the anthropological scholarship that deals with fieldwork in violent situations does not offer a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the difficulties it entails, or a proposal for how to use them in order to further our knowledge of these phenomena. The chapters in this volume represent the rich diversity of current work on genocide and other forms of mass political violence. We begin with the reflections of two senior researchers in this field, historian Debórah Dwork and social psychologist Ervin Staub. Their stories demonstrate how subtly our work can influence our private lives, as well as how profoundly our private lives can influence our work. Work and life prove to be powerfully intertwined, in an existentially poignant and scientifically productive combination. All the contributors tackle the ways in which we gain knowledge of violence. In the following three chapters of the volume, Stéphane Bruchfeld, a historian of ideas, Katherine Bischoping, a sociologist, and Johanna Vollhardt, a social psychologist, discuss the emotional perils of this process, which arise from the interplay between our research and educational aims and efforts on the one hand, and our family history and private experiences on the other hand. Three anthropologists—Giorgia Doná, Nerina Weiss, and Ivana Maek—and a theologian, Anne Kubai, share their bewildering but also transformative experiences and insights connected to

Engaging violence

3

fieldwork in violent places. In the following chapter, psychoanalyst Suzanne Kaplan probes the nature of the emotional, wordless communication and understanding that fieldworkers rely on and gives examples from her own research of how we can apply the skills of psychoanalytic listening and containment in this type of study. Finally, trauma psychotherapist Laurie Perlman shares her and her colleagues’ experiences in working with traumatized people and materials and describes the ways in which we can increase our resilience and persist in our work. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the interdisciplinary search for connections, commonalities, and cross-fertilization that this project requires is combining research on our inner psychological world and our outer social, cultural, and historical world into a meaningful, theoretically and methodologically coherent whole. This introduction tackles this task through a nuanced discussion of different theoretical approaches and a careful description of the theoretical concepts and processes we propose. Methodologically, the focus necessarily2 falls within the domain of communication and knowledge or understanding that seems to escape words, and even artifacts and symbols, and often is impossible to trace except through the emotions and bodies of our collocutors—and ourselves. The next section of this introduction, headed “Trauma and experiences of violence,” discusses experiences of exposure to extreme political violence and their destructive as well as gratifying consequences. Other kinds of psychological reactions to experiences of mass violence are scrutinized, in addition to the foundational concept of trauma, in order to broaden our understanding and make it more useful in research and teaching. The second major section, called “Knowledge,” probes the nature of knowing that lies beyond words, one of the central points that this volume makes, as well as memory, story-telling, and listening to these kinds of experiences. Finally, “Representation” considers how we can pass on knowledge of violence as researchers and teachers within and beyond the academy. One of the crucial elements of the successful representation of this knowledge is taking care of ourselves; strategies for doing so are described in several chapters towards the end of the volume.3

Trauma and experiences of violence This introduction brings together the theoretical frames and methodological practices of multiple disciplines in order to understand not only their differences but also the similarities that underlie their apparent conceptual diversity. In joining theories germane to the inner and the outer worlds, it starts with psychological concepts that are of central importance and are applicable to social and humanistic theory. This section considers secondary and vicarious traumatization, as well as intersectional traumatization and ends with a discussion of the role that identification has in generating the emotionally charged reactions that people experience when exposed to others’ trauma during research.

4

Ivana Macˇek

Trauma and memory Trauma is clinically understood as overwhelming emotional experiences that cannot be coped with and integrated into the person’s existing inner world. The psychic defense against this overpowering threat is to cut off this experience from any integrative psychic process. Thus, traumatic experiences remain unintegrated or isolated in our inner world, which protects us from them. Since they are not processed psychologically, traumatic experiences are preserved as they were first experienced and can be re-experienced time after time if they are triggered. In post-traumatic syndrome, the traumatic experience is triggered by an external stimulus, such as a smell, a sound, the look of a person, or some other association, and the trauma is repeated. The difference between trauma and psychically integrated memory is that memory consists of experiences that have been processed in the inner world; they are interpreted and symbolized, and information that seems unnecessary is removed from both our memory and the stories that we later tell. Thus the characteristic difference between a relived trauma and a remembered memory is that reliving the traumatic experience is literal and takes the same time that experiencing it originally took. The telling of memories is more compact: a witness can tell the story of several years in several hours or perhaps over several days (see Perlman’s and Kaplan’s chapters in this volume).4 The reactions that the contributors to this volume have experienced while researching violence were nearly overwhelming; they were often just barely within the limit of what our psyches managed to process and integrate. Sometimes they were beyond our psychic capabilities and thus traumatizing in the clinical sense of the word. Traumatic reactions can be recognized in painful and intrusive or haunting bodily, sensory, and emotional states that are described in the subsection on “Researchers’ reactions and symptoms.” The same is true of our collocutors. Most of the memories and stories we have had the privilege to hear and document are digested versions of existential shocks that people have been through. But some of them were beyond their psychic capacity and were communicated in concrete, non-symbolic ways, through bodies, actual remains, and sights, smells, or unconscious affects. Survivors and witnesses as well as researchers are often somewhere on the border between difficult memories and traumatic experiences. The subsection on “Remedies” shows that it is possible to cope with reactions and symptoms that are difficult and even traumatic; indeed, some of us have done this intuitively, on our own. When talking about trauma, we tend to imagine irreparably damaged people who are victimized for the rest of their lives. It is important to emphasize that, just as our psyches and brains can be damaged (there is a physiologic equivalent to our feelings), they can also be repaired. The good thing about psychic injuries is that, like physical wounds, people have an inherent capacity for self-healing—“time heals all wounds.” All medical and psychotherapeutic interventions rely on this capacity. Furthermore, neuroscientific studies have shown that, for those who are not injured by weapons, the physical and psychological damages of war are caused by an overflow of

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stressors, while meditative practice diminishes them.5 Some of us have found that to be true through our personal experience and practice; the saying that “meditation is the opposite of war” is not just a belief, but also a neuroscientific fact. Secondary, vicarious, and intersectional traumatization Indirect traumatization, which occurs through contact with a traumatized person or traumatizing material, has not been defined systematically in clinical and social psychology. The terms secondary and vicarious traumatization have been used interchangeably and sometimes synonymously. In this volume we follow Laurie Pearlman’s definitions and use secondary traumatization for the trauma transmitted between family members, where exposure to traumatized persons is involuntary but carries no necessary responsibility towards their trauma. We reserve vicarious traumatization for the transmission of trauma in a professional relationship, such as psychotherapy, social work, or research, as well the trauma transmitted through the study of emotionally demanding materials in schools and universities. Here exposure is voluntary, but the person has an inherent responsibility to deal with the trauma, to contain it, either in order to help another person in psychotherapy or to understand and communicate about it through research and writing. In her chapter, Katherine Bischoping offers a sensitive and selfreflective description of secondary traumatization through her investigation of her family members’ experiences of Nazism during the Second World War and the transmission of trauma though her mother’s wordless communication of feelings of rage, fear, shame, ambiguity, and paranoia whilst she was growing up in Canada. These theoretical concepts are seldom so clearly separated in lived experience. Almost all the chapters in this volume describe the blending of experiences of violence inherited through family with those acquired through professional work. (I use “experiences of violence” instead of “trauma” because not all of our experiences were traumatic in clinical sense.) Giorgia Doná introduces the concept of intersectional traumatization in her chapter, paralleling the idea of intersectionality of race, gender, age, ethnicity, and class in the social sciences. Intersectional traumatization can include primary, secondary, and vicarious traumatization. Traumatic experiences within our families combine with our professional experiences in psychologically intricate ways that do not simply add up adverse experiences but actually amplify them into much more powerful reactions. When the direct experience of violence is added to this intersection, the results can become overwhelming and traumatizing. The complexity of intersectional violence is similar to what is called “multiple or complex trauma” in clinical psychology, which is used for people who have experienced trauma repeatedly. These experiences are much harder to heal than single traumas. In research on violence, multiple, complex, or intersectional experiences of violence are more often the rule than the exception. Suzanne Kaplan uses the concept of “research related trauma linking” in order to capture our inner traumatic association paths between work,

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family stories, and personal experiences—in other words, between vicarious, secondary, and primary traumatization. The contributors to this volume who have lived through a genocide or war have direct experiences of violence, whether as private persons or because of their fieldwork. Several also have family members who have survived genocide or war, so they have secondary experiences of violence as well. The vicarious experience of violence is inherent in our work. Whether these experiences are traumatic for us depends on a number of personal and contextual factors that Pearlman discusses. Trauma and identification It is important to nuance the overly sharp theoretical divide between trauma and other reactions to experiences of mass political violence. We know that individuals react to adverse experiences differently; even when they share a common situation, not everybody is traumatized in the clinical sense. Moreover, the interest of clinical psychology often ends where clinically healthy reactions start, so those reactions are not as well researched and theorized as traumatic reactions are. Many of our direct and indirect experiences of violence as scholars would not be clinically defined as trauma, yet can be emotionally overwhelming and existentially bewildering. They also have some common features, which makes it possible for us to generalize and theorize them here. Most of the contributors to this volume describe instances in their research when their identification with their interlocutors or materials has caused strong emotional reactions that hindered them in carrying out their research. Yet, for many, their distance from the subject and content of their research has enabled them to recuperate emotionally and continue the work. For example, while Anne Kubai describes the traumatizing effect of living with smells and intimate images of genocide in Rwanda, Debórah Dwork makes it clear that her sensory and bodily distance from her research material and her “recognition of that chasm” have protected her from secondary traumatization. This distance can be geographical, physical, temporal, and/or emotional (see Weiss in this volume). The effects of trauma that Dwork describes are better defined as “vicarious identification” than as “vicarious traumatization.” When she talks of the Holocaust as the “prism” through which she sees the world, the central feature is not the trauma but rather the unconscious identification with her collocutors’ experiences and worldviews. When she speaks of the Holocaust as the “compass” in her life, she refers to her conscious choice to reflect on the knowledge of the world that she has gained through her lifelong study of the Holocaust. None of this is traumatic, but it has shaped her and her family in unmistakable and sometimes painful ways. Dwork is also clear on the relatively high price that we must be prepared to pay in this line of work—in sadness, fear of loss and separation, and loneliness, although that is not trauma in the clinical sense. At the same time, this work brings real gratifications. Dwork concludes that on balance her experience has been positive. The privilege of listening and learning, the personal

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growth she has experienced, and the compass that her work has provided her with outweigh the emotional strains and the Holocaust prism that her daughters find warping rather than formative. Most of our overwhelming reactions during our work are closely connected to our identification with our collocutors and/or research materials. In many cases it is the identification that is difficult to bear, not the trauma. Keeping a distance tends to lighten that burden.

Knowledge Holistic bodily and emotional knowledge One of the continuing questions in this field of study and in this volume is how much we can really know about the unimaginable and unbearable nature of our subject. Dwork proposes that since she was not there during the Holocaust (“I don’t even know what it smelled like”), she cannot know what it was really like. Kubai, on the other hand, learned the smell of dead bodies in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, but her being there does not make her knowledge the same as that of her informants. Apart from our personal constitution, our position in relation to the violence is what determines how similar our experiences will be to those of our informants. A researcher who cannot be mistaken as belonging to the group of either perpetrators or victims is in a different position from one who could, or actually does, belong to one or both of these groups (as Doná illustrates in her chapter). Furthermore, the status of direct knowledge is especially problematic because overwhelming and intrusive experiences are often impossible to integrate into our inner worlds and thus escape what would be called knowledge in an academic sense. Knowing through being there is more like lived experience, which does not necessarily mean that we can use it in a constructive way. Johanna Vollhardt and Suzanne Kaplan each warn us not to presume too much on the basis of our own idiosyncratic experiences, identifications with our collocutors, and supposed knowledge. So, how can we know the nature of genocide and mass political violence, beyond what is literally said and beyond what can be precisely counted? The answer is deceptively simple, but has complex consequences. No one can ever know everything about this subject. Survivor-witnesses have great difficulty finding ways to communicate their experiences. Even those who can do so represent only a small fraction of people’s experiences. Researcher-witnesses can collect many accounts, but in order to convey anything beyond a repetitive description we need to use our own understanding, our own perceptions, and our own capacity to find similarities and make generalizations. So here we are, caught in the necessity of our own subjectivities. In this volume, we demonstrate that if we embrace our subjectivity and learn how to be aware of it and use it more effectively, we can move towards deeper knowledge in this field. None of us will ever be able to capture the complete picture of genocide, but together we can develop a much richer understanding.

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The ways of acquiring knowledge of violence described in this volume include direct experiences during childhood or anthropological fieldwork; growing up with stories within the family—that is, secondary experiences; and listening to stories in the midst of conflicts, in their aftermaths, or several decades later—that is, vicarious experiences. Despite the many differences between them, all these ways of acquiring knowledge of violence fundamentally involve bodily and emotional means of intersubjective communication, rather than verbal communication. Much of this communication is silent or fragmented; it does not follow the temporal chronology or the logic of everyday reality but rather the inner psychic logic of unconscious associations; and it is ambiguous, inexact, and full of implicit meanings. The primary means through which we understand it is through our bodies and often disquieting if not overwhelming emotional reactions. Knowledge beyond words poses particular challenges to humanistic and social scientific research. In order to understand, theorize, and develop a methodology for intersubjective communication through bodily and emotional channels, we draw on specific concepts of psychodynamic theory: countertransference, projective identification, containment, parallel processes, the logic of the inner world, and differentiation. In order to make them useful outside of clinical practice, in intersubjective encounters with our collocutors as well as in our institutions, we broaden their meanings and describe how they can be used by researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Suzanne Kaplan describes transference, countertransference, and the psychoanalytic listening that enables us to note the shift of affects in facial expressions and bodily dispositions. She gives an example of an apparently empty and wordless communication with hospitalized survivors of the Holocaust in Israel, which in her countertransference proved to be a “psychic space … overcrowded with inchoate, tumultuous masses threatening to break through into consciousness by paralyzing thinking and eliciting psychotic experiences.” While in the psychotherapeutic relationship countertransference stands for the psychotherapist’s reactions to the client, in intersubjective research it can be understood as the researcher’s reactions to the collocutors and/or content of materials. The useful parts of these reactions are those that the therapist or researcher recognizes as uncharacteristic for themselves, or as evoked in an unexpected way. These surprising reactions, together with the more expected ones, say something important about our collocutors and the subject of our inquiry. Wordless communication can be also picked up without face-to-face contact. Johanna Vollhardt reflects on her strong reactions to the surveys she conducts; she feels validated or invalidated by her informants, not only in relation to the given survey but also in relation to her research as a whole. The strength of these reactions reflects the frustration and the sense of loss of meaning and identity brought on by violence in her informants’ experiences. They project, or transfer, this existential meaning of identity between the lines of the survey, and the researcher picks it up as almost overwhelming feelings about her own identity.

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The special quality of existential loss and anger could not be communicated as accurately through words as it is through countertransference. While the concept of countertransference focuses on the reactions of the recipient, projective identification is the most powerful means of intersubjective communication. In her chapter, Nerina Weiss describes an incident of projective identification when one of her collocutors enacted the way he had been tortured. The way he did it made Weiss feel completely deprived of control over her body, probably in much the same way that her collocutor was at the time of his torture. It took her several weeks after she had returned from the field and entered a supportive collegial environment to come out of this bodily and psychological devastation. Projective identification is a way of psychologically communicating bodily and emotional states without using symbols such as visual images or words. For the person who originates this communication, it is like putting one’s own state of body and mind into another person, an act that at the same time releases one from it. Infants use it to communicate their physical and emotional needs to their caregivers. When grown-ups use projective identification, it is with the same psychic aim: to communicate a bodily and emotional state which they experience as overwhelming and are unable to put into images or words. As Anne Kubai says, after an interview with a Rwandan prisoner who did not show any affect while he told her how he slaughtered a woman, “it seemed as if I was the one that was supposed ‘to feel it’ and not him.” Containing is a process of experiencing the difficult emotional material of someone else and not reject it, but rather process it in our own psyche, and then later communicate it in a bearable way to the person who was originally overwhelmed by it. Suzanne Kaplan argues that this process is essential to scholarship, not just to psychotherapy. By containing overwhelming emotional experiences, we provide not only a psychological environment for our informants where they can share more of their experiences and thus enable us to better understand them, but we can also avoid vicariously and secondarily traumatizing our colleagues, students, and family members. The distinctive characteristic of parallel processes is that they repeat certain phenomena in different contexts. Parallel processes were first noticed in supervision of psychotherapy, when processes from therapy with a client were later repeated between the supervisor and therapist. In my chapter in this volume on the unconscious forces behind our professional choices, and on the obsessive and haunting nature of images of genocide, I describe how phenomena characteristic of mass political violence can be unconsciously repeated in our institutional and private contexts. Freud discovered that the logic of our inner and often unconscious worlds is different from the logic of our outer worlds. He showed this difference mostly in his analysis of the logic of dreams (Freud 2010) and used it in his clinical method of free association, which follows the same logic. Two characteristics of the logic of the inner world that are particularly helpful in our research are the non-chronological quality of time and association through senses and emotions. In dreams, experiences

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get connected because they feel or look related, even though in the outer world we would not think that they were related. When, after having been immersed in study of genocide, we associate incidents in our private, peacetime lives with genocide, the logic of the inner world is at work. An excellent example of this association is Debórah Dwork’s horror of separation as her daughters were leaving for summer camp on a bus. For a historian of the Holocaust, the mass transportation of children can emotionally mean only one thing, despite her rational and realistic thinking: deportation, permanent separation, and loss. The same logic rules what Kaplan calls “research related trauma linking,” what Bruchfeld calls “vicarious time collapse,” and what I call “genocidal imagery.” Because of these associative patterns of the inner world, things that in the outer world are distinct and separate can become confused and muddled. Private and professional experiences, as well as wartime and peacetime experiences, merge in an unconscious way, generating difficulties and distress. These problems arise when we are not able to separate vicarious experiences of violence from our daily lives in our inner world associations. Actively using our empathic capacity in order to grasp meanings beyond words entails greater risks of this confusion. In empathy, countertransference, and projective identification, we understand the bodily and emotional experiences of the others through our own reactions. It takes extra attention and training to be able to separate our own inner worlds from those of the others again, to differentiate them. Most of the contributors discuss problems of identification with our collocutors, and we make a joint call for selfreflective practice as a constant companion in our research and teaching. The researcher as a tool of knowledge The method of participant observation provides anthropologists, sociologists, and other ethnographers with a special quality of knowledge and understanding that no other fieldwork method seems able to achieve. This understanding is characterized by wordless and intuitive, bodily and emotional knowledge, or empathic knowledge (see Weiss’s and Maek’s chapters in this volume). Anthropology has long used the anthropologist’s whole person as a tool of gaining knowledge, but has not developed an adequate theoretical and methodological understanding of how this is done. The effects of violence on knowledge and its processing, in particular, remain seriously understudied. Holistic bodily and emotional knowledge is used by fieldworkers such as Kubai, historians such as Dwork, and even quantitative survey researchers such as Vollhardt. As Weiss points out, an important component of this knowledge-gathering process is the intersubjective relation that develops between the researchers and their collocutors, which makes constant self-reflection so necessary. We call particularly for self-reflection about our motives for undertaking this research, our own prejudices and biases, and what Vollhardt calls our “privileged knowledge,” as well as our bodily and emotional reactions. The key concepts we have drawn from psychodynamic theory are useful tools for understanding and developing our self-reflection and research

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processes in ways that can make use of adverse direct and vicarious experiences that might otherwise be overwhelming. Intimacy is part and parcel of ethnographic fieldwork and life-history interviewing. Our collocutors tell intimate stories, and we build intimate relationships with them. But understanding phenomena intimately also means that we understand them personally: we identify with them and experience them, not in practice, but in our imagination and fantasy. While this “inner knowing” is vital to the deep understanding we seek, in the study of violence it means that we expose ourselves to the emotionally overwhelming experiences that are inherent in a violent environment. As several contributors show, intimate knowledge of violence is intrusive in a way that is reminiscent of post-traumatic flashbacks that come involuntarily and cannot be willed away. We do not wish to diagnose whether these intrusive memories are traumatic or not, but rather to raise awareness of the hardships that arise from their involuntary nature and strong emotional impact. Dwork talks about sleepless nights; Kubai of the smells and fragments of bodies that make the abstraction of genocide very concrete and personal; Bischoping of the unbearable intimacy of listening to the family stories that interfered with her personal development of identity in ways that research with nonrelated collocutors does not. We should train ourselves to keep a balance between identification with and distance from our informants and materials. We must be careful not to overidentify with our collocutors to the point that we cannot see ourselves as different, and we should notice and utilize the ways we already have of achieving distance, as Kaplan illustrates in her chapter. While identification with our informants can open doors, create productive relationships, and make us feel better in stressful circumstances, we should always be aware of the implied privileged understanding that might make us blind to the experiences that are not our own, which Vollhardt calls “false empathy.” As Robert Harrison and Marvin Westwood put it, we should train ourselves in “exquisite empathy,” which enables us “to get very close without fusing or confusing the client’s story, experiences, and perspective” with our own (2009:213). Some of us have felt that, in order to empathize with our subjects and collocutors, we should hide parts of our identity and experience lest we be automatically disqualified as biased. For example, I made it a practice not to mention the Serbian identity of my grandmother when arguing against Croat nationalists (Maek 2009). As Ervin Staub points out in his chapter, instead of hiding our personal backgrounds and the experiences and knowledge that they entail, we should instead use them to better understand what is shared and more general. Surely other children besides Staub experienced altruistic help from non-Jews. Surely I was not the only “Croat” whose grandmother was a Serb. It takes time and experience to learn how to do this in a way that is genuinely self-reflective and introduces as little bias as possible. In short, we cannot get away from our own subjectivity, but by being aware of it and using this knowledge in our work we can produce better research, broaden

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our understanding of the world, and deepen our comprehension of ourselves and others. In the long run, that will provide us with a sense of meaningfulness that will help us to persevere in this challenging work. In her chapter, Giorgia Doná gives us examples of how researchers’ intersectional traumatic experiences can limit their questions, the interpretation of the material, and their conclusions. Researchers unconsciously protect themselves by avoiding certain complex and ambivalent topics and creating emotional distance from material that would otherwise be overwhelming. In this field of study, avoiding the emotionally overwhelming material creates serious holes at the very core of the subject. Suzanne Kaplan shows how her personal and family experiences functioned as a “sounding board” in all her research, but also warns that this process can both limit our perspectives and increase our psychological vulnerability. In Anne Kubai’s chapter, we sense that having her family with her opens many doors but also generates identification and exposure to difficult emotions, for example with a young female survivor of the same age as her daughter. On the other hand, genuine identification with our interlocutors can suddenly open new levels of understanding, for example, when Nerina Weiss realized that she had ignored the non-political but traumatic loss of a husband while narrowly focusing on the effects of political violence among Kurds in Eastern Turkey. The non-political losses were as poignant a part of the lived reality of her collocutors as the politically related ones. At a geographical distance, Weiss realized that she had been blinded by the primacy of the political, which in turn revealed the hierarchies of suffering that were shaping her field. Our personal lives inform our professional choices in ways that are not always obvious, and our professional knowledge affects our private lives. Ervin Staub’s focus on instances of altruism amidst genocide is connected to his childhood experience of being helped to escape the Holocaust in Hungary by the family’s maid, who was among the most emotionally important grown-ups in his world. This connection has nurtured and sustained his work. Conversely, Debórah Dwork describes how the Holocaust has become the prism through which she perceives the world, which has in more and less conscious ways formed her parenting practices (or, as her daughters would put it, warped them) and shaped her political views and engagement. We must take a look at our family inheritance and consider how it has shaped our choices to undertake research in this field—consciously or unconsciously, and therefore not entirely voluntarily—and to focus on certain questions rather than others. Inheritance and knowledge The stories that we heard from intimate and emotionally important adults when we were growing up, like our family’s histories, influence our research choices and understandings. Stories of genocide and violence are often fragmented

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memories that cause a child’s fantasy to fly off on its own paths. They can be inspiring (Vollhardt) or confusing and revolting (Bischoping). For Suzanne Kaplan, learning to notice and interpret her grandmother’s facial expressions while she was listening to her fragmented memories laid the ground for her later professional psychoanalytic work as well as her research on affect in survivors of genocide. Our decisions to engage in the study of massive political violence have been driven by motives that were seldom clear to us at the beginning. The contributors to this volume describe their choices as a way of making sense out of their early experiences (Staub, Kaplan, Vollhardt) or of confusing contemporary events in which the most important ingredient was identification, the conviction that “it could have been me” (Kubai, Maek), no matter how unrealistic this identification was. Most of us report a sense of compulsion or an internal force that drives us forward in a passionate way. Maternal grandmothers stand out as especially important figures behind these impulses: an altruistic survivor (Vollhardt); a refugee with fragmented stories (Kaplan); an often depressed yet morally strong and outspoken survivor of four wars (Maek); a paranoid Nazi supporter (Bischoping). Parents and other intimate family members also played essential roles: contributors describe supportive (Weiss) or ambivalent and avoidant (Bischoping) mothers, and supportive (Kubai) or silent and absent (Vollhardt) fathers. Some of us have transmitted this urgency to our children, as Dwork describes in her daughter’s motivation to become a bat mitzvah. “Sublimation, altruism and humor are the therapist’s saving graces,” writes Judith Herman in her Trauma and Recovery (2001:153). In psychology, sublimation is understood as directing energy from more destructive and socially unacceptable impulses to activities that are considered to be socially more acceptable. Whatever the sources of the passions that drive us into this field, research itself is a very good way of sublimating them. But, as Herman (2001) and Staub (in this volume) both point out, active, altruistic engagement with the world to lessen the consequences of violence is an important and often necessary complement to sublimation. Humor, too, is an important counterforce to powerlessness and destruction (see Maek 2009), although it tends to vanish from our lives when we work with genocide, as Kaplan has noted. I believe that sublimation is an important part of research on the Holocaust, genocide, and mass political violence. We investigate highly charged research questions, not out of pure scientific curiosity (if anything like that exists), but because we have inherited them. This deep and emotionally sensitive family material, transmitted over generations, has already yielded invaluable knowledge about mass political violence, particularly in Holocaust research. This volume has so many examples of how our family history formed our research questions that tackling our troubling family experiences through research seems like a sublimated way of moving on, in much the same way that successful therapy brings new insights into personal problems.

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Representation Researchers’ reactions and symptoms of vicarious traumatization All the authors report on the strong emotions involved in this kind of research. The most characteristic and disturbing are traumatic or existentially overwhelming, such as reactions of fear, including terror, horror, paranoia, anguish, unease, and nightmares; sorrow and pain; anger, including aggression, frustration, and desperation; acute awareness of the ambiguity of truth, implicit meanings, and the unspeakable; guilt and a sense of moral responsibility to bear witness; depression, including a sense of isolation, powerlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, and disappointment; stress and disorientation; and obsession and compulsion. Unpleasant bodily reactions are common, such as discomfort, trembling, disgust so extreme that it stimulates vomiting, and out-of-body experiences. Some are intrusive and linger over time. The quality of time seems to change while we are emotionally immersed in the research, much as it does in dreams and in the associative, timeless logic of our inner world. The typical response to these bodily and emotional discomforts is to distance ourselves physically, emotionally, and/or in time. There are reflective and flexible ways in which we can keep our distance when necessary. However, most of us will initially experience the involuntary, automatic reaction of withdrawal from what threatens to overwhelm us. These forms of emotional detachment include numbness, emotional fatigue or disengagement, dissociation, avoidance, a sense of estrangement, and the endless pursuit of methodological technicalities and numbers. Yearning for human closeness is a healthier reaction to the emotional strain, but our inner preoccupation with horrors makes us utterly asocial and in need of emotional help, rather than capable of engaging in reciprocal relations. Our own empathy necessarily brings about these emotional reactions, and we have to take care of them, not ignore them (which is rarely an option because they intrude in our daily lives). Rather, we must understand and contain them and then reproduce our understanding in a symbolic form that will make it available to our colleagues, students, and wider audiences. Several contributors describe the process of disillusionment. It usually starts with feelings of utter powerlessness and hopelessness, which are typical signs of depression and/or trauma, and may be accompanied by rage over the loss of our sense of omnipotence: we feel that we should be able to change the course of events, but whatever we do proves that we cannot. Through self-reflection, we can reach a more realistic understanding of our own agency, with its limits but also its potentials and possibilities.6 Almost all the contributors describe how they were drawn to do research on genocide and went through periods of obsessive reading and information gathering. This attraction to genocide can be partly understood as resulting from an existential tension between a partial identification with the people involved and the

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incomprehensibility of the destruction. But sometimes it seems that knowledge of one atrocity compels us to learn about others in a never-ending spiral. Our children are exposed to it, calling to us, “Dad, something related to your work on TV” whenever anything about violence comes on (Staub). Perhaps the sheer horror of genocide, the sense that this is the “crime of crimes,” utterly annihilating and entirely unacceptable, compels us to try to understand it, find some logic or structure in it, in a more or less conscious attempt to learn how to avoid and prevent it. Some researchers are very open about these political aims, while for others these subtle processes and efforts occur unconsciously. Most of us find ourselves in between prevention-oriented activism and an unconscious attempt to avoid inner annihilation. This obsessive attraction to genocide increases our exposure to genocidal destruction and raises the probability of vicarious traumatization. One of the characteristics of trauma is that it isolates, as Laurie Pearlman explains, but we have also witnessed isolation in our professional work with extreme political violence. Debórah Dwork describes the isolation that she feels while collecting oral histories, as her inner world is filled with stories that differ drastically from what is socially expected and accepted. The silence that this imposes on the witnesses is well captured in Katherine Bischoping’s description of her father, who left Germany, settled in Canada far away from any neighbors, and gradually became deaf, conveniently isolating himself not only from the destructive state and its history but also from most future social contacts. Moreover, as Nerina Weiss points out, traumatic experiences are difficult to listen to, which makes them doubly hard to share. This problem might explain why knowledge of violence is relatively rare and poorly understood among our colleagues (Bischoping 2004; Staub in this volume) and in our societies (Vollhardt in this volume). Remedies In the face of the serious difficulties that can hinder our work, we have discovered counterforces and practices that build our resilience to these adversities. Laurie Pearlman gives us important tools for taking care of ourselves bodily, mentally, socially, and spiritually. Drawing on her long-term experience as a trauma therapist (Pearlman and Saakvitne 1995; Saakvitne and Pearlman 1996), she explains how those methods can be utilized by genocide scholars. Pearlman emphasizes the necessity of keeping or restoring distance through taking breaks, leaving stressful fieldwork sites temporarily, engaging with joyful and creative things, and preserving the sense of control over one’s life. Distance from potentially overwhelming experiences and materials can be achieved not only through taking breaks but also by remaining grounded in ourselves—that is, by repeatedly reflecting on our aims and motives in our work, as well as on our own role and previous experiences. Reflection should be done in an emotionally secure environment, and it can include holding debriefing sessions, writing about our experiences, or just sharing them with supportive

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colleagues. In the field, distance can be achieved through taking photos and making notes, putting something that we can control between us and the intrusive adverse materials.7 Being able to let go of the obsessive attraction of our material and task is a crucial skill that we need to take seriously and develop systematically. It is important to be able to move flexibly between being immersed in the emotional and wordless content of our research, identifying with our collocutors, and using our imagination and fantasy in our work, on the one hand, and keeping our distance, on the other. The balance between our exposure to evil and the counterforces we use to cope with that exposure should be on the positive side of the scale. Precisely when the work seems most compelling, we must take care that creative, emotionally supportive experiences of sharing and belonging with others prevail. It is extremely difficult to keep this balance amidst work that is by definition about the most destructive extremes of social experience. Perhaps we cannot spend as much time doing our work as an art historian can spend in front of a beautiful painting, but it is better to spend less time than to become so exhausted and traumatized that we have to give up our work altogether. Some of us have found alternative and positive subjects related to the study of genocide, such as altruism, inclusive caring, moral courage, prevention, and reconciliation. We cannot ignore the massive scale of atrocities, however. Ideally, we should be able to acknowledge these horrors but contain them and communicate them in bearable form without diminishing their magnitude or abandoning our moral condemnation, while at the same time bringing to light more hopeful scenarios such as altruism and positive caring. Finding a positive emotional balance and attaining a realistic sense of agency as genocide scholars is not only a personal challenge but also an organizational one. The institutions where we work, in contrast to psychotherapeutic institutions, are unaware of the limitations on our professional capacities. Academics and those in more practically oriented organizations are expected to “produce” as much as our colleagues working with much less devastating subjects. All too often, the result is that we abandon the field completely. Developing our ability to be flexible and to balance distance and immersion will enhance our capacity to contain the emotionally overwhelming material we encounter in our research. Several contributors show how containing strong emotions that are often overwhelming for their collocutors is crucial not only for being able to reach a deeper, wordless understanding of those who have suffered trauma but also to their ability to proceed with their own work, for example by containing informants’ accusations and the emotional burdens that informants have dumped onto them (for example, Kubai and Weiss). Successful containment of difficult emotions seems a prerequisite for gaining insights into the phenomena we study. Another positive counterforce in this work is the sense of gratification, which we should actively use and consciously strengthen. We should not be falsely shy or restrain our positive emotions when others express appreciation of our work.

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Criticism for the sake of scoring points in an abstract debate and envy or competitiveness that deprives us of wholehearted collegial support are destructive academic behaviors (see also Nordstrom 2009). One of the main gratifications of this work is the privilege of hearing the existentially important and intimate life-stories of our collocutors and colleagues. It has provided many of the contributors to this book with invaluable insights about life and the world that are applicable to all aspects of our lives, not only to our work. For those of us who were forced to struggle against the pain and hopelessness inherent in different forms of intersectional traumatization, the slow process of healing has given us a heightened appreciation of life, which psychologists have called “post-traumatic growth.” We never become immune to the hardships of this field, though; our development is a path, not a final destination. Closely related to this source of gratification is a sense of doing something meaningful and useful to humanity, of an altruistic engagement with the wider world. The sense of belonging to and working for a broader community that exists beyond our individual selves usually makes our activities feel meaningful, which is the best antidote to the sense of meaninglessness that this work so readily creates. Many of these gratifications contain a strong element of moral values. One of the most characteristic ethical notions in this work is the sense of responsibility as researchers to witness—that is, to know, share, educate, and perhaps help those in need.8 One of the ethical problems we inevitably encounter is the hierarchy of suffering in our fields: political suffering is more serious than non-political suffering; the suffering of the defeated enemy is less profound than our own suffering and the suffering of the victors; the more we can identify with the people who are suffering, the higher its importance. In our research, we are careful to notice and analyze these hierarchies. We should be equally careful to avoid reproducing hierarchies of suffering in our classrooms and institutions. When prestige is attached to the extremity of researchers’ experiences of hardships and violence (the more you have suffered, the cooler you are), we have to bear our burdens alone, without genuine sympathy and support from our colleagues. Working with violence is not cool, although some of us might have thought so at an early stage of our work. The hierarchy of suffering is even more troubling on the societal and political level. Several of us have been urged by others, ranging from acquaintances and colleagues to the highest state authorities, to work on these heinous crimes against humanity. It is right that the importance and relevance of our studies is recognized; any other view would be morally suspect, as the denial of the Holocaust and other genocides is. But very few people actually become engaged with this subject. Although our work is accorded the highest moral priority by our societies, we who do it carry a heavy moral burden as we vicariously represent those who share our concerns but do not act on them.

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The ambiguities that exist in the materials we work with and the knowledge we attain inevitably pose difficult moral questions about our work: What am I allowed to ask? What are my motives and goals? What is my role and responsibility here? It is not self-indulgent, but instead vitally necessary, to ask ourselves intimate and uncomfortable questions: What driving force prompts me to do this work? What is my inner motivation? What do I gain from it? What do my collocutors gain? Am I somehow guilty, or is my interlocutor guilty? These are not small crimes we are working with, so the answers to these questions are ambiguous and contradictory, blurred and shifting. But, if we ask ourselves these questions, we will be better equipped to keep our moral course in line with our intentions. Academic work If we can seldom make a visible difference in the wider global and political context, we can and should make a difference in the academy, where most of us work. Given the stresses that engaging with extreme violence entails, we should be able to count on the non-judgmental support of our colleagues. Yet the institutional pressures and bureaucratic procedures that characterize many universities, coupled with the competitive and judgmental interpersonal relations that they generate among coworkers, make them difficult places to carry on this work. If we are aware of these structural drawbacks and of the psychological processes that occur in academia, however, we can make our workplaces into more containing and creative places. First and foremost, we need to create spaces for meeting where academic pressures are minimized. The open-mindedness and warmth of the Uppsala Symposium on which this volume is based was exceptional in this respect and demonstrates what can be done through deliberate effort. If we are fortunate to have colleagues who understand the importance of a supportive atmosphere, we can help each other be aware when we unwittingly enter into more combative and judgmental modes of relating, which we sooner or later do. It is equally important for us to reflect on our teaching and to ensure that we take the burdens inherent in studying this subject into account in our courses. A significant number of our students will surely have family backgrounds connected to genocide and mass political violence. We must be aware of the intersectional traumatization that these studies can cause them, but also of the possibilities of sublimation that have probably, more or less consciously, drawn them to this field. We should openly acknowledge the hardships and gratifications of this work and try to teach them the self-awareness and self-reflectiveness that it requires. Several chapters discuss this matter, but the best way to teach someone is to show it by example. We can demonstrate how the emotional burden of the subject can be contained by doing it ourselves. We should make use of students’ own experiences, as some of them may tend to over-identify; early discussion of their own identities, experiences, backgrounds, and presuppositions can be instrumental in their development as individuals as well as scholars. At the same time, the majority

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of students, especially in elective undergraduate courses, may be unable to identify with the subject, expressing incomprehension that genocide could ever have happened and concluding that at least it could never have happened to them. Sharing our own histories can render the subject more comprehensible, although attaining a complete understanding remains emotionally and ethically elusive.

Engaging with violence Reactions to the overwhelming emotional experiences that accompany work with extreme political violence and traumatized people affect research, teaching, and studying. In summing up the common experiences of the contributors to this volume, I propose some ways in which these reactions can be turned into conscious, voluntary, constructive, and healing actions. The body is the temple of the soul Witnessing mass violence provokes intense emotions and bodily reactions. A restless obsession with the work, high levels of guilt, and a desperate need to help or to influence the situation, which often result in fantasies of omnipotence, take a bodily toll. These and other emotional reactions produce a variety of physical symptoms: insomnia, headaches, heart arrhythmias, anxiety attacks, nausea, and trembling, to name but a few. Drinking alcohol is one of the most typical responses to these bodily discomforts (Smith et al. 1996); using stronger drugs is also common (Loyd 2001). The lack of the adrenaline kick found in war zones, coupled with the resulting feeling that peacetime civilian life is meaningless, has called many a UN soldier, ex-combatant, humanitarian aid worker, journalist, and social anthropologist back to the fields of combat. Instead of drugging ourselves, which only provides temporary relief and can easily lead to addiction, we must take care of our bodies. Laurie Pearlman recommends a number of ways of nurturing the body: getting enough sleep and exercise and eating a healthy, balanced diet. But these are insufficient for working with trauma and witnessing extreme political violence. Meditation restores our brains so we can reflect rather than follow the paths of automatic reaction; feeling connected to other people counterbalances the overwhelming sense of insecurity and paranoia that is omnipresent in the material we work with; pursuits such as writing poetry, drawing, painting, or playing music, take us into to other domains of human life where our creative capacities can be safely restored. Self-reflexivity (learning from ourselves) Typical emotional reactions to engaging with trauma and mass violence, the second domain considered here, include depression, the loss of the sense of meaning and even the sense of the self, our anchoring in who we are; asocial behavior, avoiding others since we cannot really explain to them why we are depressed and

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we already know that they are not interested in our obsession with horrors; and cynicism about how the world works, anger that leads to despising those in need as well as those in control of the resources required to help. When such emotions preoccupy our consciousness, the bodily symptoms take over and we react in order to reduce them, developing dysfunctional behaviors and attitudes. Together with other contributors to this volume, I propose that we take care of our thoughts and feelings—of our souls—as well as our bodies. When we notice the bodily symptoms and the symptomatic behaviors and attitudes, instead of simply trying to get rid of them, we should face them. What is this bad feeling? Where does it come from? It must have some source. If I can understand it better, I will be able to do something about it. If it still seems overwhelming, I know where to look for support and help. Indeed, like trauma psychotherapists, people who do this work full time should have a continuing consulting relationship with a psychotherapist, helping them ascertain whether or not they should continue gathering material and how to handle material that they or their collocutors find distressing. Being self-reflective about our emotions not only helps us learn to deal with them in a constructive and healthy way but also enables us to learn more about the work we are doing. Understanding the emotions it stirs up in us, what parts of ourselves and our identities are affected by this material, provides insight into the questions we are asking of the material and our collocutors.9 Containing communication The third domain of reactions to overwhelming emotional experiences in our work is the social, as we share our moods and knowledge with others. One of the more spontaneous reactions is what Laurie Perlman calls sharing the small horror stories—that is, venting our own emotional reactions and existential anxiety by telling the raw stories of inhumane treatment and suffering to our colleagues in more or less casual settings. In our written work, we may expose readers to the horrors of genocide without giving them a clue how to understand and handle it, which has been criticized as writing pornographically. We may also share the emotions of horror without taking care of them in our teaching. For example, in one of my classes on genocide, a guest lecturer showed a documentary in which ex-soldiers imitated how they butchered their victims, while in another class I showed a documentary in which extermination camp guards imitated their handling of the victims. My guest’s interpretative model lacked any theories about the brutality that the documentary revealed and the emotions that watching it evoked in us. In the class I conducted, when a student asked, “Why did you show this to us?” I realized that I had not given the class an adequate interpretative model of the phenomena I wanted them to understand. After the first documentary, one of the students quit her two-year masters degree program, telling me that she had nightmares and that she had thought the program would be “more academic.” The phrase “more academic” could be interpreted as more detached, reflecting a profound aversion to dealing with the emotional ramifications of the

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subject. But I think that, in a way, she was right: it is not emotional detachment that we should have provided, but rather a way of moving from being emotionally overwhelmed to a more reflexive and theorized way of understanding and containing this horrible experience. This type of “sadistic” communication, which is designed to provoke overwhelming emotions, is common in documentary filmmaking. It has also been observed in guided tours of concentration camps, as the film KZ shows (Bloomstein 2006), discussed in more detail by Stéphane Bruchfeld in this volume. Many lectures and books about genocide seem to be made with the intent to terrify the audience, probably with the hope of provoking people into action. In my experience, however, such overwhelming experiences have the opposite result: they often numb the audience and put them into a state of detachment and non-involvement. In order to avoid this vicarious traumatization of our colleagues and students, open recognition of the emotionally burdensome nature of the subject is necessary. Only then can researchers’, teachers’, and students’ overwhelming reactions be taken care of in a supportive and constructive way. We should organize collegial support networks where we can acknowledge and reflect on these problems. Regular individual or group counseling with a professional trauma therapist should also be provided by our institutions. We should always ask ourselves whether we are capable of containing the full emotional implications of the material we share with others, directly or indirectly through writing, photographs, or films. Being aware of how we maintain our own emotional distance can help us keep from overexposing others while protecting ourselves in more or less unconscious and hidden ways. When we come across a “tough” person who can stand witnessing atrocity, we should ask ourselves what detachment mechanisms he or she uses and at what cost. Recognition of the emotional toll taken by our work can facilitate our having varied assignments that limit the time we spend in direct contact with genocide and traumatized people. But researchers and teachers must first realize that this measure is necessary and then persuade administrators that it will improve our work. Engagement with the world The fourth domain of reacting to the experience of overwhelming emotions is our engagement with the world, as Ervin Staub so eloquently and powerfully demonstrates in his chapter. Common reactions to the sense of powerlessness range from returning to the violent field to becoming cynical or even despairing, as ex-soldiers, journalists, and humanitarian aid workers are wont to do. Instead of getting caught in a never-ending chain of violent assignments or distancing ourselves from the limits of our fantasized omnipotence, we recommend engaging with the world in a more meaningful altruistic way. Developing a realistic sense of agency, with the potential and limitations that Staub and others describe, enables us to make our own choices and take responsibility for our actions. These can be practical engagements, as Staub, Pearlman, and Vollhardt have done in Rwanda. We can teach in an engaged way that offers the audience

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the most relevant aspects of our knowledge, rather than trying to demonstrate our academic brilliance. We can write in a genuine way, as we are trying to do in this volume, rather than thinking of what would best serve our careers. Self-reflection as a way toward deeper knowledge Some years ago I was looking at the cover of Pioneers of Genocide Studies (Totten and Jacobs 2002). The black-and-white cover photograph shows several serious and obviously troubled men of active, working age behind a wire fence, some looking toward the left but others looking at the viewer. They are fully dressed and do not appear starved; they could have been factory workers on strike during the 1930s. It took me an uncanny second to see that some of them were dressed in striped clothes and to realize that this was not a photograph of “the pioneers of genocide studies” but rather of “the victims of genocide.” My first association was quite telling, however. This is how I and many of my colleagues at that time perceived the pioneers of genocide studies: as men10 who appear to be physically well but clearly distressed and therefore in need of help and care. They are caught by something they cannot escape—their engagement with genocide. As my viewpoint shifted, analysts and victims of genocide traded places, creating the same confusion of identities as when the young guide who interprets the concentration camp at Mauthausen to visitors behaves more like a camp guard in the film KZ (see also Bruchfeld in this volume). Looking closely at these prisoners, I can see that my initial confusion arose in part because the photograph attests to so much more than victimization: their eyes glow, and they are filled with potential energy that could be released at the proper moment. My successive interpretations of this photograph are indicative of the limitations and possibilities of studying genocide and massive political violence: we identify with our subjects in ways that can be both helpful and damaging; and we empathize with people whose experiences we find unbearable yet unavoidable. We may be captivated by the predicaments we investigate, yet we also share the potential for healing and resiliency that liberation brings. Despite the differences between primary, secondary, and vicarious traumatization and between the emotional and psychic effects of trauma and identification, reflecting on our own responses to this disturbing subject can become an important avenue to knowledge about it. We who study genocide and mass political violence have discovered that there is no conflict between caring for ourselves and caring for those who have undergone unspeakable suffering and violations of their humanity. Working to develop a deeper understanding of ourselves will not only help us personally and privately but also improve our research and make us better colleagues. Although this may sound like a truism, in our experience it is not generally recognized. The vast majority of people in our societies and workplaces regard the personal as in conflict with the shared, the private as antithetical to the professional. In practice, they assume that if you take care of yourself you are neglecting your work and that self-reflectivity is selfindulgence that takes time away from research. Yet change is on the way. As Pumla

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Gobodo-Madikizela said at the symposium, “The time might be in for a paradigm shift: to make the public space intimate.” Some signs of such a shift are evident in our societies and disciplines.11 We sincerely hope that this volume contributes to this new direction in engagement with genocide and mass political violence.

Notes 1 Katherine Bischoping’s 2004 article on vicarious traumatization in teaching about genocide is a significant exception. 2 “Necessarily,” because other, more symbolic forms of knowing and understanding are well known, described, and used in various disciplines. 3 This work uses the term “representation” in a broader sense than it has in current American academic writing, where it refers to discursive, symbolic, and creative or performative ways of presenting and interpreting social and cultural constructions and ideologies or, in more extreme formulations, of constituting and enforcing them. In our perspective, representation encompasses responses to accounts of mass violence, as well as the ways scholars talk and teach about them. 4 For more about trauma, see Herman 2001. 5 For examples of extreme combat stress in wars, see Finley 2011, Boudreau 2008, and Lloyd 2001. Recent results of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the neurological changes that accompany meditation are reported in Hölzel et al. 2011, Kilpatrick et al. 2011, and Leung et al. 2013. 6 For a comparable description of symptoms connected to “compassion fatigue” or “vicarious traumatization” in humanitarian aid workers, see Smith et al. 1996; and in trauma psychotherapists, see Pearlman and Saakvitne 1995, and Saakvitne and Pearlman 1996. 7 Here, I am talking only about taking of photos and notes in emotionally strenuous situations, not about what it means to look at these same photos and notes afterwards. Anne Kubai offers an example in her chapter. 8 The role of survivor as witness and helper is exemplified in Ervin Staub’s and Johanna Vollhardt’s writings on “altruism born of suffering,” “active bystandership,” and prosocial behavior. 9 For a similar plea for self-reflexivity in anthropological work on war and violence, see Whitehead and Finnström 2013. 10 Among the twenty-five contributors to Pioneers of Genocide Studies, only two are women. 11 In Sweden “healthcare”—actively taking care of one’s health instead of only responding to illness—is gaining attention. Recently, several anthropologists who have not been educated in psychology approached me and confirmed that psychological understanding of what we are doing in the humanities and social sciences is important and, indeed, necessary.

References Bischoping, Katherine (2004) Timor mortis conturbat me: Genocide pedagogy and vicarious trauma. Journal of Genocide Research 6(4): 545–66. Bloomstein, Rex (2006) KZ (film). London: Rex Entertainment Production. Boudreau, Tyler E. (2008) Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. Figley, Charles R. (ed.) (1995) Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those who Treat the Traumatized. Levittown, PA: Brunner/Mazel.

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Finley, Erin P. (2011) Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press of Cornell University Press. Freud, Sigmund (2010) [1899] The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. Harrison, Richard L., and Westwood, Marvin J. (2009) Preventing vicarious traumatization of mental health therapists: Identifying protective practices. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 46(2): 203–19. Herman, Judith (2001) [1992] Trauma and Recovery. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora. Hölzel, Britta K., Carmody, James, Vangel, Mark, Congleton, Christina, Yerramsetti, Sita M., Gard, Tim, and Lazar, Sara W. (2011) Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 191: 36–43. Kilpatrick, Lisa A., Suyenobu, Brandall Y., Smith, Suzanne R., Bueller, Joshua A., Goodman, Trudy, Creswell, J. David, Tillisch, Kirsten, Mayer, Emeran A., and Naliboff, Bruce D. (2011) Impact of mindfulness-based stress reduction training on intrinsic brain connectivity. NeuroImage 56: 290–8. Leung, Mei-Kei, Chan, Chetwyn C. H., Yin, Jing, Lee, Chack-Fan, So, Kwok-Fai, and Lee, Tatia M. C. (2013) Increased gray matter volume in the right angular and posterior parahippocampal gyri in loving-kindness meditators. SCAN 8: 34–9. Downloaded from http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/ on June 13, 2013. Loyd, Anthony (2001) [1999] My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Harlow: Penguin Books. Maek, Ivana (2009) Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nordstrom, Carolyn (2009) Prelude. An accountability, written in the year 2109. In An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline, ed. Alisse Waterston, 1–11. New York: Berghahn Books. Pearlman, Laurie Anne, and Saakvitne, Karen W. (1995). Trauma and the Therapist: Countertransference and Vicarious Traumatization in Psychotherapy with Incest Survivors. New York: W.W. Norton. Saakvitne, Karen W., and Pearlman, Laurie Anne (1996) Transforming the Pain. A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization. New York: W.W. Norton. Smith, Barbara, Agger, Inger, Danieli, Yael, and Weisaeth, Lars (1996) Health activities across traumatized populations: Emotional responses of international humanitarian aid workers. In International Responses to Traumatic Stress, ed. Yael Danieli, N. S. Rodley, and Lars Waisaeth, 397–423. Amytiville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Stamm, Beth H. (ed.) (1999) Secondary Traumatic Stress: Self-care Issues for Clinicians, Researchers, and Educators (2nd ed.). Lutherville, MD: Sidran Press. Totten, Samuel, and Jacobs, Steven Leonard (eds) (2002) Pioneers of Genocide Studies. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Whitehead, Neil L., and Finnström, Sverker (2013) Introduction to Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chapter 1

To work with the history of the Holocaust © Debórah Dwork

The Jewish holiday of Passover celebrates the ancient Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. Ritual observance of the festival includes telling the story of that flight to freedom. At one point in the narrative, the reader is enjoined: “You shall tell your children on that day saying, ‘It is because of what Adonai did for me when I went free out of Mitzrayim.’” (Exodus 13:8). In other words, there is no distinction between past and present. The Haggadah (as the story text is called) is the script of a living drama, not the record of a dead event. Further: the text assumes personal identification. “Did for ME.” All Israel went forth out of Mitzrayim, all Israel stood before Sinai, and all Israel includes us, those telling the story. Narrating is not an act of remembrance, but of individual identification. This injunction struck me anew this year, as I thought about the Hugo Valentin Centre conference on “Trauma and Secondary Traumatization in Studies of Genocide and Massive Political Violence.” The conference organizers had identified a significant and under-explored matter: the psychological or, more broadly, emotional cost to researchers of engaging with these subjects. Yet, neither “trauma” nor “secondary traumatization” resonated with me, and it occurred to me that possibly this was due to my temporal separation from the subject I research. Thus, the Passover command to experience an event that occurred thousands of years ago as if it were today, as if we were part of it, prompted me to ask: To what extent do historians of the Holocaust and of genocide identify with the people about whom we write? Does their history become our history in order for us to understand it? My friend and colleague Taner Akçam, a historian of the Armenian Genocide, had joined my family for the holiday, and for him it was clear; pondering the development of Turkish perpetrator policy and practice, he (a Turk), identified unequivocally. I work on the history of the Holocaust, and I have focused on Jewish victims, gentile and Jewish rescuers across Europe, and German perpetrators. And I do not identify in the way that Taner described. I do my best to recover the threads of their lives – their decisions, choices, and actions – and to weave them into a historical narrative. But I am not they, and they are not I. On the contrary, I must use my historical imagination. What I know is that I will never really know. And thus World War I historian John Keegan’s opening passage of

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his book, The Face of Battle, has always made sense to me. “I have not been in a battle; nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen its aftermath,” Keegan began. I have questioned people who have been in battle – my father and father-inlaw among them; have walked over battlefields … I have read about battles, of course, have talked about battles, have been lectured about battles and, in the last four or five years, have watched battles in progress, or apparently in progress, on the television screen. I have seen a good deal of other, earlier battles on newsreel … as well as much dramatized feature film and countless static images of battle: photographs and paintings and sculpture of a varying degree of realism. But I have never been in a battle. And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like.1 Keegan nailed it. I found his observation word perfect when I read it more than a quarter century ago, and I continue to feel validated by it today. He expressed precisely what I feel about my understanding of people’s experiences of victimization and murder during the Nazi era. In the course of my work, I have recorded the oral history of hundreds of nowadult child survivors. “You understand as well as anyone can who was not there,” more than a few have told me. “No,” I reply, both to them and to myself. “I don’t even know what it smelled like.” And, I am happy to say, I never will. Recognition of that chasm has protected me from secondary traumatization. And, frankly, it has made me a bit impatient with the whole concept of secondary traumatization with regard to historical events. I can well imagine that people who deal with current or recent politically generated violence would experience secondary traumatization, just as people who deal with everyday violence – domestic abuse, street crime – are no strangers to secondary traumatization. But really: we who work on events that occurred over half a century ago? Might that not be a little presumptuous? And yet. If I am honest, I must acknowledge the unnerving disjunction between listening, absorbed, to an oral history and subsequently adjusting my tone and subject to ordinary conversation. Recording an oral history I am there, a half century ago in time, following the life narrative of my interlocutor through her or his eyes. And then I am here. This is particularly unsettling when I am on the road working in archives and conducting histories. Far from home, I am surrounded by people I do not know well and thus find myself marooned in a kind of isolation. The history with which I have engaged all day is not a typical topic in socially acceptable discourse. The research experience that prompts a yearning for warm human connection is precisely the research experience that has established a chasm. I am separated from those around me by sixty years. This is not secondary traumatization, but it is, as the Godfather character in Francis Ford Coppola’s famous film of the same name put it, the price we pay for the life we choose.

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If working with the history of the Holocaust affects me in the field, it has an even more profound influence on my daily life. In specific and concrete ways, the history I ponder has shaped my outlook, parenting practices, teaching philosophy, and social activism. It frames how I interpret the daily news and how I vote. Startled by my open admission of atheism, a rabbi friend rejoined, “How can you not believe in God? God is my up, my down, my compass!” “Really?” I asked with genuine wonderment. “The Holocaust is my compass.” And I meant it. I still do. Let me drill down on that. My first book about the Holocaust, Children With A Star, is a history of Jewish youth in Nazi Europe. And it is all about loss. It is about resilience, too, and about life until the moment of death, escape, or liberation. But loss stands at the core: loss of childhood, loss of community, loss of friends, loss of family. I gave birth to my two daughters Miriam and Hannah during the years that I worked on the book, and I took them with me across Europe as I researched. Surely I did so because I was a not-so-young, new mother. But I did so, too, because I refused to accept separation. Working on that subject, I could not tolerate leaving my daughters at home while I journeyed afar. Those feelings did not abate as the years slid by. Miriam and Hannah went to nursery school, and I took them and picked them up. They began primary school, and the parental trolley service continued. And then, when they were about six and eight years old, they chose to go to a summer day camp run by the Jewish Community Center (JCC), and held on its suburban leafy grounds. The safest place imaginable. They were to travel by yellow school bus. I died. The prospect, the vision, of sending them off by themselves on a bus was just too close to images of deportation, of child transports from the transit camps in France or the Bialystok children from Terezin. I understood that my response was not normal. And I understood, too, that the bus ride was part of the camping experience; that the children enjoyed the chatting and the camaraderie. And so I compromised. Miriam and Hannah would take the bus. BUT: Sit cheek to cheek, I told them. Tushe (backside) to tushe. Which they did. With their own compromises. From their conversation one day, I realized that they could not have been sitting right next to each other. “I don’t get it. How were you playing cards with Rachel if Hannah was sitting with you?” I asked Miriam. The sisters exchanged a look. “Don’t worry, Mama,” both assured me earnestly. “We were sitting cheek to cheek. Just air between us.” “I sat on the aisle of my [two-person] seat,” Hannah explained. “And I sat on the aisle of my seat,” Miriam said. “So we really were tushe to tushe.” It is likely that Miriam and Hannah wished to go to the JCC camp because, notwithstanding the fact that everyone in my family is an ardent atheist, they attended a conservative Jewish day school. There are a host of excellent reasons for choosing a religion-based educational institution, but all of them are secondary to my calculus of decision making, which was grounded in Mariella MilanoPiperno’s history. The passage in November 1938 of Italy’s racial laws excluded her from public school. She felt “marginalized.” That was, she said years later, the heart of the matter. “The day that we could not return to school, I remember that I was ashamed before my companions, to tell them: ‘I cannot come because

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I am a Jewish girl.’ And then the questions came. ‘Why? What did I do to be forbidden from going to school?’” Like other Italian Jewish families, the Pipernos had two choices: send their children to a Catholic school with its Catholic rituals, or to a non-denominational private school designed for remedial students who had to repeat a year, having failed in the public schools. Rome – and many other cities in Italy – had a Jewish primary school (grades one through five), but there was little in the way of Jewish secondary education. To meet that need, a number of Jewish communities organized schools for their young people; they were taught by the very teachers and professors dismissed by the same racial laws. By all accounts La Scuola Ebraica di Roma, like its counterparts elsewhere, was an extraordinary institution. When we went to the Jewish School, Mariella Piperno explained, “we asked: ‘Who are we? What does it mean to be Jews?’” They, who had been very assimilated before and lived among Catholics all their lives, now were on the outside. What to make of that? This was the great discovery of the Jewish School: when we began to understand that to be Jewish was not only to be of the Jewish religion. A Jewish culture existed, a Jewish civilization existed, that, in other words, all that is meant by Judaism existed. And this was very important. In my opinion, the Jewish School was like the opening of a book for us, and we began to read in this book which had been completely closed to us before.2 As I say, there are many good and rational reasons to send one’s children to a Jewish day school in the United States. Yet those were not mine. I knew perfectly well that New Haven, Connecticut was not Rome, Italy, and that I did not live in a fascist state or suffer racial laws. Still: what I studied made it impossible for me to choose otherwise. I am glad of the choice, I hasten to say. My daughters enjoyed a wonderful education. But my route was not normal: the other parents did not send their children to that school because of the positive experiences of youngsters in newly established Jewish schools in fascist and Nazi Europe. If these examples illustrate how working with the history of the Holocaust shaped the way I handled the perfectly ordinary practice of school bus travel and schooling choices, the following will show how the Holocaust serves as my moral compass in parenting decisions. Every year, graduating high school classes across the United States hold festive dances. Who will go with whom is a major social question. Daughter Miriam accepted her friend Kit’s invitation to be his date. But she had her eye on another boy, Dave Rose. And lo and behold! Dave Rose asked her to the dance. Jubilant, she bounded in to tell me the wonderful news. “Great! But what about Kit?” I asked. “You can’t leave him in the lurch.” She could not see the issue. It was accepted social practice: everybody does it. “What are you, a good German? Everybody does it? Just because everybody does it doesn’t it make it right!” I thundered. “Mama! Not everything is about the Holocaust!” she cried. And she was right, of course.

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None of these incidents is about anything hugely significant; indeed all pertain to the usual fabric of child rearing. I adduce them precisely because they illuminate the ways in which working with the history of the Holocaust frames the warp and weft of my daily life. My perspective on ordinary events is refracted through the prism of my work. This is not secondary traumatization. But it is something. Bat mitzvah decisions prove a weightier example. Notwithstanding their atheist beliefs, both daughters became bat mitzvahs. Why? Working with the Holocaust entails (for me) accepting a certain responsibility and obligation, which is passed on through the assumption of responsibility of becoming a bat mitzvah. God is not part of this social contract. The community stands at the core here. I no longer recall what happened when my older daughter Miriam met with the rabbi to discuss her bat mitzvah, but I remember daughter Hannah’s meeting vividly because of what followed. Knowing that she did not believe in God, rabbi Rick asked her why she chose to become a bat mitzvah, and indeed to run the whole service herself. “Because if I were the only Jew to survive Auschwitz, I would need to be able to re-create the entire Shabbat liturgy,” she explained. Rabbi Rick soon sought me out. “Isn’t that a heavy burden to put on the girls?” he suggested politely. Perhaps. But it was also a privilege. In my view and, happily, in theirs. The other part of working with the history of the Holocaust is an overwhelming sense of privilege. I hasten to clarify: it is not a situation of “on the one hand, but on the other.” There are no two hands and there is no but. I am talking about two experiences simultaneously, and the by far dominant feeling is privilege. Researching and writing about the Holocaust enriches the whole of my daily life. I draw upon knowledge gained to interpret current events, understand social problems, and decode political positions. Again, an example might help. Some years ago, a number of adoption questions jumped into the public arena. Should a woman who had given her baby up for adoption be permitted to reassert custody? And, if so, was there a time limitation? Were the courts acting in the best interest of the child – or the mother? And should a white couple be allowed to adopt a black baby? I had studied the return of hidden Jewish children to parents, other family members, or the Jewish community after the war. The historical perspective I brought to bear helped me navigate on-going events and, as it transpired, provided sectors of the legal community with what they found to be a useful lens. Similarly, I published Flight from the Reich, a history of refugee Jews during and immediately after the Nazi era, in the midst of Congolese flight to neighboring states, and the Iraq war, which created millions of refugees and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Roughly 40 percent of the Iraqi middle class was believed to have fled at that time. And the United States was then in the throes of one of the largest economic refugee movements since the 1930s. As jobs withered in states like Ohio, Michigan, and even tiny Rhode Island, the unemployed packed up their families and descended on states like Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota, where unemployment was nary a third of that whence they came.

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The question I asked myself was: “What does the refugee experience I have explored tell me about the persistent problems of refugees now?” In my view, the past is not a blueprint for the present, but it sheds light on problems we face today. And in the case of refugees, then as now, economic worries prevent bold action. Then as now, individual cases call for individual solutions, while mass movement requires bureaucratic imagination and flexibility. Then as now, statesponsored persecution calls for political action, while the obstacles refugees encounter and the assistance they need once arrived in safe harbor requires humanitarian action. And then as now, it is precisely those who are most at risk who are least likely to have papers, permissions, passports, and visas and most likely to suffer from disease, depression, and disenfranchisement in their host homes. Studying the past, in short, served as a compass for me to understand unfolding situations around the globe and to develop clear ideas about the policies and practices I wanted my government to pursue. In a circular way, working with the history of the Holocaust informs how I teach the history of the Holocaust. First and most obviously, I encourage students to set their own family history in the context of era in which it was lived. Students with gay grandparents, for example, or biracial histories thus develop a new appreciation for the ways in which the political, public world shaped the domestic, private arena. As a corollary to that, and prompted by many survivors’ histories, I insist that students read or listen to the news several times a week. As Elly Stein, who had fled to Switzerland, explained, “I can’t stand to hear the news.” Speaking of her husband, who together with his family made their way to the United States after Germany unleashed World War II but before America had entered the conflict, she noted, “I think that is Eli’s biggest scar from the war. He comes home and he sticks his head into the [radio] speaker there. When I see that, you know, my blood pressure goes up! It drives me nuts, you know! It’s like I’m waiting for the next bulletin, you know, who’s coming? Where is the invasion?” Asked whether she didn’t like to hear the news, Elly clarified, I like the news a lot but I don’t like anxiety about the news … If you miss the news, it’s like you’ve missed a war. Each hour there is a crisis literally. You know, shut up, the news is on! This is forever … This kind of behavior reminds me of the war. You know, I could skip the news a couple of hours and it will still be there … If you miss the news, you’re not sure you still exist. I mean, it’s true.3 And it was true: in a fundamental way, her life – and the lives of her generation of European Jews – was shaped by the news. The point is: so is ours. But as our lives are not immediately at stake as theirs were, we don’t pay attention in the same way. I have grown sensible, too, to the broad spectrum of ways in which individuals measure expectations and experience appreciation. What they code may well be

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beyond my ken, and it is my job to ask; to ensure that I understand their frame. I have found this especially helpful in my communication with students. And I have the Kobylanski family to thank. Moishe Kobylanski grew up in the village of Gruszwica, about 14 kilometers from Rovno in Ukraine. When he lived there it was a village of about 6,000 with no electricity, no radio, no pavement, no running water. “Just a little mud road.” The family survived by hiding in the surrounding countryside; from the end of 1942 until May or June 1943 they lived burrowed in a straw loft of a pigsty. Decades later, Moishe (Martin, by then) recalled a postwar conversation with his father after they had immigrated to Detroit, Michigan. One day I was sitting on the porch of this new house and talking, he says, “You know, this is a wonderful country, this place.” He said, “Do you know, I went with shoes like this.” (He always made sure his shoes were polished.) … And he said, “You know, I went to work today, it was about fifteen miles. How many kilometers?” I said, “Oh, twenty-five kilometers.” “Oh,” he said, “that’s farther than to Rovno and back.” Fourteen kilometers there and fourteen kilometers back. This is twenty-five miles, so that’s forty kilometers. He said, “You know, I went over there to Michigan Avenue and came back and no mud on the shoes.” For a minute, you know, I kind of didn’t [follow him]. I said, “That’s true.” And he said, “no mud on the shoes. All the way there and back.” Then I got it all connected. Because over there, you know, you couldn’t go anywhere without mud. The soles of the shoes got sucked off by the mud. You know, it was that loam, that heavy stuff. He said, “What a wonderful country. Water, you just turn on the spigot and there she goes!4 More immediately and more intimately: working with the history of the Holocaust offers insights that I apply to my emotional universe. I learn from the observations and analyses of those whose histories I study. To start with the quotidian. It is thanks to survivor Iza Erlich-Sznejerson that I learned that some quarrels with one’s husband will remain hot buttons for half a century. Iza Sznejerson and Viktor Erlich were young and very much in love when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Viktor’s father, Henryk Erlich, was a leader of the Jewish Labor Party, the Bund. So, as Iza recalled decades later, “the whole family decided to leave. Viktor called me up and said, ‘Come with us.’” But Iza would not leave her father. “I told Viktor, ‘I have a better chance of seeing you again if I stay in Warsaw than of seeing my father if I leave. My father is fifty-two, and you are twenty-five.’” Four months later, Iza decided to flee. Viktor sent word to her through a smuggler and, with her father’s blessing, Iza left to make her way clandestinely to Lithuania. It was a harrowing experience and, in the end, a Lithuanian Bundist helped her in the last stretch. At the same time, the Bund had let Viktor know that Iza was on her way to Vilna and he should meet her at a particular house.

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She arrived, and he wasn’t there. She took a droshka to where his family was staying. I was furious that he didn’t wait for me. He should have. Now, he would tell you that he feels bad about it, fifty years later. But he wasn’t there. I said, “How come you didn’t wait?” and he said they were told I would not come that night and his mother was very tired and she couldn’t go back herself, which is true because she was half-blind. She was very myopic, so he had to take her home. Well, I never forgave him for that, never. Not even as I am talking because I thought he should have come back or sent her with somebody else or put her in a droshka. But if I could leave Warsaw and come all this way, he could have waited. So, you know, I’m still angry about that. Because he chose his mother above me. He should not have done that. I left Warsaw and I left my father maybe forever to be with him, and he couldn’t leave his mother for a short time. Well, he paid for it in different ways over many years! It was just that one time. He learned his lesson. And it is true, his mother was myopic and all what he said was true, but I felt he should have found a way because I left my father. Now he would tell you that it’s true, that he should have behaved differently, that this was very foolish. But he didn’t know any better.5 I started this essay with a passage from the Passover Haggadah that raises the issue of past and present, and insists upon our personal identification with historical actors. I end with two observations that complicate that project. Lodz ghetto (and camp) survivor Sara Grossman-Weil pondered the power of words to transport the speaker back in time, and the disjunction between past and present. “When I speak, I am there. But you are here,” she noted at the end of one of our sessions. “What do my words mean to you when you cannot see what I am seeing, when you cannot hear what I am hearing?”6 Returning to continue recording her oral history with me after a toilet break, Iza remarked, “I was surprised when I went to the bathroom and I saw my face in the mirror. It’s not me, you know, the me that I have now in my mind is the me of those years.” And then she went on to say, “But the me that felt that pain, that is not the me now. Whatever troubles I have, whatever problems I will have, that pain I don’t have any more.” My charge from the conference organizers was to discuss what it meant “To Work with the History of the Holocaust.” Of course it entails disrupted sleep and a lot of weeping. That goes without saying, but nevertheless perhaps needs to be said. At the same time, it is working with, not living through – and here we return to John Keegan. Perhaps it is fairest to say that working with the history of the Holocaust has shaped (my daughters would suggest “warped”) me. And, at the same time, what I learn as I work with that history guides me as I go through life.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 13. Mariella Milano-Piperno, oral history conducted in Rome, Italy, 6 June 1985. Elly Stein, oral history conducted in Princeton, NJ, 21 September and 23 October 1992, and in Wellfleet, MA, 1 August 1994. Martin Koby, oral history conducted in Ann Arbor, MI, 11 and 12 November 1987 and 12 January 1991. Iza Erlich-Sznejerson, oral history conducted in Hamden, CT, 20 October, 2 and 18 November, 16 December 1993, and 11 January 1994. Sara Grossman-Weil, oral history conducted in Malverne, NY, 29 and 30 April 1987.

Chapter 2

Life in the trenches Hope in the midst of human tragedy Ervin Staub

This chapter is about the impact on me of my life-long engagement with research, teaching, and working in real world settings both on issues of genocide and other extreme violence against people, as well as my work on people helping others and on promoting helping, “active bystandership” and reconciliation. I have spent about 32 years doing research and writing about genocide, mass killing, violent conflict and more recently terrorism. Most of this time, I have also taught about these issues, at my university, and in lectures all over the place. For many years I have also worked in field settings to reduce violence, and promote reconciliation and active bystandership for positive ends. I can see the beginning of this work, in part, as a way of creating meaning out of my early experience in Hungary during the Holocaust and afterward during communist rule. Perhaps in part it has been a survivor mission. But everything in life evolves, and this work has become my path in the world.

The initial motivation for my work on helping and harmdoing in my early experience It took me a long time to acknowledge to myself that just about everything I did in my work life as a psychologist had to do with my life experience, especially as a six-year-old child experiencing and surviving the Holocaust in Hungary (Staub, 2002). After I received my Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford, in the first year of my first job at Harvard, I studied ways of combating and overcoming fear, and the positive effects on people of the opportunity to exercise control over aversive events (Staub & Kellett, 1972; Staub, Tursky, & Schwartz, 1971). At Stanford I became friends with a visiting professor, Perry London, who was the first person to study rescuers, Christians in Nazi Europe who were saving Jews, greatly endangering themselves by doing so (London, 1970). Inspired by this, but having been trained at Stanford to be an empirical researcher, I soon began to study kindness in a measurable, but at first limited way. Early during my Harvard years I began to do research on sharing behavior. What leads children to share candy with each other? When do children reciprocate and when do they not? I then moved on to study people helping others in emergencies, when they hear sounds of physical distress, or see someone in

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distress, or when someone is in psychological distress because of a personal relationship such as abandonment by a partner. I also began to study helping by children: What affects it? What influences and experiences increase children’s caring for other’s welfare and helping other people? (for overviews of these studies see Staub, 1978, 1979). The beginning of my work on helping behavior, in terms of its methodology, was inspired by Latane and Darley’s (1970) research on emergencies. However, while many psychologists are interested in what is, in studying and describing how things are, I have always been also interested in how things can be, in how they can be changed, improved. In particular, in studying how children’s caring and helping can be increased, I came to believe that learning by doing—children (and adults) changing as a result of their own actions—is an important principle of change. I therefore did a series of studies in which my students and I engaged children in helping others. We found, as expected, that children who had these experiences later helped more than children who had alternative experiences (Staub, 1979, 2003). As I later found, this is a very important principle in the evolution of violence as well. Perhaps the primary inspiration for all my work in the domains of people benefiting and harming others, at least the initial inspiration, came from a woman, Maria, who worked for my family, who was our maid, who was my second mother. At the time of the Holocaust she did many things, endangered herself many times, to help us. She took me and my sister into hiding for a while. She got food for us and others in our so called “protected house.” She took the copy of the letter of protection created by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish rescuer extraordinaire, to the forced labor camp my father was in and handed it to him over a barbed wire fence. This was not a realistic help to my father, since nobody would have respected that document held by a man of his age, who would have been supposed to be either in a forced labor camp or dead. However, my mother and I later thought that having the letter probably emboldened him to escape when his group was being taken to Germany. He was the only survivor of the group. The example of Raoul Wallenberg, to whom we owed our life, certainly influenced me, but even more the example of Maria, with whom I had immediate, direct, and ongoing loving contact (Staub, in press). I had not thought much in my early work life about the roots of my motivation. But I do remember one day as I was reading a book about a German doctor who was at one of the extermination camps, doing the terrible things German doctors did there, tearing up and thinking: “I am doing this work to help create a world in which such things do not happen.”

Moving from studying helping to studying mass violence, and its impact on me When you study helping, you also inevitably study not helping. You come to see the frequent passivity of bystanders. At a certain point I was ready, both psychologically and in terms of the evolution of my work, to move further. I began to

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seriously read about the Holocaust, and then for many years studied the roots of genocides, mass killings, and later other forms of violence between groups, such as violent conflict and terrorism. This was a kind of “muss sein,” an idea of the philosopher Schopenhauer, which I learned about from Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The phrase means “must be,” a commitment to or even compulsion to engage in some activity. Once I started it was not a matter of reasoned choice—there was an internal force that moved me forward. To engage in this work was challenging for several reasons. First, I left behind work that was highly respected by fellow psychologists and for which I was by then known for: my empirical research on helping behavior and altruism. I turned to careful, elaborate case histories of genocides and mass killing, combining history, psychological analysis, and other social science concepts. But that was not respectable science within psychology in 1980. Committed to experimental methods, psychologists had not studied genocide and other forms of group violence. I felt for a good number of years that I put myself outside the boundaries of my profession. I was a full professor by then, did not have to worry about tenure and promotion, and I don’t actually know what my colleagues were thinking. They were kind to me, but I felt I made myself an outsider. When I was invited to the University of Trier, in 1987, to give a lecture on my work on helping and altruism, I asked if I could instead give a lecture on the origins of genocide. After my lecture one of the first questions from the esteemed German psychologist who invited me, if not the first, was whether it was challenging for me to give up my empirical research. Just as an aside here, another professor asked whether there was not something actually wrong with the Jews, since they have always been persecuted. Working on genocide and mass violence was also challenging because I was obsessed with reading and seeing anything and everything that had to do with violence. Books were lying about in our house with pictures of terrible things on their covers, an everyday fare for my children. Whenever my children saw anything on television that had to do with violence, they would call to me: “Dad, something related to your work on TV.” For many years I was also obsessed with people being harmed around the world. I wrote letters to editors and op-ed’s to newspapers, mainly the New York Times. While the media wrote about my work, only a few of my op-eds or letters were actually published. I was a veritable Herzog, if you read Saul Bellow’s book in which the main character, Herzog, constantly writes letters to the newspapers. It was especially upsetting to me when the U.S. was doing things that harmed people, which sadly was pretty common. Support for the Contras in Nicaragua, who often killed innocent villagers, was one example. The first book I wrote on genocide and mass killing, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Staub, 1989), was very well received. I believe, as apparently many reviewers did, that it gives a useful understanding of the influences that lead to genocide and mass killing. If, however, genocide is understandable, it is also preventable. I received many invitations to give talks, a reasonable number of them by psychology departments, but the

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majority by other groups. For a long time, in giving these talks, I avoided talking about my life experiences, in particular surviving the Holocaust. I feared that people would discount the substance of my work, thinking that it was shaped by my experience in the Holocaust—that in addition to seeing my motivation shaped by it, they would also see the results of my studies due to it. Perhaps I was also not ready to go personal. Over the course of many years, especially in recent years, it became easier and more natural for me to refer to my life experiences. Part of the challenge in doing this work was the impact of deep and persistent exposure to human cruelty and suffering. I was not aware of and so did not think about this impact. I didn’t yet know about vicarious trauma (Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1996), and given my intense focus on what I was doing I probably would not have done much to address my vicarious trauma. Related to this was the impact on me of the ongoing intense violence in the world, and of the death of my delusion, the not consciously formulated but implicit idea that as my work helps us to understand the origins of mass violence, it will contribute to its prevention. This was not so much hubris but naïve optimism. But how naïve can you be? Violence between groups, and individuals, has been around probably forever. For it to change, there has to be systematic change at many levels: people’s attitudes toward others, the way they raise children, the institutions they create, the values they live by and maintain, their ability to address their traumas and what I call life injuries, and as an outcome of all this their ability to constructively engage with and peacefully resolve conflict at a variety of levels—interpersonal, in group relations within their societies, and between societies (Staub, 2005, 2011, in press). Seeing all the persistent and newly emerging violence in the world, and being so deeply engaged with these issues and responding to them emotionally, I started to feel helpless and hopeless. It was scary to me that at some point the intensity of my reactions to harm done to people, my empathy, began to diminish. What would earlier get me really upset, I would now at times look at as an observer. Research has shown that when people are guided to look at another’s situation by imagining what it is like for him or her, or what it would be like for themselves to be in that person’s situation, they feel more empathy. But empathy diminishes when they are instructed to take the perspective of an observer (Stotland, 1969). The same is true, I believe, if people take an observer perspective on their own.

Engagement with the world: working on prevention, reconciliation, and active bystandership A number of things helped me to move on. One was my increasingly direct engagement with the world. I worked with teachers on developing classrooms in which children’s experience promotes caring and helping and makes aggression by them less likely. I developed training for police officers in California to make unnecessary use of force by them less likely (Staub, 2003). This was a challenging engagement—they were tough to work with, and I had no prior experience working with such a group. I organized a conference on the prevention of genocide. This

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gave rise to an organization that is still active, Global Youth Connect, which brings young people on educational tours to post-conflict countries, and inspired Laurie Pearlman and me to go to Rwanda. We first went there in January 1999 and began work on healing and reconciliation, in the hope of helping to prevent new violence. Our work in Africa led to an even more intimate look at human cruelty and suffering, but also to direct engagement with working on positive change. When we first arrived in Rwanda people looked frozen in pain. And contrary to what our cultural consultants told us before we went, that Rwandans are extremely private in talking about their experiences and feelings, everybody was telling us about the horrible things that were done to their families and themselves. The head of the organization we first worked with and his wife had two adopted children, the children of one of their siblings who was killed by her Hutu husband. The men in the family of one of our assistants were killed by neighbors who came into their house; when other neighbors came in and wanted to kill the women, the neighbors who killed the men talked them out of it. I assume that there were two primary reasons for this difference in what people saw as the cultural inclination, even rule, to be private about feelings, and how people, mostly Tutsis actually behaved. One was the almost unimaginable level of suffering and trauma. What happened to people, such as I described in the previous paragraph, or a person surviving as she was left assumed dead in a pile of bodies, was quite different from the normal pain of everyday life. Another likely reason was that we were outsiders, not part of the society and culture, and seen as sympathetic simply because we were there. While in some cases when people got to know us our interest and sensitivity as researchers/ practitioners in this realm may have made a difference, in a number of cases people began to tell us what happened to them and their families just about immediately on meeting us. While I was impacted by the horrors of the genocide, I also felt that our work, and the work of others, can make some difference, even if on a smaller scale than I imagined before. Laurie and I did workshops/seminars for many groups to promote understanding of the origins of genocide, approaches to prevention, and approaches to healing from the impact of violence and reconciliation. We then expanded the reach of our work, in part because we were encouraged to do so by people in Rwanda (including leaders), from workshops to educational radio programs. The intense collegiality of our group with George Weiss and the staff of the NGO Radio La Benevolencija that he established to produce our programs, in translating our conceptions and approach into educational content for a radio drama and informational programs, and designing these programs, also helped (for an overview of all this work, see Staub, 2011; see also articles under downloads at www.ervinstaub.com). While I engage intensely with what I am doing, for better or worse I also look at opportunities I have not used and wonder how things might have developed had I made use of them. After we did earlier workshops in Rwanda, and found that what we did had positive effects (Staub, Pearlman, Gubin, & Hagengimana, 2005),

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we did workshops with high-level national leaders. Our participants were very engaged. But we discontinued the leaders’ workshops because we did not have the resources, the financial and especially the human resources, and the energy, to continue with them as we intensely engaged in developing the educational radio programs. To make a real impact on leaders requires long-term engagement. I also did not realize at the time to what extent all power in Rwanda was in the hands of Paul Kagame. We could have engaged with Kagame; we had good relations with very high level people in Rwanda who would have been pleased to arrange it, and Kagame was not inaccessible. But I was cautious, because journalists who met with him lost their objectivity, and their writing about him and about his leadership became completely uncritical (e.g. Gourevitch, 1999; Kinzer, 2008). I should have trusted myself more since other experiences, especially in Rwanda, showed me that I can remain true to my beliefs and speak truth to power, scary as that can be. With our many trips there, we might have been able to meet with him regularly. This may not have made much difference, but I did not try. My reason for my thinking about this has been that while the government is advocating and in its own way tries to advance reconciliation, elements of the government’s policies and the resulting political situation in Rwanda are counterproductive to reconciliation (Staub, 2011). For example, the government strongly discourages even mention of Hutus and Tutsis, guided by an ideology that “we are all Rwandans.” But this represses open discussion of important issues and the voice of the large majority of the people, the 85 percent of the population that is Hutu.

The psychological benefits of studying helping and how it can be promoted Being engaged with people, working to help people who have suffered, was a positive experience for me. I believe it also made a great difference that I was all along engaged with understanding what leads people to help others, and worked on promoting caring and helping. As I have mentioned, I was doing teacher training on how to create classrooms that promote caring, sometimes working with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves. Individuals and groups who have been victimized often see the world as dangerous. Feeling easily threatened some may turn against others, believing that they need to protect themselves, and become perpetrators (Staub, 2011). But I also became aware that many people who have suffered want to help others who have suffered and prevent others’ suffering. I became concerned with understanding such “altruism born of suffering” and how it can be promoted (Staub, 2003, 2005, 2013; Staub & Vollhardt, 2008; Vollhardt & Staub, 2011). Working on helping, altruism, inclusive caring (caring about people outside one’s own group), moral courage and active bystandership (Staub, 2005, in press), the prevention of violence and reconciliation were important antidotes to my constant exposure to evil. Near the end of my university career I established a doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts on The Psychology of Peace and

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Violence. Working with students deeply engaged with the issues I was concerned with also made a difference.

In summary: remembering our goals and principled engagement While what I earlier experienced as my diminished empathy was distressing to me, some degree of psychic numbing may have actually helped me to continue with my work, as it enabled me to react less intensely to seeing harm done to people. In recent times I am back to more intense feelings, but not quite as intense as I had in earlier times. There is a question of what kind of empathy is most beneficial in working in these realms. Both a therapist and a researcher need empathy—without that we are not much use. But to be able to persist with such work we need a vantage point that is empathic without being engulfed by the pain we witness. We need empathy but also need to limit the woundendess that can naturally result from engaging with others’ great suffering. It also seems important, however, that we don’t distance ourselves by looking at our work as simply professional activity, that we keep an awareness of the ends it means to serve. Such a focus can maintain our motivation—and improve our work. I have repeatedly experienced that when I am about to give a lecture and think about what benefit my talk can provide to the people I talk to, rather than about doing a good job and coming across well, I engage in a different way, do a better job, and feel better afterwards. The same I believe is true in choosing research topics. It is sometimes difficult to continue in spite of the lack of apparent change in the world. But returning to the values that have motivated us in the first place can help. A community of others who do relevant work can also help—shared projects, being part of organizations with like people, can maintain one’s spirit in the face of the challenges I described. And a principled commitment to what we do—doing it because it is the right thing—can help each of us to continue important work in this realm.

References Gourevich, P. (1999). We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Kinzer, S. (2008). A thousand hills: Rwanda’s rebirth and the man who dreamed it. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Latane, B., & Darley, J. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: Why doesn’t he help? New York: Appleton-Crofts. London, P. (1970). The rescuers: Motivational hypotheses about Christians who saved Jews from the Nazis. In J. Macaulay & L. Berkowitz (Eds.), Altruism and helping behavior. New York: Academic Press. Pearlman, L. A., & Saakvitne, K. W. (1995). Trauma and the therapist: Countertransference and vicarious traumatization in psychotherapy with incest survivors. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Staub, E. (1978). Positive social behavior and morality: Vol. 1. Personal and social influences. New York: Academic Press. Staub, E. (1979). Positive social behavior and morality: Vol. 2. Socialization and development. New York: Academic Press. Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Staub, E. (2002). Understanding and preventing genocide: a life’s work shaped by a child’s experience. In S. Totten & C. Jacobs (Eds.), Pioneers of genocide studies: Confronting mass death in the century of genocide (pp. 479–507). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers. Staub, E. (2003). The psychology of good and evil: Why children, adults and groups help and harm others. New York: Cambridge University Press. Staub, E. (2005). The roots of goodness: The fulfillment of basic human needs and the development of caring, helping and nonaggression, inclusive caring, moral courage, active bystandership, and altruism born of suffering. In G. Carlo & C. Edwards (Eds.), Moral motivation through the life span: Theory, research, applications (pp. 33–73). Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. Staub, E. (2011). Overcoming evil: Genocide, violent conflict and terrorism. New York: Oxford University Press. Staub, E. (2013). Building a peaceful society: Origins, prevention, and reconciliation after genocide and other group violence. American Psychologist, 68(7), 576–589. Staub, E. (in press). The roots of goodness: Inclusive caring, altruism born of suffering, moral courage, active bytandership and heroism. New York: Oxford University Press. Staub, E., & Kellett, D. S. (1972), Increasing pain tolerance by information about aversive stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1972, 21, 198–203. Staub, E., & Vollhardt, J. (2008). Altruism born of suffering: The roots of caring and helping after experiences of personal and political victimization. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78, 267–280. Staub, E., Pearlman, L. A., Gubin, A., & Hagengimana, A. (2005). Healing, reconciliation, forgiving and the prevention of violence after genocide or mass killing: An intervention and its experimental evaluation in Rwanda. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 24(3), 297–334. Staub, E., Tursky, B., & Schwartz, G. (1971). Self-control and predictability: Their effects on reactions to aversive stimulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 157–163. Stotland, E. (1969). Exploratory studies of empathy. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 4). New York: Academic Press. Vollhardt, J. R., & Staub, E. (2011). Inclusive altruism born of suffering: The relationship between adversity and prosocial attitudes and behavior toward disadvantaged outgroups. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 81(3), 306–314.

Chapter 3

“Sometimes I just don’t want to go on …” Navigating personal and collective time and space in researching and remembering genocides Stéphane Bruchfeld

If human beings have been able to live through this hell, others should not avoid looking at the picture with open eyes. Betty Happ, July 1945

A picture. Remnants of a cemetery. Trees. Small bushes. Grass, mostly. A few gravestones. Some are standing. Others are lying on the ground, or are halfway there. A derelict and abandoned spot. Down a little slope there is a river. Geese are strutting nearby. Some distance away, not very far, we see buildings. A town in western Ukraine with about 9,000 inhabitants. Busk. The river is the Western Bug. The cemetery and an old synagogue is what remains of Busk’s Jewish community. In 1996, the French priest Patrick Desbois and his team examined the area around the cemetery, with Ukrainian assistance (Desbois, 2009). Down the slope, by the river, 17 mass graves were uncovered which held the remains of about 1,750 Jews, murdered during the years 1941–1943. A pre-First World-War-Swedish encyclopaedia states that Busk in the Austrian crown land is called “the Galician Venice”.1 The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica makes no mention of it, nor does the current online edition (2013). The English language Wikipedia says little apart from providing some basic facts. As for the town’s history we only learn that it had a “very active Jewish community” before the Second World War, that its synagogue was built in 1502, that the “old Jewish cemetery was renowned” and that 1,500 Jews perished when the ghetto created by the Germans in 1941 was eliminated on May 21, 1943. In contrast, the Ukrainian Wikipedia entry offers much more information about the town, including its complex history in this borderlands region. But with regard to Busk’s once important Jewish presence and the final fate of its Jews it is completely silent.2 Leading into the symposium, I chose to screen this picture in order to open the discussion on some of the themes we wished to broach. Although I haven’t been to Busk it is in a sense not much different from many other such places in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which I’ve visited. As my co-author Paul Levine and

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I note in the revised and expanded edition of the book Tell Ye Your Children …, in which this picture is the last one, thousands upon thousands of desolate, overgrown and forgotten Jewish cemeteries lie scattered all over Europe. A civilisation created over centuries was obliterated in a matter of years, taking with it virtually all traces of human life, memories and its diverse manifestations. The link between the past and the future, and the generations to come, was violently severed, abruptly and irrevocably. Who were the people buried in Busk’s old cemetery, or in the mass graves nearby? Does anyone remember them?3 The point we wish to make is that all such places confront us with a choice. Would we listen if the gravestones were to tell us their stories of a vanished world, and what happened there in the years of Nazi German terror and extermination? Or would we turn away, pretending they have nothing to tell us? Or are we like the geese in the picture that strut heedlessly among the mass graves, unable to do otherwise? What determines how we respond to these and similar questions? To illustrate this in a concrete way, I put my knapsack on my back and stood up, turning to or from the picture. The knapsack is of course a common symbol for everything each one of us carries, in terms of our individuality, life path, professional training and so on. From a systemic point of view, I submit that we need to consider this background in a broad sense—that is, our family of origin and its history (not least important life events in earlier generations, primarily in our parents’ and grandparents’ lives but sometimes even farther back in time, that have had a strong impact on the family system and its individual members’ places and roles within it), as well as our gender and the cultural, religious, political, geographic, social and educational contexts in which we grew up and matured (i.e. the very broad setting in which our paths and life experiences have unfolded, and which make up a large part of who we are). It’s a lot, and almost certainly a lot more than we are generally aware of, all of it going into the equation of what we will value and pay attention to, how we do it and why. Doubtlessly there will be diverse reasons for choosing to turn away from the picture, and, just as I did, it can be a useful exercise to position oneself physically with one’s back to it (or any other prop symbolising let’s say the gravestones) and try out what the different positions may “feel like”. For instance, there can be a more or less conscious disregard, stemming from sheer ignorance to not wanting to see what’s behind me, maybe because I consider it less important than what I have in front of me here and now and ahead, a “life goes on” attitude possibly. Or maybe the gravestones represent something which I perceive as not being part of my world or “tribe” and therefore not worth considering, or I find them intimidating precisely because they disturb my identity and its associated narrative and therefore shut them out of my mind. It could also be that I’m afraid to look because witnessing the stark and many-faceted desolation of the place is too painful or

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depressing. At most I will perhaps do so for a brief moment, with trepidation, and then look away again. The opposite of these states would obviously be to turn around and face the stones, intentionally and willingly, and listen. Outwardly this movement, just like turning away, appears simple enough, but inwardly will also have different grounds and aims. It also entails a danger. Standing with our back to the present and the future, we risk becoming transfixed by what’s there. For those of us who are researchers and educators working with genocide and mass violence, it is our profession or even calling to study the picture or the document, to enter into dialogue with the witnesses and their testimonies, to go to the place itself and investigate the physical remains, to study the analyses and results of those who were there before us, etc., and then, hopefully, find ways to communicate what we have learned. As we all know this is in so many respects a deeply disturbing endeavour, as much as anything can be disturbing, and researching and teaching these subjects will evidently impose other demands and entail other consequences than comparatively “neutral” ones such as languages, the natural sciences or the history of Greek antiquity. Although questions about how and why we came to choose this path and remain on it (or not) are important and valid, the symposium’s primary aim was to focus on what it means for those of us who, albeit indirectly and mostly long after the events, regularly come face to face with these massive, collective traumas, their origins, their unfolding and their immediate and long-term consequences, on both an individual and collective level. Many of us have probably experienced an urge to come closer, to delve deeper, and to understand more. Close to half a century ago, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel (1967) had already noted that “the literature of Nazism is immense”, and since then this vast field has continued to grow at what seems to be an exponential rate, providing ever more overarching and detailed findings and insights as well as harrowing facts and testimonies. What and who supports us in this movement, so that we will be able to cope with a more or less constant exposure to things which are by their nature very hard to bear but which at the same time often have a strange power to “pull us in”? Without entering into a terminological discussion about whether it is correct or not to label what we may experience “vicarious trauma”, let me point to a phenomenon which I’ve encountered myself and which others have reported too. Suzanne Kaplan (2008) in her work with individuals who survived the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide as children speaks of “time collapse”, i.e. when something in the here and now triggers the traumatised individual (which may also include bystanders/witnesses) and causes the protective boundary between past and present to give way, so that he/she is suddenly “then and there”, in some way re-living the traumatic event, maybe also presenting physical symptoms. In analogy to this, let me suggest the term “vicarious time collapse” as an image for what sometimes seems to happen when we research or teach our subjects. While being perfectly aware that we are in the here and now, the past, or rather our non-verbal

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images and sense of it, at times very powerfully appears to invade us, disrupting our rational bearings of time and space. With this in mind, let’s move on to the second part of the introduction to the symposium. In order to provide more background and deepen the perspective, we chose to screen the film KZ, by the British film maker Rex Bloomstein (2006). In contrast to Busk, where genocidal murderers came to take human lives, KZ revolves in and around the former concentration camp Mauthausen in Austria, a place which was purposely built by murderers in order to exploit and take human lives they sent there, by “annihilation through work” or other means. Although branded as a “radically different Holocaust film”, the film is not about the history of the concentration camp and its place in Nazi “Jewish policy” and the emerging “final solution of the Jewish question”. The Mauthausen concentration camp, set up in 1938, was after all geared primarily to other Nazi schemes.4 Rather, the film KZ is about “us” and our relation to the past, specifically with regard to the place today and the adjacent, eponymous town by the banks of the Danube river. In this rich and thought-provoking film we meet inhabitants of the town, both old and new. Some of the older generation share their memories from the years 1938–1945. A woman reminisces with delight about her wedding to an SS camp guard (“a handsome man”). Accompanied by “soft music” it took place at the camp itself with an SS guard of honour. Her aunt had said at the time that it was “the most beautiful wedding she’d ever seen”. The filmmakers ask some younger inhabitants what it is like to live in villas that once housed the SS officers. They appear to be more ill at ease with the question than with living there. We also meet tourists of all ages from all over the world, in groups or individually, who come to visit the former concentration camp for a couple of hours. But more central to our purposes was the fact that the film closely follows the work of some of the guides at the former camp. Among them are four young men who have opted to do civil service at Mauthausen, instead of serving in the military. Interestingly, an interview with them reveals that of the four three have grandfathers who were in the Waffen-SS (the fourth was in the Wehrmacht). It is hard not to sense that their choice to serve as guides at the former camp is not a coincidence. One of them leads an English-speaking youth group through the different stations of the former camp. His looks and demeanour are striking. As soon as he has greeted the youngsters and begun the tour, the mood among them shifts instantly. As they were approaching the site a moment earlier they were easygoing, talking and joking. Maybe a little bit apprehensive under the surface, but still their normal, everyday selves. However, there is something in his low-key but determined, controlled and rather harsh manner which instantly transforms them. They suddenly become subdued, silent and serious. He is not emaciated but with his shaven head and dark clothes he looks very thin and pale, akin to images of camp inmates. His delivery is absolutely relentless. The youngsters are not given even one moment of respite. Early on, one of them asks how the prisoners who arrived at the train station six kilometres away reached the camp. Did they walk?

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“They had to run”, is the instantaneous answer, in a tone which appears to definitely knock the youngsters out of any complacency they might still have harboured. After having heard how the prisoners were “introduced” to the camp at the so-called Wailing Wall, a girl begins to vacillate and is clearly about to faint. She is helped by two other girls and an adult who have noticed what is happening, but the young guide seems oblivious and simply moves on to the next station with the rest of the group.5 The filmmakers also follow a man in his forties who has worked as a guide at Mauthausen for close to a decade. It soon becomes clear that as much as he is engaged in his work, an “addiction” as he calls it, he is also troubled and suffering. While driving his car along the forest roads surrounding the camp he talks about how he used to tell himself that he was “the best up there”, because eventually he would win over every group even if they initially “played it cool” and weren’t interested. By the end of the tour they would shake his hand and thank him. That’s what he “lives for”. Sometimes though, he says, “I just don’t want to go on”, because “every time it takes a lot out of me”. The whole thing has begun to “go downhill” and he can’t “dig as deep” inside himself anymore. Then: “We’re all sick up here … every single one of us. From a slipped disc out of the blue to … well … I’ve been taking antidepressants for years. I’ve become an alcoholic”. His interlocutor, to make sure he’s understood, asks the guide whether he’s become an alcoholic because of his work at Mauthausen. Not only, is the answer, but “a great part”. He explains: When you always feel death and … torture and blood and violence. And when you’re always having a mirror held up to you … That you too could be like that yourself. And you take it home with you. I knew all along that I would reach my limit. That there’s a high risk of burnout. I’m not insane yet … not entirely … sometimes in my dreams. But I can manage … I can still manage. This sympathetic man is clearly burdened and is paying a serious price for his dedicated work at the former concentration camp, including marital and social problems. His colleagues too suffer from some illness or other, they’re “all sick up there … every single one of us”, as he says. It’s neither possible nor our business to offer an explanation or hypothesis for this, but I believe it is important that we pay attention. Perhaps we may yet infer a contributing factor from another sequence in the film, in which the guide is standing outside the cider house cum tavern Frellerhof (“Moststube Frellerhof”), just a stone’s throw from the camp grounds. The tavern used to be a farm which produced food for the camp, the road to the camp passed by the farm (although today it is straighter) and just like people do today the SS would come there to eat and drink. In this scene some kind of festival is underway in the tavern, and while the guide speaks we hear merry shouts and singing from the yard. Absurdly, a lyric in one of the songs extols “the Frellerhof by the KZ”, and one cannot help but wonder what year this

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song dates from. Today a green sign indicates the cider house, while another green sign next to it shows the way to the former camp. Maybe he is being silly, he says, but somehow, “it’s just weird. Sure … life has to go on … but it feels peculiar”. Yes, he has visited the Frellerhof, but, unsurprisingly, he doesn’t really like it. One senses an unease with regard to how the excruciating past and its dead are both remembered and not remembered, how physical space has both changed and not changed, and with how the patrons of the Frellerhof appear to be unencumbered by the proximity of this place of death and moreover not particularly mindful of any need or obligation to honour the dead. Although hardly a “vicarious time collapse” per se, such ambiguities probably add to the challenge of finding a good position vis-à-vis both the then-there of the historical past and the herenow which moves on inexorably. In his 1966 essay “Postscript” George Steiner pointed to a different but related challenge, having to do not with the present as opposed to the past, but with the existential chasm between the victims and all other human beings while the extermination of Europe’s Jews was taking place. There were those put to death in Treblinka and here, in another existence and so to speak another time altogether, was the “overwhelming plurality of human beings” 5,000 miles away in New York or even only two miles away on the Polish farms, who “were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist”. The absolute incongruity of these simultaneous events made Steiner’s imagination balk: The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox – Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be – that I puzzle over time. Without some notion of “different species of time in the same world … simultaneous but in no effective analogy or communication” it would according to Steiner be exceedingly difficult for “the rest of us, who were not there, who lived as if on another planet” to grasp the continuity between normal existence and the hour at which hell starts (on the city square when the Germans begin the deportations, or in the office of the Judenrat or wherever), an hour marking men, women, children off from any precedent of life, from any voice “outside”, in that other time of sleep and food and humane speech. He remarks that the painted clock which pointed to three, always, on the fake station platform at Treblinka showed an “acute perception” on the part of the commandant, Kurt Franz. For Steiner it was essential to bridge this separation, not least for our own sake today but in a sense retroactively as well:

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That, surely, is the point: to discover the relations between those done to death and those alive then, and the relations of both to us; to locate, as exactly as record and imagination are able, the measure of unknowing, indifference, complicity, commission which relates the contemporary or survivor to the slain. So that, being now instructed as never quite before – and it is here that history is different – of the fact that “everything is possible”, that starting next Monday morning at, say, 11.20 a.m. time can change for oneself and one’s children and drop out of humanity, we may better gauge our own present position, its readiness for or vulnerability to other forms of “total possibility”. To make oneself concretely aware that the “solution” was not “final”, that it spills over into our present lives is the only but compelling reason for forcing oneself to continue reading these literally unbearable records, for going back or, perhaps, forward into the non-world of the sealed ghetto and extermination camp. The film KZ resonates deeply with me, as it shows so well many of the difficulties involved in meeting this challenge, both for individuals and societies. Not least, I can recognise myself in the young, relentless guide as well as his older, troubled colleague. The younger one’s apparent unwillingness to let the teenagers “off the hook”, even to the point of ignoring the disturbing effect his words and his presentation has on them, is an attitude I have harboured as well. Is it anger, and if so whose anger is it and where is it directed? At any rate, the target for me used to be those who I felt didn’t want to listen, who turned away and wanted to talk about something else, or who I presumed would do so. At times I had a strong need to “catch” such an audience and not allow them the possibility of “fleeing” or looking away. An example which comes to mind is when I insisted, against my co-author’s inclination, that we begin Tell Ye Your Children … with the story of the twenty children of the Bullenhuser Damm. It is a short text but it was very difficult to write. I had to break off several times and do something else, and it took me three days to complete. But I strongly felt that if our readers didn’t learn anything else, they should at least have heard about the twenty Jewish children who were subjected to medical “experiments” for months, only to be murdered, hanged, not even three weeks before the end of the war, in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg! I’m not sure I would be as adamant now, but this is how the book begins even today in the new version. As for the “vicarious time collapse” a host of such experiences through the years come to mind, of different kinds and in diverse circumstances. Among them is the following, illustrating a form of “mal d’archive” (in a sense different however from that advanced by Jacques Derrida in his eponymous book, 1995) which surely is not uncommon but is rarely discussed. In December 2006 I spent two weeks in Berlin as part of a research project on the origins of Holocaust denial and so-called historical revisionism, with a special focus on Sweden. In particular, I wanted to know if there were any archival remains in the Federal Archives and the Political Archives of the Foreign Office which could illuminate

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how Nazi Germany and its officials in the propaganda ministry, the foreign ministry and the security apparatus, reacted to news and reports disseminated internationally about the Nazi terror regime, especially the persecution and extermination of the Jews, which in official Nazi parlance was regularly dismissed as “atrocity propaganda” (Greuelpropaganda). I had been to Berlin before but only briefly en passant, and had not particularly liked the city. It had seemed “heavy” and charmless to me. This time however I found the German capital fascinating. The first week I stayed with a friend in Schöneberg and the second week I was on my own in a small flat in Neukölln, thus getting to know the city “from within”. Towards the end of my stay I also had the unusual good fortune of being guided very amiably and free of charge around the city for two full days by a professional tour guide. But spending the first week at the Bundesarchiv at Lichterfelde, albeit quite successful from a research point of view, was not among the high points of my stay. Walking from the S-Bahn station Lichterfelde West (on the Wannsee-Oranienburg line, a combination of terminus stations I found “weird” in a sense similar to that expressed by the guide at Mauthausen), passing by the magnificent villas of the area, I could not help but feel some unease every time the entrance to the Bundesarchiv appeared at the end of the Kadettenweg. Now and here were obviously not then and there, but pictures of the premises from the time they served as the HQ of the SS Leibstandarte kept popping up in my mind. After lunch one day I was going through files from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office under Reinhard Heydrich and later Ernst Kaltenbrunner, dealing with reports from outside Germany about Nazi policies, especially against the Jews. It was clear that this was of interest to the RSHA, which played a principal and decisive role in the murder of the Jews. There were newspaper clippings, articles and transcriptions of radio programmes, sent to Berlin from German missions in neutral countries or from other sources. In contrast to the propaganda and foreign ministries, it turned out that the security services were not interested in denying anything. Instead, under the heading “Abwehr”, there were proposals and reports about intensifying antisemitic activities, mainly through various forms of propaganda geared to the local populations in the occupied territories in the East. Thus, what mattered to the RSHA was garnering local support for the “final solution”. As I was reading Dr. X’s and Dr. Y’s machine-typed translations and reports from the foreign press, including Sweden, I noticed after a while that the paper quality was getting worse as the war went on (OK, I thought, the war is taking its toll, understandable), and by and by I also noticed that some reports were typed on the reverse side of pre-printed pages of better quality. I was so absorbed in reading the reports that it dawned on me only after some time to check the other side. What was printed on them? I turned a page, and froze. I couldn’t believe my eyes. In my hands was a document I had never seen before, nor read or heard about. A “normal” researcher up to the task would have been excited. I wasn’t. Even though closing time was still several hours away I had to get away from the archives to regain my bearings.

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The next thing I remember is that I spent an hour or two in a restaurant close to the S-Bahn station, collecting my thoughts, and then returned to the flat I was staying in in Schöneberg. The next day I was still unable to do what I “should” have done, i.e. go back to the RSHA material and order copies. Instead I began working on files from the RMVP (Propaganda Ministry). What had happened? At the top of the page were the following words: “Reichsicherheitshauptamt. SD-Kasse. Kommandogelder-Abrechnung” (security services pay desk, commando (squad) funds, billing).6 They hit me like a sledge hammer. Such a thing really existed? In my hands, I held a printed but unused Einsatzgruppen time sheet. That in itself was shocking enough, but compounding the jolt was the fact that there was nothing to distinguish it from similar forms in any normal line of work. There was a space to fill in one’s name, grade, the time and place of the assignment, days worked, etc., as a basis for pay. And I understood that at the RSHA, in 1944 when some of the reports I was reading were typed, there must have been stacks and stacks of these sheets which were of no use any more, and with the paper shortage they began to use the empty reverse sides. A door had suddenly swung open to the concrete reality of the Einsatzgruppen, and there and then, at the former premises of the SS Leibstandarte, I could momentarily not separate the present from the past. During the symposium I shared this anecdote, as an example of how even an apparently mundane archival document can set off a chain reaction of affects in the unprepared researcher, ill-equipped to deal with untoward surprises. But this is not the end of the story. While preparing for this article, I thought it would be a good idea to publish a facsimile of the document. Although I hadn’t done anything about it since my stay in Berlin, I did after all feel some pride in this finding and still hadn’t come across anything similar in the literature I was aware of. Consequently, I got in touch with my friend Christian Mentel in Berlin, who very kindly took the time to go to Lichterfelde to retrieve the document and other related materials which I had failed to copy, and emailed PDFs of them to me. Christian told me that he hadn’t seen the original documents; all of them were now on microfilm. I felt a bit apprehensive about opening the files, but nevertheless did so soon enough and discovered that having an image of the RSHA time sheet on my computer screen was a different thing altogether from holding the “real thing” in my hand. Now I was able to look at it, to study it. And to my astonishment I began to realise that it wasn’t quite what I remembered it as, or more precisely what I had thought it represented. In small print, to the left at the bottom of the page, I could read “RSHA. Amt VII. 3 44”. So it had been printed in March 1944, not before? There went my neat little theory about paper shortages and the stacks and stacks of Einsatzgruppen time sheets which were no longer of any use in 1944. Not only that, the form originated with the Amt VII, the department for “ideological (Weltanschauliche) research and assessment” of the SD-Ausland (“Security services – foreign countries”), which was not directly involved in genocidal or other murderous activities, even though its erstwhile head had been Prof. Dr. Franz Six, the first commander of the “Vorkommando

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Moskau” (Einsatzgruppe B) in 1941. But at the top of the page there were still those words: “Kommandogelder-Abrechnung”. What was it, then? Through Christian, I was able to contact Professor Michael Wildt at the Humboldt University in Berlin and send him the PDF along with some questions. Wildt thanked me for the document and wrote that he could very well understand that I had been quite shocked by it (Wildt, 2013). As he hadn’t come across such a form before, he could not identify it with any certainty. However, Wildt confirmed that the Amt VII was not directly involved in the extermination of the Jews even though individuals of the department did take part in Einsatzkommandos. He explained that the bureaucratic term “Kommandierung” (secondment) in Nazi Germany (as well as in the military both before 1933 and after 1945) meant the transfer of a member of a unit from one place to another place or to another unit, for a certain period of time. Such a transfer could also entail a special allowance: The form that you have discovered concerns the secondment from a specific place to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. This could be for the purpose of all kinds of tasks in Berlin, in Amt VII for example to join in the organisation of looted libraries and archives. Even though it in my opinion does not represent a “remuneration form” for acts of murder by the Einsatzkommandos, the form is despite its bureaucratic character definitely connected to the crimes of the RSHA, and shows how these perpetrators understood their job as officials sheltered by bureaucratic normalcy. Thus, the document I had come across was not at all what I had assumed it to be. The initial mistaken impression, due also to a lack of knowledge concerning the inner workings of the RSHA, had triggered a reaction which made me incapable of observing and studying it in a detached way, not only in the immediate moment but also for a long time afterwards, in the process preserving my mistaken reading of it.7 In retrospect, I ask myself if it is possible to identify factors which could have led to another outcome. What would have helped, not only in the moment but also afterwards, to handle the shock in a more fruitful way? Is it a matter of having “the right stuff” for this kind of work, and what would be involved in that case? It would be a dismal irony if the “ideal” genocide and mass violence researcher/ educator would need to possess an insensate and unimaginative disposition, in order for her/him to remain dependably detached and objective in the face of a constant exposure to the records and remains of massive inhumanness. At any rate, what is probably required is some capacity and support of a both personal and collective nature, which however does not appear to be too common. Just to mention another example, I am familiar with the cases of two doctoral students who were so deeply affected by their work with aspects of the “final solution” that they had to interrupt their projects. One of them could eventually return and finish her dissertation, but subsequently left the field. The other has not been able to take it up again. But it is not only work with genocide and mass

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violence that can generate this kind of “mal d’archive”. Difficult and tragic life events of any kind that we come in touch with can affect us deeply. For instance, as Ulrika Nilsson writes about her work with the medical records of the first women and men to be subjected to lobotomies in Sweden in the years 1944–1945 (Nilsson, 2008): As archive material psychiatric medical records are very emotional. To a present-day archive visitor the emotional charge of a 20th century patient’s records seems to be transmitted while reading. After the process of having been granted access to these classified files, I spent days in an otherwise empty room supervised from behind a glass wall by the archives staff. Given special permission to take digital photos without a flash, I made records of the files of 49 women and 4 men, the very first people to have lobotomies in Sweden. To work with medical records is very interesting, emotionally draining and exhausting. The records amass specific aspects of life stories that are gripping and impregnated with despair, anxiety, shame, guilt, rage, protest, rebelliousness, pride, contempt, and empathy. Long afterwards it felt like I was accompanied by these once institutionalized people, having them under my skin – restless, bumping and kicking. Some of them affected me more than others. To return to the picture of the abandoned cemetery in Busk and the choice it confronts us with, Paul Levine and I conclude Tell Ye Your Children … by stating that we shouldn’t turn away from the gravestones. But neither can we face them endlessly, ignoring both present and future. Instead we “must find ways to consciously bring with us into the future” what those stones tell us.8 The key word here is “consciously”. Nevertheless, the question remains: how to do it if there is an inherent conflict between the two movements “life goes on and must go on” and “the past must be honoured and the dead remembered”? As time passes, people and events of the past are by the very nature of things forgotten. The act of consciously remembering, and choosing what to remember, and how, is therefore in itself a way of resisting the passing of the time and the oblivion that is its unavoidable consequence. Most will travel the first road without being overly concerned about the past, some will travel the second, navigating its pitfalls more or less successfully. For this both inner resources and external support are needed, not least in a Western culture which is predominantly forward-oriented. Seen in this way, the older guide at Mauthausen, who is safeguarding the knowledge and memory of the past and its dead, appears to be taking on a burden for others, carrying out a service for society as a whole and thus in fact also for the future. After all, in the society in which he lives, most seem to prefer not to look back too closely, if at all. Hopefully, if he and his colleagues had broader support and understanding and were less isolated, their daily task would be easier to bear and not “every single one” working at the former camp would be sick. By this, I’m however in no way implying that a society in which

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for example “Holocaust memory” is present in different ways, be it through institutions of various sizes, memorial sites, memorial days and school curricula, etc., has succeeded in reaching these goals. The conflict between the two movements mentioned above can probably be reconciled fleetingly and provisionally at most, and needs to be constantly examined and renegotiated, if the work of remembrance is not to become stale and in the end of merely limited importance to society and the living. To complicate things further, just as remembering is vital for many reasons, one of them being that we would be acting in the interest of the murderers and their accomplices if we’d let their acts and those they murdered pass into oblivion, it is equally vital to recognise that those who died did not do so “for us”, their death had no ulterior meaning and should not be instrumentalised. Finally, we also have to take into account a universal awareness that, as is often said, the dead have a right to rest in peace. In comparison to these issues, the remit of the symposium might appear trivial. Yet it’s not, it’s just the opposite. In Joseph Conrad’s novel Typhoon (2008), Captain MacWhirr exhorts the young Jukes to “keep a cool head” and not “be put out by anything”, while they wait for the giant storm which is quickly approaching. When the storm hits them Jukes must keep the ship facing it, because “facing it – always facing it” is “the way to get through”. Maybe the same holds also for those who would wade in the wreckages of colossal, man-made disasters. But we know very little about what it takes, let alone what it means and what it entails to take part in the work of researching and remembering genocides and mass violence. In order to help bring their records, remains, and memories with us consciously into the future, it is high time that these questions are addressed as well.

Notes 1 2

3

4

”Busk”, in Nordisk familjebok, Vol. IV, Stockholm 1905. The German and French entries are similar to the English. The Russian and Polish versions are more generous, but barely mention Busk’s Jewish past. Interestingly however, the Russian Wikipedia page features two pictures of the Jewish cemetery. There is a short entry on Busk in Encyclopedia Judaica (2007). The town is also mentioned in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (nd). A Yizkor (memorial) book in Hebrew was published in Haifa in 1965 (Shayari, 1965), whose contents are listed in English at the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project. A fair amount of information can be found online (in Polish) on the web pages of Wirtualny Sztetl (nd) (Virtual Shtetl, of the Museum of History of Polish Jews). The book was originally published in 1998 by the Swedish government offices, and after 2003 subsequent editions and print runs have been issued by the public authority Living History Forum. The most recent Swedish version appeared in 2009, with an English translation in 2012. The usage of the term “the Holocaust” as an umbrella covering everything and every group or individual who was a victim of Nazi policies is, however common, problematic from a historical point of view. It often tends to reflect a historical metanarrative that presupposes a fundamentally global and total coherence and consistency in Nazi ideology and “practice” which in fact did not exist. Such broad assumptions fail to provide an explanation for what actually happened and why, and in the final analysis

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Stéphane Bruchfeld amount to not much more than the correct but not very helpful observation that the Nazis were “very bad to a lot of people”. Historiographically speaking, ex post facto concepts such as “the Holocaust” often conceal more than they disclose, even if taken in a more restricted sense. In my view, it is preferable to begin at the other end, i.e. from the Nazis’ own terms, such as “the final solution of the Gypsy question”, and try to understand what they thought they were doing and why, how their ideas about their various projects, “solutions” and policies changed and developed over time, and how they were actually implemented between 1933 and 1945 in areas controlled or influenced by Nazi Germany. By doing so as precisely and extensively as possible, crucial differences as well as similarities will be better delineated, enabling a deeper and more nuanced historical understanding. This incident raises a key question, but which I will only mention here in passing and without attempting an answer, namely that of our pedagogical aims as teachers and educators. Is it possible to tell a story which by its nature is extremely traumatic without traumatising our audience and maybe even ourselves, or is it unavoidable and at times perhaps even desirable? “Kommandogelder-Abrechnung”, Bundesarchiv (BArch R58-6368). Why I had this reaction I can’t explain, but I was obviously overwhelmed and most likely experiencing some type of “vicarious time collapse”. Neither do I know exactly how and why I ended up working in this particular field. At any rate it wasn’t through conscious choices and decisions. It’s hardly enough to recognise that there is a “Holocaust background” in my family of origin and that I belong to the so-called second generation. Doubtless, this plays a part, but most with such backgrounds have after all made other life choices. When I grew up I dreamt of becoming an astronomer, and I was especially drawn to cosmology. Such a career would quite clearly have been “situated” as far away as possible from “Busk’s gravestones” and the RSHA timesheet. Somehow things just turned out differently. But of course they didn’t. It wasn’t happenstance, and there is a path which I’ve begun to understand. The final paragraph reads in full: “We should not turn away from the gravestones, pretending they tell us nothing. Nor can we face them endlessly, ignoring the present and future. We must find ways to consciously bring with us into the future that which those stones, documents and witnesses tell us. Only then will knowledge of the Holocaust and its memory support us as we craft a present and future in which Auschwitz can not be repeated”.

References “Kommandogelder-Abrechnung”, Bundesarchiv (BArch R58-6368). Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911 and 2013 online edition), London: Britannica. Encyclopedia Judaica (2007) Detroit: Gale (also accessible online). Bruchfeld, S. & Levine, P. (2012) Tell Ye Your Children …, Stockholm: The Living History Forum (accessible online at http://www.levandehistoria.se/sites/default/files/material_ file/om-detta-ma-ni-beratta-engelska_0.pdf) Bloomstein, R. (2006) KZ (film). Conrad, J. (2008) Typhoon and Other Tales, Oxford: Everyman. Derrida, J. (1995) Mal d’archive, Paris: Galilee. Desbois, P. (2009) The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Happ, B. (pen name) (1945) Bortom all mänsklighet (Beyond all humanity), Stockholm: Bonnier.

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Kaplan, S. (2008) Children in Genocide: Extreme Traumatization and Affect Regulation, London: Wiley. Manvell, R. & Fraenkel, H. (1967) The Incomparable Crime. Mass Extermination in the Twentieth Century: the Legacy of Guilt, London: Putman. Nilsson, U. (2008) “Emotional Archives and Body Politics”, in Thinking With Beverley Skeggs (ed. Olsson, A.), Stockholm: Centre for Gender Studies, Stockholm University. Nordisk familjebok (1905) Vol. IV, Stockholm: Nordisk familjeboks förlag. Shayari, A. (ed.) (1965) Sefer Busk; Le-zekher Ha-kehila She-harva (The Book of Busk, In Memory of the Destroyed Community), Haifa: Busker Organization in Israel. The original can be viewed online at the New York Public Library, http://yizkor.nypl.org/index. php?id=1029 and the contents of the book are translated in English at the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project (http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/busk/busk.html). Steiner, G. (1966) “Postscript”, in Language and Silence, London: Faber. Wikipedia (nd) Articles on Busk (Ukraine) in English, French, German, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. Wildt, M. (2013) Email to Stéphane Bruchfeld, 4 June. Wirtualny Sztetl (nd) (accessible online at http://www.sztetl.org.pl/pl//). YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (nd) (accessible online at http://www. yivoencyclopedia.org/default.aspx).

Chapter 4

Identity and mutability in family stories about the Third Reich1 Katherine Bischoping

It was a history assignment in my northern Ontario high school that turned my mind’s eye toward the death camps. Choose a work of historical fiction, it said. Write a report that sorts the fiction from the fact. From my father’s bookcase, I chose The Odessa File (Forsyth 1972), a thriller with the Riga Ghetto as one of its settings. For months, I read about Hitler, the ghettoes, and the camps. Did I feel stricken, guilty, engrossed, or numb? I don’t know. I read. Early in high school I’d leaned toward the humanities and their stories, but during a phase of downcast uncertainty, I decided to study statistics, a discipline offering certainties about uncertainty. For my PhD, having become interested in survey research methods, I changed over to sociology, a playing field for all kinds of methods, quantitative and qualitative, factual and imaginative. A dissertation could not be in methods alone. Having read about the Holocaust for some years, I chose contemporary knowledge about it as my substantive area, and would later design and teach a course on Sociological Understandings of Genocide. My parents wondered whether their having grown up in the Third Reich had influenced my direction. ‘There’s why you arrive somewhere’, I thought, ‘but then there’s why you stay’. I stayed because genocide studies was an abyss that could catch at those who looked into it. We could feel safe, make our little forays in, throw conceptual ropes across the edges, and think we’d understood something. Those were the days of the former Yugoslavia and then Rwanda; much of what we thought we knew was turning out to be wrong. What I saw – or looked for – in the abyss confirmed that it was cruelty that was most real and all too available. Respite from this way of seeing became rare, and even seemed unwary. It was on a bench at the Seattle Aquarium, where I sat watching giant starfish floating easily in their tank, nothing cruel or urgent weighing them down, that I realized I had to leave genocide studies. I left by writing on its relation to vicarious traumatization (Bischoping 2004) and thought never to return. Then came an invitation from Sweden to address that very topic. I conceived of this chapter by remembering the final time I’d taught the course on genocide. Though they didn’t know it, I felt estranged from my students, who were all so sure they’d join the resistance should their lives ever come to a genocidal

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pass. One day I found myself telling family stories of my father and the coat hanger, my grandmother and her bronze cross, my grandfather and the way he had recounted a family suicide. Suddenly the students and I connected. Something about the storytelling episode felt – what, more direct? More honest, more true? I wanted to investigate those stories and their power. As I began writing out my family stories of the Third Reich, I realized that I was considering them with new eyes. My perceptions of them and their meanings had altered over the years, in relation to changes in my identity, and this chapter has become, in part, an account of such changes. Moreover, as I considered the stories with new eyes, they raised new questions, leading to historical research. What I found shocked me. To borrow Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall’s (2002) terms, my ‘album’ of family stories had to be wrenched into alignment with the ‘lexicon’ of institutionalized history of the Third Reich (p.10). Thus, this chapter is also an account of how the stories had altered over time and from teller to teller, and – not least – of what had been left out. The writing involved a process of comparison with parallels to that long-ago high school assignment, but this time, it was personal.

Erich and the coat hanger We begin on the Bischopink side of the family, with my father, Erich (b. 1928).2 A younger son who’d gone to war in stages, he criss-crossed from Czechoslovakia to the Netherlands with the boys in his school class, who’d been assigned paramilitary roles till they were inducted. In March 1944, a few months shy of 16, he’d become a Luftwaffenhelfer, which turned out to mean that he loaded bombs onto planes. When I was about eight, I asked him, ‘Why did you help bomb people?’. ‘They were bombing us,’ he answered. Rolling his words around in my mouth, I couldn’t find anything to argue with. Early in the war, when he’d compared Germany’s size to the Allied countries’ on a map, he’d begun to think that Germany could be defeated. He’d said so one evening to his commanding officer, and had been called a traitor the next day, leading to a fistfight among the boys. Later in the war, as he was rebuilding bridges that the Dutch resistance had blown up, the end came into sight, in the form of the Royal Air Force, sashaying into German airspace to fly test patterns in broad daylight. In winter or spring 1945, he and a friend were equipped with a rifle, 10 rounds of ammunition, and a bucket of jam, and ordered to the front. Hearing this story in university, I never thought to ask which front or battle he meant. Instead, I asked, ‘Why jam?’. ‘What else was there?’ he answered, equally confused. However far he, his friend, and the bucket got, the Allies captured them and set the German soldiers, and – in the distance – a group of prisoners in striped uniforms, tramping in the other direction. In a time of hunger, they trampled down fields of wheat, past dying horses, away from the front, away and out of danger.

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‘Prisoners in striped uniforms?’ I asked uneasily. My father said he wasn’t sure whether they were from a concentration camp, a jail or what. He’d seen their like one other time during the war, he said, picking over a potato field that his group had already picked over. I worried that he wasn’t telling me the whole story. And that’s how our ‘What did you know?’ conversation was launched. His recollections about the Holocaust began with the morning after Kristallnacht, when he’d have been 10 years old. As though a film reel were spooling through his mind’s eye, he recounted every street name, every turn and crossing in his walk to school, past this church, alongside that soccer field, then onto the street where he saw the windows of Jewish businesses, all shattered. ‘How’d you know they were the Jewish ones?’ I asked. ‘We knew’, he answered – an answer that was no answer. So he offered another story: In a cupboard in his family’s home had been a wooden coat hanger from a Jewish business, maybe a tailor’s, that marked its hangers with its name as advertising. Someone in the family had burned the name out, so no one could see that they’d frequented a Jewish establishment. ‘Who burned it?’ I asked, but I was starting to catch on. They weren’t exactly going to hold a family council on the topic of The Burnt Coat Hanger. Perhaps the hanger reminded everyone to keep quiet. Otherwise, why keep it? ‘Did your father support the Nazis, then?’ I ventured. ‘Pff!’ replied my father, staunchest of atheists. ‘He was a Catholic!’ In 1953, my father left Germany. ‘He could have made something of himself’, his sister lamented, but he’d quit his university studies in economics, rejecting the management career he was headed toward. At the same time, he felt German reconstruction was replicating the society that had been. He thought of himself as a socialist and Canada as more egalitarian. There he would work in a mine and then a steel mill, refusing promotion. He never acquired Canadian citizenship. He was done with states, he said, and imagined that failure to renew his German passport had rendered him stateless. Having 33 acres between him and his neighbours suited him. So did endlessly watching the news and slowly going deaf.

A story without a hero Hermann, Uncle Wedding Ring My father wasn’t one to talk about his family. On the four visits to Germany and Austria that I made during high school, post-university and after my parents died, I gleaned what I could. One of the better stories was of how my father, the son of a bakery’s delivery van driver, could ever have met my mother, whose family had curlicued porcelain dishes on which to lay their peach stones. The answer lay in an earlier romance between the two families, between my father’s eldest brother, Hermann, and Thea, the youngest of my mother’s aunts.

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Hermann (b. ca. 1911) had been his parents’ hope and pride. The first in his family to go to university, he went all the way to doctoral studies and became President of something called the Dante Alighieri Friendship Society, whose name was pronounced to me with careful importance. (Some kind of student club, I guessed.) He met a journalism student, Thea Ziegler, a wild child who showered children with Easter chocolates and who had reputedly worn scandalous shoes that were ‘nothing but heels’. Her bourgeois parents supposedly thought Hermann was using their daughter, who’d fallen hard in love, to better his table manners and his prospects. But when the young couple had married and had a daughter, they named her Cordelia,3 the Latin diminutive for heart, their nickname for one another. Before he went to war, Hermann gave Thea his wedding ring. He knew he would die, the story goes; he gave her the ring so she could wear it below her own, in the manner of German widows. Within months, he’d be dead on the Russian front. ‘Sein Leben hatt sich erfüllt’ – his life had fulfilled itself – said the unlikely newspaper announcement. Some years later, Thea would be dead by her own hand. Their story had an odd postscript. After the war, a British civil servant who’d entered into a romantic liaison with one of Thea’s nieces revealed that Thea had been a member of a Communist cell. Whether before, during, or after the war was never clear. Rolf, Uncle Pocket-knife I’d hear a different account of Hermann and Thea’s marriage from my uncle Rolf. This brother of my father’s had survived the war, though that was cold comfort to my father, who’d needed a drink anytime Rolf telephoned. Meeting Rolf overseas when I was 14, I couldn’t understand why. He gave me a satisfying pocketknife and I wrote, ‘Onkel Rolf is fat and nice’ in my diary. He also said I had thick ankles, but no matter, I looked forward to seeing him again when I returned to Europe at the age of 23. Our reunion in Köln was disastrous. Rolf generously toured me around to my father’s childhood home and Bischopink graves, but tombstones and grey streets didn’t speak to me. I couldn’t speak to him well either, for I was awkward and my German dilapidated. Rolf tried to baptize me with a splash of holy water in Köln’s famed cathedral, and called me superstitious for shrinking away. Then, one night in a pub, with his wife looking on vaguely, Rolf said that I lacked sex appeal. I stormed away, but where could I go? Only back to their flat. Inertia overcame me, as though absenting myself psychologically was as good as being gone. As I grew more silent, Rolf grew more extreme – perhaps I seemed like a blank slate on which anything could be inscribed. And so, one evening as his wife was sleeping, he lolled in his underwear on his tufted leather loveseat and began to extol Hitler. For having built the autobahns. For having recognized that military authority should be flexible, so that even a foot soldier could redirect a battle.

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By way of illustration, Rolf boasted of having sold German arms to locals when he’d been a soldier in Russia. (Russia, where Hermann had died?) The topic lurched to Hermann and Thea. Hitting hard at my image of a perfect love, Rolf depicted Hermann as marrying opportunistically, and the widowed Thea as taking up with my father – Hermann’s younger brother – after the war. My father, who’d been some 20 years Thea’s junior? To my ears, this verged on incestuous. Yet, it had a ring of plausibility.4 Rolf went on to say that my father had resembled Hermann, that both, after all, ‘looked Jewish’, while he, Rolf, was ‘more Aryan’. And thus, he said, his eyes hectic, Cordelia could have borne him the perfect Aryan child. Cordelia, another of Rolf’s nieces!? Cordelia, whom photos showed to have a delicate build, and not the ankles of a pony. As I write this chapter, I’m struck by the congruence between Rolf’s fantasy and Wagner’s (1997 [1856]) epic of a Teutonic hero borne of incestuous love. At the time, I felt like prey. Otto, Uncle Lead Pencil Rolf regarded me and declared suspiciously that I looked like Otto.5 Otto? I could scarcely place the name. He’d been the last of my father’s older brothers and all I knew of his life story was that he’d died in the war. Rolf said Otto had left school and home at 14, when my father would have been one year old. Otto had joined the army early, said Rolf, his eyesight not good enough for railroad work. There was a photo somewhere … With that, Rolf had me hooked. My sisters each took after maternal relatives – a cousin here, a great-grandmother there – but I had nothing in common with anyone, except for having my father’s hands. At 23, I felt it keenly, imagining resemblances to represent continuities with the past (see Mason 2008), to foster understanding, to suggest answers to questions of identity. Surely I’d have liked Otto, and he, me. Had he lived, he could have come to Canada and drawn my father out of his solitude. Toward the end of my visit, Rolf came through, producing a little heap of photos and memorabilia. A first glance at Otto astounded me. I saw my own face, my planes, my angles in masculine form, only a dent in his chin differentiating us. Another photo showed me – or Otto, rather – in a foolish-looking peaked cap, driving a truck of helmeted soldiers. Then there was his diary from 1942, a pocket-sized book kept in licked pencil, containing series of words such as Lugano, Violet and even Kanada, which might have been passwords. The dates of unit delousings, which sounded disgusting. The names of his correspondents from back home: I had the self-same habit. ‘You are Otto!’ exclaimed another relative, noticing this. This burgeoning fantasy of an uncle with whom I’d be in ready sympathy, and nostalgia for what might have been, slammed back at me when I opened the card from Otto’s memorial mass. It named the place where Otto had been fatally wounded on 2 January 1943 – Schapkowo – and the site of his grave – the

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Ehrenfriedhof (Honour Cemetery) in Rshew. To my English-habituated eyes, the ‘w’s in these unknown places spelled Poland. ‘Poland’, I thought, and German atrocity sprang to mind. Ghettos demolished. By men like this. Perhaps this man, whose face I bore. That ‘Poland’ was a watershed in how I thought about the Holocaust. My mirror image told me that, had I lived during the Third Reich, I could have done terrible things. Surveying my family at 23, I could see no evidence to the contrary. My father, who seemed to have passed the war dreading Germany’s defeat, would be the first to say he’d done no good. Nor would Otto have, in Poland. Hermann didn’t seem to have either (unless he, like Thea, had been a Communist). If Rolf himself truly had traded German arms away in Russia, then, absurdly, a man who still admired Hitler and who dwelt on grotesque racial fantasies had done the most of all the brothers to bring the war to its just end. I strove for stoicism about all this. I don’t mean indifference. I can’t think of Köln without the odor of my uncle’s tobacco settling into my hair. Rereading Otto in ‘Poland’ During my doctoral research, I again read extensively about ghettos, but never heard tell of Schapkowo, Poland. I didn’t seek it out, I knew that once I started looking in the library stacks, I’d never stop. I decided to let the whole of what I read stand in for whatever part Otto might have played. But work on this chapter jumpstarted my ability to read German, my first language, which I’d hitherto understood best in spoken form. As I set new eyes on Otto’s memorial mass card, letters and sounds reconfigured themselves. In German, Schapkowo’s and Rshew’s ‘w’s would sound like ‘v’s. What if Otto hadn’t died in Poland after all? I asked the internet for a drop of knowledge and received a deluge. He’d died in Shapkovo, Russia. Near a breath of a syllable called Rzhev, a town of 55,000 people lying between westward Smolensk and Moscow to the east. I read of how, between autumn 1941 and March 1943, German and Soviet forces as well as Soviet partisans had fought the Battles of Rzhev, the Germans aiming to regain the route to Moscow and the Soviets pushing them back. The battle lines swirled between Smolensk and Rzhev: ‘It is unclear anymore who is encircled and who is doing the encircling’, wrote a German officer (Terry 2005: 27). Soviet soldiers, whose losses approached those at Stalingrad, dubbed the Battles ‘the Rzhev meat grinder’ (Gorbachevsky 2008: 432). Otto’s 22 August 1942 diary entry, ‘1840 ab Brest Lituws nach Reschew’, set him on what might have been a night train from Brest, in today’s Belarus, toward Rzhev. 28 August, said his diary, was his second day at the front after a leave. The digits 13502, Otto’s Feldpost number, eventually told me that he’d been in a unit of Ninth Army tank-hunters that had first arrived at these Battles in January 1942 (stampsX.com n.d.; kabelfoon.nl n.d.). ‘Otto was the best shot in his battalion’, Rolf had said and I read of a cemetery of burned-out tanks, of earth churned with barbed wire, mines and corpses (Belov and Mikhailova 2002), and of a present-day

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farmer who drives his tractor with his ‘eyes fixed rigidly to the next birch – so as not to see what his plough stirs in the earth’ (Neef 2008, translation mine). Attacking the Soviet Union had led to labour shortages that the Third Reich solved with fresh war crimes. The Ninth Army, I read, was among those seizing and imprisoning thousands of civilians, using some as ‘personal slaves’ and deporting others alongside prisoners of war to meet quotas for forced labour in the Reich, including in the coal mines of the Ruhr (Terry 2005: 81) – to which this chapter will return. At a time when German propaganda characterized Slavic people as a brutish ‘Volk without nuance’ (Wette 1994: 68, translation mine), German forces were beating, raping, freezing and starving the civilians remaining in Rzhev (Merridale 2006; Neef 2008; Terry 2005). Otto, whose battalion never strayed more than 100 km from Rzhev during the battles (kabelfoon.nl n.d.), left one trace of its depredations in his scanty diary. His September 1942 notes on delousings would have been prompted by the louse-borne typhus epidemic sweeping through the overcrowded civilian population into the army (Terry 2005). Cannibalism was reported on Christmas Day and by the end of 1942, a few days before Otto’s death, ‘Rzhev had been reduced through evacuation, epidemic and famine to 3,000 inhabitants’ (Terry 2005: 201). To read of Otto in Rhzev disturbed me in many ways. I felt a compulsion to read more and more, though the survivors’ accounts overwhelmed me, as did seeing all Rzhev’s misery condensed into five lines of transcript from the 208th day of the Nuremberg Trials (1946). I began to feel that I was floating in the air, loosely tethered to the body of a woman who read and spoke about people being turned into objects and into evidence of others’ crimes, their previous lives all but imperceptible on the pages. One chapter she read about Soviet prisoners who had survived the war even said that they could no longer remember the lives they’d led before being taken captive (Scherbakova 2010). It was when she saw an ordinary colour postcard of the Rzhev-that-was, before the razing, that the floating broke off and I could cry. Of course I knew that a conceptual vocabulary of vicarious trauma and dissociation disorder explained the floating that quickly became habitual and the flatness in my eyes. But the vocabulary concerning me more was German. I’d been reading a former German soldier’s oral history of unexpectedly meeting his brother on the Eastern front, and of following up the reunion lunch by killing two Russian prisoners of war (Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall 2008: 50). The soldier speaks colloquially, saying ‘Ham’ wa die getötet’ (we killed “em”), instead of the formal ‘haben wir die getötet’. His casual words, echoing the half-forgotten cadences of my childhood, took to muttering in my ears whenever they pleased. Rewriting Hermann’s story Inquiries into the past of my father’s eldest brother, Hermann, made for shocks of a different nature. It had already taken me years to realize that my account of Hermann’s death had heightened its tragedy by placing him and his wife, Thea,

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in as rosy a light as possible, emphasizing a struggle to overcome class barriers, set against the backdrop of a war that was hell. The narrative I’d cherished flew in the face of my certainty that the Second World War had been a just one. It made even less sense when I prodded at one of the few specifics in Hermann’s story, his presidency of a Dante Alighieri Friendship Society. That a 1930s or 1940s German organization was named for an Italian poet hinted, to my older ears, at an organ of Italian fascism and not a celebration of Italian medievalism. And so it proved to be. His publications set him in Petrarca-Haus, a cultural institute established in 1931 by Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Köln, as the German outpost of Italy’s Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista (Hoffend 1995; Visser 1992). Its members had sent Mussolini a copy of their 1936 translation of his speeches as a ‘small token of boundless devotion’ (Hoffend 1998: 287, translation mine).6 Hermann, who turned out to have an MA in economics, had become a PetrarcaHaus office administrator in 1940 and was also managing director of an associated language training institute, the Society for Friends of Italian Culture, writing yearend reports for both organizations (Petrarca-Haus 1939; Bischopink 1939a, 1940a). Hermann had also begun to publish in economic sociology, describing sociology as a lady of ill-repute who was subservient to a moribund bourgeoisie, and calling for the discipline to become more applied and more daring (Bischopink 1938).7 He favoured Vilfredo Pareto, who conceived of history in grand cycles, and he paused in the middle of a review of fascist economic literature to dwell on the beauty of an Italian phrase (Bischopink 1939b:442). His 1940 year-end summary of events related to Italy and the Axis was rich in rhetorical symmetries, pairing Italy’s January population boom with the birth of her February princess, and Britain’s March blockade of German coal ships en route to Italy with Italy’s May response: to declare war on Britain (Bischopink 1940b). In 1941, Hermann seemed more tentative, forgoing the symmetries, cautiously citing a Wehrmacht bulletin to report that Britain had defeated Italy in East Africa, and unwontedly using the passive voice to announce that Germany had attacked the Soviet Union (Bischopink 1941). Perhaps he foresaw he’d soon give Thea her widow’s ring. I couldn’t say I rued his death quite as I had before. Mostly, I felt confused. My link to Otto, avatar of my younger self in a realm of blood and ice, had been based largely on resemblances, which compel because of their ‘capricious yet elemental character’ (Mason 2008: 35). My link to Hermann had little to do with resemblance, though we were both social scientists and both noticed language. Of greater consequence was how embedded this long-dead uncle had been in my nearest family relationships. ‘But my father admired him’, I kept repeating when first I found him in Petrarca-Haus: admired him, perhaps imitated him in studying economics and in regard to women, though not in ambition. My parents had met and I’d been born because of the earlier wedding of Hermann and Thea, a fascist man and a woman who, between her supposed Communism, her rumoured relation to my father and her suicide, was altogether a sore tooth. Otto had long raised the question of whether I, too, would have been a perpetrator (see Rosenthal (2002) on this phenomenon). The new information about

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Hermann, though, raised unanswerable questions about my family’s communicative practices. What I hadn’t known, hadn’t heeded, or should have asked about in conversations with my parents and relatives all the way to a step-grandmother could be thought to beg the question of what they hadn’t known, hadn’t said, or perhaps assumed I already knew. Then too, loyalties were at stake, as in Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall’s (2002) and Rosenthal’s (2002) research on German families’ versions of the past. I observed myself giving full marks to my father, the source of the garbled ‘Dante Alighieri Friendship Society’ clue that had led me to find Hermann at PetrarcaHaus. I needed to believe my father’s data were good, I wished him alive so I could ask him more questions, I was relieved that he was dead in case I wouldn’t have liked his answers. After all, I’d never asked whether experience was the basis for the directives he issued to me one evening on how to make Molotov cocktails to throw into the air intake of an oncoming tank. Nor had I asked about his instructions on how to use a bayonet … We turn now from the Bischopinks to the Hauttmanns, my mother’s close-knit side of the family, the side that readily kept generations of its dead alive in memory, and among whom so much more was at stake in dealing with a Nazi past that a full-blown fantasy of anti-Nazi resistance (see Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall 2002) could emerge.

The death of Annie Schmidt The cherrywood box The family tree I’d been working on in high school sprawled across pages of graph paper. I was mapping the throngs of relations I’d met in Kammer, the Hauttmann summer home, with its espaliered pears, jasmine tree and path down to one of Austria’s most idyllic lakes. My mother’s big sister answered question after question with dates of birth and death and cousins thrice removed. But she didn’t answer my question of when one Annie Schmidt – my Hauttmann greatgrandfather’s second wife – had died. I wrote again. She wrote back. ‘Ask your mother.’ My mother looked miserable. She said that Annie Schmidt had died in 1941, in Mauthausen. ‘Died or been killed?’ I think I asked. ‘The letter said influenza’, she answered. ‘She was Jewish?’ I asked, brushing aside the impossible letter. ‘Schizophrenic’, said my mother; she was going to cry. I couldn’t ask anything more. In hindsight, the story explained how upset she’d been to hear that I’d taken a psychological test at school in 8th Grade. She’d insisted I redo it the next day and answer each question ‘correctly’, as if being on record as unstable would be risky.

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A year later, when I had my first menstrual period, my mother was overseas, visiting her parents for the last time. When she returned and heard my news, she gave me the box she’d brought from Kammer: a lovely round vessel, not two inches in diameter, made of thinnest cherrywood, a crack running down one side. It had been Annie’s. In those disturbed years when I scoured the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and the stories F. Scott Fitzgerald told of fragile, doomed femininity, for hints about ‘what was wrong with me’, Annie Schmidt and her memento seemed to hold some kind of answer. The meaning of Annie’s death altered during my doctoral research. One day in the library, looking at a book with photographs of Mauthausen’s liberation, I realized that I was searching the corpses’ faces for Annie’s. I shut the volume, appalled. I’d knew I’d never find the smiling woman I’d glimpsed in one summer’s photograph, her face turned toward her husband, her nieces and a feathery pair of Irish setters. What would it be to look for one’s entire family, or village? In truth, I never could have found Annie in that book. She didn’t fit the prisoner profile for the Mauthausen concentration camp, whose captives had, until 1943, been male (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2012). A much later conversation suggested that Annie had instead been taken from her asylum to Schloss Hartheim, a castle 40 km from Mauthausen that had been turned into an Aktion T4 ‘euthanasia’ centre that had sent its victims’ relatives those ‘impossible’ letters attributing deaths to disease (Dameron 1945). It would later be used to kill Mauthausen prisoners (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2012). A marriage of bronze and steel To my mother, the death of Annie Schmidt had a different significance, as the linchpin for her most hopeful narrative about her father, Hubert Hauttmann (b. 1895), and his politics. Hubert was from a long line of Austrian, Slovenian and Scots professional families, iron marrying medicine marrying steel. A promising metallurgist, he’d found work at the Gutehoffnungshütte, a steel mill in Oberhausen, Germany and met Anneliese Ziegler, the daughter of a prominent figure there, and Thea’s elder sister. Engagement photos show a leggy woman, strategically arranging roses in one, admiring a piece of machinery of Hubert’s design in another. He was tall and bold; she had cornflower blue eyes and a diploma in domestic science to ready her for marriage. A model couple, they were supporters of National Socialism. Hubert had joined the NSDAP in 1934 (Zilt 1996: 200).8 Anneliese was awarded an Honour Cross of German Motherhood, a pendant given to ‘worthy’ women whose children were of ‘German blood’ and who were deemed ‘hereditarily-fit’ (Weyrather 1993, translation mine). Via the Crosses, the Nazis promoted theories of racial purity, morally regulated women and their families, and, in connection with reconfigurations of Mother’s Day, promulgated a death cult wherein sons lost to war were deemed a mother’s sacrifice (Weyrather 1993).

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Anneliese’s Cross was Bronze – the entry-level, as it were – for mothers of four or five children; I’m thankful that my mother was only her third. For Anneliese to receive the Cross, a mayor or local NSDAP leader would have nominated her, but for her to also possess the miniature version, a swastika’d brooch on a striped blue-and-white ribbon bow, presently in my possession, meant that she’d been pleased enough with the honor to go out and buy it (Weyrather 1993: 153). My mother also remembered Anneliese dashing to be first on the block to hang the Nazi flag from the balcony after every German victory in battle. My mother even thought she could remember the beginning of the war, when she’d been four years old. That is, she remembered the family gathering around the radio to hear the first shots fired on Poland. (Of course, this could not be.) What drew her most, though, was a vase of irises on the same table. A huge, luminous bead of fluid suddenly issued from within one of the flowers and plopped onto the tablecloth, the most enchanting thing she’d ever seen. Then came the excitement of windows being boarded up ‘because of the war’. The events that followed are hard to put in chronological order, since my mother told stories about the Third Reich as if dropping eggs on the floor. But it was definitely at age five that she was packed off to a convent school in the safer countryside, and warned to look out for her younger cousin and her sister. At the school, she stamped out communion wafers, not in tidy rows, but to her own pattern of bunny rabbits. The nuns were not amused. Also at the school, another little girl vanished, there one day and gone the next. When my mother demanded to know what had happened, the nuns said, ‘She’s in God’s hands’. Whether my mother told me the girl was Jewish, I don’t remember, but the implication was clear. The war went worse for Germany. The children returned home. My mother rode a train through a city on fire, comforted by an aunt who shook her head at the Allies’ rudeness. At home, Anneliese had been stricken with polio.9 She appears in photographs alongside the sombre children, her arms gripping crutches, her face in a dreadful, emaciated smile. Hubert, meanwhile, continued his metallurgical research. But what did that mean? Till doing the research for this chapter, I’d have said, ‘Something for the war’. I knew that, at the war’s end, the Americans had him choose whether to work for them or be interned and denazified, and that he’d chosen internment. Later he’d contribute to some breakthrough in steel processing: used in the mill where my father worked, studied in my high school geography curriculum and celebrated in Austria with a commemorative postage stamp. His war years were a perfect blank. To fill it, I began looking in the city in which he’d met Anneliese: Oberhausen, in the Ruhr region. It turns out that Hubert had been creating a research institute at the Gutehoffnungshütte, which was enslaving Soviet prisoners of war, perhaps some of those whom the Ninth Army had seized and deported from Rzhev. In October 1941, the Ruhr coal mines had become the first of Germany’s industries to use forced Soviet labour (Herbert 1990: 144). An August 1942 memo from the Gutehoffnungshütte’s mine seeks more rations for 397 newly arrived prisoners,

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saying ‘by the first night, already one of the prisoners died’ and predicting ‘the whole camp will die off from malnutrition’ (Forced Labour n.d.). By December 1942, deaths at the Gutehoffnungshütte mine came so frequently that the head army command directed that bodies be buried in butcher paper rather than coffins (Gillingham 1985: 125). Meanwhile, Hubert’s research had come to the attention of Fritz Todt, Reichsminister for Armaments and Munitions. Hubert admired Todt in return: when they’d met at Plassenburg, a Bavarian castle, he’d decided that Todt was a cultural sophisticate with fine taste in pianists (Hauttmann, cited in Zilt 1996: 201). Todt had been setting up numerous research groups in a new, then-controversial structure that increasingly took military research and development from the Army’s hands and put it into civilians’ with Ministry oversight (see Green, Thomson and Roots 1990). For Todt, and then his successor Albert Speer, Hubert led groups on Delivery Processes and Quality Control and also on Thomas Steel, the type used in rails, support beams and ship-building (Maier 2007: 977; see, for example, Hauttmann 1941, 1942). His research at the Gutehoffnungshütte might have helped to shape the very rails used to bring prisoners into captivity there. Following Hubert’s post-war internment, the Allies set occupational restrictions on him within Germany (Zilt 1996). He returned to Austria. By 1948, he would be continuing his research at the VÖEST steel mill in Linz (Slapnicka 1999), in a fine example of what Renneberg and Walker (1994: 17) call the postwar ‘consecration’ of research projects that National Socialism had supported. Then came the breakthrough I’d heard about, the 1949–1952 discovery of how to refine the Thomas steel making process so as to produce higher-quality and remarkably cheaper steel (OÖNachrichten 2012; Slapnicka 1999). UNESCO awarded the VÖEST team, whose discovery was being applied from Peru to Tunisia to Vietnam, a Science Prize to recognize ‘ways of using science and technology for the benefit of the most “deprived” sections of mankind’ (UNESCO 1972: 2). Good thing he didn’t come up with this for the Third Reich, I thought, eyeing the award citation. Now to return to my mother, who spoke of Nazis as though they were a trap. Until I was in high school, she’d turn white around the mouth when my sisters and I agitated to wear jeans, which she called ‘a uniform for children’. Then, there was the time she heard that a baker from whom we bought our rye bread had decorated his lodge in the bush with Nazi flags. This news was disconcerting, but the panicky way she told it was even more striking. So too was her bitter recollection that she’d wished the war had gone on till November 1945, so that she could have received a Bund Deutscher Mädel dress upon turning ten. That her own father had been a Nazi was the biggest trap of all, one that my mother tried with desperate ingenuity to resolve. Her solution was to believe that Anneliese’s paralysis, and the possibility of her being taken away, as Annie Schmidt had been, had awakened her parents to the flaws of the system they’d been supporting. She even suspected that the Nazis had meant Annie’s death to serve as a threat to Hubert that Anneliese’s could be next. She based this belief,

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on having overheard her parents whispering, under their own roof, about the end of war. ‘Why whisper’, she thought, ‘if you think you’re alone?’ She believed a young woman living in the household was a spy, sent to keep watch over Hubert’s fidelity to Nazism. ‘What woman?’ asked my mother’s big sister. I mentioned a photo of a young woman in a dark coat, lifting my mutinous mother. ‘Nonsense, that was a servant’, said the big sister. It’s easy to add to the list of people whom Hubert might have liked to protect – an in-law whose Jewish grandfather or great-great-grandfather had converted to Christianity, a younger brother who was gay – but sadly easier to wonder about my mother’s logic of spies and whispers. The story my mother told herself allowed her to hope that her father had been coerced into working for the Nazis, even though she had pored over her father’s three-volume autobiography, with its reams of steel-making diagrams and patent admiration of Fritz Todt. Moreover, her story asserted that Hubert loved Anneliese enough to want to save her. They had divorced after the war and his biography, said my mother, left Anneliese out altogether and contained a lone sentence about the four children. My mother had all the painful affection for him that children do for deadbeat fathers. Engaged at 16, at 18 she emigrated for love, to marry my father who had gone ahead of her to Canada. She’d left Austria as a high school dropout, having feigned her way to an appendectomy in order to duck the maths and Latin finals that she was sure she’d fail. By 1979, when she made her second and final return to Austria, my mother had become a university student and an ardent, effective social justice organizer, eager to show her parents that she’d made good. On that visit, she listened to classical music with her ailing father, and asked him why he’d supported the Nazis. It was her moment for, ‘Why did you help bomb people?’. ‘Germany needed a strong leader’, was his answer. As she told her mother about her university studies, her mother interrupted, ‘But, Hanni, [you’re mentioning] so many Jews?’. My mother came home stretched thin. Her story was broken. They hadn’t learned. Nor had my gay greatuncle, who, when I met him in Austria, railed to me about what he called ‘Jewish control of Hollywood’. A story from Opa One of my sisters and I met our Opa, Hubert, only the once when we were in our teens. He had remained tall and bold, though he’d become weighed down by illness. After lunch, says my diary, came a forgotten conversation about tea and the Ganges. After dinner, more memorably, ‘we looked at photo albums’. He showed us a photo of a girl a few years younger than us, her hair in ringlets. ‘Your Tante Rudi’, he said. ‘She killed herself at the end of the war. Because the Russians were coming’.

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I knew – though, how? – that he meant Rudi had believed Russians would rape her. Of course, to my teenage ears, she seemed all of a piece with suicidal Thea and schizophrenic Annie Schmidt, fragile, doomed and female. It turned out that Opa had left out that Rudi had been 80 years old when she killed herself. I was incensed to discover this, feeling he’d misogynistically programmed us about what German maidens should do under attack, echoing a Nazi slogan for girls: ‘Be brave! Be pure! Be German!’ (Koonz 1976: 561).

On floating truth I’d conceived of this chapter by thinking about the time I told family stories to my idealistic students, about how such story-telling changed the quality of attention in the classroom. Had that moment been more direct, more honest, more true? It might have seemed so. Stories focused on identities, loves and relationships, especially in domestic settings, would have been more directly accessible to students than most of the content of a genocide syllabus. My stories may have seemed more honest because I was putting my grandparents’ Nazism on the table. (Likewise, my mother’s willingness to say that she’d once longed for a Bund Deutscher Mädel outfit always impressed me.) They may have seemed truer because they ground abstract structures and ideologies in the idiosyncratic or telling detail, a burned clothes hanger, a child born third instead of fourth. They may have conveyed layers of possible interpretation, offering something for every listener without ever seeming to vary (Portelli n.d.; Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall 2002), accommodating and even inviting what in my high school history class we called fiction, and what positivists or lawyers call error. Oral historian Alessandro Portelli (n.d.) eloquently calls ‘error, invention, misunderstanding, even lies, especially when they are socially widespread … precious symptoms of such important historical processes as memory and desire’. Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall’s (2002) study of how intergenerational transmission of family stories about the Third Reich systematically whitewashes family members’ deeds is, in essence, a study of error at the family unit of analysis. With this in mind, the better of my family stories may be ones that tell of some facet of life in the Third Reich, at the same time they reveal the vagaries of their construction, which sometimes include my own excesses of idealism. Ordinarily I adore stories and how they subtly transform as new listeners raise questions, smile, argue and speculate. It happens now and again these days as I exchange stories with people whose family backgrounds lie in Germany and the Netherlands, Poland and the former Soviet Union, Italy and Ethiopia. Perhaps I was born in Canada so that this could happen. However, just as in high school, when I’d despondently chosen statistics as an avenue to certainty, as I was doing the research for this chapter I increasingly adopted positivist, legalistic conceptions of truth. A historian friend felt that I lacked sympathy for my family members. I found this confusing. What I felt, really, was ashamed of several of them, to the extent that I had taken pride in what I’d known of their accomplishments. I wished that

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I could have known their hearts, but those lay out of reach. What I could do was bite down on what facts were to be had about their actions in a system I now understood to be rich in opportunity for several of them, to establish how a woman might come by a miniature bronze cross, to track a soldier’s journey back to a battlefield, to sort out who had done what where and in whose awful company. But facts led to more questions, not to closure. The research became spiralling and compulsive, aided by my propensity for floating and dissociation, itself exacerbated by imagery of people turned into objects. A compulsion that goes hand in hand with responsibility is not easily remedied. The historian’s endeavour of focusing an inquiry through biography and the disparate careers of my family members also drew my attention in fresh directions, to the Soviet theatre of war, the geopolitics of the Axis and the armaments industry. I began to sense, as I had not before, that all together these formed a vast machine, in which a clamour of metals – a gold ring, a bronze cross, a lead pencil and lead shot, bayonets and pocket-knives and endless rails of steel – could mass against one small cherrywood box. The abyss beckoned with the possibility of greater understanding. Perhaps my clearest insights in Holocaust studies have involved benches. While working on this chapter, I visited Stockholm and saw a bench floating in the air. That I could float was a phenomenon I understood to be subjective. That a bench should defy the law of gravity, though, was a phenomenon of a different order. Caught up as I was in questions of which ‘facts’ I had were solid and which were nebulous, of who had been reliable and who had not, for a treacherous moment I believed that benches could float, that anything I held true could arbitrarily alter. Of course, upon inspection, I could see that the bench couldn’t float, but had been designed so that its base was invisible from certain angles. Still, I wasn’t about to sit on it. I could see that this project would be no place to linger.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

I am grateful to: Erik Kooistra and Nicholas Terry for information about Rzhev; Ivana Maek, Alex Benevides, Greg Bird, Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, Margaret Nieradka, Riley Olstead, Roberto Perin and Michael Scott for their thoughtful comments; and especially Markus Gerke for perceptive and reliable assistance with all matters German. My father spelled his surname differently from others in his family because he was indifferent to their genealogical research, which established ‘Bischopink’ as the original spelling. A pseudonym with the same meaning. Out of respect for my father’s possible affections, ‘Thea’ is a pseudonym. This account collects Rolf’s remarks into one sequence, as I remember it, but my diary shows that some of his stories were scattered over a few days. A rebuilt Petrarca-Institut is part of today’s University of Cologne, one of Mussolini’s translators led an advisory group in the post-war Ministry of Economics, and Konrad Adenauer became German’s first post-war chancellor. Derks (1999) demonstrates how social sciences became transformed in the Third Reich, emphasizing ‘practical’ projects based in Nazi ideology and ‘applied’ work related to the war economy.

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Some readers have wondered whether party membership was required of Hubert. Bockstaller (2003) states that, between January 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and April 1933, NSDAP membership grew from 850,000 to over 2.5 million (of a population of 66 million). Wanting to keep out opportunists, the NSDAP then put a moratorium on new memberships until 1937. This suggests that, in 1934, Hubert hadn’t been required to join the NSDAP, and that his 1934 date is puzzling. Adult victims of Aktion T4, ‘euthanized’ until the programme ended in August 1941, had been ‘non-Aryan’ or had one of a specific list of conditions (Mitscherlich and Mielke 1949). Polio was not among them.

References Belov, N. and Mikhailova, T. (2002) ‘Rzhev July–August 1942: The battle for Hill 200’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 15(4): 79–114. Bischoping, K. (2004) ‘Timor mortis conturbat me: Genocide pedagogy and vicarious trauma’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6(4): 545–66. Bischopink, H.A. (1938) ‘Die Lage der Soziologie in Deutschland: Eine soziologische Anmerkung’, Kolnische Zeitung, 563: 6. Bischopink, H.A. (1939a) ‘Die Gesellschaft der Freunde italienischer Kultur’, ItalienJahrbuch, 2: 252–3. Bischopink, H.A. (1939b) ‘Staat und Wirtschaft’, Italien-Jahrbuch, 2: 427–56. Bischopink, H.A. (1940a) ‘Das Deutsch-Italienische Kulturinstitut (Petrarca-Haus) in Köln im Jahre 1940/1941’, Italien-Jahrbuch, 3: 264–6. Bischopink, H.A. (1940b) ‘Kalendarium 1940’, Italien-Jahrbuch, 3: 267–78. Bischopink, H.A. (1941) ‘Kalendarium 1941’, Italien-Jahrbuch, 3: 207–18. Bockstaller, N. (2003) ‘Ein Volk im Gleichschritt’. stern.de. Available at http://www. stern.de/politik/geschichte/nsdap-ein-volk-im-gleichschritt-503311.html?eid=501045 (accessed 9 July 2013). Dameron, C.H. (1945) ‘Hartheim euthanasia: war crimes investigation – the Charles H. Dameron report’. Available at www.holocaustresearchproject.org/euthan/dameron. html (accessed 11 May 2012). Derks, H. (1999) ‘Social sciences in Germany, 1933–1945’, German History, 17(2): 177–219. Forced Labour (n.d.) ‘Gutehoffnungshütte Oberhausen Aktiengesellschaft letter re: Sowjetrussische Kriegsgefangenen 6 August 1942’. Available at www.ausstellungzwangsarbeit.org/index.php?id=484&L=1 (accessed 19 March 2012). Forsyth, F. (1972) The Odessa File, London: Hutchison. Gillingham, J. (1985) Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe, New York: Columbia University Press. Gorbachevsky, B. (2008) Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier’s War on the Eastern Front, S. Britten (ed. and trans.), Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Green, C.M.,Thomson, H.C. and Roots, P.C. (1990) The Ordnance Department: Planning Munitions for War, Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army. Hauttmann, H. (1941) ‘Mit Silizium und Aluminium beruhigter Thomasstahl für Schiffsnieten’, Stahl und Eisen, 61: 801–6. Hauttmann, H. (1942) ‘Essais d’endurance de l’acier dur Thomas calmé’, Revue de metallurgie, 39: 12. Herbert, U. (1990) A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Hoffend, A. (1995) ‘Konrad Adenauer und das faschistische Italien: Zur Instrumentalisierung von Kulturpolitik am Beispiel der Gründung des Petrarca-Hauses zu Köln 1931’, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 75: 481–544. Hoffend, A. (1998) Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen ‘Drittem Reich’ und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und Rassenfragen, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. kabelfoon.nl (n.d.) ‘86 Infantry Division’. Available at http://home.kabelfoon. nl/~oswald/86infdiv.html (accessed 19 July 2012). Koonz, C. (1976) ‘Nazi women before 1933: rebels against emancipation’, Social Science Quarterly, 56(4): 553–63. Maier, H. (2007) Forschung als Waffe: Rüstungsforschung in der Kaiser-WilhelmGesellschaft und das Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Metallforschung 1900–1945/48, Göttingen: Wallstein. Mason, J. (2008) ‘Tangible affinities and the real life fascination of kinship’, Sociology, 42(1): 29–45. Merridale, C. (2006) Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945, New York: Picador. Mitscherlich, A. and Mielke, F. (1949) Doctors of Infamy: the Story of the Nazi Medical Crimes, Heinz Norden (trans.), New York: Henry Schuman. Neef, C. (2008) ‘Attacke um jeden Preis’, SpiegelOnline. Available at http://einestages. spiegel.de/external/ShowAlbumBackgroundPrint/a11121.html (accessed 16 May 2012). Nuremberg Trial Proceedings (1946) ‘Two hundred and eighth day: Wednesday; 21 August 1946, morning session’. Available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-21-46.asp (accessed 16 May 2012). OÖNachrichten (2012) ‘LD-Verfahren: eine Industrie-Revolution wird 60’, OÖNachrichten, 12 April: 1, 9. Petrarca-Haus (1939) ‘Verzeichnis der Mitarbeiter’, Italien-Jahrbuch, 2: 487–90. Portelli, A. (n.d.) ‘A dialogical relationship. An approach to oral history’. Available at www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/expressions_portelli.pdf (accessed 30 June 2012). Renneberg, M. and Walker, M. (1994) ‘Scientists, engineers and National Socialism’, in M. Renneberg and M. Walker (eds), Science, Technology and National Socialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenthal, G. (2002) ‘Veiling and denying the past: the dialogue in families of Holocaust survivors and families of Nazi perpetrators’, The History of the Family, 7: 225–38. Scherbakova, I. (2010) ‘Oral testimonies from Russian victims of forced labour’, in A.v. Plato, A. Leh and C. Thonfeld (eds), Hitler’s Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe, New York: Berghahn. Slapnicka, H. (1999) ‘Kunstgattung, Tatsachenbericht oder Täuschung? Selbstbiographien aus Oberösterreich im 20. Jahrhundert’. Available at www.landesmuseum.at/pdf_frei_ remote/JOM_144a_0231-0247.pdf (accessed 7 May 2012). stampsX.com (n.d.) Postmark database. Available at www.stampsx.com/ratgeber/stempeldatenbank.php (accessed 7 July 2012). Terry, N. (2005) ‘The German Army Group Centre and the Soviet civilian population, 1942–1944. Forced labour, hunger and population displacement on the eastern front’, unpublished dissertation, King’s College, University of London. UNESCO (1972) ‘Address by Mr. René Maheu, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), on the occasion of the

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presentation of the Unesco Science Prize for 1972’. Paris, November 22. Available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000016/001659eb.pdf (accessed 7 May 2012). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2012) ‘Prisoners: Mauthausen’, Holocaust Encyclopedia. Available at http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007728 (accessed 14 May 2012). Visser, R. (1992) ‘Fascist doctrine and the cult of the “romanità”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27(1): 5–22. Wagner, R. (1997 [1856]) Die Walküre Libretto, trans. R. Sabor, London: Phaidon. Welzer, H., Moller, S. and Tschuggnall, K. (2002) ‘Opa war kein Nazi!’ Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, Frankfurt: Fischer. Wette, W. (1994) ‘Das Rußlandbild in der NS-Propaganda, Ein Problemaufriß’, in H.-E. Volkmann (ed.), Das Rußlandbild im Dritten Reich, Köln: Böhlau Verlag. Weyrather, I. (1993) Muttertag und Mutterkreuz: der Kult um die ‘deutsche Mutter’ im Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt: Fischer. Zilt, A. (1996) ‘“Reactionary modernism” in der westdeutschen Stahlindustrie? Technik als Kulturfaktor bei Paul Reusch und Hubert Hauttmann’, in B. Dietz, M. Fessner and H. Maier (eds), Technische Intelligenz und ‘Kulturfaktor Technik’: Kulturvorstellungen von Technikern und Ingenieuren zwischen Kaiserreich und früher Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Münster: Waxmann.

Chapter 5

The question of legitimacy in studying collective trauma Johanna Ray Vollhardt

Introduction In this chapter I reflect on secondary and, to a lesser extent, vicarious trauma among descendants of people who have survived genocide and mass violence. These descendants have often been exposed to family and group narratives of trauma. The resulting psychological reactions have been referred to in the clinical literature as “transgenerational trauma” (e.g. Danieli, 1998) or secondary trauma (see Pearlman, this volume) and are also reflected in social psychological processes that I refer to as “victim consciousness” (Vollhardt, 2009a, 2012a, b). In the following I explore how these phenomena shape both participants’ and the researchers’ responses to research about collective trauma and victimization. I draw on my experience of conducting research among groups that have experienced ethnic conflict and mass violence; and on my observations of different responses to these research questions, including intense emotional reactions. I also address these topics from the perspective of my own family background, which has shaped my interests as a researcher and my theoretical perspectives on these issues. As a social psychologist, I focus mostly on the group and intergroup level. I study peoples’ reactions to their group’s collective experience of violence and trauma, rather than the individual experience of trauma that clinical psychologists examine. However, these levels are obviously intertwined, and responses to questions about collective trauma can reflect what clinical researchers may consider secondary trauma. The questions I address in this chapter are: (1) From the perspective of the researcher, how does one’s family’s traumatic experiences of collective violence influence research interests in these topics—and does this personal background create bridges or walls between researchers and research participants? (2) From the perspective of participants in research on collective violence against one’s group: how does secondary trauma through family and group ties manifest itself in responses to the questions asked in such research? I give some examples of participants’ reactions to studies I have conducted in

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various contexts of the aftermath of mass violence, mostly among members of the second, third, or even fourth generation after the events. I also examine the differences in such secondary trauma—addressing not only suffering, pain, and anger, but also agency and empowerment; parallel to what Arnold, Calhoun, Tedeschi, and Cann (2005) refer to in a different context (among psychotherapists) as vicarious post-traumatic growth. (3) Finally, I address the question of legitimacy in studying collective trauma and victimization. This involves difficult questions I have been struggling with as a researcher on a personal as well as methodological and epistemological level, including: Who has the right to do this kind of research and to ask questions about these extremely sensitive topics? Is it legitimate to study a group’s experience that we do not share or understand; or should this be limited to members of the given group? Are we, as researchers and human beings who have been personally touched by these issues through our own background, imposing our view and our personal way of coping with transgenerational trauma? Can we assume that experiences transfer from one group to another, or is this a naïve and misled belief? In fact, can we even assume that an individual’s experience within a given group allows us to understand another group member’s experiences? All these questions are related to the controversial assumption of something like a “privileged understanding” in the realm of trauma and violence studies, which shares some core ideas with feminist standpoint theory (e.g. Harding, 2004). I reflect self-critically on this position that—not always consciously—has influenced my research, and examine the ways in which this belief about secondary trauma can obstruct work with populations that have experienced mass violence in the past or in the present.

The role of personal background in research on collective trauma and victimization It is not uncommon to see that people who work on and with collective trauma and violence have had relevant personal experiences. For example, many Jewish social scientists who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe later studied discrimination and social justice (Suedfeld, 2001; Unger, 2000), and many therapists and social workers working with underserved populations experienced interpersonal trauma themselves (Grossman, Sorsoli, & Kia-Keating, 2006; Krous & Nauta, 2005). Anecdotal evidence suggests that this link also exists for secondary trauma resulting from family or ingroup experiences of collective victimization. Many—but of course by far not all—who work on these issues belong to groups that were targeted in the past, and were therefore exposed to family stories of collective trauma. For example, students who choose to take my classes on genocide and ethnic conflict often come from countries that have been affected by conflict and mass violence. I have had students of Armenian, Irish, Jewish, Libyan, Nigerian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Turkish, and Vietnamese origin. In this chapter I use my

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own story as an example to illustrate how family experiences of collective violence can shape related research interests, one’s theoretical framework, and the particular research questions one asks. Secondary traumatization among descendants of survivors While the term “vicarious trauma” is often used to describe reactions among therapists, aid workers, and others working with direct survivors of trauma, some clinical researchers (e.g. Baranowsky, Young, Johnson-Douglas, Williams-Keefler, & McCarrey, 1998; Dekel & Goldblatt, 2008; see also Pearlman, this volume) have used the term “secondary traumatization” to refer to intergenerational transmission of trauma; that is, trauma narratives that are shared in families throughout generations (see Danieli, 1998). Obviously, conceptual nuances are important; and vicarious trauma among people who work professionally with survivors differs from secondary trauma among family members of survivors. Secondary trauma symptoms among descendants of survivors vary widely, and are related to how much family members talk about the traumatic events (Wohl & van Bavel, 2011). Additionally, secondary trauma is experienced more adversely among those who strongly identify with their group (Wohl & van Bavel, 2011). Thus, social identity processes explain why collective violence also affects group members who were not directly affected by the violence, and even those who are not related to survivors. Social psychologists have argued that because of social identification and perceived similarity with the victims, group members can experience intense psychological reactions to collective violence directed against their group, in part driven by the perception that “it could have been me” (Wayment, 2004). These reactions include not only psychological distress and what clinicians would consider as secondary trauma, but also more general responses on the societal level, such as a strong desire for security and selfdefense (Bar-Tal, 2000). Transmitted through media, speeches, monuments, memorials, songs, poems, and group members’ stories, narratives of collective violence can result in what has been referred to as “cultural trauma” (Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen Smelser, & Sztompka, 2004) or a sense of collective victimhood (Bar-Tal, Chernyak-Hai, Schori, & Gundar, 2009). This affects most, if not all group members—regardless of whether or not they had contact with those who experienced the events personally. This phenomenon has been documented in many contexts in the aftermath of mass violence, including genocide, one-time terrorist attacks, ethnic conflict, war, and slavery (for reviews see Alexander et al., 2004; Bar-Tal et al., 2009; Vollhardt, 2012a). In the following I reflect on how transgenerational trauma narratives and the awareness of violence directed against one of my social groups have influenced my research on collective victimization. I explore how this personal connection may in some cases facilitate, but in other cases also get in the way of researching these issues.

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Personal background of the researcher researching collective trauma: a case study I came to the study of collective violence and trauma more or less by birth, or at least that is how it feels. My mother is a Polish Jew whose own mother escaped Warsaw during the Second World War and survived in the Soviet Union, but lost many relatives in the Holocaust. Fortunately, her parents and siblings survived because they had immigrated to British-occupied Palestine, or what would later become Israel, in 1937. My grandmother returned to Warsaw with the Red Army after the war. She was a member of the Communist party and became the director of the Polish radio station for children. My mother was born in 1946. She grew up in a secular environment with Communist, universalist values and did not know about her Jewish background until 1956, when there was a wave of Jewish emigration to Israel during the thaw that occurred after Stalin’s death. This mass emigration did not only happen because of the liberalization of emigration laws in Poland at the time, but was also reinforced by the resurgence of anti-Semitism in this period. For example, Jews were often blamed for the repressions of the Stalinist era (Szaynok, 2005). A decade later, an anti-Jewish movement started in Poland that was officially referred to as “anti-Zionist” but targeted Jews in general. It culminated in an antiSemitic propaganda campaign in the Spring of 1968, giving these political events the name “March ‘68.” The campaign started in the context of the 1967 Arab– Israeli war and the alliances between the Soviet Union and other Communist countries with Arab countries. Gomułka (the First Secretary of the ruling political party in Poland) introduced a domestic, anti-Semitic element to it by declaring that Polish Jews were sympathetic to Israel and therefore a “fifth column” in the country (Stola, 2005). Guised by the excuse of responding to a (completely unrelated) student demonstration in March 1968, a propaganda campaign was launched against perceived internal enemies, above all alleged “Zionists.” Many students who were of Jewish origin were arrested, and many politicians, university staff, and other professionals with a Jewish background were removed from their jobs. Officially, this campaign lasted only about three months, but it led to the emigration of the majority of the Jewish population remaining in Poland at the time. This was possible because of special regulations allowing Polish Jews to leave the country if they renounced their citizenship—thereby becoming stateless refugees— and declared that they wanted to emigrate to Israel. Thereby, the allegations were supported in a self-fulfilling prophecy. In reality, many also moved to Sweden, the United States, and several other countries. My mother was finishing her master’s degree in sociology at Warsaw University at the time. Although she was attached to the Polish language and culture and did not particularly identify as Jewish, she felt offended by the campaign. She thought that if Poles did not want Jews in the country, fine! Then one should leave and not stay where one was unwanted. Her husband at the time had been arrested in the course of the events, and she found these arrests difficult

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to bear. Her identity changed due to the events, and from then on she would always refer to her Polish and Jewish background together, never singly—these two categories had become intertwined through her experience. My mother, her husband, and my grandmother left Poland in 1970, toward the end of the immigration wave. They traveled via Vienna, where most Polish Jewish immigrants stayed until they received visas for the next country. My grandmother was at first denied a visa to the United States because of her Communist past. She therefore went to Israel instead, where she lived for four years with her siblings and parents in a kibbutz. My mother and her first husband received fellowships for a graduate school in the United States, where they completed their doctoral degrees. My grandmother was eventually granted a U.S. visa, and she moved to Queens, New York, in order to be close to my mother. While I was growing up and even after she died when I was eight years old, my grandmother was my role model and hero. She was a strong and serious woman who was greatly respected by everyone who knew her. She spoke several languages and had lived in seven countries (Poland, France before the war, the Soviet Union during the war, Austria during the emigration period, Israel, the United States, and Germany in the last year of her life). She had studied mathematics and accounting and worked in a relatively high position, at a time when it was not very common for women. She did not seem to bear any scars of her difficult life and was full of wisdom and warmth. It is presumably the memory of her person that shaped my image of survivors of mass violence; an image that reflected strength and dignity. My father’s family, in contrast, is German and Christian. My father was born in 1944, in the last phase of the war. While his parents did not directly sympathize with Nazism, they accepted and participated in it—my paternal grandfather was a soldier in the Wehrmacht, his brother was even higher up in the Nazi ranks, but like in most German families this was never talked about later and the details remain unknown. During the war, my grandmother’s family had forced laborers working on their farm, but again this was not discussed in much detail. As a teenager I tried to find out more about it, and learned that one of the forced laborers died during a bomb attack, while my grandmother was in a bomb shelter with her child, my father. My father belonged to the generation of students who questioned their parents about their complicity with the Nazis. He joined the student movement in 1968 and left the church because of its role during the Holocaust. He emigrated from Germany to the U.S and became a psychiatrist. Part of his work was with German-speaking Holocaust survivors in New York who were filing reparation claims with the German government. Obviously, given this family constellation, genocide and ethnic conflict were salient and of great personal importance to me when I grew up. However, there were many confusing experiences and mixed messages related to this past, for example, the contrast between how the two sides of my family dealt with these issues. My maternal grandmother, despite her experiences, never showed any

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resentment toward Germans—although my mother remembers her saying when the topic came up that she would like to kill one, just one Nazi. In general though, she was such a tolerant and interpersonally sensitive person that she never uttered a word about my father’s background. My mother told me that although her mother was certainly not overjoyed with the fact that her daughter had decided to marry a German, she did not object to it. She even moved with us to Germany when my father decided he wanted to be closer to his family. In contrast, my German side of the family seemed to lack this sensitivity. One of the stories I remember was that my paternal grandfather told my mother that he knew Warsaw—her home town—because once during the war he had to bring someone who was to receive a disciplinary punishment to the headquarters of the Nazis occupying Warsaw. While again the details of the event were never clear in these family stories, in my imagination it became an execution my grandfather was delivering a prisoner to. This and many other experiences contributed to the stark contrast I observed between the sensitivity of my maternal grandmother, who had been victimized by the Nazi regime and yet was so graceful toward my German side of the family, and the moral disengagement when talking about these issues among my paternal grandparents, who had been on the side of the victimizers. As a child and young adult, this contrast I witnessed was simply confusing. It certainly shaped my academic interest in and ideas about the aftermath of mass violence. Confusing and often hurtful experiences of this kind also occurred in school. We moved from the U.S. to Germany when I was about eight years old, and there were no other Jewish children in my grade, probably even in my school. My first and strongest memory about this involves an experience during 5th or 6th grade, when our teacher showed us a movie about Simon Wiesenthal’s life that included scenes in concentration camps. I do not remember any preparation in class for this movie, and the concentration camp scenes came as a big surprise. I remember being shaken by the experience and staying behind in the still darkened classroom after the movie, alone and deeply disturbed. I was unable to process what I had just seen, knowing vaguely that it somehow related to my own family history— while everyone else ran out to recess to be first at the ping-pong table. The feeling that “this could have been me,” and seeing that those who would have been on the other side were able to remove themselves so quickly and seemed so unaffected by the movie, was overwhelming. It triggered a mix of emotions that I would describe as loneliness and pain, deep grief and confusion. This experience was followed by a long phase during my teenage years in which I read every single book on the Holocaust that I could get my hands on. I also started learning about Judaism, studying Hebrew, regularly attending services and events at a reform synagogue, and later as a university student I co-founded the first reform Jewish student organization in Germany after the Shoah, which we called “Jung & Jüdisch” (“Young and Jewish”). In other words, I began to identify 100 percent with the Jewish side of my family. I even went through a phase in which I used my mother’s maiden name instead of my very German last name, wanting to remove any trace of my German origin.

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During this phase of ethnic identity exploration (Phinney & Ong, 2007) I encountered several intolerant reactions by peers, most of whom had never before met a Jewish person. These reactions started with seemingly benign yet paternalistic lectures about the fact that I was not any different from “them” because I had a German father and had been baptized and undergone Protestant confirmation (this is true, although I officially left the church a few years later). However, my peers’ reactions to my open display of Jewish identity, which they had not known about before, also included more crass reactions. For example, when I wore a necklace with a Star of David pendant, a boy in my class—one of the best students, from a very educated family, who later studied history—asked me: “Why are you wearing that? Do you want to end up in an ashtray?” He thought it was funny. I started wearing a “chai” pendant (Hebrew for “life”) instead, a symbol that was less obvious to non-Jewish Germans. Later as a university student and fellow of a social-democratic foundation, another fellow who was leftist and studied development economics expressed his belief in a private conversation that Jews controlled the media in the U.S. He spoke quite openly and did not seem to understand why I was bothered by this remark. All these personal experiences shaped my professional interests and drew me to the topics I was eventually able to study in graduate school, in the new Ph.D. concentration in the Psychology of Peace and Violence that Ervin Staub established at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. When I learned about this program I immediately knew this was it. I felt at home, academically and personally, and began to study these topics with great passion. Although until then I had not been aware of the path I described above, it suddenly became obvious to me that I had been steering toward this direction all my life; and that I had found what I was meant to do. Ervin Staub’s idea of “altruism born of suffering” (Staub, 2003, 2005) became my main research interest during graduate school (Staub & Vollhardt, 2008; Vollhardt, 2009b; Vollhardt & Staub, 2011), evolving into my dissertation work on victim consciousness that I continue to research (Vollhardt, 2009a, 2012a, b, 2013; Vollhardt & Bilali, forthcoming). The topic resonated with me because it drew a different picture of victimization and traumatization than the pathologizing view I had seen in most of the literature. Ervin Staub’s positive and empowering perspective was also much more in line with what I had observed in my own relatives who had experienced collective violence, and who were the most caring, loving, and socially responsible people I knew. During my years in graduate school, Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman also brought me and another fellow graduate student into a reconciliation radio project with the NGO Radio La Benevolencia Humanitarian Tools Foundation in Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (www.labenevolencija.org). I traveled to Rwanda twice to participate in workshops with the local staff. This experience was intense and deeply moving. I saw genocide survivors who had a particular, blank look in their eyes; and people doing community work on the sides of the street chopping away weeds with machetes, which made me shudder

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when I imagined what had happened on those streets with the very same instruments just a bit more than 10 years ago. It was also my first visit to a country that had been colonized by my own people—Germans were the first to colonize Rwanda, before the Belgians. For the first time I found myself on the other side, in the role of the historical perpetrator group, feeling deeply ridden by collective guilt and extremely insecure imagining how Rwandans might feel about the current presence of Europeans in their country. My work with the NGO suddenly felt like neocolonialism, and I noticed the inequality and power differences in almost any interaction I had. I spent hours every evening writing about these experiences and trying to make sense of the confusing feelings I had about being there and about my role. It was during this first trip when I had an interaction with a Burundian journalist, a Tutsi. When I mentioned to him that I was Jewish, he suddenly lightened up and gave me a big smile, saying: “Oh, then you are my sister!” He told me how Tutsis and Jews had both suffered through genocide and had these experiences in common, and throughout the workshop as well as afterwards when we exchanged a few e-mails he continued to call me his “sister.” I was touched by this and, admittedly, experienced it as validating and legitimizing my presence there— which I had previously been struggling with as an outsider in my White skin, with my European background and German name, constantly fully conscious of the colonial past and all the historical and present day baggage related to race, economic and political inequality, and so on. The intersectionality of social group memberships, of privilege and disadvantage, the fluidity of victim and perpetrator roles throughout different contexts and historical times and spaces had created walls, but also allowed building of bridges. By recognizing similarities between the Jewish and the Tutsis’ experiences, this Burundian journalist had implied that I was able to understand, and had implicitly granted me the right to be there and ask these questions.

Vicarious trauma and vicarious post-traumatic growth among descendants of survivors Victim consciousness This conversation with the Burundian journalist was probably one of the experiences that triggered my work on group-based victim consciousness (Vollhardt, 2009a, 2012a, b; Vollhardt & Bilali, forthcoming). I define victim consciousness as the personal centrality and relevance of the ingroup’s victimization to the self. I further distinguish the different ways in which these collective experiences of victimization can be construed: as unique and distinct from other groups’ experiences, which I refer to as “exclusive victim consciousness”—or as something that is shared with other victim groups, based on general similarities between the ingroup’s and other victim groups’ experiences, which I refer to as “inclusive victim consciousness.” Collective memory scholars, such as Daniel Levy and

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Natan Sznaider (e.g. 2007), have written about similar ideas, using the terms “universalistic” and “particularistic” to describe the different ways in which collective trauma can be construed. My research has focused on the consequences of these divergent construals of ingroup victimization for attitudes and behaviors towards other victim groups: the destructive and hostile reactions that can arise from exclusive victim consciousness, and the prosocial responses and solidarity between victim groups that can result from inclusive victim consciousness. Both paths are possible responses to collective trauma experienced by ingroup members and can be understood as manifestations of secondary trauma and secondary post-traumatic growth. Destructive responses to collective trauma are discussed more frequently in the literature and may be more commonplace (e.g. Bar-Tal et al., 2009). For example, Lickel, Miller, Stenstrom, Denson, and Schmader (2006) have described how social identification and negative group-based emotions in response to the ingroup’s victimization—such as anger, rage, and humiliation (see also Lindner, 2006; Ramanathapillai, 2006)—can give rise to what they refer to as “vicarious retribution.” The authors use this term to describe a desire for revenge for harmdoing that was not experienced personally, but by other ingroup members. In addition, often group members who did not commit the harmdoing themselves are targeted for revenge. Yet, this destructive response to collective trauma is not inevitable. An alternative, presumably less common response may occur when people recognize similarities between their group’s suffering and other groups’ experiences—what I refer to as inclusive victim consciousness—and are motivated to help these groups in order to prevent them from suffering in similar ways as the ingroup has (see also Staub, 2005; Staub & Vollhardt, 2008). These more prosocial, constructive responses to collective and secondary trauma can be considered akin to a host of reactions to vicarious trauma (i.e. trauma experienced through professional work with survivors) that have been referred to as “vicarious post-traumatic growth” (Arnold et al., 2005). Manifestations of secondary trauma and secondary post-traumatic growth: examples from research participants I have encountered both types of responses to secondary trauma in my research. For example, there are often two distinct reactions in the open-ended sections of my surveys, where participants can comment on the study. Some express positive and validating reactions, such as when participants agree with the inclusion of other groups’ suffering: “Congratulations on doing this comparative study, especially with Native Americans, who are still discriminated against by our government. Our American Genocide was as bad as its Armenian counterparts, but thieves are what they are. Let’s hope that studies like yours will transform us and make us better humans”

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(Armenian participant) or: “I like that you included other genocides in this survey. It’s important for us (Armenians) to remember that we are not unique, and that in order for us to create alliances with other victim groups, we have to be sensitive to their suffering/experience” (Armenian participant). In addition, many participants express positive affect and gratitude because these studies provide recognition of their group’s experiences, for example: “I am grateful for anyone being the voice of the victims who can no longer be a voice for themselves. Lest we forget …” (Armenian participant) or: “I appreciate these kinds of surveys, because I often feel like the Holocaust is not discussed these days as much as it should be” (Jewish participant). In contrast, other participants react negatively and express sadness or even anger, such as: “I wish I could write more, however I will have to take a break, go and rest. I am really sad, right now”; or “Frankly, I find your survey mediocre and full of poorly phrased questions that are irrelevant to the definition of genocide. The results of your survey and your analysis will contribute very little to the understanding of anything except levels of prejudice”; and “Your questions are meaningless, or based on ignorance.” It is important to try to understand the reasons for such strong affective responses and why they can differ so much, as well as to understand my own reactions to them as a researcher. I believe these reactions can be understood as manifestations of secondary trauma. Although my participants have not experienced the traumatic events personally, transmitted trauma narratives about family and group members who were targeted gives rise to strong emotions. This makes research on these topics difficult; and these difficulties need to be recognized by researchers who study genocide and mass violence and work with populations that have been targeted by such violence. This is true even for work with people who did not experience the traumatic events personally. It is also important to realize that no matter how sensitive one tries to be in such research, these kinds of responses always occur sooner or later. In all of my research projects I collaborate with members of the respective group and ask for feedback on the wording of questions, preferred terminology and words to avoid, about sensitive questions and how to communicate acknowledgment to participants, etc. Nevertheless, there are usually a few participants who are upset and bothered by some of the questions. The quantitative methodologies I use as a social psychologist, working primarily with questionnaires rather than conducting in-depth interviews, may further contribute to the negative reactions that are triggered by the questions. Questionnaires often do not allow discussing and resolving misunderstandings. Participants presumably feel frustrated when they are restricted to a close-ended answer format and predefined questions that do not do justice to the complexity of these issues. This frustration is then expressed in the comment sections I always add to my surveys for this reason. It is also important to reflect self-critically on my own reactions as a researcher. I have noticed that my participants’ responses have a strong impact on me. I feel validated and happy when I manage to make a connection with my participants

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and when they feel acknowledged and understood. I then feel at ease and content with my work, believing that I do something meaningful. When I receive angry or distressed responses, however, it hits me very hard. I do not want to upset my participants in this way, and it feels unethical and makes me question my research. In addition, it is in strong conflict with my self-concept of being able to understand these issues and relate to members of victim groups because of my own background. I explore this reaction in more depth in the following.

The question of legitimacy: who has the right to ask these questions and tell the stories? Inclusive victim consciousness is not only one of my primary areas of research, but it is also a position I personally deeply identify with. It is the way in which I relate to various groups that have been targeted by ethnic violence and genocide worldwide. I often tell the story of my mother’s family to establish trust and build connections with the groups I work with in my research. Usually this strategy is effective. For example, in focus group interviews with Nepali-Bhutanese refugees in the U.S., while introducing myself to the participants I explained that I became interested in these topics because my own mother and grandmother were once stateless refugees. This immediately seemed to resonate with my participants, who nodded and smiled empathically when hearing about this family story. In result, I felt more legitimate in asking my interview questions, and less intrusive. When I worked with Armenian Americans, I told them that my grandmother had survived a genocide, and again there was immediate sympathy and a personal connection, as many of the participants were also children and grandchildren of survivors. However, I also recognize that this approach is somewhat problematic and naïve, even presumptuous. I seem to assume that as a member of a group that has been targeted by genocide, and as a descendant and relative of refugees and survivors, I have a privileged understanding of these issues—a particular social knowledge and ability to take the perspective of other groups with similar experiences and a common fate. This kind of reasoning has been expressed by some scholars and activists in social movements coming from a position of disadvantage or oppression. For example, feminist standpoint theory (e.g. Harding, 2004) argues that our social positions shape our understanding of the world and of social phenomena; and that marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that facilitates awareness of certain social issues. Thus, feminist standpoint theory reverses the meaning of disadvantage and argues that this position can actually turn into “epistemic privilege” (e.g. Harding, 2004, p. 9; see also Narayan, 1988), giving rise to inquiry about power and oppression. This position is parallel to the perceived privileged understanding of issues related to collective violence and trauma from the perspective of targeted groups. A similar position is reflected in statements of activists from such groups that have also engaged in collective action on behalf of other disadvantaged groups.

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For example, many Jewish Americans were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, fighting for equal rights for African Americans (Greenberg, 2006). The rhetoric of these activists often included the implicit or explicit reasoning that because of the historical experience of persecution and discrimination, Jews had a special understanding of these issues and a resulting obligation to act when it happens to others. There are several other cases in which this perceived privileged understanding of what it means to suffer from collective violence has been linked to a perceived obligation to help others who are being targeted (see also Vollhardt, 2012a). For example, in the Jewish community, this is reflected across various situations in the following statements: As Jews we know what it means to suffer, and we should join this fight. It’s our fight too. (Kamenetz, 2003, in an article about immigrant workers’ rights) The Bible tells us that the seminal experience of slavery was meant to teach us that we are never to subjugate others precisely because we know what it means to suffer. “Do not shun a stranger, because you yourself were strangers in Egypt,” the Bible reminds us. (Rabbi Stern, 2004, in a message about Passover) When Doris Apsan Sorell, 83, saw a newscast in August about the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, it conjured up horrific memories of her time at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Earlier that same day, Sorell had received a reparations check for the slave labor she did during the war. With the images of emaciated Sudanese children in her mind, Sorell sent all $3,043 from the check to a Jewish organization that provides relief in Darfur. “I want the Jews to help the Sudanese people”, said Sorell … The Jews know what genocide is. We need to show our compassion and interest in other people, as well. (Popper, 2004, in an article about Jewish relief efforts for refugees from Darfur) We can see from these quotes that a perceived privileged, collective understanding of collective trauma is derived from the Jewish experience of persecution and violence—reflected in statements that all boil down to the idea: “as Jews we know what it means to suffer.” (A sentiment that, of course, can be found in many other communities with a long history of persecution and oppression, such as among Armenians or Palestinians: e.g. Azarian-Cecchato, 2010; Khalili, 2007.) We can also see from these quotes that, along with the idea of a privileged understanding of collective trauma, people might develop a sense of responsibility to prevent other groups from suffering (Staub & Vollhardt, 2008; Vollhardt, 2009a, b, 2012a). For example, Jewish leaders have stated: “As Jews, we have a particular moral responsibility to speak out and take action against genocide”

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(Galchinsky, 2008, p. 83); and Armenian American leaders have said in response to the genocide in Darfur: “Armenian Americans, as citizens with a direct connection to the Armenian genocide … bear a special responsibility to prevent atrocities all over the world” (The Armenian Weekly, 2011). Likewise, referring to the situation of Muslim Americans, Japanese Americans have stated that “Japanese Americans who experienced that hatred and incarceration have a responsibility to speak out at every opportunity” (Murray, 2007, p. 449). However, while it can give rise to solidarity and positive relations across group lines, the assumption of a privileged understanding of suffering based on one’s own group’s experiences is also in many ways problematic. First, this position may be fundamentally flawed in assuming universalisms, as some critiques of feminist standpoint theorists have stated (see New, 1998). This critique is mirrored in so-called “third world” or “postcolonial feminism,” which also has warned against neglecting important differences in experiences of women in general and within the feminist movement (e.g. Narayan, 1997). Specifically, some feminists have emphasized that the oppression faced by White women is different from the oppression faced by women who are also disadvantaged based on race, ethnicity, and locality (e.g. hooks, 1990; Mohanty, 1988). Acknowledging the intersectionality of group memberships and oppression (e.g. Cole, 2009) is important in order to acknowledge the distinct suffering of each group despite some shared experiences. If differences within experiences of oppression are not acknowledged, it can give rise to backlash and reduce positive effects of recognizing similarities (Vollhardt, 2013). Accordingly, claims of similar experiences of suffering by Jewish Civil Rights activists who took this perceived commonality as a starting point for ally activism was often met with skepticism in the African American community and sometimes even rejected. One reason for this was the very important difference of skin color and White privilege (Greenberg, 2006). Similarly, in focus groups I conducted with Armenian Americans, participants insisted that despite some similarities between the Jewish and the Armenian experience of genocide, there was a crucial difference in regard to the widespread denial that Armenians are still facing. In general, glossing over differences in the interest of highlighting commonalities can impede efforts toward social change and therefore be detrimental for minority groups (Saguy, Tausch, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2009). A second risk is that in assuming similarities between victim groups or even within a given group, and in believing that one is able to understand reactions to collective trauma because of one’s background, one may impose one’s personal understanding and way of coping with this past. For example, in my research on collective victimhood I have focused on what I, admittedly, assume to be a more empowering, constructive way of making sense of victimization—phenomena such as altruism born of suffering and inclusive victim consciousness. Although I try to address and incorporate other ways of understanding collective victimization, I may be imposing my own way of making sense of what happened to my group and to my family, while being blind to other subjective views. Therefore,

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I have to ask myself whether I have the right to assume that I understand other groups’ views from my own position. In fact, I must even question whether I even have the right to make this assumption among my own social group(s). Indeed, can we ever really understand the subjective suffering of another person? My mixed background obviously further complicates these issues. Sometimes, and especially when working with Jewish samples, I find myself wishing I could explain that my German name is not the whole story and that I am also the descendant of survivors—as if this would give me more legitimacy to study these issues. This thought process is again based on the problematic assumption of a privileged understanding of suffering. Of course I also conveniently ignore my family ties to the “perpetrator group,” which happens easily and naturally because I do not identify or have much contact with that side of my family.

Conclusion and implications for researchers To conclude, I believe it is important for researchers who come into research on collective trauma with personal ties to family narratives about mass violence and oppression to be very mindful of the implications, and to not impose their own way of making sense of these experiences. It is crucial to self-critically reflect on one’s theoretical framework and the personal roots this framework may have, and to acknowledge differences despite the desire one may have to see commonalities in suffering and collective victimization. Furthermore, I believe it is important to avoid the assumption of a privileged understanding derived from one’s own sense of collective victimhood. This position is problematic for several reasons discussed earlier. In some ways, the researcher’s secondary trauma resulting from family members’ experience of collective victimization may actually create an obstacle to empathizing with and listening openly to others’ collective trauma narratives. Because of a relevant personal background and the perception that “we know what it means to suffer,” there may be a greater danger of imposing one’s views on the research topic—precisely because it is so deeply personal and tied to one’s own identity, self-concept, and group image. Thus, instead of creating a privileged understanding and epistemological advantage, it may actually blur our understanding and give rise to false empathy. If we are not cautious, this background may prevent us from learning from other individuals’ and groups’ perspectives, because we may inadvertently impose our own outlook on the lessons and legacies of collective trauma. Therefore, it is crucial to include a reflective and self-reflective process in this work, and to take methodological steps to help avoid these pitfalls: such as asking participants explicitly about what one has missed or which research questions they find important to ask in this context. While this is obviously easier to do within qualitative research methods and more common within this paradigm, quantitative methods also allow for incorporating elements such as open-ended comment sections that should be included in the analysis and interpretation of the

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results as well as in the development of new research questions. Only through such additional steps will it be possible to reduce the risk of falsely presuming that “we know what it means to suffer.”

References Alexander, J., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N., & Sztompka, P. (2004). Cultural trauma and collective identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Arnold, A., Calhoun, L.G., Tedeschi, R., & Cann, A. (2005). Vicarious posttraumatic growth in psychotherapy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 45, 239–263. Azarian-Ceccato, N. (2010). Reverberations of the Armenian Genocide narrative’s intergenerational transmission and the task of not forgetting. Narrative Inquiry, 20, 106–123. Baranowsky, A., Young, M., Johnson-Douglas, S., Williams-Keeler, L., & McCarrey, M. (1998). PTSD transmission: A review of secondary traumatization in Holocaust survivor families. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 39, 247–256. Bar-Tal, D. (2000). Shared beliefs in a society: Social psychological analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bar-Tal, D., Chernyak-Hai, L., Schori, N., & Gundar, A. (2009). A sense of self-perceived collective victimhood in intractable conflicts. International Review of the Red Cross, 91, 229–258. Cole, E.R. (2009). Intersectionality and research in psychology. American Psychologist, 64, 170–180. Danieli, Y. (Ed.) (1998). International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma. New York: Plenum Press. Dekel, R., & Goldblatt, H. (2008). Is there intergenerational transmission of trauma? The case of combat veterans’ children. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78, 281–289. Galchinsky, M. (2008). Jews and human rights. Dancing at three weddings. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Greenberg, C. (2006). Troubling the waters: Black–Jewish relations in the American century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Grossman, F., Sorsoli, L., & Kia-Keating, M. (2006). A gale force wind: Meaning making by male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 76, 434–443. Harding, S. (Ed.) (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies. New York: Routledge. Hooks, B. (1990). Yearning. Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Kamenetz, A. (2003). A push for immigrant workers’ rights. The Forward, August. URL: http://forward.com/articles/8023/a-push-for-immigrant-workers-rights/#ixzz1vQIWJWJw Khalili, L. (2007). Heroes and martyrs of Palestine —The politics of national commemoration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Krous, T., & Nauta, M.M. (2005). Values, motivations, and learning experiences of future professionals: Who wants to serve underserved populations? Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 36, 688–694. Levy, D., & Sznaider, N. (2007). The cosmopolitization of Holocaust memory: From Jewish to human experience. In J. Gerson & D. Wolf (Eds.), Sociology confronts the

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Holocaust. Memories and identities in Jewish diasporas (pp. 313–330). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lickel, B., Miller, N., Stenstrom, D., Denson, T., & Schmader, T. (2006). Vicarious retribution: The role of collective blame in intergroup aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 372–390. Lindner, E. (2006). Making enemies: Humiliation and international conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Mohanty, C.T. (1988). Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review, 30, 61–88. Murray, A. (2007). Historical memories of the Japanese American internment and the struggle for redress. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Narayan, U. (1988). Working together across difference: Some considerations on emotions and political practice. Hypatia, 3, 31–47. Narayan, U. (1997). Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions, and third world feminism. New York: Routledge. New, C. (1998). Realism, deconstruction and the feminist standpoint. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 28, 349–372. Phinney, J.S., & Ong, A.D. (2007). Conceptualization and measurement of ethnic identity: Current status and future directions. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 54, 271–281. Popper, N. (2004). Donors mobilize resources to ease Sudan’s humanitarian crisis. The Forward, November. URL: http://forward.com/articles/4502/donors-mobilizeresources-to-ease-sudanes-humani/ Rabbi Stern (2004). It all depends on what you do with suffering: A Passover perspective. Messages from Rabbi Stern, Arden Heights Boulevard Jewish Center. URL: http:// www.ahbjewishcenter.org/message9.htm Ramanathapillai, R. (2006). The politicizing of trauma: A case study of Sri Lanka. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 12, 1–18. Saguy, T., Tausch, N., Dovidio, J. F., & Pratto, F. (2009). The irony of harmony: Intergroup contact can produce false expectations for equality. Psychological Science, 20, 114–121. Staub, E. (2003). The psychology of good and evil: Why children, adults, and groups help and harm others. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Staub, E. (2005). The roots of goodness: The fulfillment of basic human needs and the development of caring, helping and nonaggression, inclusive caring, moral courage, active bystandership, and altruism born of suffering. In G. Carlo & C. Edwards (Eds.), Moral motivation through the life span (pp. 33–72). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Staub, E., & Vollhardt, J. (2008). Altruism born of suffering: The roots of caring and helping after experiences of personal and political victimization. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78, 267–280. Stola, D. (2005). Fighting against the shadows: The anti-Zionist campaign of 1968. In R. Blobaum (Ed.), Antisemitism and its opponents in modern Poland (pp. 284–293). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Suedfeld, P. (Ed.) (2001). Light from the ashes: Social science careers of young Holocaust refugees and survivors. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Szaynok, B. (2005). The role of antisemitism in postwar Polish–Jewish relations. In R. Blobaum (Ed.), Antisemitism and its opponents in modern Poland (pp. 265–283). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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The Armenian Weekly (2011). ANCA asks Armenian Americans to protest new Sudanese attacks on civilians. URL: http://www.armenianweekly.com/2011/06/17/anca-asksarmenian-americans-to-protest-new-sudanese-attacks-on-civilians/ Unger, R. (2000). Outsiders inside: Positive marginality and social change. Journal of Social Issues, 56, 163–179. Vollhardt, J.R. (2009a). The role of victim beliefs in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Risk or potential for peace? Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 15, 135–159. Vollhardt, J.R. (2009b). Altruism born of suffering and prosocial behavior following adverse life events: A review and conceptual integration. Social Justice Research, 22, 53–97. Vollhardt, J.R. (2012a). Collective victimization. In L. Tropp (Ed.), Oxford handbook of intergroup conflict (pp. 136–157). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Vollhardt, J.R. (2012b). Interpreting rights and duties after mass violence. Culture and Psychology, 18, 133–145. Vollhardt, J.R. (2013). “Crime against humanity” or “Crime against Jews”? The importance of acknowledgment in construals of the Holocaust for intergroup relations. Journal of Social Issues, 69, 144–161. Vollhardt, J.R. & Bilali, R. (forthcoming). The role of inclusive and exclusive victim consciousness in predicting intergroup attitudes: Findings from Rwanda, Burundi, and DRC. Political Psychology. Vollhardt, J.R. & Staub, E. (2011). Inclusive altruism born of suffering: The effects of past suffering on prosocial behavior toward outgroups. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 81, 307–315. Wayment, H. (2004). It could have been me: Vicarious victims and disaster-focused distress. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 515–528. Wohl, M., & van Bavel, J. (2011). Is identifying with a historically victimized group good or bad for your health? Transgenerational post-traumatic stress and collective victimization. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 818–824.

Chapter 6

Intersectional traumatisation The psychological impact of researching genocidal violence on researchers Giorgia Doná

In this chapter, I adopt an intersectional approach to examine the impact of personal and social identities on traumatisation processes of national and international researchers of genocide and socio-political violence. I problematise the implicit assumption that primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation are independent and mutually exclusive, and I introduce the concept intersectional traumatisation to explain how different traumatic processes intersect on multiple and often simultaneous levels through the act of listening, imagining, empathising and experiencing. A case of an international researcher shows how an outside researcher’s direct exposure to violence echoes her listening to narratives of violence; an example of the returnee researcher highlights the psychological impact of the researcher’s diasporic ethnic identity on her ability to cope with research material; and a case of a researcher who is both a survivor and related to the perpetrator group demonstrates the burden of researching the legacy of violence when the researcher’s personal and social identity intersects with those of both victim and perpetrator groups. I argue that intersectional traumatisation can contribute to advancing our understanding of researchers’ traumatisation processes when the study of violence takes place in contexts that are themselves violent.

Primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation The historian Eric Hobsbawm has remarked that the twentieth century is the age of ‘extremes’: a time characterised by wars, ethnic conflicts, refugees, terrorism and natural disasters (Hobsbawm 1994). Within a global environment of ‘extremes’, trauma has exited the room of the psychotherapist and clinical psychologist to enter the realm of the social and everyday life. Miller and Tougaw (2002) write that ‘if every age has its symptoms, ours appears to be the age of trauma’ (p. 1) whose popularity fits within a western medicalisation of societal distress and is symptomatic of a post-modern condition of undermined social stability and weakening of institutions that provide meanings (Bracken 2001). From the Greek verb titrosko – to pierce – trauma refers to an injury (Papadopoulos 2002) that can be physical but also psychological. In the age of

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‘extremes’, different conflicts are associated with different kinds of psychological wounds. If ‘shell shock’ was introduced to describe psychological harm resulting from combat in the First World War, trauma and post-traumatic stress are dominant concepts used to explain the psychological effects of contemporary wars and ethnic conflicts on their victims (Jones and Wessely 2005). Trauma and post-traumatic symptoms have been documented for general populations after war and genocide (Munyandamutsa et al. 2012; Neria et al. 2010), children exposed to massive violence (Gupta 1996; Klingman 2006; Schaal and Elbert 2006; Veale and Doná 2002) and war widows (Schaal et al. 2011) amongst others. Genocide and war trauma has become so widespread as to the point of acquiring a hegemonic position in the articulation of collective suffering during mass violence (Summerfield 2000; Zarowski and Pederson, 2000). Given its prominence, it is worth noting that war trauma has been almost exclusively used to refer to the suffering of victims, and its association with victimhood has marginalised the trauma of other social actors such as bystanders, perpetrators, helpers or researchers who are not direct targets of violence yet occupy spaces of violence. The literature on violence in intimate relations or social violence in western societies differentiates between primary and secondary traumatisation, and between secondary and vicarious traumatisation. Primary traumatisation refers to the psychological impact resulting from direct exposure to violence while secondary or vicarious traumatisation describes the indirect effects of violence (Jenkins and Baird 2002) on those who are not directly exposed to conflict, such as survivors’ family members, friends, neighbours, helpers and community members. Secondary and/or vicarious traumatisation has been used alongside ‘burn out’ or ‘compassion fatigue’ to describe the effects of working with traumatised persons on those who help them (Jenkins and Baird, 2002). More specifically, vicarious traumatisation originates from clinicians’ awareness of the effects of therapeutic work with survivors of sexual violence onto the therapists themselves (McCann and Perlman 1990; Schauben and Frazier 1995), and describes therapists’ reactions to clients’ traumatic material (McCann and Perlman 1990). In this chapter, I will distinguish secondary traumatisation, which describes the traumatic experiences of families, relatives and friends of direct targets of violence, from vicarious traumatisation, which refers to the traumas experienced by professionals and researchers who are exposed to violence through listening to personal and collective narratives of violence. While much is known about primary traumatisation during conflict, less is known about secondary and vicarious traumatisation. Only recently has vicarious traumatisation been applied to contexts of war and genocide to describe the effects of violence on humanitarian professionals working in complex geo-political environments. High rates of direct and indirect exposure to life threatening events result in rescue workers manifesting post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety (Erikson et al. 2001; Connorton et al. 2001), with the most frequently reported post-traumatic symptoms being those of an intrusive nature (Argentero

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and Setti 2011). Psychosocial and organisational support for mental health workers (Varley et al. 2012) and aid workers more generally (Argentero and Setti 2011; Connerton et al. 2001) is usually recommended to address these symptoms. Students and academics who research violence are also likely to be psychologically affected by listening to traumatic narratives of individual and collective violence, and to be exposed both indirectly and directly to violence as they work in conflictive field-sites where researchers and subjects ‘inhabit the same complex world’ (Jenkins 1994: 434). Yet, an understanding of researchers’ primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation is missing both from the existing literature on traumatisation that focuses on victim trauma (and to a limited extend on the helping professions) as well as the methodological literature on researching violence. The latter has focused on researcher’s positionality, participant– researcher relationships and ethics of researching conflict (Doná 2011; Sriram et al. 2009) rather than on the effects of researching violence on researchers themselves. The few texts in which the effects of researching violence are reported include Pollard’s (2009) small study of sixteen doctoral students in anthropology, whose reported emotions during and after fieldwork range from feeling alone, depressed or desperate to being disappointed, disturbed, fearful, frustrated, guilty, paranoid, stressed and unwell. Nordstrom and Robben (1995) use the term ‘existential shock’ to describe the ‘disorientation about the boundaries between life and death’ (p. 13) that comes with researching violence. Living in situations of violence while researching violence, a highly personal and context-specific research phenomenon, is examined through the lens of vulnerability and moral uncertainties (Varley 2008), fear (Green 1995), despair (Olujic 1995), ambiguity and ambivalence (Winkler 1995). This chapter aims to address the existing gap in the literature on researchers’ traumatisation by examining the relevance of primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation to our understanding of researchers’ psychological responses to studying socio-political violence, war and genocide. It aims to advance our theoretical understanding of trauma processes through the connections that exist among different kinds of traumas, and to contribute to the methodological literature on researching conflicts through an examination of the impact of researchers’ intersectional identities on traumatisation processes. I use the term intersectionality to refer to the ways in which social and personal identities crisscross and impact on traumatisation processes while I introduce the new concept ‘intersectional traumatisation’ to show how different kinds of traumatic processes are interconnected and intersect on multiple and often simultaneous levels. While primary, secondary and vicarious trauma are useful concepts that help to analytically distinguish different phenomena, there is often an implicit assumption that they are independent and mutually exclusive. Our understanding of primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation, which is developed in contexts of peaceful societies, is problematic when applied to research on violence that takes place in violent contexts. The new concept intersectional traumatisation

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offers a valuable contribution to ongoing debates on war and genocide trauma by introducing a more sophisticated approach to our current analysis of the relationship among primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation processes.

The psychological effects of studying violence on researchers: an intersectional analysis Intersectionality is a methodology for studying ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations’ (McCall 2005). Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) first introduced the concept of intersectionality in her work on sexual abuse of Black women, where she argued that the consideration of independent social categories like gender and ethnicity did not capture the experiences of marginalisation of Black women in society. Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualisations of oppression within society, such as racism, sexism, homophobia and religion-based bigotry, do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the ‘intersection’ of multiple forms of discrimination. Hence, intersectionality explains how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability and other axes of identity intersect on multiple and often simultaneous levels contributing to systematic social inequality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991). In this chapter, an intersectional approach is adopted to examine the intersection of personal and social identities of national and international researchers who study violence, and to explore the differential effects of intersectionality on researchers’ traumatisation processes. Similarly to Crenshaw, I argue that classical conceptualisations like ethnicity or race are not independently sufficient to understand researchers’ identities and traumatisation processes. While Crenshaw uses intersectionality to highlight how the intersection of multiple categories contributes to systematic social inequality, this chapter shows that an intersectional analysis of researchers’ multiple social categories can also help to reduce the formation of hierarchies of suffering and to overcome existing forms of discrimination during conflict and its aftermath. Since the end of the Second World War, wars and socio-political violence have erupted across the world: in Africa and Asia following the liberation wars and post-colonial conflicts, in the Caucasus in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and across the Middle East, Northern Africa and Central Asia since the beginning of the new millennium. While most of these conflicts are situated in non-western contexts, research on war and socio-political violence continues to attract researchers located in universities in the global north, who often hire research assistants from war-torn societies, use local interpreters and cultural brokers, and develop collaborations with national research partners (Doná 2007). The following section examines the intersectionality of racial, ethnic, diasporic and transnational identities as well as professional roles and personal experiences of international and national researchers of the Rwandan genocide to problematise

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the separation among primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation in the context of post-conflict Rwanda. The cases presented in this chapter are about three women researchers. Gender is an important dimension of intersectionality; while I do not explicitly analyse it, I use gender as the common starting point for the analysis of other relevant components of intersectionality like ethnicity, professional roles and migratory experiences.

Researching the Rwandan genocide and its legacy I went to Rwanda to research violence and its psychological and social effects on ordinary Rwandans, especially children, eighteen months after the end of the Rwandan genocide that took place in 1994. At the time of the genocide the Rwandan population of approximately seven million people was composed of three ethnic groups: the majority Hutu (85 per cent), and the minority Tutsi (12–13 per cent) and Twa (1–2 per cent). Recent Rwandan history has been characterised by extreme genocidal violence during which almost one million Tutsi and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists between April and July 1994. Since then the Tutsi-led Government of National Unity has been ruling the country. I lived in the country for four years in the aftermath of genocide during which time insecurity was prevalent in the northwest region, massive refugee repatriations took place from Eastern Congo (then Zaire) into Rwanda, and the war between the Rwandan army and rebel groups that included Rwandan Hutu refugees in Eastern Congo began. Although the genocide had officially ended, low intensity violence and insecurity continued during my time in Rwanda when the separation between peace and violence was still blurred. After leaving the country at the end of 1999, I began to research the psychological impact of violence on the lives of Rwandans in exile in the United Kingdom, Uganda and Belgium where I was exposed to the transnational effects of violence. In 2000, 2009 and 2011, I returned to Rwanda to conduct additional fieldwork on the long-term psychosocial consequences of violence. I experienced different degrees of proximity to violence across geographical, temporal and emotional spaces when listening to narratives of violence in the safety of a European neighborhood, in Uganda where refugees felt constantly under threat, and in Rwanda where low intensity violence persisted after the end of genocide. Since 1996, I have conducted research both as an independent researcher and collaboratively in research teams composed of Rwandans, Africans and Europeans. Through a process of self-reflexivity of these long-lasting relationships I show how racial, ethnic, diasporic and transnational identities as well as professional roles and personal experiences intersect to bring about intersectional forms of traumatisation that contribute to differently articulate social suffering. Together with national and international colleagues I have been listening to personal narratives of violence of genocide survivors, their rescuers, unaccompanied children,

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bystanders and refugees for the past seventeen years. My colleagues and I have documented the stories of separated and orphan children during the genocide, and we have listened to their difficulties in integrating into extended or foster families following the deaths of their parents. We have listened to the long-term impact of violence on ordinary Rwandans’ feelings of fear and insecurity, their unacknowledged suffering, and threats to personal safety in exile. Such sustained listening to traumatic stories of mass violence and its effects would classify my colleagues and I as professionals likely to have experienced vicarious traumatisation. At the same time, long-term residence in Rwanda when socio-political violence was still continuing in the aftermath of the genocide meant that my colleagues and I were directly exposed to insecurity, social, criminal and accidental violence ranging from threats to personal safety, to murder of friends and road accidents. We experienced the limits of trust, silences and self-censorship, frustration at the course of events, sadness at the loss of family members and friends, and fear for our lives and those of colleagues and friends. Many of these emotions are associated with primary and secondary traumatisation. Hence, in post-genocide Rwanda, primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation processes were closely interrelated.

Intersectionality and traumatisation During the course of collaborative research on violence and its legacy, I noticed that there were differences in the ways in which international, regional and national researchers expressed distress when studying the effects of violence amidst violence. In the following section, I compare three cases: the international researcher, the diasporic returnee researcher and the survivor researcher affiliated to the perpetrator group. The first example shows how an outside researcher’s direct exposure to violence echoes indirect stories of violence; the second case analyses the psychological impact of the researcher’s diasporic ethnic identity on her ability to cope with research material; and the third one shows the burden of researching the legacy of violence when the researcher’s personal and social identity is closely associated with those of the ethnic groups of both victims and perpetrators. The international researcher As a European woman who went to live and work in Rwanda in the aftermath of mass ethnic violence, I was a visible outsider. My race, language and status, which carried symbols of membership of the international community, placed me in the category of the outside researcher/humanitarian worker prone to experience secondary or vicarious trauma (rather than primary traumatisation). However, when I arrived in Rwanda in 1996, the legacy of the genocide was palpable and low intensity violence was still taking place. My experience of direct exposure to violence and of listening to violent stories echoed each other. I was regularly stopped at checkpoints on the way to and from home and the

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office. Checkpoints were a source of anxiety that not only reminded me that the country was still not safe, that perpetrators of the genocide were still being searched for and that military opponents of the current government were moving around. These daily occurrences took place while I was listening to survivors’ stories detailing how checkpoints were used to identify ethnic targets and political opponents during the genocide. I was permitted to travel to the northwest of the country in convoys, and I was only allowed restricted access to rural villages for security reasons. This not only made me feel exposed and vulnerable to the ongoing violence but it also acted as a reminder that supporters of the former Hutu president whose assassination sparked the genocide lived in the northwest of the country. I was unsure about whom to trust, and my perception of the situation ranged from a naïve sense of safety to heighten suspicions followed by withdrawal and exit to safe areas across the border. The incident that most affected me was when two men with machetes entered the compound in which I lived. They jumped over the compound wall, and broke the glass of the back door of the house where I was staying on my own. Hearing the noise of the broken glass, the house guard made a high-pitched sound that forced the burglars to run away and guards from neighbouring houses to come to the rescue. The traumatic aspect of the incident was the realisation that the burglars had broken the glass with machetes. I had listened to survivors recollecting how machetes had been used to clear ground, to maim victims, in the rape of women and young girls, and to kill. Suddenly the listening and the real threat to my body came together and echoed each other. They were expressed through the shaking of my body, which was suddenly transformed into an object of violence, and its vulnerability exposed. Soon afterwards, I went to live with other expatriates. Because of my expatriate status, professional role and social networks, I responded to violence differently than my Rwandan colleagues. Safety nets were in place to make me feel less vulnerable and more supported. I was registered with the embassy of my country; I knew that through my walkie-talkie I was connected to the United Nations security team; I shared a house with other expatriates who became my fictive family. Together we shared our worries and vented our fears and frustrations. We regularly left the country on rest and recuperation trips. I remember how as soon as we crossed the border we would make comments like ‘the air suddenly feels less heavy here’ or ‘people look much more relaxed here’. When interacting with Ugandans we would observe how much more freely they spoke about the social and political situation in their country. We were surprised at the sense of relief we felt and also astonished at the fact that we had not noticed how uptight we were until we crossed the border. We had introjected fear, self-censorship and tension in ways we were not aware of until when we left the social and physical spaces of violence (Doná 2011). In her essay, ‘Living in a state of fear’, Green (1995) writes about the ways in which terror, most of which was a ‘visceral rather than a visual experience’

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(p. 108) had become routinised in Guatemala, and the effects of this practice on her ethnographic participants and herself. She noticed that the stories of internalised self-censorship, terror and fear that she listened to for her research descended onto her life in similar ways. While fear is a response to danger, in Guatemala fear had been transformed from an acute reaction into a chronic condition that destabilised social relations and penetrated social memory. This affected Green’s sense of reality and resulted in internalised self-censorship and mistrust that her participants also felt. ‘I came to realize that terror’s power, its matter-of-factness, is exactly about doubting one’s own perceptions of reality. The routinisation of terror is what fuels its power’ (p. 108). Like Green, I experienced the connection that existed between my fears and vulnerabilities and those of research participants and colleagues. Yet because of my race and status I felt relatively protected from certain kinds of violence such as ethnically motivated attacks, while I felt more vulnerable to other forms of violence like politically motivated attacks, theft, robbery and road accidents. I also knew that as a foreigner I had a permanent exit option if I chose to exercise it, and this contributed to rendering me more resilient and able to cope better with the situation. The intersectionality of different social categories is expressed through what can be described as ‘echoed’ emotions and experiences. Researchers share participants’ emotional states through the intersection of their roles as observers/ listeners and simultaneously inhabitants of spaces of violence. Direct and indirect exposure to traumatic episodes of violence have left a mark on my psyche, which manifests itself in dreams of Rwanda as a place of danger and sometimes of men with machetes or soldiers with firearms searching for me as they did for the victims of the genocide. When I see people carrying guns I keep a safe distance, and I am uneasy when I hear fireworks because they remind me of the sounds of guns fired at night in the Rwandan capital Kigali. My interactions with participants, colleagues and with the research material itself were affected by these experiences. I adopted different mechanisms to deal with the experience of simultaneously researching violence and living with the legacy of violence. Avoidance was one of these mechanisms. There were questions I could not bring myself to ask my Rwandan colleagues about their whereabouts and experiences of the genocide. When in 2009, I finally asked one of my ex-colleagues about his experiences during the genocide, and I told him that I had not been able to do so when we worked together, he replied that it was better this way, and that he himself would have not been able to talk to me about what happened to him. When we met in the 1990s and we researched violence together it was too painful and complicated for him to tell me about his own experiences of the genocide as a Rwandan of mixed ethnic identity, and for me to know the truth. Another mechanism my colleagues and I used to deal with violence was through emotional distance and numbing. We collectively coped with the traumatic research material by distancing ourselves from its emotional content. We compartmentalised information, and we hung on to the technicalities of methods

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and analysis to cope with the overwhelming emotions associated with the content of some interviews. Time delay was another mechanism. I have not yet analysed the content of interviews collected in Rwanda in 2009 because they resonate with my suffering, and I have been slow to transcribe other interview material collected with Rwandan refugees living in Europe and Africa. Having lived in Rwanda is also associated with my post-traumatic growth (Cohen and Collens 2012). It has enhanced my confidence in being able to survive in difficult circumstances, it has taught me to manage people, and it has strengthened my commitment to social rights. It has allowed me to encounter wonderful individuals who have become long-lasting friends, and strengthened my bonds with those who became my ‘fictive’ family in Rwanda. I have greater understanding of conflict situations, and I have become more tolerant of antagonism and better able to handle other people’s traumatic stories. I have gained a greater appreciation of the value of life and I am better at distinguishing what matters and what appears to matter in life. The diasporic returnee researcher Through the examination of my role as an outside researcher of violence who also inhabited spaces of violence, I have shown how primary and vicarious traumatisation are not mutually exclusive but rather intersect to add complexity to our understanding of researchers’ traumas. The existence of complex traumas that coexist in different combinations is highlighted in the case of some of my colleagues who were members of the ethnic/social groups involved in mass violence either as victims, perpetrators or bystanders. Colette1 is a Tutsi woman who grew up in Eastern Congo (then Zaire). She was not directly persecuted during the genocide even though she was affected by it when she received phone calls from family members and friends in danger asking for help or when she heard of losses and deaths among the Rwandan Patriotic Army, mostly composed of Tutsi from the diaspora, which included people she was related to or she knew. She was not in the country at the time of genocide. She had actually never lived in Rwanda before the genocide, and she did not know the country well as she told me while watching the landscape of northern Rwanda from the car window during one of our field visits to interview children and their families to the border towns in the north-west of the country. Our admiration of the scenery was accompanied by a feeling of uneasiness as we moved from one town to the next in the awareness that the region was, at the beginning of 1996, an area of insecurity and cross-border rebel incursions. We both welcomed arriving in Gisenyi town before sunset when an informal curfew to visiting rural areas was in place. She was more uneasy than I was, as shown by her hesitation in getting out of the car until we reached the main town. She knew that most Hutu supporters of the assassinated president Habyarimana lived in this part of the country, and she was afraid of

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them. I was more naïve about ethnic and regional politics inside Rwanda, and I had chosen to ignore them as a defence mechanism. In certain ways our personal histories were similar. We both were women, migrants, professionals, and we both lived outside Rwanda at the time of genocide. We had experienced mass violence indirectly, and this type of exposure placed us in the category of those likely to experience vicarious traumatisation through listening to stories of mass violence. Yet, the intersectionality of our respective racial, ethnic and migratory experiences marked us apart. Our social histories and experiences were different in many ways, and that included our personal and social traumatisation histories. As a Tutsi member of the targeted group during the genocide, Colette was a physical outsider yet an emotional insider to the imagined spaces of ethnic violence. Although not a direct target of violence, she had experienced it indirectly when members of her extended family living in Rwanda had been persecuted and killed. Additionally as a diasporic Tutsi, she had friends and family members fighting with the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army, some of who had died during the conflict. Hence, she was also likely to have experienced secondary traumatisation. She identified with the Tutsi inside the country who had been exterminated and those in the diaspora who had returned home at the end of the genocide. In the course of our research on the effects of genocide on children, Colette was listening to stories of genocide violence and its legacy in different ways. She was collecting information on the effects of the genocide on children while simultaneously listening to stories of the genocide of children she knew in her personal life. She was an individual listener and a group participant, individual outsider to violence and group member inhabiting spaces of violence. Her vicarious traumatisation resulting from the ongoing listening to traumatic stories of past and present violence intersected with her secondary traumatisation as a family member, friend and relative of victims. Also, as a member of the victim group, she identified with the primary traumatisation of the members of her own ethnic group. Thus for Colette, secondary and vicarious traumatisation processes were ‘blurred’ processes. They did not simply ‘add’ to each other but rather merged to generate more complex traumas through associative imaginations. The intersectionality of Colette’s ethnic and diasporic identities influenced her research experience, positionality and empathic listening. The distinction between empathy with the victims and identification with them was at times ‘blurred’. Consequently, she found it difficult to listen to counter-narratives of Hutu victims of violence or perpetrators because this type of listening required detachment, dis-identification with the (Tutsi) victim and empathy with the (Hutu) aggressor. She had a tendency to interpret Hutu stories in stereotypical fashion, in line with the national narrative promoted by the Tutsi-led Government. Colette was coping with the research material by empathising with the victim side, and detaching herself from or ignoring controversial stories. Within this national post-genocide narrative, counsellors and helpers also adopted these mechanisms to cope with overwhelming emotions. For instance, soon after the

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genocide ended, Rwandan counsellors became aware that they were not able to cope with perpetrators’ traumatic material, and chose to concentrate on counselling traumatised victims (personal communication in Kigali 1996). Most diasporic returnees were unfamiliar not only with the country’s geography but also with pre-genocide relations of trust and cooperation that existed between Hutu and Tutsi. Upon return, there was a tendency to apply social stereotypes to the Hutus as a group, which in the wake of recent violence meant that the collective stereotype of the Hutu was that of génocidaires (genocide perpetrators) or supporters (Elthringham 2004). This resulted in mistrust of out-group Hutu members, and this perception affected interviews and researcher–participant interactions. The importance of developing trusting relationship when sensitive topics are discussed and when vulnerable groups are researched has been documented (Hynes 2003; Miller 2004). However, research relationships are influenced by relationships of trust and mistrust that exist in society (Beristain and Doná 1998). Social mistrust correlated with mistrust in research relationships, and this resulted in relations that were carefully managed so as to avoid direct confrontation with the past, and focused on non-controversial, present-day and factual information. Traumatisation in research relationships could be seen in the ways in which information was selected and narrowed down so as to avoid the eruption of anger against perpetrators, feeling overwhelmed by pain, confronting survivors’ guilt, and collective guilt for not having been able to avoid so many deaths. Traumatisation connected with the past remerged in the present when ongoing uncertainty, fear and mistrust persisted. Olujic (1995) writes about her perturbed departure from California to war-torn Croatia, a departure to the field that was at the same time a coming home. Her mother buying her a gas mask epitomises the ambiguity of returning to a homeland that she perceived as not offering her any security – neither physical nor emotional. Filtering through her lines is a continuing despair at the violence in the Balkans as she clutches at her ethnographic skills to retain her balance. Similarly, Colette hung on to the technicalities of her role to control and cope with her reactions to genocidal violence and to her return ‘home’ to a place she did not know. The intersectionality of her ethnic, migratory and professional identities meant that she was an outsider to the physical space of genocide yet an insider of the victim group and a researcher of the effects of violence while inhabiting spaces of ongoing violence. Because of Colette’s specific positionality, her experiences of secondary and vicarious traumatisation were ‘blurred’. The (Tutsi) survivor researcher affiliated to the (Hutu) perpetrator group This section offers another example of intersectionality, which highlights the psychological effects of researching the legacy of violence when the genocide researcher belongs to the (Tutsi) group targeted during the genocide but is married into a (Hutu) family belonging to the perpetrator group.

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Francine is a Rwandan Tutsi who grew up in Rwanda where she married a Hutu with whom she had two children. She was pregnant with her second child during the genocide. She was personally targeted because she was a Tutsi while her firstborn child, a girl born before violence started, was spared because ethnicity is transmitted along patrilinear lines and thus she was Hutu like her father. Similarly to Colette and myself, Francine is a professional woman and a researcher. However, as a member of a family of mixed-ethnicity, she is differently positioned in post-genocide Rwanda than Colette or I are. During the genocide, she was personally threatened and forced to flee across the border to survive. She told me how some of her family members were killed during the genocide while her husband’s extended family includes members who are in prison accused of genocide involvement, and others who died during war and refugee movements. Francine is a Tutsi réscape but she belongs to a Hutu family, and thus she is connected to the Hutu group that includes génocidaires. The intersectionality of her ethnicity and professional background are similar to those of Colette yet her first-hand experience of genocide and her marriage into a Hutu family differently affects her traumatisation processes and her researcher’s positionality. In telling me her survivor story, Francine was aware that direct exposure to violence had affected her and her children. She was in particular worried about the behavioural problems shown by her second-born boy, who found it difficult to concentrate and to make friends. She attributed his behaviour to the fact that she was carrying him in her womb during the genocide, and also to the discrimination he experienced in the years following the end of the genocide because of his ethnic membership. Her primary traumatisation as a genocide survivor intersected with her secondary traumatisation as a mother listening to and dealing with the traumatisation of her son. As a researcher, Francine connected participants’ narratives of violence and social injustices in post-genocide Rwanda to those of her children or family members. Differently to Colette, her vicarious listening to stories of past violence and present discrimination of members of the perpetrator group resonated with those of her Hutu husband and her children. Francine found it difficult yet possible to listen to narratives of violence from both victim and perpetrator groups, and to empathise with both sides because of the intersectionality of her ethnicity, marriage and parental status. Francine was able to gain the trust of participants who would have not spoken about their post-genocide traumatic experiences to foreign researchers like myself who they did not trust or to Colette who could not have empathised. She was able to manage participants’ narratives that were painful and controversial. Francine too experienced vicarious trauma while listening to these stories. On more than one occasion, she recounted how shaken she was by hearing details of stories she had previously only had a superficial understanding of, or how distressed she was when hearing stories of suffering that had been silenced and that resonated with her own experience and that of her ethnically mixed family.

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She fitted the primary traumatisation categorisation of the genocide survivor and the secondary traumatisation of members of ethnically mixed families, who were also indirectly exposed to the shame and traumatic experiences of the members of the perpetrator group. In addition, her primary and secondary traumatisation intersected with her vicarious traumatisation associated with listening to research material that addressed the psychological legacy of genocidal violence for the population as a whole. Her personal trauma, that of her children and husband, and that of her research participants overlapped. De-briefing sessions during data collection were useful because as she remarked, it was good to find the space to talk about these issues. Often interview material became the source of conversations about our personal lives and traumatic experiences, and debriefing sessions became trusted places where we both articulated our suffering. The ability to become a researcher into one’s own extreme experience can act as a cathartic force. Cathy Winkler (1995) describes how she was abused repeatedly by a rapist and then became the victim, survivor, witness, plaintiff, investigator and researcher of her own assault. Ethnography and ethnographer collapsed. Winkler’s contribution excels in conveying the confusion, irrationality and bewilderment of the rape attack and the disordered world of ambiguity and incongruence. Similarly, survivors of the Holocaust like Primo Levi (1943) spent their life recovering from the trauma of concentration camp internment and writing about it, and Bruno Bettleheim (1943) used his academic training to study personality changes of others and himself in adapting to extreme hardships as an ego defence against his experience. Similarly, Francine used the research as a way of working through her primary and secondary traumas. By discussing interview material with her I too was able to revisit traumatic events that had happened to me in Rwanda when I was first there. Fifteen years after the genocide had ended, we both felt that its psychological impact was still ‘fresh’. We could not be open about our feelings or our analysis of violence in a politically charged post-conflict environment, and we valued our debriefing sessions as trusted spaces of dialogue.

Intersectional traumatisation The examples given above highlight the usefulness of adopting an intersectional approach to understand the impact of researchers’ social identities on traumatisation processes when researching violence. The conceptualisation of independent and somewhat mutually exclusive primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation processes is problematic in contexts of mass violence and socio-political conflict. This disconnection is premised on the assumption that there are clear boundaries between peace and violence, which allows for listening to traumatic experiences of violence to take place in peaceful contexts. It also implies that victims are directly exposed to violence while researchers only experience violence vicariously through listening. The three cases presented in the previous section challenge these disconnections on temporal, spatial and experiential grounds.

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Temporally, primary traumatisation in studies of war and genocide refers to trauma resulting from direct exposure to violence during conflicts and vicarious traumatisation refers to the listening that usually occurs after the conflict has ended. Yet, the existence of clear-cut boundaries between peace and conflict is challenged by the literature on contemporary forms of violence, especially internal ethnic conflicts and global terrorism, where socio-political contexts continue to be unstable and violence reoccurs (Doná 2013; Richards 2005). In these settings, researchers are likely to experience the effects of violence during conflict, as a result of conflict, and due to the legacy of conflict, and these phases are connected. Spatially, the distinction between primary and vicarious traumatisation during genocides and socio-political conflicts also marks a separation between experiences of insiders (victims) inhabiting violent spaces and those of outsiders (researchers) into spaces of violence, and it does not take into account the experiences of researchers who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, simultaneously victims of violence and listeners to traumatic stories of violence for research purposes. Finally, primary, secondary and vicarious trauma divides non-discursive (embodied) and discursive (imagined) experiences of violence where direct experiences of violence impact on the senses – sight, smell, hearing – and on the whole body, while listening is carried out through the auditory system and the mind. In situations of generalised violence this is not necessarily the case. Embodied and oral histories overlap. Insiders and outsiders can experience violence both through listening to traumatic stories of violence and direct exposure to past and present violence. While maintaining the distinction among primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation can be analytically helpful in peaceful contexts, it is crucial to advance our understanding and to investigate the connections that exist among and across different forms of traumatisation in settings of collective violence. I introduce the concept intersectional traumatisation to contribute to a more complex analysis of trauma processes that the three case studies described above brought to the fore. Intersectional traumatisation explains how multiple forms of traumas intersect through the act of listening, imagining, empathising and experiencing, and how traumatic processes intersect on multiple and often simultaneous levels (temporal, spatial and sensorial). Intersectional traumatisation describes multiple forms of traumatisation and their relationship when individuals’ complex, multiple and dynamic identities are taken into account. It explains the differential traumatisation processes that result from taking into account the intersectionality of social and personal categories like ethnicity and migratory experiences in understanding researchers’ experiences of direct and indirect exposure to violence. Finally, intersectional traumatisation can help to overcome existing social inequalities in collective narratives of suffering, as the following section will show.

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Intersectional traumatisation in contested socio-political spaces In pre-genocide Rwanda the term ‘trauma’ was unknown to ordinary Rwandans. Like in other African societies the articulation of suffering was expressed with reference to imbalances among the worlds of the living, nature and the dead, and disproportions of bodily fluids or the weakening of organs (Bagilishya 2000; Hagengimana et al. 2003; Honwana 1999; Taylor 1989). More than a decade after the end of the genocide, trauma has become a familiar concept for ordinary Rwandans (Doná 2010; Kaninba 2007; Schaal and Elbert 2006) who have learnt to recognise its symptoms and identify its causes on television and radio programmes, and who encounter trauma counsellors in health centres, nongovernmental organisations and government bodies across the country. The arrival of international donor agencies and humanitarian organisations soon after the genocide was pivotal to the introduction of trauma into Rwanda. Central to this process were two UNICEF initiatives. The first was a nationwide study on the effects of the genocide on children, which reported that 95.5 per cent of 3,030 children said that they had witnessed violence, 70 per cent killings or wounding, 62 per cent had been threatened with death, 90.6 per cent had thought they were going to die, 58 per cent had witnessed killing or wounding with a machete, 82.5 per cent had watched destruction of houses, and 87.5 per cent had seen corpses or body parts. The study concluded that the majority of Rwandan children were ‘traumatised’ (Gupta 1996), and it was instrumental in raising funds for the implementation of the second UNICEF-led initiative: the establishment of the National Trauma Centre (later renamed Psycho-social Centre) in Kigali to provide intensive therapy for severely traumatised individuals and to train trauma advisors within social and education systems. By early 1996, over 6,000 trauma advisors had been trained in trauma alleviation methods and had assisted an estimated 150,000 children (Veale 1999). At the same time, the Irish non-governmental organisation Trócaire trained trauma counsellors and supported the creation of a trauma-counselling programme, which in 1998 became the Rwandan Association of Trauma Counsellors (Ibuka et al. 2007). In post-genocide Rwanda trauma is either associated to the genocide as in ‘war/ genocide trauma’ or to specific categories of individuals, which include trauma victims (Ibuka et al. 2007), orphans (Schaal and Elbert (2006) and widows (Schaal et al. 2011). The examination of how knowledge has been utilised in postgenocide re-constructive efforts shows that ‘trauma’ has become a dominant discourse in Rwanda, and it may have been appropriated and politicised as a symbol of genocide and political legitimacy (Veale and Doná, 2002). Within the national post-genocide Rwandan narrative of violence, the trauma of genocide survivors and orphans has become the symbol of primary traumatisation during genocide. This leads us to reflect upon those groups that have been marginalised from trauma support and national trauma discourses. Primary traumas like those experienced as a result of massacres of Hutus that took place towards and

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after the end of genocide, or the secondary and vicarious traumatisation of bystanders, perpetrators, counsellors and researchers are marginalised. A hierarchy of suffering emerges in which (Tutsi) survivor, orphan or widow traumas are situated at the top; the traumas of moderate Hutus or ethnically mixed families and those of the Tutsi as an ethnic group targeted for genocide are situated in the middle; and the traumas of the Hutu refugees who fled at the end of genocide or of the perpetrators is situated at the bottom and it is not spoken of. This societal hierarchy of suffering is replicated in the research context, where the focus on participants’ primary traumas marginalises some informants’ secondary traumatisation processes and researchers’ vicarious ones. When disputed traumatic experiences of different social groups occur in contested socio-political spaces, the politicisation of primary, secondary and vicarious trauma can lead to the formation of hierarchies of suffering that mirror unequal post-conflict social relations, and can contribute to systematic psychological and social inequality that can itself become traumatic. Each year, during the month of April, Rwanda commemorates the genocide. Throughout the month, survivors’ testimonies are heard, bodies are exhumed and reburied, and commemorations are held across the country. The ongoing listening to genocide stories can be seen as a form of collective vicarious traumatisation, which is built around an official narrative that construes genocide trauma almost exclusively through the lens of primary traumatisation of those Tutsi who died or survived. The politicised legitimacy of genocide trauma marginalises the suffering of those belonging to different ethnic, political and social categories. The suffering of survivors and more broadly of the Tutsi as a victim group is constructed as having higher value than the suffering of other groups like moderate Hutus or denies that perpetrators may also be traumatised. As commemorations of the genocide against Tutsi are under way inside the country each year, Tutsi become the legitimate bearers of trauma in the postgenocide collective nation-building narrative. The traumas of other categories of individuals are therefore marginalised or ignored within the genocide trauma national narrative. Diasporic Tutsi returnees like Colette or children of mixed ethnicity like Francine’s children are placed in the ‘secondary traumatisation’ category, and their suffering considered less ‘worthy’. An intersectional approach to understanding the psychological impact of studying violence on researchers offers a more nuanced way of understanding how collective suffering is articulated, which acknowledges the suffering of genocide victims but also considers that there are other kinds of suffering that intersect with the primary traumatisation of victims in non-hierarchical ways. Intersectional traumatisation problematises the exclusivity of (Tutsi) survivor traumatisation that prevails in the narrative of Rwandan collective suffering; it unpacks the multiple and complex layers of trauma, and it gives visibility to the connections that exist among various violence-related traumas. This can potentially help to overcome the social and psychological inequality portrayed in representations of suffering in politically contested social spaces.

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Conclusion There is a significant difference between studying violence in social contexts that are peaceful and in those that are violent. In peaceful societies, the researcher (like the therapist) can leave the traumatic setting, and there is a tendency to analyse traumatic experiences of participants (and clients) independently of the broader social context. In societies that have undergone mass violence and genocide, it is more difficult to separate the study of violence from the violent setting. Traumatic experiences of researchers and participants are embedded in social contexts, where the topic of research – violence – and the violent setting intersect. Violence is simultaneously individual, social and political, and research on violence becomes a social, and often political, endeavour. In these situations, the separation of primary, secondary and vicarious traumatisation is hard to maintain, as it easily becomes part of the ‘politics of trauma’. Intersectional traumatisation challenges the mutual exclusiveness of different kinds of traumas and contributes to advancing our current analysis of trauma processes by emphasising their mutual interconnections. It also overcomes the social inequality that may result from the hierarchical articulation and national validation of suffering in politically contested social spaces.

Note 1

Pseudonyms are used to preserve anonymity.

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Chapter 7

Conducting fieldwork in Rwanda Listening to silence and processing experiences of genocide Anne Kubai

Introduction As I always say, moving to Rwanda to live and work there six years after the genocide changed me as a person. I came to realize that human beings have an infinite capacity for self-destruction and for forgiveness and healing. When the genocide happened in Rwanda I was doing my doctoral studies at the University of London; some of the horrors were beamed onto the TV screens and from my room in the then privileged accommodation for Commonwealth graduate students at William Goodenough House, Russell Square in Central London, I sat and watched with utter dismay the slaughter of men, women and children in Rwanda. My knowledge of Rwanda at that time was based on history lessons at school and the stories that I had heard earlier on from a number of ‘Ugandan’ refuges living in Kenya. I had come across some of them as teachers in secondary school and a few others through my childhood friend who was married to a ‘Ugandan’ French school teacher in Nairobi. But many of these refugees, who were known in Kenya as ‘Ugandans’ because they had fled the political terror of dictator Idi Amin in the beginning of the 1970s, were Rwandans who had fled with their parents from Rwanda in 1959 or had been born to Rwandan refugees in Uganda. The images of genocide remained ingrained in my memory and after completing my studies in 1995, I returned to my job as a lecturer at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya; and for a long time, I could not get rid of a burning desire to go to Rwanda and learn more about the genocide. When I reflect in retrospect about this desire, I can say that it was in a way generated by my general knowledge of African history, and an apparent hole in it, because this knowledge did not help me to understand the horrors of genocide. I had not learned about Rwandans as people who espouse horror of unfathomable proportions, I had learnt about a small country with a relatively large population; one of the show cases of the International Monetary Fund Structural Adjustment models for developing countries in Africa. I had learnt about Rwandans as a people who spoke a Bantu language, with many similar words to my own mother tongue, a people related culturally to others in the region; they did not stand out as tyrannical genocidaires. But when I do a little soul-searching in an attempt to explain

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my own deep interest, I can say that there is something compelling about the nature of Rwanda genocide, a sense of existential urgency to react, to get involved in some way or other. Perhaps it is the very nature of the atrocities and the immensity of the genocide. I share Prunier’s sentiments that understanding the nature of Rwanda genocide, “why they died is the best and most fitting memorial we can raise for the victims” (1995, xii). I am convinced that I belong with those of whom Prunier speaks thus: “For those who are convinced that indeed it is morally proper to attempt to understand even the worst of human tragedies, there remains a fascinating tale, an exceptional piece of historical experience” (1995, xii). The opportunity presented itself in 2001 when I was recruited as an expert for the Ministry of Education to work within a human resource development program at Kigali Institute of Education. The entire program was first funded by UNDP and later by the World Bank with a view to building capacity in the education sector among others. When I learnt about the recruitment, I presented myself for interview and I was first hired on a one-year contract. I applied for one-year’s sabbatical leave from Kenyatta University, but this was declined because, as the administration put it, being the only qualified lecturer in Islamic studies in the department of philosophy and religious studies, it was not going to be easy to find a quick replacement in the given time. I quickly tendered my resignation and gave the university one month’s notice. I left for Rwanda. Today when I reflect about the near urgency in which I submitted by resignation letter, and the reaction of those in administration, all for the promise of only a one-year contract, I say perhaps, it was a calculated risk, but also something of reckless courage. A number of friends tried to dissuade me, with some even expressing fear of what would happen to me and my two children among Rwandans who were known to have killed their friends and even family. The most important thing about this calculated risk or reckless courage was that, I was determined to go there and learn more about the genocide, and therefore I believed I was psychologically and physically prepared to deal with the challenges that I and my children might encounter in Rwanda. More importantly, my father who has always been my greatest source of support and inspiration encouraged me to pack my bags, take my children and move to Rwanda. When I arrived in Kigali, I was struck by the sense of safety compared with Nairobi which was and still is notorious for its high crime rates. I was shocked to see money changers sitting on the pavements and street corners with stacks of foreign and local currency calling out to potential customers, each promising the best exchange rate for the day. In fact when 9/11 happened I was in Kigali and stared with horror at the crumbling World Trade Center towers on the TV screen. I soon settled into my new job as the head of the department of religious studies, and focused on the development of the curriculum and the growth of the department. As a member of the university senate, I was able to participate in the decision-making process at that level. It was not long before I dived into research on the Rwanda genocide and travelled the breadth and length of this small, beautiful

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country with its deeply wounded and traumatized society. I visited memorial and burial sites in different places and interviewed both survivors and perpetrators in prison and out of prison. We arrived in September, and within a short time I had established contacts through students and my network of friends and Kenyan women married to now former school teachers that I have mentioned above. As fate would have it, I found some of these at the Kigali Institute of Education and others working as senior government officers. I must say that this turned out to be a great resource for me as I tried to settle in my job and in Kigali – they gave me a sense of security, moral and material support. This was important because I was interested in a subject which Rwandans at the time were not keen to include in public discourse. Many perpetrators were still held in prisons all over the country and their families were living in anguish that I experienced when I went to the prisons and saw them visiting their loved ones, taking food items to them. Similarly, many survivors were smarting from both the physical and psychological wounds inflicted on them during the genocide, as were thousands of children in child-headed households who were struggling to fend for themselves. Besides, life in Kigali was a totally new experience for me and my two children – my daughter who was sixteen and my son who was two-and-half – we had to make do with erratic water and electricity supplies. It was dusty and much hotter than Nairobi. Today, it is beautiful and nice to live there because many amenities have been improved or developed. When I go there these days I see a big difference between the almost non-existent infrastructure in 2001 and the many cleanswept and lighted streets in Kigali in 2013. If progress is to be measured in terms of buildings and cars that create massive traffic jams as they snake up and down the roads that curve around the hills on which the city stands, then much progress has been made in Rwanda. Also, Kigali boasts a number of new shopping malls where the elite shop at expensive supermarkets such as Kenya’s giant Nakumatt. In comparison to that time (2001) one can say that Kigali has now entered the arena of world capitals.

The search for a house in Kigali When we arrived in Kigali we were provided with accommodation on Kigali Institute of Education campus, which was quite comfortable since the college had a generator which would be turned on whenever electricity supply was disrupted. At the beginning, accommodation on campus was necessary because we needed time to get settled in Kigali. However, after a few months, it was time to seek accommodation outside the campus, but not too far away. I contacted an ‘agent’ to help me find a decent house with basic amenities such as piped water and electricity and a reasonable monthly rent. In addition to these was safety, therefore it was necessary to find a house that was enclosed in a compound with a gate that would be kept locked all the time. Soon I received phone calls from the agent saying that there were several vacant houses and he had already made arrangements for me to go and view them. This search for a house led to my first encounter with the horrors

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of genocide: I went to see a large house in an enclosed compound and as soon as we went through the gate, there was a strong smell of something I could not pinpoint. It was a strange smell for me that I sensed for the first time. I looked at the agent searching for clues, but his face was expressionless. We walked into the house and looked at all the five rooms and then went out into the kitchen located a few yards from the back door. The house had not been occupied for a number of years and therefore it was in need of minor renovation and painting. We discussed the amount to be paid monthly with the agent and another person who I assumed was the owner of the house, but during the discussion I was puzzled by the strange ubiquitous smell. The ‘owner’ was asking for a rather large amount in monthly rent to be paid in US dollars; and he was unwilling to cover the cost of renovation and painting of the house. Therefore the deal did not go through, and I felt a sense of relief that I would not have to deal with the unsettling smell. The following day we went to view another house some two kilometers down the road from Remera market. When we arrived at the house, it was very close to the road and it was not secured in an enclosed compound. Again, I sensed the same smell. The agent agreed with me that this was unacceptable and soon we went away, leaving the ‘owner’ visibly disappointed. A few days later, we went to view two more houses. The first house was rather large, in the center of a large enclosed space. Just like the first two houses that we had seen, it had not been occupied for a long time, and no wonder, I thought: there was the same pervasive smell. We went into the rooms and the kitchen and looked around. It was dark inside and also in need of a fresh coat of paint, which I thought could be done easily. But as we were standing outside and negotiating the amount of the monthly rent with a woman who I was informed was the owner of the house, I looked around in what could have been a garden and saw at the center, a large part of it was slumping and the grass was relatively thinner than the thick green mat that covered the rest of the space. As I stared I did not realize that the others were looking at me and when I turned to look at them, I felt uneasy. The owner was willing to paint the house, but the monthly rent was a little higher than I was ready to pay. We agree that we should think about it and call back the next day. In the evening I decided to go with my children to show them the house, though we would just stand outside the gate and look from the driveway. As we approached, the neighbor who lived in a small one-roomed dwelling on the other side of the road opposite the gate of the big house came and greeted us. He said he had seen me earlier on when I came to view the house with the agent. He mumbled something about the house and at first I did not hear what he was saying. I asked him to speak more clearly in Swahili so that I could understand what he was saying. Almost in a whisper he warned me that some of the houses that were unoccupied for a long time belonged to people who had died during the genocide. Without apparently making much of a disclosure, he asked me if I had looked around and what I had seen. I said I had seen a part of the garden that seemed to be slumping and he nodded knowingly. Then he said in a rather low whisper “what do you think is underneath that place which is sagging? Anyway,

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as a foreigner who is new here, perhaps you do not know, but with time you will understand.” It seemed imprudent to ask further questions, but I began to search in my mind what he meant and why he looked visibly frightened and why he was whispering. After this experience, I began to wonder whether I should continue to trust the agent or the man who spoke to me in whispers. Then I thought more about the smell. What was it? I had been to disused buildings before, but never encountered that kind of smell.

Munyamahanga, insider and outsider To the majority of Rwandans, initially I was seen as a foreigner, a munyamahanga and therefore an “outsider,” but over time, my status changed I also became an “insider.” Once, I discussed with a native of Rwanda the meaning of the term munyamahanga or foreigner and in the end he said that it depends on the context because anyone in Rwanda could be called a “foreigner.” It was not clear what he meant by this, but I thought it was a veiled reference to the fact that many Rwandans are returnees who left the country during its troubled years or were born to parents who were refugees mainly in the neighboring countries. From these two points of view, the term applies even to Rwandans. On another occasion, while we were having drinks with a group of friends, I raised the question of what it means to be an insider or outsider in Rwanda. Since they all knew that I was conducting research, one of them volunteered the following response: You are walking around to memorial sites and asking about things that people do not normally talk about. Do you really believe that you can understand what happened when we ourselves cannot explain why it happened? You cannot understand us. I can honestly tell you that those street boys, can understand me, but you (meaning both his Kenyan wife and I) cannot understand me. This is one way to say that someone is an outsider, one who is not in the know. With these statements he makes two different points: first, he points to the incomprehensibility of genocide even to Rwandans, the very people who experienced it; second, he refers to something that many Rwandans believe – that outsiders cannot understand Rwandans. When I reflect on the advice of Cramer, Hammond and Porttier (2011), citing Caplan (2003: 27) that the researcher should ask “who am I to do this research?” and “What is it all for?”; and Spivak’s (1988) admonishment of western scholars who arrogate to themselves the right to speak for the people that they study, I ask myself why am I doing it, and although I do not get a clear answer, I realize two things: first, though it is sorrow-filled research, I am happy to have the opportunity to do it. My deep interest and sense of commitment must arise from a desire to understand what, for instance, drove mothers to kill their own children, but the more confounding this is, the greater the impetus to dig deeper. Second, living in Rwanda for a number of years, makes me the right person to do this research.

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I experienced life in different ways, which brought me closer to the reality and the people I was studying than would a researcher who would visit Rwanda for purposes of research and organize interviews in an artificial research environment. I learned about Rwanda by seeing, hearing and feeling – simply by getting involved in the rhythm of ordinary (and extraordinary parts of) life. For me it was the life I had come to learn to live that became the subject of my enquiry and this affects both the way people respond to the questions I ask them, and the way in which I perceive the phenomena that I am investigating. I must also add that there is a sense of satisfaction in knowing that I have the advantage of being close to the society, and being neither Hutu nor Tutsi, I can do this kind of research, which would not be easy in the prevailing circumstances – community relations and the deep sense of “woundedness” – for a Hutu or Tutsi living in Rwanda to do. Cramer, Hammond and Porttier make a useful point here: The emotional intensity of the events and people studied, the political stakes that surround research on violence, and through haphazard circumstances under which fieldwork is conducted intertwine fieldwork with ethnicity. These tensions weave their way through the whole of the anthropological endeavor – coloring the lines and the perspectives of researchers and those they study alike. (2011: 3) As I will illustrate below, it requires someone outside the confines of group identities to raise questions relating to the horror of genocide and the challenges of forgiveness and reconciliation. I share Spivak’s apprehension of the murky underbelly of academia, at the same time, I think I can be spared from his admonishment even though I am western educated because in a sense, I am an insider – being not so culturally distant, I can relate to the people and as one of my interviewees said, I am indeed accepted as one of them. This allows me to get to the grain of the society and to really feel its pulse so to say. But this does not discount Spivak’s sentiments, which Osaghae echoes but articulates differently when he laments that, research on Africa continues to be dominated by foreign scholars who mostly import and employ Western unilinear paradigms encapsulated in neo-modernization frameworks … Although there has been an increase in the number of African researchers this has not led to the emergence of an indigenous paradigm or framework. (2001: 15) I raise the point about munyamahanga here as I reflect on the impact that my “positionality” (Bourke et al. 2009) can have on my research. I observed things in their natural order in an everyday situation. I learned much about the horror of genocide by observing what happened during the annual commemoration in April – I heard the whispers and experienced the somber mood in public places. I attended

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funerals and observed that people just kept quiet, they did not cry, unlike what I had seen in Kenya. I went to churches, weddings, and visited friends’ homes; and as a teacher for students from across the country and through participation in other forums in both professional and private capacity, I accrued an extensive personal experience of doing fieldwork in Rwanda. The difficulty with this depth of involvement is that what I was studying was gradually becoming part of my everyday experience, hence the challenge to keep the researcher’s critical distance. Nevertheless, I find relief in the suggestion proffered by Robben and Nordstrom (1995: 4) that “the lived experience of violence – the ways of knowing and reflecting about violence – are not separate. Experience and interpretation are inseparable.” Bourke et al. put the case of insider/outsider to rest by concluding that: “Ultimately, the tension between insider/outsider, centre and periphery, positionality and representation, process and purpose are part and parcel of what it means to grapple with being a researcher” (2009: 10). I can say that my insider–outsider status in different situations, was not without its challenges, for instance I have a constant struggle with representations – how best to understand and represent my observations? Can I avoid reading too much into my observation of phenomena that I know very much about already? I can illustrate the nature of my status with an excerpt of a casual conversation that I once had with a taxi driver in Kigali. I had asked him to drive me to pick up one of my children from Green Hills School a few times, but on this particular day, as he drove down the road towards Kigali Institute of Education, we struck up a conversation. He said: I can understand you and I think I can say something about you. Of course we are supposed to be different, not because you are a woman and I am a man, not because you came from Kenya; I have lived in Kenya and driven trucks from Mombasa to Kigali. Believe it or not, those are the days when I had a good life. You are different just because you are a “professor” that is the only reason why you are different than me … Do you think it is easy to live with the knowledge that your family was hacked to death by your neighbor? But you see, here in Kigali, after what happened in 1994, we are careful this time though it is difficult to forget what we know. When you think of what happened here, it is too much to say. You see people going about their lives as if nothing happened; they have to contain their pain and suffering. Sometimes I think we are all victims. But you know, you live here, you understand what is happening. You speak with people like me, with everyone and you get to know how people here feel. You can learn about what happened by just listening to the silence around us, about what we feel and think about what happened eight years ago. Life has changed, but suffering has also changed. In this conversation the taxi driver raises several important points about my status and after making a brief analysis of what would otherwise be considered as the differences – coming from another country and gender – that would mark me

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as an outsider, he concludes that after all, I am not an outsider. To him I am not a munyamahanga; I am a person with whom he can discuss important social issues. I can know what people are feeling because I am part of the local community. Also I know the sense of fear, guilt, mistrust and caution contained in the silence which comes across, for instance, when I record testimonies from perpetrators in various prisons. I see the palpable anguish and fear that often grips even those prisoners who have confessed and therefore admitted guilt for their participation in the genocide. Sometimes I am left with a numb feeling after recording the gory details and am often overwhelmed by the emotion of the perpetrators. In this conversation he speaks in a rather guarded manner because he expects me to understand what he means by his carefully chosen words and even his unspoken words. The subtlety of such a conversation reflects the subtlety of Rwanda. In Rwanda one is always cautious about whom one speaks to, and what one says is carefully weighed. How did I feel about myself? I always wanted to blend in the society and I believed that one of the best places to do this was at the Remera market, where women sitting behind their wares placed on concrete benches, often invited me to look at the fresh fruits, vegetables, potatoes and bananas, etc. Many of them were amused by the way I spoke – they wondered why I spoke Kinyarwanda in a strange way that made it sound almost like a different language. In the market I met many women who told me stories of how they had lost their families and later on had tried to pick up the pieces of their lives. A good number of them supported orphans that they had adopted. For instance, a survivor named Chantal whose family had been wiped out during the genocide, had adopted seven children who were now living with her in her one-roomed house not too far from the market. As a friend of Chantal, I had come to know that there are many persistent questions to which she could get no answers, only mental anguish, especially because she believed that her neighbors knew what happened to her family. Though none of them volunteered any information, she sensed from the way they looked at her, that there was something in the silence on their faces and the uneasiness that she felt about them. When I reflect on such conversations, I realize how useful these networks were in providing a heuristic space in which to explore my own positionality in relation to women survivors and wives of perpetrators held in prison. Not only did I build trust and friendship with these women, but the conversations from the market were frank and emotional. I was treated as “one of us” in a sense that I could share and feel the pain of what they had gone through. Also since I am neither Tutsi nor Hutu, I was considered objective in my listening and empathy – I could listen and empathize objectively as a friend, a fellow woman.

A visit to Murambi genocide memorial site I have visited many genocide memorial sites in Rwanda, and I can say with certainty that each one of them gave me a different experience and sense of the pain and suffering of the victims. But the experience at Murambi was comparable to none and I still have a vivid memory of the contrast between this genocide

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memorial site situated on a hilltop with a picturesque view of the beauty of the surrounding hills and valleys, and the apparent tranquility of the neighbors whose homes are only a few hundred meters below the two buildings where the remains of thousands of victims are laid. The site, not too far from the town of Gikongoro in the southwest, was supposed to be a technical school, still under construction when the genocide began. Here thousands of Tutsi sought refuge in the empty buildings, but they were massacred. Before I describe my experience at Murambi, I think it is illustrative to compare it with my visit to Nyamata, the first genocide memorial site that I visited after arrival in Kigali. Nyamata Catholic church, where one of the largest massacres took place, is some forty kilometers from Kigali. A friend took me there not because he knew that I am interested in seeing the memorial sites, but just because I was rather new in Kigali and he wanted to “show me around Rwanda” as he put it. I must say that the feeling that I had was “eerie” when I went out of the church and descended into the underground chambers in the church grounds where thousands of skulls and other bones are neatly arranged. I was horrified, and though for a long time I remembered the visit and the stories in great detail, I was not consciously aware of the smell after I left Nyamata church. This was before my search for a house, where I would later encounter the smell. For me, the story of Nyamata is relevant for two reasons: first, it was one of the most horrific sites of the genocide and one of the few that represent most vividly the various aspects of the genocide. Secondly, when I encountered the smell later on, I was slow to recognize its saturated and horrible meaning – death. But now I can say that it was an immediate sensory experience of genocide, unmediated, wordless and non-symbolic. Then one day I went to Murambi genocide memorial site accompanied by my research assistant. There were two men who worked as guards in this apparently desolate place. After introducing ourselves: me as a lecturer from Kigali Institute of Education and my assistant as my student, we were given a guide to show us around. He introduced himself to us, we shook hands and he said that he was a survivor, and that before the genocide he lived on a hill quite close to the site. He pointed in the direction of the hill and explained that if his house had not been destroyed, it would have been clearly visible from where we were standing. He was a slim tall man with a hole on the left side of his forehead which looked like a mini crater with the skin around the sides dark and scarred. His name was Murangira. When we entered the main memorial building, my attention was diverted from him by my assistant who suggested that we should take photographs. We walked around and took photographs. I have taken many photographs at the memorial sites all over Rwanda because I feel that the visual representation of genocide is like an artifact of the reality of its horror. One can look at a photograph and see it from different perspectives, and photographs can tell a story in ways that words cannot. As I pored over the information about the memorial site, personal testimonies and, photographs of survivors and victims and video clips, placed strategically around the building, Murangira said that we should “go and see what really happened in Murambi.”

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He took us a few hundred meters across the field to the row of classrooms and moved along the corridor opening each classroom where the remains of the victims were placed in rows on slatted wooden tables. As we entered the first classroom, I encountered a powerful smell and immediately I recognized it. It was the smell in the houses that I have mentioned above. Then I began to wonder whether there were remains of victims in the houses where I had encountered the smell first time. I struggled to figure out where human remains could have been kept because I did not see any, but the smell was unmistakable. My visit shed light on my earlier encounter with the smell of death. But then I felt a sense of urgency, I thought there was no time to dwell on that, I was staring at the horror of genocide, and being enveloped by the smell from human remains. When we were through with the classrooms, we passed by a big hall, which I was told was meant to be the students’ dining hall and looked at an enormous amount of clothing that was hanging on a rope across the hall. These were the clothes of the thousands of the victims whose skeletons we had seen in the classrooms. Then we returned to the main memorial building and stood on the veranda. We looked at each other somberly, but after a few minutes I ventured to ask Murangira why he, as a survivor was working here. His response was that he felt that it was a duty to his family “whose bones are among the ones that are preserved here. It is a way of being with my family.” I looked at his face which was blank, expressionless. Silent. While he, with chilling clarity, gave us his eyewitness account of the killing of about forty thousand Tutsi who had gathered at this place for safety, I was musing over how he could have survived a bullet to the head which left such a hole in his skull. I have visited nearly all the memorial sites in Rwanda, and I think Murambi, one of the largest massacres, with its unique, compelling displays of preserved bodies, is no doubt the most important memorial site in Rwanda. Visitors to Murambi experience not only horror, but they are also confronted with the truth of the genocide. Perhaps it provides the mental framework for understanding what happened here, but not why it happened. It explains the pervasive silence that seems to speak louder than any words. The experience at Murambi remains engraved in my memory. First, the smell of the partially decomposed bodies preserved in lime, reminded me of the smell that I had first encountered when I was looking for a house in Kigali. The significance of both the Nyamata and Murambi experiences lies in the realization of the intrusiveness of smells, and also of the intimacy and immediacy of the memorial. Moreover, at both memorial sites I got the feeling that genocide was no longer distant, or something that had happened seven years before, it was present, and pervasively present.

Research among genocide prisoners Apart from the memorial sites, my research took me to twelve major prisons in Rwanda, where I interviewed genocide perpetrators who were held as prisoners in different prisons across the country. Those who were willing to be interviewed

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were those who had agreed to participate in the Gacaca tribunals, and therefore, they had already “confessed to the crimes of genocide” and “admitted playing a role,” as they put it during the interviews. In the prisons, I interviewed them in the company of my research assistant who helped to explain or clarify important points during the interviews with those who wished to speak only in Kinyarwanda, because my knowledge of the language was limited. I was interested in the individual role of the perpetrators and with this came the gory details of how they did the actual killing of individual neighbors, friends and even family who were identified as “those who should die.” I remember once a prisoner spoke quite easily and calmly about his role as he described it. I could not but notice the-matter-of-fact way in which he said that he killed one person before the eyes of his family and buried him right there. On the one hand, when he spoke about the horror of some killings, he seemed to be in a way, detached from the kind of emotion that such a description would evoke. Though he was describing the horror for my benefit, it seemed as if I was the one that was supposed “to feel it” and not him. And I can say he managed to convey the pain and evoke that emotion in me: I began to imagine how it felt for a woman whose skull was crushed to die slowly in deep pain. I still cannot help thinking about a man who was picked up from a bar – he prepared himself for his death and even drank two bottles of beer before he was taken “to meet his death.” Because the prisoner did not give any details about this man or how he met his death, I was left with many unanswered questions. Yet I could not ask more questions about him. On another occasion, as we walked out after recording a testimony from a prisoner, I noticed that my research assistant, though a man of few words, was unusually contemplative but otherwise showed no emotion. I did not want to ask him whether the man we had interviewed had said something that upset him, I just kept quiet. As I drove back to Kigali, he said after a long silence “Now I know how my family was finished, I mean my uncle.” I slowed down with the intention of pulling the car beside the road, but he said “there is no need to stop.” I was quite surprised to learn that the last person we had interviewed had described to us how he had killed Stephen’s uncle and family. Yet Stephen had remained calm throughout the interview as if he had no idea who the victims were. When I asked him how he could do this, he said that he also had no idea until the perpetrator gave the names of the victims; then he became even more interested in the testimony, but he had to make sure that he did not reveal his identity. Indeed his identity would have been a serious challenge for the research in the prisons, as one prisoner asked us: “what justice would I expect if the complainant is a Tutsi, the prosecutor is a Tutsi and the witness and the survivor are also Tutsi?” My research assistant explained to me that his general features and mainly wide face and nose helped to conceal his Tutsi identity, which was especially important because interviews with perpetrators were quite sensitive – they were describing their participation in genocide and remembering the gory details of the

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attacks which they had organized or in which they had participated, crimes for which they were now held in prison. This particular research experience speaks volumes about the challenges of doing research in the situation that prevailed: first it shows how sensitive this type of research is in a society that is still deeply wounded; second the forces of fear and hatred that played an important role in the genocide are still present and this can be a challenge for research, especially among perpetrators who might admit their guilt but still have to deal with a sense of injustice. I realized that I had to deal with this paradox of perpetrators’ sense of guilt and injustice in the way I conducted interviews and discussions with perpetrators in and out of prison. My assistant’s facial features remained an important aspect of his identity throughout the research period. I did not realize how important this was for our research until we encountered a perpetrator in Remera Central Prison who turned out to be hostile. We introduced ourselves and sat down in the office of the prison officer in charge to conduct an interview with a man who had returned from Congo and had been arrested for his role in the genocide. The prison officer left us to carry out the interview with the perpetrator and we thought this was necessary because we had realized that prisoners were uncomfortable giving interviews in the presence of prison warders. This prisoner was a man of average height, but stocky and looked quite strong. He asked us what we wanted to hear and we explained to him why we were there and described the research project and also said that we had permission from the Minister of Internal Affairs to conduct research in prisons all over the country. He retorted “if you want to know, yes I killed during the genocide and I can even kill again.” He moved menacingly towards where we were sitting across the table. I was quite frightened and I looked at the guard who was also present and he too seemed quite unsure of what was likely to happen. I looked at Stephen and thought that since he is big, he might be able to defend himself if need be, but then I remembered what I had been told – that some of these perpetrators have been trained killers and in the previous week a prosecutor had been killed by a prisoner in a matter of minutes. I managed to muster the courage to say first in Kinyarwanda and then in Swahili that I was a foreigner, doing research and Stephen was my assistant, and therefore we did not support any side. We managed to get out before anything happened, but I was terrified by this experience, though it did not deter me from going into other prisons to conduct interviews with genocide prisoners. As we walked out of the prison gate and bade farewell to the guard, it dawned on me how dangerous such a situation of confrontation with fear and aggression can be; and the risks involved in this kind of research became apparent for the first time. Much has been said about the physical features of the Tutsi – angular faces, thin noses, tall and slim – which served as the distinguishing physical markers of Tutsi identity during the genocide. Indeed a woman survivor once told me that it was difficult for her to pass the road blocks because she could not hide her “identity card” – her nose. However, it is this particular experience that taught me the real existential importance of physical features during the genocide. It was nearly

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always difficult to get rid of an uneasy feeling as I approached the prisons. I remember once I felt my stomach tighten, literally speaking, after we went through Nyanza prison gate and I saw what looked like a sea of eyes as numerous prisoners pressed their faces on the wire mesh that covered the ventilation space high on the wall around the prison block where they were being held. It was frightening, but also it was here that I got some of the most amazing testimonies in a relaxed atmosphere in the prison warden’s office. One perpetrator who had been a senior medical officer, and had facilitated the killing of so many people, said that it took him two weeks to compile the list of the victims. By the time I left this prison, the initial uneasy feeling had been replaced by a sense of numbness as I tried to process in my mind the content of the testimonies that I had been listening to for five hours.

Concluding remarks Initially, within the broader context of studying reconciliation in Rwanda, I set out to understand the interplay of the prisoners’ release and the survivors’ possibility of forgiving. My study focused on the possibility of forgiveness, the pursuit of reconciliation, the effect of confession and the initiatives to bring about justice. My research on perpetrators examines the process of a carefully choreographed social change in Rwanda, where the government is striving to “change the mindset” and create “a new moral order,” “de-ethnicize” the society and ultimately realize the achievement of nation-building. From the foregoing description of my experiences of doing fieldwork in Rwanda, I think I do not have to belabor the point made by Robben and Nordstrom (1995: 5) that “researching and writing about violence will never be a simple endeavor. The subject is fraught with assumptions, presuppositions and contradictions.” When I listen to testimonies, in most cases the speaker – both survivor and perpetrator – goes back and forth, cutting and adding different strands into the narrative. For me, the veracity and authenticity of the narratives is not in question. I concur with Robben and Nordstrom in their observation that “victims can never convey their pain and suffering to us, other than through the distortion of word, image and sound. Any rendition of the contradictory realities of violence imposes order and reason on what has been experienced as chaotic” (ibid.: 12). Remembering and telling depend on many factors, for instance the Gacaca process shaped the way stories were told and received. The whole idea of public confession made what people said and how they told their story matter, in addition to the knowledge and memory factors since the telling was being done long after events that took place in 1994. Others depended on their own viewpoints at the time of the event and when they were telling the story, there is no doubt that timespan can alter and color the material being presented in a narrative. Though the testimonies of perpetrators and survivors varied considerably, similar characteristics of violence were often woven into the narratives, perhaps because “violence is an intricately layered phenomenon. Each participant brings his or her

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own perspective” (ibid.). There is also a psychological reality – having suffered during the genocide, and now being a survivor or a perpetrator, each of which has implications for the individual and the society. Both have to live with the impact of genocide, the differences between such impacts notwithstanding. When I reflect on my personal experiences of listening to informants tell their stories and describe their experiences of genocide; and also during my visits to various memorial sites, I cannot but think about the incredible human capacity that each individual in Rwanda epitomizes. This capacity is most manifest in the possibility of their living together again, survivor and perpetrator, victim and victimizer walking the same dusty paths in the villages and going to the same churches as before. And for me, they are willing to put in words some of the unspeakable, and by so doing make it possible for me to listen to and document some of their experiences for posterity. But for me the important point here is that: on the one hand, they can only put into words some of the unspeakable, not all of it, therefore, what I am able to document is only a part; and how big a part, I cannot tell. On the other hand, I understood more than they put into words by listening to the silence that pervades life in the post-genocide Rwandan society – for example, during a discussion on forgiveness and reconciliation with a survivor, she said both the government and the church tell people to forgive those who killed their families and so as a Christian and a law-abiding citizen, she has forgiven a neighbor known as Jean de Dieu. But she went further to explain that this man has not told the whole truth, he has admitted to killing only four of her family members and not to the killing of two of her nephews. Therefore, she has forgiven him only for the four cases that he has acknowledged and she cannot speak about the rest, she is supposed to keep silent, in spite of the fact that she knows how they died. Then she said, “did you see when Jean de Dieu greeted me, our eyes do not meet even when we hug each other in the Rwandan way of greeting, I always feel it when I greet him. And he too, knows what I know, but it remains unspoken.” In this case, I was supposed to have noted that their eyes did not meet and make sense of that affectless contact between survivor and perpetrator. That is one way of knowing and hearing from the silence. But the challenge for me as a researcher, as illustrated in this case, is that even if I observed something unusual about the greetings, without the details about the confession, I would not have got the whole story – the astounding idea of what I call “part-forgiveness” – forgiveness for the four murders and not for the unacknowledged murders of two nephews. This case makes me not only question myself about how I gather knowledge of the unspeakable in such circumstances, but also, I struggle with the meaning and nature of the much talked about forgiveness and reconciliation in these circumstances. As this case clearly shows, the silence and the affectlessness that are pervasive in Rwanda today can be attributed to the social precaution that has been well crafted and institutionalized. Forgiveness is systematized and coordinated by certain institutions and authorities, therefore this woman is expected to forgive Jean de Dieu and he is supposed to confess to his crimes and offer an apology.

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But then one cannot fail to see the psychological inability to cope with the overwhelming experiences such as re-experiencing fear and traumatization. People cannot be forced to reconcile; therefore, I can say that though reconciliation is not helped by the official process of systematization and coordination to which it is subjected, people might in many cases pretend to forgive. However, inside they cannot forgive, like the woman described above, even though they do what they need to do to be seen as good citizens and good Christians. Going back to my experiences during the search for a house, I must say that even though I found a house, I had to move twice and in each case I encountered the ubiquitous smell that for me was a constant reminder of the genocide. But because people could not avoid it completely, it was another thing that was never spoken about, it remained enshrouded in silence. For many, especially the less privileged who could not afford to live in the new expensive residential areas of the city, they seemed to be unperturbed by the smell, but this is illustrative of how people cope with the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda. In my conclusion, I find inspiration in Watson’s advice that the important thing “is not the insider or outsider status but the ability to be open, authentic, honest and deeply interested in the experience of one’s research participants and committed to accurately and adequately representing their experiences” (1999: 59). I must say that my life and work in Kigali: my network of friends, neighbors colleagues, students, women in the market, taxi drivers, strangers and acquaintances at the hair salons where I regularly went to get my hair done, discussions in the pubs and in other public and private spaces and occasions, all afforded me the possibility to gather an incredibly large amount of information about the genocide, politics, and many other aspects of life in Rwanda. My level of involvement with the society provided a level of safety with the society and comfort for the perpetrators and survivors that I interviewed. I am grateful for the richness of the diversity of the perspectives and the details availed to me by my informants. I have a sense of gratitude particularly for access to information that I obtained from people who trusted me and told me about their most painful experiences during and after the genocide, especially the perpetrators in prison who gave me descriptions of the horrors of the genocide that only they could give. From them also I learnt much about the challenges of justice and reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda.

References Bourke, L., Butcher, S., Chisonga, N., Clarke, J., Davies, F. and Thorn, J. (2009) “Fieldwork stories: Negotiating positionality, power and purpose”. In Feminist Africa. Body Politics and Citizenship Issue 13. Rondebosch: African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town. Caplan, P. (2003) “Anthropology and ethics: An introduction”. In P. Caplan (Ed.) The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London: Routledge, 1–33. Cramer, C., Hammond, L. and Porttier, J. (2011) Researching Violence in Africa: Ethical and Methodological Challenges. Leiden: Brill.

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Osaghae, E. (2001) “The role and function of research in divided societies: the case of Africa”. In M. Smyth and G. Robinson (Eds.) Researching Violently Divided Societies: Ethical and Methodological issues. London: Pluto Press. Prunier, G. (1995) The Rwandan Crisis: History of a Genocide. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. Robben, A.M. and Nordstrom, C. (1995) “The anthropology and ethnography of violence and sociopolitical conflict”. In C. Nordstrom and A.M. Robben (Eds.) Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. London: University of California Press. Spivak, G. (1988) “Can the subaltern speak?” In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Watson, D. (1999) “The way I research is who I am. The subjective experiences of qualitative researchers”. M.A. thesis, York University.

Chapter 8

Research under duress Resonance and distance in ethnographic fieldwork1 Nerina Weiss

Introduction James Clifford has defined ethnography as a ‘means for producing knowledge from an intense, intersubjective engagement’ (1983: 119). Keesing and Strathern furthermore have argued that ‘the intensity and intersubjectivity is mostly achieved through long-term involvement, intimate participation in a community and the deep immersion into people’s life’(1987: 7). But what does this intensity, intersubjectivity and immersion mean when doing research under duress? How do we for example apply these basic requirements for fieldwork to the field of violence, social suffering and conflict, when it is widely known that continuous research under duress – be it in the field or through the data processing – may have considerable emotional and psychological effects on the researcher (Gentry, Baggerly, and Baranowsky 2004)? Such effects do not only impact the researcher’s personality but also her ability to deal with and process the material gathered. Drawing on my own experience from fieldwork on and in the Kurdish conflict, I want to call for a greater awareness of the detrimental effects of research under duress – not only on the researcher but also on the product of the study. And at the same time argue that ethnography, when practiced consciously and reflectively might provide the necessary methodological and analytical tools to handle emotional stress, and turn such an ‘existential fieldwork crisis’ into important ethnographic data and thus into a possible contribution to the development of anthropological theory. This chapter will be divided into four interrelated subsections. I will first outline how I practiced and practice ethnography. Next, I will provide some basic information on where, when, and not least how I approached my research topic. In the third part, which I call ‘spectacular blindness or a car accident in the midst of war’, I will reflect on the difficulty of maintaining an analytical distance. I try to scrutinize what it means to be heuristic, and how important it is to constantly re-evaluate our moral standards and emotional reactions. The fourth part is called ‘re-enacting torture’. Here, I question the necessity of ‘deep immersion’ and intense contact in order to gain valid ethnographic material. Finally, I hope to indicate, how anthropological knowledge, ethnographic practice and openness to

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knowledge from other disciplines may contribute to healthier and saner anthropologists and thus a better ethnographic practice.

Research under duress This volume focuses explicitly on research on genocide and mass violence. However, I want to argue here that experiences of vicarious trauma and emotional stress do not necessarily have to occur in that specific context. I would rather argue that what has been discussed in this volume has relevance far beyond that particular research field. Before I proceed, I will therefore clarify what I mean by ‘research under duress’. According to the Oxford dictionary ‘duress’ stems from Latin – durus, hard. Duress thus indicates ‘harshness, severity and cruel treatment’ and it is commonly defined as ‘threats, violence, constraints, or other action used to coerce someone into doing something against their will or better judgment’. As I will show, I interpret ‘research under duress’ as strenuous research, research in difficult and harsh settings. My research would easily classify as ‘under duress’. I worked in an area with a strong military presence, I had to pass roadblocks on my way to villages, and the police were asking my interlocutors about my doings. The political climate was tense, other researchers had been forced to leave the country and I was only protected by the Kurdish mayoress because I had promised to keep a low profile and to cover my politically charged research in a cloak of social activism – I worked as a social worker for the women’s cooperative there. My research field had all the qualities one would associate with ‘under duress’, the armored vehicles along the road, the tanks howling through the town, the gas bombs thrown at demonstrators, and the many people shot dead during protests in other cities of the region. Still, I have never been afraid while in Eastern Turkey, there has not been a single incident which I would characterize as dangerous or threatening. However, I did and continue to do research under duress. The continuous exposure to suffering, loss and mourning, and collecting stories about death and mutilation is strenuous and emotionally exhausting. I have had my overdose of torture stories and I have been confronted with the limits of what I can handle and process. I had come to a point where I was forced to realize that if I wanted to continue working with these fascinating and important topics I would have to reflect on what ethnographic practice does to the ethnographer and vice versa. But, and there is an important but. The association of ‘research under duress’, with conflict, violence and war tends to privilege certain fieldwork experiences as difficult and harsh, and to rank the ethnographer high in a ‘hierarchy of endurance’. Since I have survived fieldwork in a remote, inaccessible conflict area with police surveillance and military intervention, I have passed the test and completed my rite of passage into the ranks of tough anthropologists. Research under duress is not limited to the study of genocide and mass violence, of being surrounded by tanks and weapons, but might also include the emotional pressure of witnessing domestic violence, poverty and hunger on a regular basis, without any possibility

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of alleviating the suffering. It might also include the constant pressure and expectation to become a devoted believer, when one is an adamant atheist. Such deep and fundamental feelings of discomfort and emotional stress definitely qualify as research under duress in my eyes. Methodologically, the difference between working in a setting of conflict, violence, and mistrust and other emotionally strenuous fieldwork situations is thus not a fundamental one, but rather a question of degree. During fieldwork in and on a conflict, mistakes might have more severe consequences, hegemonic discourses might be stronger, and the positioning and repositioning of the researcher might be more important. Access to certain groups of the community might be more restricted, one might be more exposed to negative emotions, fear, mistrust, and suffering. However, when research is felt as ‘under duress’, at what point the pressure becomes difficult to bear and when duress impairs ethnographic practice is impossible to say in advance. In my chapter I will mainly draw on my ethnographic experience from fieldwork in and on the Kurdish conflict. But I hope that what I discuss in the particular context of conflict, suffering and violence, will be of a more general relevance.

From movement to multi-sited ethnography My ethnographic engagement with the Kurdish conflict started with my first fieldwork in Eastern Turkey in 2005. I had chosen a provincial town at the Turkish- Iranian border as my fieldwork base because of my initial interest in borderlands and border politics. However, when I arrived there in the autumn of 2005, the border had been closed to local trade. People did not talk about the border, but about the war. Thus, I turned my interest to politics and the conflict between the Kurdish Worker’s Party PKK and the Turkish state forces. This change of focus was further facilitated by the fact, that I had become the guest of the pro-Kurdish mayoress. She had agreed to support my research as long as I did not cause her trouble. And the best way to prevent any trouble was to keep me occupied and in the company of people she trusted. Through her political and familial network I was introduced to all kinds of people – teachers, health workers, farmers, businessmen and the unemployed, city dwellers, villagers, and refugees. I socialized with former political prisoners, guerrilla fighters, and proKurdish activists. What most of my interlocutors had in common was their striving for a (more or less) peaceful solution of the ‘Kurdish problem’ and a critical stance towards the Turkish state. As I have said, the mayoress had made sure to keep me occupied and I was given the task of planning and initiating a health and family planning project to be implemented in the surrounding villages. My double role as an anthropologist and as a social worker provided me with enough ambiguity to not raise too much suspicion from the Turkish security apparatus. In this latter capacity as a social worker I travelled to different villages several times a week, spending time with a few families, interviewing them about their health situation, family disposition, and more often than not, ending with a discussion

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about memory, war, and suffering. Although I had an aim to cover a variety of villages that differed in size, geographical position and infrastructure for my health study, my movements were initially quite random. I mostly chose villages where my research assistant or I knew somebody from before. It was simply easier to be introduced to villagers by a common friend or relative, than to approach them as total strangers. Gradually my movements in the field developed from being based on contacts and networks to being guided by certain research questions and ideas. I adapted an ethnographic approach, which George Marcus had called ‘multi-sited fieldwork’. Multi-sited research is ‘designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnographer’ (Marcus 1995: 105). In multi-sited ethnographies, the ethnographer follows the paths and movements of people, things, metaphors, narratives, biographies, or conflicts. I had started to concentrate on a few past events and to follow their traces around the town, in the slums, and the surrounding villages as well as in cyberspace. In order to understand why my interlocutors talked about statesponsored violence in a very different way than about violence presumably perpetrated by the Kurdish guerrillas, I focused on two murders.2 In order to gain as complete a picture as possible, I interviewed different witnesses to the murders as well as relatives and acquaintances of both the victims and the perpetrators. I visited the different crime sites and tried to find the village of one potential perpetrator, who had died in an avalanche – presumably sent by God himself. Finally I had settled on discourses of victimhood as my research focus and attempted to explore how violent experiences were expressed in different social and political contexts. While I restricted myself mainly to the different contexts available in and around the Kurdish border town for my PhD research, I later conducted a follow up research project and followed these stories of suffering and torture into the context of exile and the therapeutic session.

Spectacular blindness or a car accident in the midst of war In my inquiry into different expressions of suffering related to the war, I came across a particular oral tradition, the dengbej. The dengbej has been reinvented and re-appropriated by the Kurdish national movement as a political genre (Scalbert-Yücel 2009). Although it was mostly men who performed dengbej in public, I had heard of a few women who were respected for their performative skills. The core of the dengbej as I had learned to value it was that personal experiences of violence and loss were framed in a political discourse but performed with deep emotions. Quite often, the women ended their song prematurely as they struggled to contain their sobbing. A friend of mine had suggested I visit Hamide, a woman in her sixties. Hamide was said to have a beautiful voice and a vast

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repertoire of songs. She also seemed to have all the additional characteristics I was looking for. Her family was known to be pro-Kurdish. They had been forced to abandon their village up in the mountains in the 1990s and to seek refuge in the town. In addition, Hamide had lost her husband a few years ago. I was thus quite excited to record yet more political, if intriguingly personal songs about the last decades of conflict and war. It was not difficult to ask Hamide. She was flattered and embarrassed at the same time. She knew of her reputation as a gifted singer, but had not performed for a long time. Her voice had aged, she said. My friend and I assured her that – besides the fact that her songs would surely be beautiful, especially in her elderly voice – it was the content of the songs we were interested in. Hamide thus soon agreed to share some of her most personal songs with us. She wanted to tell us about her husband’s death. When Hamide had ended her first song she cried heavily. Her daughter, who until then had been sitting silently in a corner, now intervened. She was angry. We had encouraged Hamide to relive the loss of her husband once more, and she would need a good while to digest the emotions, the sorrow and sadness that had been evoked through her own song. Hamide would need some rest and her daughter suggested we’d better leave. My initial euphoria over Hamide’s beautiful voice and the deep emotions she had expressed vanished as soon as we had transcribed the song, and my research assistant had translated the text into Turkish. Hamide’s song – however heart breaking it had been – had nothing, but nothing, to do with my ethnographic focus, namely the traumata of war. For some strange reason I had automatically associated her husband’s death to the conflict. But Hamide’s husband had died in a ‘normal’ car accident, and his death was not connected to the war in any way. If she only had sung about her flight, the destruction of her village. If her husband’s death could only be linked to the conflict in any way! But there was no such connection in Hamide’s song and I would not be able to use that wonderful song in my writing. Hamide had relived her emotions for nothing, and I had wasted time recording, transcribing, and translating a song I would not be able to use. In hindsight, I frown, of course, and I am embarrassed that I did not return to Hamide again. Why did I not ask her what it meant to become widowed with five children? Why did I not ask her how she managed to survive, having been forced to leave behind her animals and house in the mountain village and seek refuge in town? Why did I not reflect about how her war trauma had influenced her experience of her ‘peace-time’ trauma? But I did not. In her seminal work ‘the body in pain’ Elaine Scarry claims that severe pain is fundamentally personal, and cannot be communicated (Scarry 1985). Scholars like Veena Das or Talal Asad have questioned her stance. They asked, whether the problem is actually situated in the inexpressibility of pain, or rather in the inability of the audience to listen. Das (1996) for example suggests understanding pain as ‘asking for acknowledgement and recognition… In the register of imaginary, the pain of the other not only asks for a home in language but also seeks a home in the body’ (Das 1997: 88). She thus argues that the failure to communicate violent

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experiences might also be a failure of the listeners to feel empathy. Das shifts her focus towards the intersubjective field. As stories emerge in the relationship between narrator and an audience, successfully communicating experiences of pain and suffering is thus not only the responsibility of the narrator, but equally of the audience. Asad follows up on this stance and argues that ‘it is not that one’s own pain can never be convincingly conveyed to others, but that when one feels the urgent need to communicate one’s pain, and the communication fails, then it may come to be thought of – with added anguish – as unshareable’ (Asad 2003: 83). When Hamide cried, when I witnessed the pain and agony in her face and her subsequent breakdown, I was deeply moved. And, I remember my professional triumph at having recorded such a powerful document of the devastating effects of war and conflict. What I lacked was not empathy, but an ability to see Hamide’s experiences as relevant. In their forthcoming volume on ‘Histories of Victimhood’, Jensen and Rønsbo (in print) invoke the notion of the figure and the background. Most of you have seen the picture of the vase/faces. Depending on your perspective you see either two black faces or a white vase in the middle. While the example of the vase/faces is far too constant and dichotomist in my view, it draws our attention to the reference point, which influences what is focused upon. The authors thus argue that the figure of the victim always emerges from within a background of events that are not recognized as producing real victimhood. ‘Victims are figured and refigured against a community, a ground or alternatively non-figured through technologies of deceptive coloration, mimicry and camouflage, and […] they might choose to disappear against the background of the ordinary or highlight their own suffering as central elements of identity’ (in print: 19). Jensen and Rønsbo suggest that our willingness to see, to differentiate, and to acknowledge is the key. To understand the notion of victimhood is exactly to understand the ever-changing identity of the victim, as she exchanges and transacts with the terrain she inhabits and produces. My initial research focus was on the Kurdish conflict, and the violent experiences related to it. Thus I failed to see anything particular, spectacular, or important in Hamide’s song. There was nothing political in her husband’s death, his death was not caused by war and conflict, and – as the high percentage of lethal traffic accidents in Eastern Turkey indicates – his death could have occurred in peace time. Unconsciously, I had adapted the local frames for legitimate expressions of pain and taken the hierarchies of suffering for granted. I had become blind to the everyday forms of suffering which had been overshadowed by the spectacular suffering caused by political prosecution, torture, and war. For me, Hamide’s experience, but also domestic violence or poverty, had become part of the inevitable ever-present background of suffering and mourning that surrounded me. I did not spend much more thought on Hamide, at least not until much later, when I changed my ethnographic focus to discourses of victimhood. My change of perspective occurred gradually, and it started during one of my field breaks. In the emotional and geographical distance from the field, I read about some car accident that had happened close to my home in Vienna. The accident had been

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presented as something horrendous, catastrophic, and detrimental. Thinking of Hamide, I started to wonder what it might have felt like for her to become a widow, and to mourn a husband, without receiving any further acknowledgement and support for that loss. It seemed as if I, from a distance, had finally become able to see what I had been unable to recognize while ‘in the field’. When I returned to the border town, I was more critical of the dominant representations of victimhood in my field and detected new, different figures against the background of suffering. Gradually I understood that in order to fully understand the dynamics I encountered, I would have to redefine the content of my ethnographic study and also to look for the silenced, unspectacular forms of suffering. Of course, taking breaks and creating that little space ‘in which the analytical work of the ethnographer gets done’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 102), is a common prescription in handbooks on ethnography and fieldwork. The – for me – more interesting question is what we do in this little space? I would suggest that we not only read, think and plan our next steps, but try to apply different frames of reference – our own experiences, imagined or real, new knowledge gained and, if appropriate, different moral and ethical standards, to probe the dominant discourses we meet in the field.

Re-enacting torture In the first draft of this chapter, I wrote that I had ‘imagined myself in Hamide’s position’, thus implying that I had tried to feel with my mind and senses what it could have been like for Hamide. In doing so I invoked Unni Wikan’s concept of ‘resonance’. According to Wikan, ‘resonance’ is ‘an effort at feeling-thought, a willingness to engage with another world, life or idea. [It is] an ability to use one’s experience [in order] to try to grasp, or convey, meanings that reside neither in words, “facts”, nor text but are evoked in the meeting of one experiencing subject with another or with a text’ (Wikan 1992: 463). Wikan stressed the importance of imagining oneself in another’s situation and feeling empathy. Her concept fits well with Clifford’s definition of ethnography, which I gave at the beginning of this chapter: ‘Ethnographic practice as a means for producing knowledge from an intense, intersubjective engagement’ (Clifford 1983: 119). But this I had not done – neither had I tried to feel-think, or to imagine, nor had I aimed at an intense, intersubjective engagement. Rather the contrary. In an attempt to protect my emotional self, I had not engaged in an intense intersubjectivity – at least not when it came to experiences of suffering and violence. From my previous fieldwork experience in Cyprus, where I had done research for my MA, I had painfully learned what effect research under duress could have on the researcher. When I headed for Eastern Turkey I was intent on avoiding another series of long-term stomach aches. I knew that I would have to take care of myself, debrief every night by writing meticulous fieldnotes, in which I would not only retell what had happened that day, but also reflect on my own reactions and emotions. I also very consciously used my mother, a medical doctor and

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professional listener, to debrief me and to discuss especially painful moments. When I was not tracing a story or an event, I sought to be surrounded by people I liked, people who became friends, with whom I could spend a pleasant evening, chat, and laugh. Unconsciously I kept my emotional distance from those stories I knew I would have difficulty digesting. My choice of doing multi-sited fieldwork, of tracing stories and events, rather than following a few selected people, was no coincidence. I had been looking for stories about the horrors of war outside, among people I did not know too well, and with whom I did not socialize too frequently. I used my close friends and acquaintances to discuss and contextualize the stories I had collected. They contributed more aspects, verified the information I obtained, explained what I did not know, and questioned what I assumed to be true. Some of my friends also shared parts of their own past with me, I listened when they told their stories, but I never asked for them. It was simply easier that way, to look for the events, the stories and the traces of the war among people with whom I shared less of this intimacy and intense intersubjectivity. Emotionally my fieldwork periods in Eastern Turkey went surprisingly smoothly. No stomach ache, no burn out, not too many tears. I seemed to have made it – learned to do fieldwork on war and conflict and stay mentally and emotionally sane. Or so I thought. In this last part, I will discuss what happens when duress becomes unbearable, and when research seems to be impossible. In summer 2011 I returned to the Kurdish border town. I had started a follow-up project on testimonies of Kurdish torture survivors in Denmark and Turkey. Prior to my return to the field, I had studied patient files of torture survivors who had been treated at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims in Denmark. Through these files I not only gained insight into the different types of torture used in Turkey since the 1970s. More importantly for my ethnographic research in Turkey, I gained insight into the physical, social and psychological (long-term) consequences of torture. My specific interest in and increased knowledge of torture in Turkey, further accentuated by the name of my new workplace, the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims, granted me a new status and position amongst my interlocutors. From having been one who should be protected against inner and outer evil and danger, I had become someone with whom silenced knowledge and shameful experiences could be shared. Ibo, a polite and friendly Kurdish man in his fifties thus told me his story during one of my visits to his family’s house. I had known him and his family for several years now and had spent many a dinner with his wife Özlem and his three daughters. Ibo was an alcoholic, who did not bother too much about working hours and dress codes. He often smelled of alcohol in a community where the majority of the inhabitants were practicing Muslims and alcohol was hard to get. Still, everybody treated him with due respect. Ibo was especially respected among young activists and journalists, even far beyond the boundaries of the small border town he lived in. In spite of our frequent and friendly contact I had never asked Ibo

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about his past. Given the respect he got from the community in spite of alcoholism, I had assumed his story to be too violent and traumatic for him to tell and for me to hear. As he himself never touched on that topic, for many years I left it as it was – until Ibo himself deemed the time ripe for me to know his story.3 As the evening was chilly for August, we were sitting inside. It was Ramazan. Ibo’s wife was busy preparing dinner while the rest of the family mingled in the living room, hungry and tired after a day of fasting. As common during visits, the TV was on, showing one or another soap opera. But no one was watching. I had taken a seat on one of the many pillows that his daughters had prepared for me. Ibo however deemed them to be too uncomfortable for me, and ushered me on to the sofa. Ibo was unusually occupied with my comfort that day. Several times I had to confirm that I was sitting absolutely comfortably, did not need pyjamas (another gesture of comfort and intimacy with the guests), and was happy to wait the two hours until we could break our fast for the day. So Ibo started telling his story. Ibo came from a politically active family. He and his brothers had been involved in the leftist movement of the 1970s and had later joined the Kurdish nationalist movement. His brother had been the town’s first PKK martyr. As a charismatic journalist and activist, Ibo had early on been in the sights of the Turkish security forces. From the mid-1970s until 1995 Ibo was arrested and tortured seven times. The time he spent in prison varied from several years to only a few months. However, as Turkish security forces systematically tortured suspects in detention, Ibo was severely tortured each time. Unlike the other torture survivors I had talked to earlier, Ibo seemed not to be content just to describe the torture method in technical terms but moved through the room and acted out the torture he had endured. There was especially one torture method that he regarded as the worst experience. He had been hung by his arms several times. In order to demonstrate the devastating effect of this torture method, Ibo moved to the middle of the room and spread his arms sideways. With his right hand, he wrapped an imaginary strap around his left forearm, and did the same movement with his left hand. He then again spread his arms sideways, as if he was strapped to a crossbar, and lifted his body slightly, so that he was standing on his tiptoes. ‘It was impossible to manage long in that position, Nerina.’ ‘How long did they keep you in that way?’ I asked. ‘I fainted after only a few minutes’ was the reply. His arms still stretched out, Ibo let his head fall to his side and closed his eyes, as if he had fainted. He then looked at me again – one arm still stretched out – and pointed to his armpit. ‘This hanging has destroyed everything here. All the tendons, muscles, everything has been ruptured. It is all destroyed.’ Ibo finally relaxed his arms and moved back to his seat. He smiled at me and shook his head as I had tucked up my legs and rested my head on one of my knees. ‘You are not sitting comfortably, Nerina. Relax, stretch out your feet!’ Against my protests, he then ordered his daughters to bring me more pillows, took a sip from his tea before he got up on his feet, moved into the center of the room and enacted another method of torture. The contrast between his re-enactment of his torture and his intense concern for my comfort was unbearable.

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Ibo returned to the hanging position again and again – perhaps three or four times. He spread his arms, strapped them to an imaginary cross-bar, lifted his body, fainted and pointed to the ruptured tendons and muscles. Each movement accompanied by descriptions of the room, the torturers, colors, and sounds. Through his performance, Ibo forced me to see, to imagine and to understand, what I hitherto had avoided imagining and understanding. By the time the Muezzin called the end of the day’s fast and the conversation around the table had turned to joking, gossiping, and everyday topics, Ibo had managed to construct the image of a naked, blindfolded body in pain, I could imagine the interrogation room and felt the presence of the torturers.4

Research under duress and ethnographic practice Returning from the field I was totally burned out. It had all been too much. While I gradually managed to note down the interviews with other torture survivors, I was unable to relate to the interview with Ibo. Not only that, I had become unable to continue my analysis of the torture files as I had done earlier. Before my interview with Ibo I had managed to read the files from a distance relatively well. To treat them simply as a pool of information, that provided me with knowledge on the diverse torture practices and their consequences on the one hand, and the victims’ different coping strategies during and after their torture experience on the other. ‘From a distance’ meant to read the files without imagining, without relating any images to the different torture methods described in the files. Now, after Ibo had forced me to imagine what I until now had refused to see, the image of his naked and tormented body followed me also into the abstract, medical patient files. As I was unable to do my job, I asked my colleagues for help. My superiors nodded in comprehension when I told them my woes. I had obviously not been the first one who had reached her limits. I was working in an interdisciplinary research environment, where nearly all of my colleagues were engaged in research on torture, prison, and war. There was thus a strong consensus that the work we do is important, utterly fascinating, but extremely strenuous. The head of department – a psychologist – sent me home for a week and informed me of the possibility of receiving crisis management, that is, crisis therapy. Henrik Rønsbo, another senior member of the department, also urged me to take a break, but advised me to wait regarding the crisis therapy. As an anthropologist, he was critical of turning attention only to my psychological state, and suggested we rather first try and work as anthropologists – that is, to contextualize the event and to explore what had happened in the intersubjective field. He started to ask detailed questions about that evening at Ibo’s. What did the room look like, who had been present during his performance? What had his family members done? Had they listened, or had they been occupied with other tasks? Had the TV been on, and what did it broadcast? How did Ibo move in the room, when did he sit down, and when move? Did he return to the same spot in the room to demonstrate the hanging position? With these questions he sent me home, and asked me to

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write down the answers in a short essay. I did what Henrik had asked for. Through describing the context, observing Ibo’s movements, and pondering on the reactions of the other family members, I could finally distance myself from the image of the tortured, naked body. I could finally also relate to Ibo’s performance as an expression of the torture experience, which could be analyzed. Having regained my focus and the necessary distance, I could then start to analyze Ibo’s performance as the fascinating and rich material it was, and to theorize how the body, especially the body in performance was an important tool through which torture survivors and asylum seekers sought to substantiate their truth claim and thus gain recognition and acknowledgement. By contextualizing the event I could also start to understand and analyze what had happened between us. I could realize that Ibo’s constant imposition of controlling my own body, his insistence on my relaxation was not coincidental but part of the impressive impact his story had had on me. Ivana Maek, an anthropologist with knowledge of psychotherapy, taught me that what had happened between Ibo and me actually had a name. In performance theory Ibo’s performance would have been classified as the ‘revolutionary theater’, whose aim it was to leave the audience in a state of utter disturbance and rage. In psychology it is called projective identification, and it is used to communicate one’s exact emotional state by means of body language, rather than through symbols such as visual images or words. Ibo’s control of my body and my unbearable discomfort with it, was an exact replica of his own discomfort at his torturers’ control over his body. While I had been unaware of the concept ‘projective identification’ and thus unable to understand and cope with it, Ivana made me realize that there actually existed standard procedures to engage with these.

Conclusion The need to take care of this emotional side of our work has been acknowledged within rehabilitation institutions and medical science, as well as for aid workers stationed in conflict settings. Most researchers in the social sciences, however, are still left alone to cope with the emotional hazards that can emerge in the field and with emotional and psychological troubles when processing unpleasant data. They are left alone to navigate the terrain between a trustworthy description of the data production (implying closeness and deep knowledge of the field) and an idea of professional distance and objectivity that are necessary to analyze the ethnographic material gathered, and also often seen as fundamental to secure the researcher’s emotional and psychological well-being. In my contribution, I hope to have shown that we have to address more explicitly how we may go on doing what we do. Our ethnographic techniques and practices, like our ability to contextualize, compare, and focus on the intersubjective field, provide us with important and useful tools to handle difficult field situations and turn them to our professional advantage. Especially, crisis, errors, and embarrassing moments may thus become the turning points, the quintessential

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moments that provoke us to ask new questions, to drive our research into new directions and thus gain new and probably deeper insights into our field. If fieldwork failures, as my inability to understand Hamide’s story, and emotional breakdowns, as after the interview with Ibo, trigger an empathic, engaging, and not least professional curiosity, then we might further explore how such ethnographic practice and being-in-the-field might influence our anthropological analysis. In my case, the profound change of perspective, from the dominant representations of spectacular suffering towards a focus on the unspectacular has led to my deeper understanding of the Kurdish conflict. Having undergone a personal paradigm shift, I have become aware of the multiple ways the war and conflict had influenced everyday life, social hierarchies and gender norms. While Hamide’s story presents the unspectacular suffering, Ibo’s story was spectacular in all meanings of the word. As I will elaborate in another article (Weiss forthcoming), his spectacular performance reconstructed and reconceptualized the torture experience not only for Ibo himself, but just as much so for me, his audience. As Ibo forced me to attend to his story with all my senses – consciously and unconsciously – he engaged me in his performance’s ‘constructive and experientially constitutive force’ (Kapferer and Hobart 2005: 1). I was forced to experience his story as sensory and embodied knowledge. The emotional impact Ibo’s story had on me forced me to question anthropological fieldwork practice in its entirety. The common attributes of anthropological knowledge production, namely deep immersion and empathy, had suddenly become an obstacle to anthropological analysis and needed to be alleviated through methodologies and approaches borrowed from other disciplines. These insights have relevance beyond the Kurdish conflict, and I hope to contribute to deeper understanding and development of the broader field of the anthropology of violence and suffering. My hope is therefore that we may be able to establish a conscious and reflective academic field, which understands emotional knowledge as crucial to our analytical processes and theoretical understanding, and which grants the emotional side of fieldwork an, at least, equally important position to the teaching of diverse fieldwork methodologies. Only then will research in strenuous situations cease to be felt like research under duress, and actually produce the deep insights anthropological analysis is based on.

Notes 1

2 3 4

Research for this project was funded by the University of Oslo and the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship. I am indebted to Edith Montgomery and Henrik Rønsbo for their support during my research, and to Ivana Maek for helping me make sense of it. For a detailed description of the two murders see Weiss (2011). Ibo’s story is described in more detail in a forthcoming article (Weiss forthcoming). My previous reading of the torture files and my increased knowledge about torture made this experience and image even more vivid and relevant.

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References Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Clifford, J. (1983) On ethnographic authority. Representations 2: 118–146. Das, V. (1996) Language and body: transactions in the construction of pain. Daedalus 125: 67–91. Das, V. (1997) ‘Language and the body: transactions in the construction of pain,’ in Social Suffering. Edited by A. Kleinman, V. Das, and M. Lock, pp. 67–91. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Gentry, J. E., J. Baggerly, and A. Baranowsky (2004) Training as treatment. International Journal of Emergency and Mental Health 6: 147–155. Hammersley, M., and P. Atkinson (1983) Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Tavistock. Jensen, S., and H. Rønsbo (in print) ‘Introduction: histories of victimhood: assemblages, transactions and figures,’ in Histories of Victimhood. Edited by S. Jensen and H. Rønsbo. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania Press. Kapferer, B., and A. Hobart (2005) ‘Introduction: the aesthetics of symbolic construction and experience,’ in Aesthetics in Performance: Formations of Symbolic Constructions and Experience. Edited by A. Hobart and B. Kapferer, pp. 1–22. Oxford: Berghahn Press. Keesing, R. M., and A. J. Strathern (1987) Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Marcus, G. E. (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Scalbert-Yücel, C. (2009) ‘The invention of a tradition: Diyarbakir’s Dengbej project,’ in European Journal of Turkish Studies, State–Society Relations in the Southeast edition, vol. 10. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Weiss, N. (2011) ‘Tense relations. Dealing with narratives on violence in Eastern Turkey,’ in Anthropological Expressions of Violence. Edited by N. Weiss and M. SixHohenbalken. London: Ashgate. Weiss, N. (forthcoming) Marks on bodies, traces on souls: testimonies of Kurdish torture survivors. Wikan, U. (1992) Beyond the words: the power of resonance. American Ethnologist 19: 460–482.

Chapter 9

Making involuntary choices, imagining genocide and recovering trust Ivana Macˇ ek

Through reflecting on my own experiences in doing research on war and teaching about genocide and mass political violence and listening to the reflections of my colleagues in this broad field, I have come to realize that researchers and their research, the personal and the social-scientific, the individual and the general, are intricately connected and must be understood as a dynamic whole. Taking only some of its aspects into account limits our research results, as well as our personal lives as researchers. My intention here is to describe this dynamic in order to disentangle its distinct components, forces, and processes. As trauma psychologists and therapists teach us, entanglement or enmeshment—the clustering and merging of different experiences in our inner world as if they were the same1—is one of the consequences of trauma. The recovery of the traumatized person often depends on developing the capacity to distinguish between these different experiences and, when they are differentiated, to integrate each of them in a more adequate way into their inner world. The enmeshment of different personal and professional phenomena is equally characteristic of research on the Holocaust, genocide, and mass political violence. While it is a consequence of this kind of work, it also lies most often behind our decision to enter this field of study. I was born and raised in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which at that time was part of Yugoslavia. The dissolution of this multi-ethnic, pluri-religious country through a war that had seemed inconceivable to many of its citizens marked my early adulthood. Until 2014 I have been associate professor of cultural anthropology and senior lecturer in genocide studies at Uppsala University, while today I am senior lecturer of social anthropology at Stockholm University, both in Sweden. I have been working with mass political violence for over twenty years, since I conducted fieldwork in the besieged city of Sarajevo during the early 1990s, and have been teaching genocide studies for more than ten years. In 2008 two of my colleagues and I took the initiative to start the TRAST2 network for research related to trauma, including secondary and vicarious traumatization. By then, I had become a licensed psychotherapist with a psychodynamic orientation, as well as a Mindfulness meditation instructor. The subject of this volume—the relation between researchers and their research on mass political violence, war, genocide, and the Holocaust—requires

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each of us to scrutinize our path into this field, as well as the difficulties we have encountered and the solutions we have found along the way. I hope that examples from my own life and research will make those who are new to this field aware of how intensely the work might intertwine with their lives. I also hope that seasoned scholars will recognize some of these experiences and issues, which are seldom discussed and difficult to talk about. Finally, together with the other contributors to this volume, I seek to generate a collective understanding of the similarities and differences among our research experiences and disciplines, as well as in our personal backgrounds and predispositions. I started doing research on mass political violence as an anthropologist, a discipline in which the entanglement between the personal and the professional, the affective and the rational, the subjective and the objective, the poetic and the scientific, and the bodily and the mental has recently been at the center of theoretical and methodological discussions. This discussion is not completely new. Indeed, anthropologists have been keenly aware of this aspect of fieldwork for several decades; James Clifford and George Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), Clifford Geertz’s After the Fact (1995), and Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer (1996), among other works, began the turn toward self-reflexivity. A new wave of edited collections has described and discussed the entanglements of anthropological research: Antonius Robben and Jeffrey Sluka’s Ethnographic Fieldwork (2007); Athena McLean and Annette Leibing’s The Shadow Side of Fieldwork (2007); Parvis Ghassem-Fechandi’s Violence: Ethnographic Encounters (2009); Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss’s Violence Expressed (2011); and James Davies and Dimitra Spencer’s Emotions in the Field (2012). Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnström have called for “explicit theorizing of participation” and the “use of ethnographic imagination as a research tool” (2013:18). Robben argued for a “compassionate turn in anthropology that emphasized empathic understanding” (2010b:21) and demonstrates the sort of ethnographic imagination that Whitehead and Finnström advocate in his volume on Iraq (2010a). All these authors are grappling with the same phenomenon. Fieldwork positions us as participant observers and requires us to use exactly those capacities that can be easily misunderstood as non-scientific: the personal, emotional, and subjective dimensions of experiencing, understanding, and acting within the field we study. The problem of anthropology has been the lack of a theoretical understanding of this method, a limitation that has often been misconceived as a lack of theory per se. The participatory aspect of fieldwork “just happens,” drawing on ordinary skills in social interaction in an unfamiliar cultural setting, amounting to what might be called a sort of re-socialization (see Anderson et al. 2004). The better anthropologist you are, the more easily you can switch back and forth between observation and participation and integrate life in the field with life at home. Fieldwork has traditionally functioned as a rite of passage: once you have conducted the fieldwork successfully, you have been initiated into anthropology. You learn by doing and experiencing, as well as by hearing and reading what others have done. But work

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in the discipline is hampered by the absence of a conceptual understanding of what happens during our engagement in the field. As Clifford Geertz put it in 1995, “We lack the language to articulate what takes place when we are in fact at work. There seems to be a genre missing” (1995: 120). This genre has grown during the subsequent decades, but theoretical comprehension of what happens to us and how we respond while in the field is still missing from anthropology.3 The conjoined forces of enmeshment in both anthropological fieldwork and research on mass political violence hit me and other anthropologists of war and violence particularly hard. Over the years, I have met many who have struggled with the effects of their work on their own lives, sometimes as psychosomatic symptoms of depression, insomnia, anxiety, or misuse of drugs (see, for example, Nordstrom and Robben 1995, Smith et al. 1996). Indeed, some have chosen to leave the field altogether. The unsustainable psychological burden of this double enmeshment may explain why I felt existentially compelled to find some sort of solution to this predicament. Within a few years after completing my PhD thesis on war in Sarajevo based on the fieldwork I conducted there while the city was under siege, I underwent psychotherapy and subsequently decided to study psychotherapy myself. This experience opened a whole new world of inquiry into feelings and affects, intuition and spontaneity, the unconscious and associative, intergenerational inheritance, the nature of attachments, and inter-subjectivity. Gradually, through my increased understanding and engagement with psychodynamic theory, I could begin to sort out my experiences: my war experiences from my experiences in peacetime; my own experiences from the experiences of others—an instance of enmeshment through empathy; my own experiences from the experiences of other members of my family—enmeshment through intergenerational transmission; my personal experiences from shared experiences; and, finally, my private life from my professional life. I have found a number of concepts from psychodynamic theory particularly useful as methodological tools, including frames, transference, counter-transference, holding and containing, secure base, attachment styles, Kleinian positions, and projective identification. I use some of them here in order to disentangle some of the phenomena that are characteristic in research on mass political violence.

Enmeshment I left former Yugoslavia in late 1989, for a number of personal and professional reasons. Like many young Yugoslavs, I had the idea that studying and living abroad would give me the freedom I desired, offering both a better standard of living and entry into an international profession. All this worked out nicely for me, and I was happy with my choice. When the war broke out in 1991, I felt compelled to go back, although I did not really want to. Everyone back home in Zagreb advised me against returning, so I continued my studies in Sweden, but I changed the subject of my research

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from West Africa to Bosnia and Herzegovina (see Maek 2009). So I returned, not as a citizen to my own country, but as an anthropologist to a fieldwork site. The enmeshment involved here was multilayered. In the first place, the country of my origin became the subject of my research, so the private merged with the social scientific. My experiences during the war made it difficult, perhaps even impossible, for me to keep my inner world securely differentiated. The adverse experiences I had before the war became entangled with adverse experiences during the war. Paradoxically, I coped better with the adversities of war than with those of peacetime. At the same time, the spontaneous compassion I was shown by others in Sweden was exclusively about my war experiences. I had a hard time putting my finger on what was really bothering me. Eventually I developed cardiac arrhythmia and panic anxiety disorder. I was put on sick leave, which gave me time and energy to take care of myself and complete my dissertation. Moreover, I was deeply disillusioned about myself and the world. Normally, psychic maturity is a process of gradual frustration of our illusions; the ideas we have about ourselves and the world prove not to hold, which causes disappointments throughout our lives.4 One of the most basic illusions we all have to some degree is omnipotence: we believe that we can make happen whatever we want to happen. If we cannot, we feel frustrated, humiliated, and disillusioned. Over the years, our sense of omnipotence diminishes, and in an optimal course of development it gradually turns into an adequate and realistic sense of personal agency. During the war, I wanted to be able to do something about it. This attitude is generally healthy; we believe in our agency and have altruistic ideals. But I soon realized that I could not stop the destruction, killing, and suffering. In a psychologically healthy spirit, I intuitively turned my hopes to a higher and more powerful authority, the United Nations, in the same way that children look for a more powerful parent’s intervention when feeling powerless. Along with many others, I thought that the UN had the power to stop the war. This belief was not only a conscious and rationally founded idea but also, to a much greater degree, a deep subconscious conviction and psychological need that became clear to me only when it proved, time after time, to be false. Being stripped of this illusion, I was left hopeless and helpless (see Staub in this volume).5 At this point, the enmeshment of the war in my inner world became destructive. Not only did I feel powerlessness in relation to the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but this sense of powerlessness transmitted itself from the politics of war to my personal sense of agency. It seemed to me that I could not do anything at all, which put me in a state of low-intensity depression. I could sit and play computer games such as Minesweeper6 for hours in my office, randomly thinking of my friends in Sarajevo and completely convinced that I could do nothing whatsoever to change their predicament, which made me subconsciously treat my research on war as meaningless (see Maek 2009). On the positive side, psychologically, this solution effectively channeled my extreme feelings of guilt, which are common not only among survivors of war

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and genocide but also among helpers and, I argue, among researchers. What is known as survivors’ guilt7 is closely connected to our sense of omnipotence, the conviction that we could have done something to save the others and, since we did not, we are guilty of saving only ourselves. At that time, though, I did not know about survivors’ guilt. I knew that I could not do much more for the people and country I cared about, so I had no rational reason for feeling guilty. Still, I felt tremendous guilt because of my good fortune in being able to escape the war and live in peaceful Sweden. So, by playing Minesweeper for hours and wasting my time and project money, I provided myself with a real reason to feel guilty. This rationally acceptable form of guilt merged in my inner world with the survivors’ guilt I deemed irrational. In this way, through enmeshment, I could feel these otherwise unacceptable feelings. It would, of course, have been much better both for me and for my work if I had known that researchers could suffer from survivors’ guilt. I would have understood that my feelings were to be expected, and I could have accepted them and just let them be until they fell away, as I do with other intense feelings which I realize have some basis but are not productive in the current situation.8 In this way, I could have freed up my time and energy for constructive work on the project or for other activities. Enmeshment of the personal and professional is not necessarily problematic; many of us have been able to tackle our problems in creative and constructive ways. A significant proportion of those who study war and genocide have chosen their subject because of their personal experiences and engagement with it; the same is true of artists, writers, filmmakers, and psychotherapists, among others. In psychological theory and psychotherapeutic practice this is known as sublimation (see for example Herman 2001:153). It is important to be aware of the processes of sublimation in our research and of both the positive and the negative aspects of the choices we make as researchers of mass political violence. Next, I describe my own choices during the last twenty-five years. Today I see these choices as less conscious than I previously believed, which is why I emphasize their involuntary nature.

Involuntary choices When I was growing up, there was a little, thin, gray book on my parents’ bookshelf that was surrounded with a special sense of unease and even horror. It was the book that my maternal grandfather wrote after being released from the Croatian9 concentration camp Jasenovac in late 1943. I learned as a child that there were very few survivors from this camp and that he was one of them. I also knew that after the war he had nightmares and woke up screaming. I was told that he was a Communist sympathizer and provided the partisans with writing materials like ink and paper. They were hidden in the water tank of the bathroom in my grandparents’ apartment. One day, the courier who was to fetch the materials was caught by Ustashas (forces of the fascist Croatian government) and gave up my grandfather’s address. The Ustashas came to arrest him on a Sunday, when they

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had a good friend of my grandfather over for lunch. The friend was Jewish, so Ustashas took him as well. While my grandmother managed to get my grandfather out of Jasenovac after a year, his friend was executed in the camp. “Such a lovely man,” my grandmother would say on the rare occasions this topic came up, always with a sense of grief and guilt. My grandfather died when I was six years old, so I never got to know him as a grown-up. As a child I thought that he had a very loud and embarrassing laugh. When I was older, I learned that he had many friends who were artists and that he loved travelling; in retrospect, he seemed to have had an urge to travel rather than stay at home. As a young adult I thought that he might be the member of the family I had most in common with. I learned also that my grandmother was deeply depressed after his death. Once, when I was in my twenties, she told me, “The ones you love the most always leave.” When I left for Sweden in late 1989 I took very few books with me, but I did bring this thin book with my grandfather’s memories. It sat on my shelf in Uppsala for more than two decades—unread. A couple of years ago, however, I learned from my mother that a Croatian historian had contacted her; a publisher wanted to reprint my grandfather’s book, and the historian was to write an introduction about my grandfather. I read the final draft of the introduction, which my mother sent me, almost at once. It was interesting to learn more about my grandfather. I also received the new edition of the book (Riffer 2011) and intended to read it. But it stood on my shelf, still unread, for a year and a half. It was only after the TRAST symposium in 2012 that I finally read it. I was prepared to enter this reading as an exploration of my own reactions to war in relation to this relatively unknown ancestor and my family inheritance. I chose the summertime because I expected to be shaken and wanted to have time to process it. Reading it was interesting, but I was surprised that the book did not affect me strongly. In fact, I was already well aware of many of the horrors it described, either through the shared heritage of post-partisan, Communist Yugoslavia or through my studies of war, genocide, and the Holocaust. The inhumanity that shocked my grandfather was all too familiar to me. Suddenly I realized that, although he had experienced the concentration camp first-hand, it was I who had studied concentration camps and other inhumane phenomena during the past 20 years of my life. I had never even been to a concentration camp, but I could identify with my grandfather’s experiences. Where did this empathic capacity come from? I was struck by a similar phenomenon for the first time ten years ago when I read Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness (2004). I was disturbed by the book because to me it felt as if I had had similar experiences to the main protagonist. How could this be? I had never been arrested by Germans and sent to a concentration camp. The incapacity of the main protagonist to believe that the Germans would really harm him felt so familiar, and yet I also felt that I was less naïve, or perhaps less innocent. For example, I would have seized the chance to flee because I knew more than Imre Kertész’s protagonist did. And I know more than my grandfather knew. I am more frightened than they were, at least at the beginning. I have a

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more realistic picture of what humans are capable of doing to other humans. Indeed, it was, and sometimes still is, difficult to keep this insight from polluting my overall sense of what I can expect from people. I return to that topic later; here, suffice it to say that this was another example of the enmeshment of my professional experiences and knowledge of the most adverse episodes of human experience with my personal experiences and private preoccupations, which was most disturbing in peacetime. I do not think that I ended up in genocide studies only because of my grandfather’s book. I could make a long list of other reasons and circumstances, some inherited within my family and some caused by external conditions. What is certain, however, is that my involvement with this field of study has prepared me to face the most traumatic part of my family history, which was so difficult to talk about even though the book made it more accessible. If I were to make a qualified guess, I would say that since the book was loaded with what I understood to be overwhelming, and thus threatening, emotions, I was drawn towards becoming able to deal with it and to overcome the trauma that existed in the experience of my family. Here, again, we have a paradox: whether my grandparents and parents were silent in order to protect me from humans’ horrible capacity for hurting each other or in order to protect themselves from overwhelming memories of vulnerability, helplessness, and humiliation, this silence, in combination with the heavy affect connected to the book, pushed me in the direction of attempting to come to terms with such ruthless cruelty. The protective behavior of my family actually led me to expose myself to similar types of dangers, both mentally and physically. This situation is typical of the intergenerational transmission of trauma: subsequent generations inherit the trauma, the sense that something had happened which is not possible to fully acknowledge and still survive, but experience it in a different form (Danieli 1998, Kellerman 2001, Weingarten 2004). In psychodynamic theory we learn that it often takes three generations to heal traumas within a family; my case seems to fit well with the findings of Dan Bar-On (1995), among others. But does it mean that we are all more or less unconsciously caught up in resolving our parents’ and grandparents’ traumas? The question is worth considering, especially when we are seemingly inexplicably drawn to research on mass political violence. We might learn something new about ourselves, and we will probably be more able to grasp the materials we are studying by being able to distinguish between them and our family experiences. Considering the emotionally loaded experiences we have inherited among our possible motives to engage with this subject will improve our research. It will enable us to more consciously and fully empathize with our subject, while at the same time it will make it possible for us to differentiate ourselves from it. Seeing our decisions to enter this field as involuntary choices means that what most of us thought was our own free choice—we could have chosen to study something else; nobody forced us—will on closer examination turn out to be determined by phenomena in our inner worlds. In itself, this connection is not necessarily problematic, but sometimes these choices might conflict with our

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other needs and desires and keep us from living our lives more fully. Moreover, they might limit our research to phenomena that remain unresolved in our inner worlds, rather than examining social life more widely and more freely. I realized the involuntariness of my choices gradually, as I discovered deeper and deeper levels of captivity. This enmeshment was most evident in my incapacity to leave this field of research, although I have wished to do so many times and no major outer obstacles stood in my way. When I returned to the former Yugoslavia during the war, I thought that it was really my own choice because no one understood it and everyone tried to convince me not to do it: my family, my friends, and even the research council that financed the project. The first to hint that my background might have played some role in this decision was my counselor, who enquired about my maternal grandmother. I objected that this idea was far-fetched and that my maternal grandmother had nothing to do with my choices. Over more than a decade, however, I gradually realized that she had probably a lot to do with my choices. My grandmother’s parents met in Sarajevo at the end of the nineteenth century, where her father and maternal grandfather were officers in the Austro-Hungarian army. This is where I conducted my fieldwork during the war in 1990s, although I had never been to Sarajevo before the war. Like my grandfather, I am often classified as having “left attitudes” and (since I teach Holocaust and genocide studies) many of my closest colleagues are Jewish. After my grandfather was released from Jasenovac, the family fled to Vienna, where my mother spent a year as a child. Later, as a student, she lived abroad for several years. Not coincidentally, my own pursuit of higher education outside of Yugoslavia echoed my mother’s. I was also influenced by my father’s family history, which was very different from that of my mother’s family. My paternal grandparents’ restaurant was confiscated by Communists after the Second World War, and my father spent all his life trying to get back this property. He also tried several times to start a private business parallel to his employment in a state firm, but never succeeded. Similarly, I have not managed to give up my tenured position at the university, although I would like very much to have a private psychotherapeutic practice. These parallels and connections make me think that strong inner forces are keeping me employed in a state firm, in self-imposed exile, having for more than a decade taught and conducted research about the Holocaust and genocide rather than the anthropological studies for which I was trained. It is no accident that my fieldwork took me to Bosnia and Sarajevo. Although I have chosen all of it and fought hard to do it against many odds, it seems to me that my choices were not what could be considered free. To illustrate this point, I recall the three beautifully carved stools my grandmother always used for her knitting, her reading, and later to rest her bad leg or the remote-control for the TV on. After my grandmother died, when my mother asked me whether I would like to take anything to Sweden I immediately pointed to these stools—but not yet, I said, as I saw that my mother was using them in her living room. Much later I realized that my grandmother called these stools “Bosnian stools”; in fact, they were the only remaining part of

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the home in which her mother (my great-grandmother) had grown up in Sarajevo. Thus, although I had never been to Sarajevo prior to my fieldwork during the war, I grew up with an unspoken but deep emotional attachment to three Bosnian stools—and probably to other Bosnian artifacts and stories—without ever being consciously aware of their origin. This background might explain the strength of my spontaneous “feeling of utter injustice … that these people [Bosnians], who had always been the least nationalistic of all Yugoslavs, had to suffer” most in this senseless nationalistic war (Maek 2009:x). That feeling was decisive for my choice of research subject and subsequent travels to the war-zones of Bosnia. What are the long-term effects of spending a career in this field, not only doing research on a specific instance of mass violence but also teaching about various genocides that we know secondarily? (See also Bischoping 2004.) In particular, I consider genocidal imagery and the spiral of fascination, or obsession, with genocide.

Genocidal imagery and the spiral of fascination, or obsession, with genocide By genocidal imagery I mean the spontaneous association of peacetime phenomena with genocide. For example, when I see a man in a pink shirt, I immediately think of Rwandan prisoners. It takes a cognitive effort for me to break the flow of genocidal associations—haunting images of Rwandan people fleeing, being mutilated, and afterwards struggling to make their living in an unpredictable and paranoid present—and realize that I am in a Swedish park looking at a young man who probably enjoyed getting nicely dressed. It takes an effort to let go of the Rwandan genocide and become aware of the here and now, with its beautiful greenery, scents of flowers, bird-song, and children’s shouts. Similarly, a colleague told me that when she sees a pregnant woman she thinks of wartime rapes, not that the woman is happily expecting a wanted child within a secure intimate relationship. I am sure that anyone with a deeper knowledge of at least one instance of mass political violence has plenty of examples of their own. In war situations, the capacity for genocidal associations is an asset that may save lives. In peacetime, on the other hand, it is disturbing and in the long run socially and emotionally incapacitating. We can deal with this problem only by becoming aware of our emotions and thought processes, especially the flexibility of associations between genocide and peace, and by consciously training ourselves to leave the genocidal associations and return to the here and now of our predominantly peaceful lives. One benefit of studying mass political violence, if we learn to leave genocidal imagery behind when we disengage from our work, is that we gain a heightened appreciation of peacetime beauty and its gratifying effect on the whole of our being. As Alice Sommer, a 109-year-old Czech pianist who survived Theresienstadt, said in a documentary by Christopher Nupen: “Sometimes I am thankful that I have been there, because this gave me a … I am richer than other

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people. My … my reaction on life, it’s quite another one. All complain, ‘This is terrible’—It’s not so terrible!” (min. 8:06–8:36).10 In another YouTube clip she says simply, “Beauty is everywhere. I know the bad things, but I look for the good things.” During my first five or six years of teaching the course on Genocide and Mass Violence, I noticed that I began reading more and more about different cases and looking for documentaries, fictional films, and performances that took genocide as their topic. At first, I thought that I was led by a sense of responsibility to learn more about the subject I was teaching. But as I realized that I was physically and emotionally exhausted, rather than inspired, by pursuing this subject so unremittingly, I reconsidered what I was doing. A pattern appeared quite clearly. As the course progressed, I would become more and more depressed. While I spent the days in teaching and reading, the evenings were dedicated to watching films and documentaries. I was curious to learn more, but I think that what kept me going was the strange yet familiar sense that these grotesque and dehumanizing phenomena were somehow connected with my deepest, most existential experiences. I could understand them in a subconscious and indirect way, as I understood the main protagonist in Kertész’s Fatelessness, or as I understood the Cambodian painter who survived the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh and the prison guards interviewed in the documentary S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003). The images of genocide transmitted through media became enmeshed with my own life-experiences, making the world seem like a dangerous place where no one can be trusted. This is a classic instance of vicarious traumatization (see Laurie Pearlman’s chapter in this volume, as well as the Introduction). Eventually I realized that I needed to leave my work behind when I came home in the evenings. Doing this was not easy, for I was unable to let go of the genocidal imagery by which I was obsessed. Soon I discovered that having a drink helped, so I began to self-medicate. Fortunately, I taught these courses only a month or two each year, which proved too brief a time to turn me into an alcoholic. The realization that I was indulging in genocidal imagery helped me break this spiral. Today I can teach courses about different cases of genocide for much longer periods without being shaken in my existential basis. Some colleagues have expressed a fear that they have become numb when this happens to them. I think that, when we are worried about becoming desensitized, we can see whether we still have the capacity to be shaken existentially. For my part, I am still easily moved by films and documentaries I watch with my students and the literature we read. I do not feel that I have become numbed, but rather found a way to consciously exit the emotionally overwhelming parts of my work. I have simply developed more flexibility. In this volume, Ervin Staub suggests that a certain level of numbing is useful in this line of work, and in this respect I agree with him. I would suggest, however, that an even better way of dealing with long-term work with genocide would be what in psychodynamic theory is called containing: the capacity to take in the psychic material that is overwhelming for another person (a child, a patient,

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an informant, a student, or a colleague), behold it, and then give it back in a less threatening, psychically more bearable form (see also Kaplan in this volume). There seems to be a significant difference in this regard between the first-hand knowledge that we gain through research and the second-hand knowledge that we often use while teaching. In my experience, knowing a case first-hand, as I do Bosnia and Herzegovina, helps me to be more grounded and less easily shattered emotionally and existentially. In Bosnia and Herzegovina I learned about the whole of life in a war zone, not just the most destructive parts of it. When I learn about Cambodia, I do not learn how prisoners joked with one another or marveled at a good meal. I learn only about the prisoners who were executed or have miraculously survived, and I learn about people only in relation to mass violence, as survivors or perpetrators. I know nothing about their everyday lives before or after the violence that would enable me to associate them with less destructive actions. Of course, working with any case of mass political violence takes its toll. I moved through different phases in my emotional reactions to war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At first, while the war was still going on but I was in Sweden, I was mostly numbed and dissociated. In the midst of the quiet depression expressed in endless hours of playing Minesweeper, I remained emotionally detached while teaching. I focused on facts and on portraying the war through everyday life in terms that Swedes and other Westerners would recognize. After the war had ended came a period when emotions could easily break through. It was as if I had a readily accessible layer of anger and rage that could erupt at the slightest mention of the political situation in former Yugoslavia and the failure of the international community to respond to the emergency. Today I can see that this anger was probably also a protection from feelings of humiliation, shame, and guilt, which were harder to accept. During this time I experienced an existential and boundless sorrow over all the losses and the vulnerability that I, like many others, was left with. This emotionality was new and unusual for me, as a colleague with whom I had travelled to several war-zones commented. After showing a film about Sarajevo to a class, noticing that my eyes were filled with tears, he asked, “Since when did you become so sentimental?” I did not mind this turn in my life and work, and in time I realized that I can be both factually oriented and emotionally sensitive, letting the facts and feelings converge to convey a richer portrait. Rather than trying to keep the upper hand over my emotions, I note them and let them serve as an additional guide in my teaching and research. I try to communicate this attitude to my students as well. In this way, my discovery of my own deeper layers of anger, fear and loss, as well as of joy and gratification, are intrinsically connected to the discovery of deeper meanings of the phenomena that I study as a professional. For most of us, our research and teaching is situated in an organizational milieu. In the last section of this chapter, I take a look at some phenomena closely connected to research on genocide and mass political violence in an academic context, where structure and simplification, judgment and condemnation,

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competition, bureaucratization, parallel processes, and projective identification can have unexpectedly destructive effects.

Genocide in the academy Doing research on genocide and mass political violence can have positive effects on the researcher as the research attempts to describe and structure a reality that is otherwise opaque, confusing, and morally contradictory, and to make sense of experiences that are deeply enmeshed in our inner world (see also Kaplan 2008, and her chapter in this volume). At the same time, it simplifies the subject of the research, which at times can feel frustrating, and even false or meaningless, as it does not seem to capture the complexities of experiential knowledge. The structuring and categorizing—that is, normative—nature of academic work makes it easy to lose the openness and flexibility that are essential to research. From curiosity and not-knowing, we are all too often pushed into having to know and, by extension, not wanting to hear anything that contradicts our current understandings. In social-scientific research we use our judgment to decide what seems correct or plausible and what does not. We must often judge not only our own and our students’ work, but also our colleagues’ ideas, writing, projects, and CVs. Through the pressure to make these evaluations, we easily shift from being open and interested to being judgmental and even prone to condemning others. We are supposed to create an atmosphere conducive to discovery, where seniors and peers stimulate and support one another and their juniors, but too often we end up in more or less explicitly competitive and opinionated fights. Unfortunately, these problems exist in academic work in general (Nordstrom 2009 makes a similar critique), but in genocide studies the extreme imagery that informs our inner world makes them more serious and intense. A difference of opinion may be experienced as an existential threat. A critical discussion easily becomes a fight for survival of the strongest, even though it is not consciously intended as such. Moreover, because of enmeshment, our professional work easily becomes our personal calling and takes on super-human moral dimensions, since dealing with the ethics of our subject is perceived to be beyond human capacity.11 All these factors make working on genocide and mass political violence much more stressful than doing intellectual work on other subjects. As the academy is increasingly bureaucratized, even trivial official actions can become subconsciously entangled with the bureaucracy that makes genocides and mass political violence possible. Somebody saying “I am just doing my job” in order to explain their decision resonates with so many perpetrators declaring that they were just doing what they were assigned to do. Zygmunt Bauman has written about modern bureaucratization as one of the central preconditions of the Holocaust (Bauman 1989). For a genocide scholar, “just doing my job” is readily associated with the denial of personal responsibility for atrocities. It takes an effort to interpret the expression as a co-worker making the best choice in regard to the work to be done and disregarding his or her personal preferences. Another

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common expression that resonates with authoritarianism and lack of personal agency and responsibility is “It is not for us to decide.” For a genocide scholar, this expression is very close to blindly obeying the orders of their merciless and insensitive superiors, the designers of genocide. The idea that someone “up there” in authority might actually care that a solution that works for everyone should be found does not occur to us and needs to be consciously reclaimed. Perhaps the most typical bureaucratic expression is the apologetic utterance, “I wish I could help you, but these are the rules.” Respecting and implementing collectively agreed-upon rules is the ground of any functioning society. Unfortunately, this disclaimer has too often been used by bureaucrats to deny their personal responsibility and hide behind the rules even when they felt that the rules were not in line with their personal ethnical judgment. Officials have taken this stance not only in the Holocaust but also, for example, in deciding immigration cases. Not by coincidence, in Sweden this state office has the highest rate of staff turnover, because people cannot stand taking decisions that they know will harm others, such as asylum seekers who are sent back to countries they fled. The genocide scholar characteristically regards “the rules” as part of killing machinery, not as a necessary social precondition. In the academy, these associations are more than psychological phenomena taking place in heads of individual researchers. Psychodynamic theory defines a phenomenon called “parallel processes” in which what happens in one setting— for example, in therapy with a client—is then unconsciously repeated in another setting—for example, between the therapist and his or her supervisor.12 In studying genocide, we should pay careful attention to possible parallel processes of genocidal organization that are transmitted from the subject of our study into academic organizations and our own behavior. More concretely, we should pay special attention to our tendency to insensitive, harmful, and merciless behavior that in our subconscious does not feel quite right but which we manage to ignore by reassuring ourselves and others that we are “just following the rules and doing our job” in the name of some higher authority or collective. This is a parallel process to how some of the subjects of our research behave. Interpersonal relating in academic organizations that deal with the Holocaust, genocide, and mass political violence is often plagued by what Laurie Pearlman (personal communication) has called sharing of “little horror stories,” where we see the mechanisms of projective identification at work. Very briefly (see Pearlman in this volume), projective identification is when someone disposes of his or her unbearable psychic material or feelings by dumping them onto someone else in the unconscious hope that the other person will be able to make them bearable for both of them. Working with the most adverse chapters of human history, we often confront unbearable feelings. It is important to ask ourselves: what do we do with the unbearable material? If we do not experience it as unbearable, we should ask ourselves whether this reaction is adequate. If the subject matter is horrible but we do not feel it, we are probably using strong psychic defense mechanisms that keep the unbearable unconscious. In that case, we should ask ourselves again: what do

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we do with this unbearable material? There is a significant probability that we are unconsciously transferring it to other people in our surroundings. A typical situation is when a researcher indulges in recounting facts about some horrible event of mass violence in front of less knowledgeable colleagues. While the narrator seems to be in control of things and is most energetic, a colleague suddenly feels the horror of the subject and urgently leaves the room. This situation is a typical case of projective identification that ends up with the receiving party feeling weak and incapable of dealing with the emotionally overwhelming information. In fact, the narrator is successfully dumping his or her own unbearable feelings onto unknowing colleagues. When the knowledge of adversities is handled unconsciously, it is all too easy to use projective identification. The reactions of the receiving audience are often dramatic because the feelings and affects in this line of research are extremely intense and invasive: rage, a fusion of anger and humiliation, horror, and extreme anxiety. We need to become more alert to projective identification because all too often I have seen colleagues take their incapacity to deal with the psychological burden of their own and their colleagues’ work as a private and individual weakness that has nothing to do with their occupation. All these psychodynamic phenomena are well known to psychologists and psychotherapists who have developed individual, professional, and organizational methods of dealing with them (see Pearlman in this volume, as well as Pearlman and Saakvitne 1995 and Saakvitne and Pearlman 1996). Together with other authors in this volume, I would like to make a case for scholars of genocide to acknowledge these phenomena and adopt some of the helpful methods that others have developed for dealing with them. In this way they will not only cease to hamper our work but also open up new insights about mass political violence, genocide, and the Holocaust. In other words, our reactions provide us with important information about the experiences of people we study. By understanding and using theoretical concepts such as parallel processes and projective identification, we can systematically theorize this type of knowledge, which has so far been largely obscured and at best only implicit. In conclusion, I turn to some benefits that work with genocide and mass political violence brings, as well as suggesting some tools for scholars to adopt in their work (see also Pearlman in this volume).

Working for trust While I profited from a reduction of my unconscious omnipotence to a more realistic perception of my agency and learned that studying mass political violence was one of the strategies I had for combating the inherited and current threats I experienced, this discovery did not make me feel more secure. On the contrary, it made me aware of my vulnerability and my inability to build a completely secure world either for myself or for my child. On the other hand, this awareness enabled me to work towards a more secure world in a more realistic way (see also Staub in this volume), a path that is neither clear nor easy.

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The gratifications of engaging in this type of research need to be pointed out and consciously made use of in order to counterbalance all its inherent difficulties. In addition to the heightened sense of life and beauty that I and others have experienced, some aspects of teaching and mentoring younger colleagues are very gratifying. For my part, I have found the containing function of a teacher and supervisor especially helpful. The capacity to ease younger colleagues’ anxieties is rewarding, for it yields immediate positive results without the strenuous work that research and writing demand. Likewise, opening the way for students’ sensitivities and a holistic understanding of mass political violence has felt rewarding. Finally, studying mass political violence is gratifying because it is about something that really matters but is rarely fully understood or even acknowledged. I end this chapter by recapitulating the positive tools that I have learned during my career and point to how we can go on. In the first place, we must do constant personal and joint work to increase our awareness of the secondary and vicarious phenomena that I have described in this chapter: the nature of choices, enmeshment, genocidal imagination, parallel processes, and projective identification. We must seek to develop the flexibility required to enter into and leave emotionally burdensome material. We must strive to create a more supportive interpersonal climate for our academic work, characterized by constructive criticism, safety, openness, curiosity, and not-knowing. In all this work, self-knowledge is in constant dynamic development. But in order to be able to work with mass violence, it is equally crucial that we take care of ourselves in a serious way. Many or most traumatic experiences are nonverbal, this is why it is a good idea to take care of the body. For me, yoga, meditation, long walks in nature, music, fiction and poetry, counseling, and mindfulness meditation have all given good results and provided me with tools to help me through the rough periods. Sound and safe intimate relationships are an invaluable resource. Just as bad social relations can push us into paranoia and anxiety, sound relationships can bring us back to psychic wellbeing. In our organizations, we must provide continued help to students and colleagues not only through supervision but also through sensitive interactions that can establish and develop awareness and attitudes that will further our knowledge of genocide and mass violence. Flexibility, rationality combined with sensitivity, and a fusion of the cognitive with the intuitive are particularly important. This task is not easy, as it requires us to bring into academia the gentle and supportive attitudes that are not generally promoted, schooled as we are in academic bashing. An example from a TRAST seminar a couple of years ago is especially enlightening. TRAST seminars are designed as informal meetings of professionals who work with traumatized people or on materials about traumatic experiences. The aim is to exchange experiences and ideas in a non-judgmental setting. This time a young doctoral candidate was talking about her fieldwork with rural dwellers in contemporary Rwanda. She shared an episode that was embarrassing for her, because she had forgotten the difficult predicament of her hosts’ lives. A senior

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researcher who had also worked in Rwanda thought that this showed the younger woman’s Western ignorance. The senior researcher missed the younger one’s embarrassment, a point that, as I saw the situation, she was clearly making. As a leader of the seminar, I understood that there was a misunderstanding but did not intervene. Perhaps I, too, was being overly respectful of the senior researcher, who supported her critique with an eloquent flow of important information about Rwanda. Afterwards I realized that this attack had hurt the junior scholar. It was only then that I talked to both of them and tried to resolve the situation. This incident was not terrible; rather, it was quite typical of academic seminars. It shows how easy it is to misunderstand one another; what in other fields might well be a purely academic matter takes on greater emotional resonances when the subject is genocide studies. It is essential for us to be kind and gentle with one another and not automatically adopt behavior that is routine in academic seminars. Finally, the incident taught me that I need to be more active and much braver than in ordinary seminars: the TRAST seminar is meaningful only if participants can trust one another and feel secure from attacks, and the principles of trust and security must be upheld against all academic and unofficial hierarchies and routines. Conversely, I have had very positive results when turning my academic disagreements into points of departure for self-reflection and further enquiry into the subject matter at hand, rather than adopting a combative tone. Laurie Pearlman and her colleagues have suggested some organizational ways of dealing with the vicarious traumatization of trauma psychotherapists (see Saakvitne and Pearlman 1996). Among these are group supervision, counseling, and network meetings. The crucial factor in these methods is a basic understanding of psychological phenomena, respect, and trust. One of the attempts to create a meeting place for such work is the TRAST network for work with trauma and secondary traumatization at Uppsala University, Sweden, and the symposium in May 2012 that was the original inspiration and basis for this volume.

Notes 1

2 3

Enmeshment as theoretical concept is used in a narrower sense in psychodynamic theory than I use it here, namely as the confusion of affects between parents and children in the intergenerational transmission of trauma (for a good example, see Kaplan in this volume). I broaden its meaning beyond intergenerational and intersubjective phenomena to encompass all instances of entanglement, clustering, and merging of different experiences in our inner world. TRAST stands for Trauma and Secondary Traumatization. The enmeshment of fieldwork also has a strong impact later, when many anthropologists find it extremely difficult to write up their research and shift from academic careers to doing practical work with NGOs because they feel it makes more of a difference. A large part of the problem often lies in the incompatibility between the personal involvement that fieldwork requires and academic demands for scientific (or, rather, scientistic) “objectivity.” Fiction writers resolve the problem of personal enmeshment and imaginative communication with others quite effectively, but they have other skills, as well as other institutional conditions and expectations.

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4 For more about optimal frustration as opposed to traumatic frustration, see Kohut (2009). 5 At this point, many colleagues turned to cynicism, condemning the UN as a powerless conglomeration of self-indulgent bureaucrats who tried to protect themselves and the countries they represented from one another. This cynical view, which purports to be a realistic understanding of the work, gives those who hold it a feeling of regaining control. 6 Perhaps the resemblance between the game of Minesweeper and my own predicament at that time is more than coincidental: the single player tries to detect mines in squares of territory by sheer logical deduction, in effect creating zones of safety in a dangerous situation. 7 The term was initially used in relation to the survivors of the Holocaust, but later was widened to include a variety of situations in which those who have managed to survive but not managed to help others survive, or just fared better than the others, can develop similar symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, nightmares, and emotional labiality. Perhaps one of the best known books that explore this phenomenon is Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1989). Holocaust researchers have criticized the overuse of survivors’ guilt in relation to their informants, as they have found many other ways in which Holocaust survivors reacted to and coped with their losses, often by increased psychological maturity and pro-social behavior (see the chapters by Staub and Vollhardt in this volume, and Dwork 2010). 8 As an everyday example, when I have too much to do at work, I become irritable at home. If I realize this, I can refrain from shouting at my child for not immediately doing what I tell him to do and take it a bit easier, which benefits all of us. The shouting is unproductive, but my irritation and aggression have a real cause. 9 The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), 1941–1945, was a puppet state set up by the Axis powers after the occupation of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Its ruling cadre were Ustashas (Ustaše). 10 Film available at http://www.youtube/cKYZPfF9gdo; second interview clip at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnoQ8F_CUfE. 11 See for instance Michael Jackson’s portrait of a female protagonist’s reasoning in Sierra Leone (2003). Or consider the question of whether a God can exist after Auschwitz, raised among others by Elie Wiesel in his autobiographical novel, Night (2006). 12 For some basic descriptions and definitions of parallel processes, see Searls (1955), Ekstein and Wallerstein (1972).

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Robben, Antonius C.G.M. (2010b) Ethnographic imagination at a distance: An introduction to the anthropological study of the Iraq war. In Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War, ed. Antonius C.G.M Robben, 1–23. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Robben, Antonius C.G.M., and Sluka, Jeffrey A. (eds) (2007) Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) Documentary film directed by Rithy Panh. Distributed by Institut national de audiovisuel and First Run Features. Saakvitne, Karen W., and Pearlman, Laurie Anne (1996) Transforming the Pain. A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization. New York: W.W. Norton. Searles, H.F. (1955) The informational value of the supervisor’s emotional experience. Psychiatry 18: 135–146. Six-Hohenbalken, Maria, and Weiss, Nerina (eds) (2011) Violence Expressed: An Anthropological Approach. Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate. Smith, Barbara, Agger, Inger, Danieli, Yael, and Weisaeth, Lars (1996) Health activities across traumatized populations: Emotional responses of international humanitarian aid workers. In International Responses to Traumatic Stress, ed. Yael Danieli, Nigel S. Rodley, and Lars Weisaeth, 397–423. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Co. Weingarten, Kaethe (2004) Witnessing the effects of political violence in families: Mechanisms of intergenerational transmission and clinical interventions. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 30(1): 45–59. Whitehead, Neil L., and Finnström, Sverker (2013) Introduction: Virtual war and magical death. In Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, 1–25. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Wiesel, Elie (2006) [1960] Night, trans. Stella Rodway. New York: Hill and Wang.

Chapter 10

Personal and research-related links to trauma Suzanne Kaplan

Life histories recounted by Jewish survivors who themselves were children during the Holocaust and by child survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide have constituted the core of my research. Each individual life story has made a powerful impression on me, as have the interviewees as persons. With the help of the video-recorded interviews to which I have returned many times during the research process, I can see each and every one of them in front of me, which has also facilitated my psychoanalytic listening, a space for possible deeper understanding. My research interest was sparked in 1997 when I interviewed two Jewish women who were eight years old when their native countries was occupied by Germany – Poland in 1939 and Lithuania in 1941. I wanted to understand more about the circumstances in which they lived as children and as adults and thereby the contextual psychological phenomena regarding trauma and memory. I continued with an extended study in which the two women were included. I minimized my clinical practice and have now spent 15 years doing research and writing about genocide. An important entrance to my studies of the Holocaust was the book by Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star, a history of Jewish youth in Nazi Europe. Children were afflicted particularly severely during the Holocaust. Only 11 per cent of the Jewish children in the Nazi-occupied countries survived (Dwork, 1991). Testimonies have shown that child survivors of genocide are exposed to extreme levels of violence and loss. Their reactions are associated with brutal separations from parents and siblings as well as with their having been witnesses to violence. My research aim is – as far as is possible – to obtain an understanding of overarching aspects of the ‘child perspective’ in the life histories of the now adult child survivors of genocide. I ask, how have the child survivors’ memories influenced their lives as adults and how are they coping when it comes to affect regulation, the ability to regulate emotional states? We others, are our minds capable of comprehending the inconceivable cruelties each individual has endured? I have chosen to partake of the survivors’ oral life histories, which in my view offer the possibility of coming closer to what a genocide entails. But I have asked myself: How can I write a text which, to the greatest extent possible, can convey a fraction

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of a feeling of what it meant to be a child during the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a text embodying the life histories of which I have partaken – and at the same time a text giving what is elusive a level of abstraction, a paradox if you like, so that the reader will be able to rise above the flood of information and reflect about what is being recounted? At the same time questions recur as to how I can do the interviewees ‘justice’ and get to the heart of what they wanted to put across when they chose to tell their histories. Similarly, I ask myself how I can write about and ‘systematize’ the experiences of the survivors without committing an act of intrusion with my assumptions about their life conditions.

Family background – personal links to trauma Reflecting on my personal approach to the theme of the Hugo Valentin Centre symposium in Uppsala on ‘Trauma and Secondary Traumatization in Studies of Genocide and Massive Political Violence’ – both while organizing the symposium and while preparing my contribution to this volume – I have realized that I have a tendency to put myself on the margins. I have become aware of a general tendency to see myself as a ‘guest’ with ‘the others’ – as in group trips abroad, as in courses I attend. Another observation I have made is that I have no problems in moving from one apartment to another within a short period of time. I ask myself – Am I a person who quickly tries to get an overview of the current situation, who has my ‘luggage ready’, prepared to move on? Could this attitude of a need to be independent and also to be prepared to move – among other factors – be a transgenerational phenomenon with roots in my grandmother’s flight from Nazi-occupied Norway in 1942? During my early life I have heard my maternal grandmother, now and then, tell me with intense affects about the war years in Norway – how she and the family suddenly had to leave their house an early Monday morning, according to an order from the Nazi police, and hide at the neighbour’s. Also, they had to move from one neighbour to the next, when the danger came closer. I come from a Jewish family that has lived in Sweden for several generations. However, my maternal grandmother Blommy, her husband Salomon and other relatives were living in Norway when that country was occupied by the German Nazis during the Second World War. My grandmother’s brother Herman was killed by the Nazis in Norway. Several family members were deported to Auschwitz. One of them, the son Samuel, miraculously survived and could return to Norway after the war. Blommy and Salomon managed to flee over the border to Sweden in late 1942, hidden in crates on the flatbed of a truck. After the end of the war, they got their house outside of Oslo back—a very important place also for me during all my school holidays. However, the house had been used as a headquarters by the Nazis and there were bullet holes in the ceiling, the walls and in one painting that I remember very well. Looking at the bullet holes evoked many fantasies in me about my Norwegian family’s experiences of the persecutions. I was afraid there were still Germans in the wardrobe. Throughout the years, my grandmother has recounted memory fragments for me.

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I first thought that my interest in conducting an extensive study about child survivors of the Holocaust mainly had to do with my profession as a child psychoanalyst – that I would arrive at a deeper general understanding of childhood trauma besides learning about the Holocaust. Nowadays I understand that my family background must have had significant importance for my research interest. My childhood experiences in Norway – my ideas and fantasies about what happened in my grandmother’s house – have from the very beginning of my research work served as a sounding board. As a co-ordinator in Sweden for the USC Survivors of the Shoah Visual History and Education in 1996–98, I saw the archive as a unique research resource and I started my first research project with 40 video-recorded interviews as my point of departure. The aim was to describe the content of the narratives and to analyse psychological phenomena that emerged in the life histories recalled by survivors who were themselves children during the Holocaust. This project also meant that I had a long break in my clinical work as a psychoanalyst. Instead my research had the characteristics of ‘applied psychoanalysis’, which can broaden psychoanalytic understanding as well as being a multidisciplinary research approach. My research has had a profound impact on me. It has changed my perspectives on life – both personally and professionally. I have learned about genocidal processes, about children and massive trauma, about living with memories that ‘won’t let go’ and about the life perspective of older people when they are no longer in their active life and are reflecting about their past. This knowledge has been valuable beyond measure. My research has meant staying at a constantly heightened but optimal level of anxiety which has functioned as the impetus in the work. It has expressed itself as ‘evenly suspended attention’ and a continual refinement of the concepts which I have chosen to use in my theorizing. It has also been a matter of ‘cramps’ that have stricken me when I have believed that I have understood something but have realized some shortcomings when I could not get it down on paper. These cramps have subsided after I have struggled to understand and have reached a point of greater clarity.

Psychoanalytic approach – professional links to trauma In my psychoanalytic work I have had sessions with survivors and have worked with children of refugees from different countries and with adopted children – often after their repeated stays in orphanages in their country of origin. A challenge for psychoanalysts is to help the survivor to see memory images as memories, not as phenomena in the present. Moreover, psychoanalysts can point to decades of observations showing that traumatic memories are transferred in a non-specific way from one generation to the next, and they can help to break this pattern. The researcher on terrorism, Jessica Stern, tells in her memoirs (2011) about her very first conversation with her father about his experiences. It took place when she was an adult.

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Jessica’s father said: I remember walking from the railway station. Every time I’d see an SS man, I’d try to walk around him. Whenever it was inescapable that I had to pass him I’d just steel myself for the process, try not to call attention to myself in any way. Jessica says: There is a dry hollowness between us now. The absence of feeling leaves me light-headed. I am slightly nauseated, a familiar sensation. It comes to me when there is some strong feeling unfelt. She continues: Even now I have to ask myself – what is the strong unfelt feeling that nauseated me? Even now I’m dissociated from the feeling – though at least, while we’re ‘talking’ about it, I realize that he was not feeling his own terror and that my job was to avoid feeling, so as not to burden him with my (and his) feelings. It’s amazing that I’m still dissociated from the feeling … I feel afraid.

(Jessica Stern, personal communication, 2012) What Stern describes may be seen as the enmeshed communication that is so common between the first and the second generations of survivors (for a more thorough discussion see Peter Fonagy, 1999). People who have endured extreme repeated traumas live with a doubling of their experiences, a ‘vertical splitting’. The past and the present exist simultaneously in their personalities, usually without any associative connection. The splitting – or dissociation – arises owing to the difficulties in dealing with and integrating the anxiety that has been evoked. One way to try to achieve psychic change while working with extreme traumas is to ‘reintroduce the concept of time’. Oscillation between what I call trauma linking and generational linking may also be part of the healing process (Kaplan, 2006). With trauma linking I mean that traumatic experiences are ‘easily awakened’ or repetitively ‘triggered’ associatively in conjunction with events and sensory perceptions in everyday life. With generational linking I mean that the individual has his or her attention directed more towards significant persons and objects in the past and in the present that strengthen the feeling of living in the current context and give a feeling of creativity. This in its turn allows the creation of a healthy distance to traumatic experiences. By picking up on underlying themes associated with generational linking phenomena and highlighting them – even when their presence is subtle – the listener helps the survivor to connect with the human predilection for creativity and life continuity. Hopefully, generational linking will dominate over trauma linking in the long term.

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It has been a major concern for me to highlight how survivors deal with their emotions in the aftermath of the genocide. The affects and also the lack of shown affects serve as signals and guideposts. How something is said – the victims’ facial expressions and statements about their emotions – is just as meaningful for my understanding of what they have been through as the memory images they talk about, which I describe in my book: Children in genocide – Extreme traumatization and affect regulation (Kaplan, 2008). It is a special challenge for me as a listener to be attentive to expressions of emotion when the words are not there. My sensitivity and my capacity when it comes to this type of listening most probably have to do with my professional background as a psychoanalyst. But I also suspect that I had been occupied subconsciously during my childhood in observing the facial expressions of my grandmother, being close to her and knowing a bit about what she had been through. In addition, being an only child, without the opportunity of sharing my thoughts with a sibling, may have been an important factor. As researchers in the field of genocide studies, we must be able to ‘contain’ the afflicted in a professional way, be a model for affect tolerance, and show that it is possible to bear strong feelings without breaking apart. Maybe my own position – being the ‘guest’ – as I described in the beginning, has served as a basis for controlling my own affects and thereby as a means for my professional understanding, as well as a position from which I can observe the (un-) expressed emotions of others. The feelings of our informants and our feelings as listeners are indispensable for our understanding of the dynamics between victim and perpetrator in genocide. In order to allow these feelings to have the space they need, it is essential to have colleagues with whom we can share thoughts and emotions – as in the Uppsala symposium. Pearlman and Saakvitne (1995) describe what they call vicarious traumatization that refers to a negative transformation in the psychotherapist’s inner experience resulting from empathic engagement with and a sense of responsibility or commitment to traumatized clients. There are obvious risks involved in working with traumatized people for too long a period of time without being mindful of one’s own vulnerability and compassion fatigue, as stressed by Gentry et al. (2004). These normal psychological reactions have been established as concepts for clinically active professionals working with people who have been subjected to violence. Work with tortured and traumatized individuals who have arrived as refugees places heavy demands on flexibility. The reactions of vulnerability and fatigue probably also apply to researchers who are looking into trauma-related experiences. Barbara Mattsson, a participant in the Uppsala symposium, herself a Finnish ‘war child’ and now a researcher in Finland, gave us this feedback: ‘There is a risk of re-traumatization in many professional areas when you think about it. Being a war child oneself and then working with these issues also activates feelings that have been dormant or un-worked-through before.’ During the Second World War, about 70,000 children were transferred to Sweden and Denmark – so-called “war children”. There are of course differences between personal-related links to trauma – so-called secondary traumatization due to circumstances in a psychotherapist’s family background or background in general – compared to effects of traumatic

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material on a psychotherapist, vicarious trauma. Understandably, researchers in the field of genocide studies are particularly susceptible to the phenomenon of vicarious trauma. My own studies of survivors’ testimonies have temporarily, during intense research periods, affected my closeness with members of my own family. They have all shown patience and endured my abrupt answers and my trance-like glances. As is often the case today, video-recorded interviews are used in genocide studies and may pull the researcher into an intense emotional, or even toxic, pre-occupation. I suggest the following concept for the researcher’s state: research-related links to trauma. This means the inner psychological consequences of being exposed to traumatic life histories in interviews and other data with traumatic content as well as in fieldwork. Research is not traumatic in itself but it evokes strong emotional and cognitive impressions, impressions that also create associative links to trauma in the researcher. For instance a researcher might be studying the conditions in Hitler’s camps and in his ‘private’ time outside his work he might suddenly catch sight of a bowl of soup, train tracks or a barking dog, which might trigger painful thoughts and feelings about his research. Moreover, this in turn might also affect his personal state of mind. From my own experience I can refer to the time when one of my daughters told me that I was no longer the funny and jovial person I used to be and that she really missed that person. I did not remember myself being a jovial person. I felt sad when I was made aware that I had lost that part of my personality and I wanted to regain it.

Countertransference and research-related links to trauma Transference and countertransference are central concepts in psychoanalysis. The process of transference is not conscious and involves the projection of a mental representation of previous experience onto the present. Transference goes from the patient, interviewee or informant toward the therapist, interviewer, listener, recipient, researcher, etc. Countertransference, the phenomenon that I will emphasize here, is the response that is elicited in the recipient by the other’s unconscious transference communications. Countertransference response includes unconscious reactions, as in the example mentioned above about the soup bowl. It also includes the feelings and thoughts evoked in the recipient by the other’s transference projections. Moments of sudden affective shifts in the survivor’s account may change the narrative and secondarily affect us as researchers in the very moment of data collection. This process can provide a useful guide to the other’s experiences as well as clarify expectations toward the relationship between researcher and informant. Awareness of the transference–countertransference relationship allows reflection and thoughtful response rather than an un-reflective reaction from the recipient. Moreover, the psychotherapist, when reflecting on his own reactions, will discover that he himself is also oscillating between trauma linking – being touched deeply by what the patient describes – and generational linking – trying to regain thinking space and creativity in himself. From the experience of this

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oscillation the therapist can help the patient to oscillate more easily between these two states of mind and gradually widen the space for generational linking (MaussHanke, personal communication, 2008). This knowledge may also be useful to researchers when reflecting on the informants’ reactions. Some survivors have especially complicated difficulties in attempting to relate their traumatic experiences and affects. This pattern of disorganization in survivors’ narratives led me to a study together with Dori Laub that aimed to examine a subgroup of survivors of the Holocaust who had in effect given up their efforts to communicate, and who spent most of their lives as psychiatric patients hospitalized in Israel. In listening to the hospitalized survivors’ video testimonies and to one’s own countertransference responses to them, what was conveyed was by no means emptiness. On the contrary, the psychic space seemed overcrowded with inchoate, tumultuous masses threatening to break through into consciousness by paralyzing thinking and eliciting psychotic experiences. These survivors had strikingly little capacity for an inner reflective space that allowed for ambiguity, doubt, ambivalence and associative resonances; a space wherein functions such as reality testing, judgement, remembrance and mourning could operate and thus contribute to an enhanced emotional mastery of the experience (Kaplan & Laub, 2009). The goal was – on the one hand to identify different kinds of encapsulated affects – and on the other hand to highlight ‘key-moments’ – situations where affects were shown – openings in the narratives, so the story could become ‘unlocked’. The psychotherapist runs specific countertransference risks, since he/she might develop either a feeling of distanced omnipotence as a defence against helplessness or an identification with the patient’s rage and sorrow (Herman, 1992). The researcher might either be elusive or over-identify with the informant. Interviewing a child survivor whose parents and siblings were murdered, may evoke a fantasy and a wish to adopt the child, which I felt when I interviewed Rwandan teenagers. I became aware of my impulses to look into the regulations about how one might help a Rwandan teenager to come and study in Sweden and the unusual force behind this fantasy showed me the strength of his emotional needs. In clinical practice vicarious traumatization increases the therapist’s susceptibility to certain countertransference responses. If one is suffering from vicarious traumatization, one’s countertransference responses may be more intense, less readily recognized, and thus more problematic according to Laurie Pearlman (personal communication, 2012). The same reactions could be found among researchers. Countertransference becomes a burden if it is unrecognized and if experiences are not shared with colleagues. Taken care of in an appropriate way, the countertransference will make an important contribution to our understanding and knowledge about the individuals and the field we are studying.

Creating counterforces It is essential to have colleagues with whom one can have seminars on one’s subject and share thoughts about one’s own experiences and emotional reactions.

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Students in genocide studies should not need to experience being ‘over-flooded’ by information from data that they cannot handle in a reflective and investigative way. The ambition is to extend the insight from psychotherapy to genocide scholars as well as to people working with other forms of massive violence in our society. For example, the strong feelings of the informants, such as shame and revenge, and their ability or inability to regulate affects, together with the way all of these factors affect us, constitute central themes for understanding the dynamics between perpetrator and victim (Böhm & Kaplan, 2011). We also need to create counterforces, so that we are not negatively influenced. Generational linking is my concept for all of the efforts which individuals who have been traumatized make to create their own space for thoughts and actions, conscious and unconscious, and which they communicated in the interviews during my research. The interviewees exposed themselves to the risk or the possibility of being confronted with strong affects and being upset by them. I have interpreted it as a ‘letting go of the brake’ in an attempt to approach something which has been especially hard to talk about. The possibility of working through the trauma and the affects linked to it increases. These individuals wish to ‘normalize’ their existence and choose what they want to do instead of letting the trauma dominate the content of their lives. They want to be spared the burden of a ‘survivor identity’ and a ‘victim identity’ (Kaplan, 2008). Ivana Maek (personal communication, 2012) proposes that ‘the awareness of emotions and mind, and then the flexibility of associations between genocide and peace, backand-forth, is the only way we can deal with this phenomenon.’ This connects to what I would call generational linking. During my study visits in Rwanda in 2003 and 2004, in-depth videotaped interviews, follow-up interviews and observations were carried out with ten teenage boys. The boys had almost all experienced the unbearably painful loss of having their parents and most of their siblings murdered during the genocide (one boy’s parents had died of AIDS before the genocide, and the youngest had a surviving mother who then died of malaria), after which they lived on the streets. The boys lived now in a private orphanage established in 2002. The interviews usually began with my question: ‘You do fun things today like dancing, but there are also problems you deal with – What kind of thoughts return to you when you are by yourself?’ The affect regulations that became apparent in all of the child survivors’ testimonies that I studied are elaborated and explained in a theoretical model that I refer to as the ‘affect propeller’. It is presented in my articles ‘Children in genocide – Extreme traumatization and the “affect propeller”’ (2006) and ‘Child survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and trauma-related affect’ (2013). The shape of a propeller is used to emphasize the interplay between affective states within each individual. It can be regarded as a map of the survivor’s mobility between different affective positions during in-depth interviews that usually last two hours. The blades of the propeller rotate around the central point, affect regulating. Each blade contains levels of trauma – and generational linking processes.

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The blades may cover each other or lie separately, similar to the way in which emotions fluctuate. Sometimes one affect category is dominating, sometimes another, and sometimes there are mixed forms. There are often quick oscillations between different positions during an interview. One key finding in Rwanda was the theme of re-traumatization and revenge fantasies, which I see as obstacles in efforts toward resilience. Counterforces that facilitate a positive development in the aftermath of the genocide also became clearer. On an individual level these counterforces can be identified as secure early attachment and an ability to reflect, to understand one’s own trauma and regard it as part of one’s life history as well as an ability to strengthen one’s own integrity and restoration by focusing on one’s own development instead of destructive actions. On a societal level, counterforces that promote restoration include notice fear – in both victims and perpetrators in the reparative network, documentary and pedagogic programmes, democratic processes, remembrance days and other symbolic acts (Böhm & Kaplan, 2011). The ‘affect propeller’ is intended to provide an opportunity to identify the interviewee’s possibilities to allow generational linking to dominate over trauma linking and therewith to deepen aspects of resilience after extreme trauma. I became more eager to examine revenge as a psychological phenomenon – to reflect about it specifically as it emerged in the interviews in Rwanda after the genocide – but also to reflect about how it may have expressed itself during the Holocaust and 60 years after. Coming home from Rwanda, every time I opened the daily newspaper it would seem that all the headlines were about the revenge theme, and all of the current movies likewise seemed to deal with revenge. My experiences in Rwanda also influenced how I interpreted ongoing events in the society around me. I became interested in examining and trying to describe revenge in our everyday lives in our own society – in youth gangs, in the school yard and in the family. Similar underlying psychological processes emerged. It had to do with the difference between revenge fantasies, which may be regarded as a ‘normal’ phenomenon in each one of us, as our way of regulating our inner psychic balance, our self-esteem when we are put in an inferior, humiliating position and – revenge acts that function as the motor in a revenge spiral that increases in speed and destructiveness. To act out one’s revenge fantasy seems to replace thinking and the possible process of mourning over what one has lost. Moreover, the victim now becomes a perpetrator and does not gain the dignity he had imagined and wished that he would gain because he is blinded by his drive for superiority. The subject felt very important and my husband, psychoanalyst Tomas Böhm and I, wrote the book Revenge – On the Dynamics of a Frightening Urge and Its Taming (Böhm & Kaplan, 2011). Factors that may make people refrain from putting their revenge fantasies into action – thus avoiding participation in a revenge spiral – were also identified. People can regain their dignity through constructive restoration instead. The psychic phenomena that are described with the help of the mentalization concept are of major importance in helping a person

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to refrain from taking revenge and to find instead other ways to deal with his/her humiliation or loss. To be able to feel, think, fantasize and talk about the hatred one feels and about how one might be able to achieve restoration is a significant step away from the readiness to act out the revenge urge. The ability to empathize with other people and to see things from their perspectives is also an important quality (Böhm & Kaplan, 2011). Affect regulation is a precursor of and closely linked to mentalization inasmuch as it plays a fundamental role in the development of the feeling of self and self-esteem (Fonagy et al., 2002; Allen et al., 2008).

Conclusion To conclude, I want to emphasize that we who planned and carried out the Uppsala symposium have been struck by the lack of attention to psychological/ emotional questions triggered by working in this field, the field of genocide studies. The key questions are •

•

What ‘instruments’ and meeting places do the scientists in studies of genocide and massive political violence have – during their long careers – to deal with the difficulties mentioned above? and How can we use our experiences to develop more systematic attitudes, that diminish the risks for research-, teaching- and study-related links to trauma – in order to facilitate constructive work?

Some students become overwhelmed. Other students tell us the contrary – that amazingly enough, they do not feel anything! When people are filled with unprocessed trauma it can sometimes influence their lives and work in ways that are not productive. Research-related trauma links of course constitute another level compared to the primary traumatization, which is still in itself a sufficiently important question both for the single researcher, and for his/her ability to work as a student, teacher and scientist in an optimal way. It is common to stress that the extremely painful events from genocide are situations that we usually cannot imagine experiencing ourselves. But of course that does not mean that we should refrain from doing research on them. For researchers who have been working all their lives with genocide studies, one challenge is “the deep and persistent exposure to human cruelty and suffering” as Ervin Staub, one of our speakers has pointed out. We have to – according to one of the other participants, Paul Levine – ‘do the hard task to extract the comprehensible from the unthinkable’. We know that the likelihood of surviving psychological pain increases if there are capacity and space for affect regulation and reflective functioning. We wish to continue these kinds of observations in the hope that one day they will become part and parcel of the work for every student of genocide and mass political violence, in order that we might further develop our thoughts about these psychological, social and cultural phenomena. An important outcome of the symposium is

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the initiation and development of international research in this area. The immediate positive response and engagement for this symposium that we received from all the invited researchers confirm the importance of our theme. Several researchers reported a struggle in writing their abstracts. This struggle might be an expression of a process of personal reflection that started right from the point of accepting the invitation to the symposium and that hopefully will continue. For me, new research questions related to my family history have arisen in an implicit search during the journey. Just a few years ago, my mother found and showed me letters from my grandmother, letters that she wrote and sent her while living in hiding in Oslo in 1942. My mother was living in Sweden at the time. To read these letters, to hold the paper in my hand that my grandmother had held when she was most afraid – and to see the censoring by the Nazis (some pieces were cut out) made me feel in the core of my being the rupture of being robbed of one’s home, one’s dignity and one’s rights, as well as the risky departure that the flight meant. With my grandmother’s letters as an entrance, I have wanted to make every effort to get a deeper understanding of what it meant for the Norwegian Jews to decide to leave their homes and to flee over the border to Sweden. This has led further to a general interest in the consequences for the great number of people in flight today. Most probably everyone can trace a personal thread from their own life history to the choice of their research area. The personal and professional threads become interwoven. While the personal experiences give a cultural competence that contributes to something important in the professional field, they may paradoxically also trigger vulnerability in the research. The threads may be more or less visible and become apparent in retrospect, when we give ourselves time to reflect and to create meaning.

References Allen, J.G., Fonagy, P. & Bateman, A.W. (2008). Mentalizing in Clinical Practice. Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing. Böhm, T. & Kaplan, S. (2011). Revenge – On the Dynamics of a Frightening Urge and Its Taming. London: Karnac Books. Dwork, D. (1991). Children with a Star. Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fonagy, P. (1999). The transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma – Lessons learned from the analysis of an adolescent with obsessive–compulsive disorder. Attachment & Human Development, 1(1): 92–114. Fonagy, P., Gergely G., Jurist, E.L. & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press. Gentry, J.E., Baggerly, J. & Baranowsky, A. (2004). Training as treatment. International Journal of Emergency and Mental Health, 6: 147–155. Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Kaplan, S. (2006). Children in genocide – extreme traumatization and the “affect propeller”. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87: 725–746.

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Kaplan, S. (2008). Children in Genocide. Extreme Traumatization and Affect Regulation. London: IPA Publications and Karnac Books. Kaplan, S. (2013). Child survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and trauma-related affect. Journal of Social Issues, 69(1): 92–110. Kaplan, S. & Laub, D. (2009). Affect regulation in extreme traumatization – fragmented narratives of survivors hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 33(2): 95–106. Pearlman, L. & Saakvitne, K. (1995). Trauma and the Therapist – Countertransference and Vicarious Traumatization in Psychotherapy with Incest Survivors. New York & London: Norton & Company. Stern, J. (2011). Denial – A Memoir of Terror. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Chapter 11

Vicarious traumatization in mass violence researchers Origins and antidotes1 Laurie Anne Pearlman

As a newly minted Ph.D. in clinical psychology in the late 1980s, I began doing research with adult survivors of childhood abuse and neglect while concurrently building a psychotherapy case load with this population as well as others who had experienced individual violence and victimization. This work took place in the evolving context of a private trauma-focused mental health organization, the Traumatic Stress Institute/Center for Adult & Adolescent Psychotherapy (TSI/ CAAP), which my colleagues and I were busily developing in Connecticut. For some time, I threw myself into all three dimensions of my professional life— research, psychotherapy, and organization-building—without considering the immersion in trauma to which I was committing myself. Fortunately, the context included lots of collegial support: weekly staff meetings, case conferences, and peer clinical consultation; and collaborative research. Less than a year into this exciting period, I began to note that my emotions were muted, my connections with friends beyond our institute were less satisfying, and my usual ebullience was dimmer. When I took the risk of talking about it with one of my colleagues, she acknowledged a similar experience. We mused about its possible link to the enormous amount of trauma we were seeing. As we talked about this phenomenon with others at TSI/CAAP who immediately recognized what we were discussing, we decided to add a weekly clinical staff meeting, “feelings time,” to our agendas. This meeting became the place where, for 20 years, my colleagues and I talked about the negative impact of trauma work, which we termed “vicarious traumatization” (VT; McCann & Pearlman, 1990a). As we facilitated workshops, consulted with other trauma colleagues, and heard clients’ stories about working with other therapists who had harmed them, we received extensive validation of the VT process and developed a commitment to learn and to share what we learned about it. Vicarious traumatization is a transformation in the trauma worker’s inner experience that results from empathic engagement with trauma survivors and their trauma material, combined with a responsibility or commitment to help (Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995). Its hallmark is disrupted spirituality, or meaning and hope (Pearlman & Caringi, 2009). A short time into my work in Rwanda, which

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included collaborating with Ervin Staub on both workshops and research, I found myself questioning the value of that work and of my trauma work more generally. This loss of meaning is an example of the spiritual disruption that characterizes both direct and indirect trauma. The trauma worker so affected can be a psychotherapist, researcher, judge, interpreter, humanitarian worker, advocate—anyone in a position to help those directly affected by violence, abuse, or neglect. The VT construct can help us understand and respond productively to the personal challenges we face by engaging with the dark side of human behavior through others’ reports and through images. Some mass violence scholars may be uncomfortable with the term “vicarious traumatization.” They may wonder how they can refer to the pain the work causes as “trauma,” when it is of such a lesser magnitude than that of victims of war and genocide. Shay (1999) provided an important discussion of “the ethical standing of the needs of the trauma therapist” (p. 253). He noted that our society is remarkably silent about this matter. A psychiatrist writing from a philosophical perspective, Shay noted that the challenge of balancing the needs of trauma therapy clients against those of trauma therapists could be addressed in part if therapist self-care were “strongly valued and supported by a community … of the therapist’s co-workers” (p. 255), as well as by a community of survivor clients, who might come to recognize that therapists who engage in self-care are likely to provide better services over a longer period. O’Halloran and Linton (2000) supported this position, recommending that “counselors prescribe self-care for themselves” (p. 354). The focus on workers’ vicarious trauma is not intended to blame victims, or to minimize the importance of their pain. Rather, it is intended to help trauma workers provide better care for the traumatized people they serve, while enhancing their ability to function as professionals and thrive as persons. Naturally, indirect trauma will have less severe manifestations than direct trauma. And yet, the same areas of the self are affected, and scholars and other trauma professionals may experience similar responses, adaptations, and even signs and symptoms to those of direct victims. These areas, outlined in constructivist self development theory (McCann & Pearlman, 1990b; Pearlman, 2001), include frame of reference, psychological needs and related cognitive schemas, self capacities or affect management resources, ego resources, and body. Disruptions to these areas in turn give rise to trauma adaptations and symptoms. In contrast, I use the term “secondary traumatization” to refer to the trauma responses we might experience when someone we love has been deeply harmed. This distinction is important because these two forms of indirect trauma require different responses, largely because of the nature of the role of a worker versus a loved one. These different roles will dictate different remedies. Many trauma workers experience direct trauma in the course of their work. This is true for first responders, humanitarian workers, child protective services workers, some of the scholars in this volume (e.g., Doná,, Maek, Staub, and Weiss) who have done their field work in places where violence was active, and

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others who are at risk for being assaulted in the line of duty. These workers may experience both direct and vicarious trauma—direct when they enter into potentially violent situations, vicarious when they learn about situations for which they bear some responsibility as potential interveners. If they have family histories of group or individual violence, neglect, or abuse, their work may also activate their own prior trauma. In this chapter, I will very briefly review potential contributing factors to and signs and symptoms of vicarious trauma. The remainder of the chapter will focus on what scholars working with trauma can do to cope with and transform their VT.

Vicarious trauma research One problem with trying to synthesize research findings within a relatively new area such as the study of vicarious trauma is the lack of consensus on operational definitions and measures. Some VT researchers use measures of cognitive schemas such as the Trauma and Attachment Belief Scale (Pearlman, 2003). Others use trauma symptom measures such as the Trauma Symptom Checklist (Briere, 1995) or the Impact of Events Scale (Horowitz, Wilner, & Alvarez, 1979). While there is as yet no single definitive measure of VT, there are tests that reflect trauma-work-related difficulties. One is the Professional Quality of Life scale (ProQol; Stamm, 2005), which measures compassion fatigue (a related construct indicating the end of one’s ability to feel compassion for one’s trauma clients; Figley, 1995; Huggard, Stamm, & Pearlman, 2013), compassion satisfaction (an indication of positive feelings resulting from the work), and burnout (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996). While these constructs are related to VT, a full assessment of vicarious trauma would have to include spirituality, which some studies have considered (e.g., Brady, Guy, Poelstra, & Brokaw, 1999; Harrison & Westwood, 2009; Killian, 2008), as well as an assessment of self-capacities or affect regulation abilities, such as the Inner Experience Questionnaire (Brock, Pearlman, & Varra, 2006) or the Inventory of Altered Self-Capacities (Briere & Runtz, 2002). Although some of the studies done to date have used large samples and standardized measures, many use small numbers of participants and create their own measures. While this is a natural process in the evolution of any field of study, it will be difficult to build a reliable body of knowledge until researchers agree on definitions and measures. And, to my knowledge, there is as yet no research about vicarious trauma among researchers who study mass political violence. Thus, in this chapter, I present the information based on the experience of other populations that seems most relevant to these scholars.

Signs and symptoms There is now extensive research on trauma workers’ adaptations to their work (e.g., Brady et al., 1999; Bride, 2007; Killian, 2008; McLean, Wade, & Encel, 2003; Pearlman & Mac Ian, 1995; Wilson & Thomas, 2004). This work has focused

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primarily on psychotherapists. Here I will only state that the disruptions to the areas of the self noted above often manifest in disrupted cognitive schemas (beliefs about self and others), affect management (maintaining or regaining one’s inner emotional balance), cognitive abilities such as judgment and boundary maintenance, a loss of meaning and hope, and physiological dysregulation (maintaining or regaining one’s bodily balance) (Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995; Pearlman & Saakvitne, in press). These disruptions in turn can give rise to such trauma symptoms as avoidance, intrusive imagery or thoughts (including nightmares), and physiological hyperarousal—all symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder—as well as complex trauma symptoms such as dissociation, affect dysregulation, and somatization (Pelcovitz., van der Kolk, Roth, Mandel, Kaplan, & Resick, 1997). These symptoms can result in various problematic behaviors. One area that can be affected is interpersonal relationships; social withdrawal is common, perhaps because the worker may find it difficult to trust others, doesn’t want to risk intimacy which can lead to loss, or has trouble engaging in social conversation, which can feel meaningless. Trauma workers may have sleep difficulties, including nightmares. They may be irritable, an expression of hyperarousal. They may have difficulty concentrating, which can make it difficult to work. Vicariously traumatized workers may be overprotective of loved ones as they struggle with a disrupted sense of security. Vicariously traumatized workers may seek ways to regulate themselves, through overeating, overexercising, overworking, or overusing substances such as alcohol and sleep medication. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, trauma workers can lose their sense of connection to whatever gives life meaning and purpose; for some, this will be God or spirit, for others, nature, humanity, or beauty. Those who do not embrace the VT construct may be better able to relate to questions such as, “Are there stories or images that have stayed with you? How have they affected you—your feelings about your work, your relations with your children, your sense of meaning?” I was stunned when I first arrived in Rwanda in 1999 by the frozen grief evident in most people’s faces. It took time interacting with people to see beyond their horror and grief. During this period, and for some time afterwards, I seemed to see killing and death everywhere—both in Rwanda and at home. I was preoccupied with the safety of my loved ones and with thoughts about how I would survive were they to die, an example of both intrusive thoughts and of existential anxiety.

Contributing factors Theory and clinical experience (primarily, although not exclusively, with psychotherapists) suggest that vicarious trauma, like direct trauma, arises from an interaction between persons and situations, within a social-cultural context (McCann & Pearlman, 1990b; Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995). Anything that interferes with fulfilling one’s responsibility to traumatized clients can lead to VT. Applying this framework to scholars, there are several aspects of the person of the scholar that might contribute to VT. First, personal trauma history can be a risk factor.

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However, as Bride (2004) reported, research on this potential risk factor yields mixed findings. The contribution of trauma history may be related to whether one has addressed one’s trauma history successfully, or to other factors that might interact with trauma history (Adams & Riggs, 2008). A second person variable that could be a risk factor is coping and defense styles. For example, avoiding potentially painful feelings such as grief or horror and repressing thoughts of revenge may help the scholar persist in the work in the short run. Yet, research with trauma survivors has consistently shown that confronting painful material is a more productive longer-term strategy (e.g., Powers, Halpern, Ferenschak, Gillihan, & Foa, 2010), perhaps because feelings that we suppress don’t go away, but rather remain buried only to resurface at unexpected moments. This finding may also apply to scholars. The way scholars manage boundaries could also be a risk factor for vicarious trauma. It seems likely that neither very rigid nor very porous boundaries would be ideal in doing trauma work. Those who use one style exclusively might be at greater risk than those who are aware of where their work responsibilities end, and are able to flow with the demands of each situation within a sensible framework. Boundary considerations apply, for example, to whether we take our work home with us, talk and think ceaselessly about what we are learning and discovering, become involved in the personal lives of research participants, or otherwise engage in their situations beyond the framework of the work. Finally, our current life stressors and supports can set us up for vicarious trauma. If a scholar who has young children is researching, for example, the fate of children in the Holocaust, that person may be more vulnerable to VT. When life changes such as divorce, children leaving home, or moving from one home to another are taking place, our resources may be compromised and we may be less able to confront pain, set limits, or manage complexity. There are many potential situational VT risk factors for scholars. First, the professional context for one’s work might set the stage for VT. Working independently, without a professional community, while providing freedom and flexibility, can be isolating. Without colleagues with whom to share one’s findings and feelings, a scholar will be holding a lot of difficult material alone. Another potential contributing or risk factor is lack of institutional support for the work, which can be the case even for scholars working within institutional settings. This support includes the availability of adequate funding for the research as well as for one’s own psychotherapy, collegial acknowledgment of the importance and challenges of the work, and people with whom to talk about the effects of the work on the scholar, for example. In my own work, I found that upon my return from trips to Rwanda, some of my colleagues asked me how the trip went, but only a few seemed interested in more than a superficial answer. This was a group of trauma psychologists who were holding a lot of direct and indirect trauma themselves, and they may not have had room to take in more trauma. Another potential situational risk factor is the specific nature of the research materials or participants. Graphic photos and traumatized interviewees, including

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those in prison, children, or other vulnerable persons, are but two examples of groups that may pose special challenges for the scholar. Finally, working in dangerous field settings increases stress for scholars, calling on resources that then cannot be used in the service of self-regulation, managing boundaries, etc. There are some aspects of the social–cultural context (which Rotter, 1982, termed the meaningful psychological environment) that might pose risk factors for scholars. For example, working in a society that is denying the reality or effects of the conflict one is studying, being unable to obtain research funding because the society does not value scholarly work on the conflict or its aftermath, or producing results with action implications that are not implemented might all contribute to a context that undermines the scholar’s ability to manage the negative effects of the work. This person–situation interaction implies that each person’s experience of VT will be unique, in part because the specific aspects of the work that affect one person will be different from those that affect another. Thus, for one researcher, the presence of witnesses who could have acted to prevent the violence will be particularly salient, while for another, the numbers of children killed or the ways people were killed will be the most horrible aspect of the violence. In addition, each person’s expression of VT will reflect his or her particular psychological make-up, including temperament, resources, and vulnerabilities. For this reason, some of us will respond viscerally, with somatic problems reflecting or expressing our distress, while others will find themselves feeling more cynical about the human race or the “international community.” These differences in turn imply individual differences in what each person will need to address in his or her VT. There is good research support for two sets of VT contributing factors among clinicians: exposure and empathy. Exposure is generally operationalized as number of trauma clients per week or percentage of trauma clients in one’s case load (Elwood, Mott, Lohr, & Galovski, 2011). In general, more exposure correlates with more symptoms. For researchers, greater exposure could come about through reading more documents, interviewing more trauma-affected people, or viewing more images of violence and victimization, for example. As discussed elsewhere (Pearlman & Saakvitne, in press), however, a more complex formulation of exposure may be in order, potentially leading to more consistent research findings on this risk factor. For example, mentally visualizing the horrors of a genocide while gathering information would likely result in physiological arousal, increasing the negative effects of exposure, while taking in the horror without visualizing it might have a different effect on the researcher. Not visualizing the horror is different from not feeling, as discussed below. Research on the role of empathy has had mixed results. Some have found that it correlates with greater vicarious trauma. Moosman (2002) studied 183 psychotherapists, and found that, although general empathy was not problematic, those who were “highly emotionally reactive” in engaging with clients reported greater vicarious trauma. Based on their collaboration, including Thomas’s (1998) study of 345 therapists, Wilson and Thomas (2004) suggested that over-involvement and identification can contribute to empathic strain, an aspect of vicarious trauma.

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These processes may apply to scholars as well, with respect to research participants or those they study rather than therapy clients. Working in a converse way, by trying not to feel anything, could also have negative effects, especially if the scholar does not come back to her or his feelings later to reflect upon and experience them (e.g., Hembree & Foa, 2010). The feminist and qualitative research literatures suggest that researchers cannot be effective if they are not connected to their feelings. (See Rager, 2005, for a discussion of this literature.) In addition, it is well-documented that avoidance maintains trauma symptoms in those who experience violence first-hand. Because of the theorized parallels between direct and indirect (or vicarious) trauma, it seems likely that avoidance could also be problematic for professionals such as scholars who work with trauma material. Perhaps seemingly contrarily, Wilson and Thomas (2004) also noted that therapists who were more empathically attuned to clients might provide more effective treatment, which would in turn be a potential protective factor against vicarious trauma. Harrison and Westwood (2009) identified “exquisite empathy” as a protective factor among six “master therapists.” Potentially clarifying this contradiction, they defined exquisite empathy as therapists’ ability “to get very close without fusing or confusing the client’s story, experiences, and perspective with their own” (p. 213). Based on his research, as well as that of his collaborator, Rhiannon Thomas, Wilson (2002, described in Wilson and Thomas, 2004) concluded that “high empathic functioning,” “the capacity to be fully present in-the-moment with the client” (p. 233), is beneficial to both survivor clients and their therapists. It seems likely that the capacity of a researcher to be fully present in the reality of those they study—the high empathic presence—might be beneficial to the participants (if they are living), to understanding the research material, and to the researcher. Likewise, it seems that the exquisite empathy that does not confuse the participants´ stories with researchers’ own experiences would be a factor in lower VT in researchers.

Addressing VT Among trauma therapists Recommendations from the clinical literature Most suggestions for addressing vicarious trauma come from theory and clinical observations with psychotherapists. The clinical and theoretical literatures (e.g., Bell, Kulkarni, & Dalton, 2003; Bloom, 1999; Jordan, 2010; Pearlman & Caringi, 2009; Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995; Pearlman & Saakvitne, in press; Pryce, Shackelford, & Pryce, 2007; Rothschild, 2006)2 suggest the potential value of the following behaviors as ways to prevent, mitigate, or address vicarious trauma: (1)

increasing self-awareness, including attentiveness to: what is most challenging about the work; one’s personal responses, adaptations, and symptoms; and what might be most helpful to oneself;

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(2) using social support—both connection with colleagues and personal support from friends and family; (3) engaging in personal psychotherapy (a potential contributor to self-awareness and support); (4) limiting exposure to trauma material by maintaining limits on number or percentage of trauma clients in one’s case load; (5) managing identification and mirroring behaviors during clinical encounters; (6) processing disturbing trauma imagery; (7) educating oneself about trauma and its effective treatment, including ways of managing boundaries and addressing challenging trauma-related symptoms and adaptations; (8) obtaining ongoing trauma-informed clinical consultation; (9) engaging in spiritual renewal through connecting with whatever gives one meaning and hope; (10) working in organizational cultures that support acknowledging VT, preparing new staff to experience and manage it, and processing it; and (11) working with moral integrity and creating meaning in one’s work through documenting the sources and effects of interpersonal violence. In addition, behaviors that reduce work stress and burnout or increase resilience, such as engaging in regular physical exercise and having an adequate diet and sleep, are likely to enhance the trauma professional’s ability to manage the challenges of working with violence and victimization, although these alone will not address vicarious trauma, as discussed below. Recommendations from the research literature There is some research evidence related to addressing vicarious trauma, but this is an area deeply in need of further empirical attention. Practices with some empirical support (although generally obtained through interviews with small samples of psychotherapists) for their positive effects on vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, or compassion satisfaction, include: (1) countering isolation (in professional, personal, and spiritual realms), developing mindful self-awareness, consciously expanding perspective to embrace complexity, active optimism, holistic self-care, maintaining clear boundaries, exquisite empathy, professional satisfaction, and creating meaning (Harrison & Westwood, 2009); and (2) influencing organizational culture, social support, work hours, and locus of control (Killian, 2008). There is a lack of consensus about some of these recommendations, likely stemming from operationalizing and thus measuring these constructs differently. In addition, the exclusive use of self-report measures for both dependent and

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independent measures makes it difficult to trust the findings. Finally, while generic interventions for self-care may be helpful to the extent that they provide foundational support for researchers, it seems likely that both clinicians and researchers (like traumatized therapy clients) require VT-specific interventions to address trauma-specific difficulties. For example, Bober and Regehr (2006) did not find such generic self-care activities as leisure, recreation, and supervision helpful with intrusive imagery among psychotherapists. And Brockhouse, Msetfi, Cohen, and Joseph (2011) found that organizational support did not promote posttraumatic growth (positive changes that may occur as a result of a struggle with traumatic life events; Tedeschi, Park, & Calhoun, 1998) among 119 psychotherapists, although it did mitigate work-related stress. Among scholars What can scholars take from this literature? I will focus on five points from the above discussion: exposure, empathy, boundaries and balance, connection and meaning, and the role of institutions. Exposure There are numerous potentially helpful techniques to manage exposure. The most obvious is to limit the number of people one interviews, or photographs and documents one reviews. This might be helpful for some, but for those whose primary work is the study of mass violence, this may be less realistic. Another important strategy is to pace oneself in the work, taking breaks during the day as one works (e.g., Rager, 2005), which would allow time to “bounce back,” a strategy recommended in the resilience literature. Wager (2011) also noted the value of building in time “to accommodate the possibility of periods of both procrastination and contemplation” (p. 164) that may be more common for scholars working with material “that strikes a chord with one’s own experience” (p. 164). In addition, choosing to spend one’s non-work time away from mass violence can help to diminish exposure. This could take such forms as finding movies and leisure reading unrelated to mass violence and socializing with people who draw out one’s other interests. During my greatest immersion in the work in Rwanda, while I was still doing psychotherapy and research with trauma survivors, at home I stopped reading fiction and going to movies that focused on violence. Finally, balancing negative with positive material may help limit exposure. Spending some time studying those who survived, those who helped others, successful prevention efforts, and so forth would naturally reduce exposure to harm doing, death, and destruction. Empathy The key here seems to be to allow oneself to enter into the experience of those we are studying while at the same time remaining grounded in the present and in

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our own experience. This would mean opening oneself to both a cognitive and an emotional understanding of what victims and survivors endured while simultaneously remaining aware of the present, one’s surroundings, the larger context of the community within which one is working, and the value of the work. Batson, Fultz, & Schoenrade (1987) found that entering into another’s experience as if it were happening to oneself leads to distress, resulting in paralysis and the need to get away from these feelings. The alternative, feeling with those who were harmed but not imagining it happening to oneself, can motivate us to help, resulting in empathy and prosocial behavior. This is an aspect of the sort of empathy Harrison and Westwood (2009) recommended. Boundaries and balance Scholars can create a boundary between work and non-work aspects of their lives through practices that open and close work sessions such as giving a lecture, reading an article, spending time at the computer or in the library, interviewing a research participant, or examining documents. Examples might include meditating briefly, stretching, washing one’s hands, reading a poem, or gazing at something beautiful (I have a magnificent copper beech tree outside my window which brings peace to me in all seasons; a lovely vase or painting could also serve). Another excellent option is to spend no more than five minutes at the end of each work session jotting down notes (or drawing a picture) about the thoughts and feelings one encountered during the work session. Such rituals can mark the beginning and ending of work, and also give one an opportunity to encapsulate a work session so its effects can be processed intentionally at an appropriate time and place. Such a forum might be the scholar’s own reflection time, a meeting with a colleague set up for this purpose, one’s personal psychotherapy, or another space one creates for this purpose. I have alluded above to the importance of having a life beyond work. We maintain boundaries in part by remaining aware that we have a life context that may include family, friends, and coworkers; retaining our other identities, for example as sister, gardener, yogi, parent, or cook; and leaving our work at the office, which can be very challenging in trauma work, but remains important to a balanced existence. Balancing research on mass violence with other activities— both other professional and other personal pursuits—can provide an antidote to exposure as well as promote connection. Connection and meaning For trauma professionals, three types of connection could help to overcome the isolation that seems to be a common part of the work (and a natural aspect of trauma for survivors). Such isolation may result from the feeling that everyday life is insignificant compared to the violence and trauma in which the worker is immersed or that others simply will be unable to comprehend one’s experiences, shame about one’s own personal experiences of such violence or guilt about one’s

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privilege with regard to never having had such experiences, or shame or confusion related to one’s incapacity to symbolize/communicate, These potential antidotes to isolation include remaining connected to oneself, others, and one’s spiritual source. Connection to self is a matter of self-awareness: how is the work affecting me? Which aspects are hardest for me now? What do I need in order to be able to continue this work over the long term? Why do I do this work? This type of awareness requires reflection, which we can engage in through keeping a journal, personal psychotherapy, and artistic pursuits, for example. Connection with others means embedding oneself within a community of people who are doing similar work, or who are truly interested in your work and what it means to you, how it affects you. Pickett, Brennan, Greenberg, Licht, and Worrell (1994) described a debriefing process they found useful for researchers interviewing survivors of residential fires. Rager (2005) described the enormous value she found in debriefing regularly with a colleague. Wager (2011) echoed the importance of engaging with “like-minded individuals” (p. 165). This community might be within one’s department, across institutions, or in professional societies. Finding ways to share one’s research findings, through teaching and publishing, for example, is another aspect of building community. It also lends meaning to one’s work and to the pain it evokes, and helps to fulfill the trauma professional’s “moral obligation to provide testimony to our culture about what we have witnessed” (Bloom, 1999, p. 268), thereby becoming “active bystanders” (Staub, 1989). Connection with one’s spiritual source might mean having an active religious practice, spending time in nature, meditating, or reflecting on the meaning and value of the work. For those with direct personal connections, including family members’ experiences of mass violence, such reflection seems like an essential path to remaining sensitive to both the scholarly and personal aspects of the work. This suggestion is based on the literature on countertransference in therapists that suggests that being able to separate one’s personal history from the client’s narrative is essential to being able to work effectively. The “narrative repair” approach to processing the lives and death of loved ones is an example of ways people can work with loss and move toward meaning (Neimeyer, Harris, Winokuer, & Thornton, 2011). Without such work, we can merge these dimensions and relive our family histories rather than offering something new that might add to the knowledge base about mass violence and thus to its prevention. The ability to confront the horrors of such violence and its aftermath, as well as the willingness to allow oneself to be transformed by the work, can lead to a vicarious transformation in the professional (Pearlman & Caringi, 2009). This is not simply a matter of “sadder but wiser,” but a deepening of one’s humanity as we allow ourselves to acknowledge our connection to all who have experienced mass violence as well as our own potential to harm others. It is a process of breaking down the us-and-them divide that is a common human experience, yet one that itself can contribute to both vicarious trauma and mass violence (Staub, 1989, 2011). Stolorow (2013), writing about integrating emotional trauma, described an “expanded emotional world that coexists alongside the absence of the one that

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has been shattered.” This portrayal of a life that includes, but is not defined by, trauma conveys the state we can enter through our own vicarious transformation. This expanded comprehension of the human condition can generate a renewed compassion for and understanding of the people who suffer from mass violence— both harm doers and victims—which we can in turn share with others, providing a potential benefit from our vicarious trauma. Finally, placing one’s work in a larger context can provide meaning. Placing the content of the work in a larger context could mean, for example, trying to understand why something happened as well as what happened, learning as much as possible about people’s motives, social forces, and other contributing factors. Placing the process in a larger context could involve reminding ourselves why we do this work, its personal rewards, and how it might benefit others. The role of institutions In addition to the many clinicians who have called for institutions to acknowledge vicarious trauma and provide training and support for students and faculty, Rager (2005) and Bischoping (2004) have written from their own experience about the need for institutions of higher education to prepare scholars for the inevitable emotional demands of working with trauma. Caringi and his colleagues (Caringi, 2008; Caringi & Lawson, 2012), have written about organizational culture and climate as possible contributors to, and preventers of, indirect trauma. One academic institution that is attending to VT is Uppsala University, through its Trauma and Secondary Trauma program (TRAST). TRAST organized the conference that gave rise to this volume. The conference provided a forum for sharing experiences, reflection, and collegial connection. One hopes that other universities will follow suit. Students, faculty, and the field would benefit from systematic institutional attention to the sources and effects of vicarious traumatization. Scholars should not have to do this work alone; the potential costs, in the form of personal distress, less effective work, and the loss to society of their curiosity and productivity, are far too great.

Notes 1 2

The author wishes to thank Jamie Sullivan, B.A., for research assistance, and Ted Bober, M.S.W., Suzanne Kaplan, Ph.D., and Ervin Staub, Ph.D., for productive conversations related to the concepts in this chapter. These citations are grouped because some suggestions are made by multiple authors.

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Index

academy: bureaucracy xiv, 151; destructive behaviors 17, 150–5; pressures 18; supportive behaviors 154–5, 182 adoption 29 affects: confused 155; encapsulated 165; intense 68, 146, 153, 160, 166; lack of 9, 124, 163; management 172, 174; positive 83; regulation 159, 163, 166, 168, 173; shifts of 8, 164, 166; as signals 163, 165; traumatic 165–6; unconscious 4; unexpected 50; see also emotions, feelings agency: personal 143, 152; realistic sense of 14, 16, 21, 143, 153; research of 75 aggression 14, 37, 122, 156; see also anger, frustration, rage (Akçam, Taner 25) alcohol 19, 46, 134, 135, 149, 174 altruism 11–13, 16, 39, 143; born of suffering 23, 39, 80, 86; engagement with the world 13, 17, 21 ambiguity: moral 5, 18, 47; in psychic space 8, 165; in research materials 18; in research communication 93, 103; in researcher’s role 129; as symptom 14; in violent fields 101, 103 anger: in communicating research 48, 153; in research materials 9, 82–4, 131; in research 75, 83, 101, 150; as symptom 14, 20; see also aggression, frustration, rage anguish 14, 113, 118, 132 anthropology 10, 93, 138, 141–2; see also fieldwork, method, participant observation anxiety: in everyday 30; as symptom 19, 92, 142–3, 154, 156, 162; in research 52, 97, 153–4, 161; existential 20, 174 Asad, Talal 131–2

associations 22; to genocide 148, 152; associative links to trauma xiv, 164–5; associative patterns 8–10, 14, 100, 142, 162; flexibility of 148, 166; traumatic 4–5 attachment 142, 148, 167, 173 avoidance: as behavior 13, 19, 125; in research 12, 37, 98, 136, 175; as symptom 14, 162, 174, 177 balance: and boundaries 11, 16, 179–80; disrupted 105, 174; and exposure 6, 16, 154, 179; researcher’s 101, 180; revenge and psychic 167; therapist’s 172 Bat mitzvah 13, 29 Behar, Ruth 141 Berlin 48–51 bias: researcher’s 10, 11 Bloomstein, Rex 21, 45 body: care of 15, 19, 20, 154; communication through 3–4, 8–10, 105, 135–7; dead 7, 11, 38, 67, 105–6, 120; impact of violence on 104; experience out-of 11, 62; and pain 131, 136; in research 141; and soul 19; and trauma 4 bodily: balance 174; devastation in research 9, 19; discomforts 11, 14, 19, 137; distance in research 6, 14; intense reactions 19, 97; knowledge 7, 10, 104, 138; reactions in research 1–2, 10, 97, 137; symptoms 20, 172 Bosnia and Herzegovina 143, 147–8, 150 boundaries: distorted 44, 93; between life and death 93; managing 174–6, 178, 180; between peace and violence 103–4; of profession 36; scholars’ 175–6, 179–180; see also limits brain: capacity to heal 4, 19

Index Bund (Jewish Labor Party) 31 burnout xi, 46, 173, 178 Busk 42–3, 45, 52–4 bystander 35, 44, 92, 96, 99, 106 bystandership: active 23n8, 34, 37, 39, 181 Cambodia 149–50 Children With A Star 27, 159 choice: conscious 6, 28, 142, 144–5; consequences of professional 26; and family inheritance 12–13, 27, 29, 45, 54n7, 75, 147; and identification 13; informants’ 25, 28, 32, 66, 118, 132, 160, 166; involuntary 36, 140, 144, 146–7; and personal experiences 144, 147, 169; professional semi-conscious 1, 9, 12, 147; professional choice as defense 101, 142; professional choice and feelings 148, 159; reasons for professional 44; in research 69, 98, 100, 129–30, 134, 161; and responsibility 21, 43, 52, 151 civil rights 85–6 Clifford, James 127, 133, 141 cognitive: abilities 154, 174; effort 148; impressions xiv, 164; shemas172–4; understanding 180 collective: action 84; authority 152; coping 93; experience of violence 74, 76–7, 80, 84–5, 104; guilt 81, 101; memory 81; narratives of genocide 106; narratives of suffering 104, 106; narratives of violence 92–3; nation-building narrative 106; stereotype 101; rules 152; suffering 92, 106; support 51; time 42; trauma 44, 74–5, 77, 82, 84–7; vicarious traumatization 106; victimhood 76, 86–7; victimization 75–6, 81, 86–7 collocutors: and containing 16, 20; emotions and bodies of 3; empathy with 11; encounters with 8; experiences 4, 12; identification with 6–7, 10–11, 16; reactions to 8, 9, 20; relation to 10–11; and responsibility 18; intimate stories 11, 17; see also informants, interlocutors, interviewees, participants commitment: to help 171; to informants 160; methodological 36, 125; “muss sein” 36; to principled work 40; to research 115, 171; to social rights 99; and trauma 171; to traumatized clients 163

187

communication; bodily and emotional 8–9, 137; difficult 7, 165; enmeshed 162; failed 132, 165, 181; within family 64; of feelings 5; fragmented 8; with informants 83, 166; intersubjective 8; knowledge 44, 47, 155n3; and pain 131–2; sadistic 21; silent 8; with students 31, 150; of trauma 5, 165–6; of violent experiences 131–2; wordless 3–5, 8; see also containing, countertransference, enmeshment, projective identification, teaching community: access to 129; African American 86; history (of oppression) 85; international 96, 150, 176; Jewish 27–9, 42, 85; legal 29; local 118; loss of 27; membership xiv, 92, 118, 181; and meaningfulness 17, 180; Muslim 134; participation in 127; of peers 40; professional 175, 181; relations in 116; relations to 132; respect from 135; responsibility to 29; support 172; survivors 172; work 80 compassion: for trauma clients 173; fatigue 23n6, 92, 163, 173, 178; for informants 2, 182; Jews and 85; in methodology 141; for researcher 143; satisfaction 173, 178 compulsion; in research 13, 36, 62, 70; and responsibility 70; as symptom 14; see also obsession concentration: difficulties 102, 174 concentration camp 21, 79; experience of 145; Jasenovac 144–5, 147; Mauthausen 22, 45–6, 49, 52, 64–5; prisoners 58, 65; study of 145; Theresienstadt 148; survivor 148; trauma 103; Treblinka 47; work at former 46, 49, 52 confusion 10, 22, 79, 103, 155n1, 181 connection: to colleagues 178, 182; cross-disciplinary 3; to family history 147, 181; to friends 171, 178; to others 19, 26, 97, 102, 180–1; with participants/ informants 83–4, 181; personal 76, 84, 181; spiritual 181; with students 57; to things 146; see also intimacy constructivist self development theory 172 consultation: clinical trauma 171, 178; with colleagues 171; cultural 38; with psychotherapist 20, 178 containing: in academia 18; and balance and flexibility 16; communication 20–1;

188

Index

of informants’ emotions 16, 149, 163; of pain and suffering 117, 130; psychoanalytic 3, 8, 9, 142, 149; in research 14, 16, 149, 163; in teaching 14, 16, 18, 21, 149, 154; and vicarious traumatization 5; see also writing contested socio-political spaces105–7 context: academic xiv, 9, 150, 175–6; of aftermath of mass violence 75–6, 81, 95; community 180; contextualization 134, 136–7; current 162; of exile 130; family history 30; global 18; growing up 159; historical 81; and meaning 182; in methodology 87; non-western 94; organizational 172; peaceful 93, 103–4, 107; personal history 43; political 18, 81, 130; private 9, 180; professional 175–6; psychological 159; psychotherapeutic 75, 130; research 106–7, 175–6; research on reconciliation 123; research in violent 91–4, 103–4, 107, 128–9; socio-cultural 81, 107, 115, 130, 174, 176; and trauma 6, 137 contradictions: in academy 151; ethical 18, 151; in research on violence 123 contributing factors 46, 173–4, 176, 182; see also risk factors coping: with affect regulation 159; child survivors’ 159; with collective trauma 86; through empathizing with victims 100; researchers’ xiv, 75, 86, 100; style 175; with transgenerational trauma 75; victims’ 136 countertransference 8–10, 164–5, 181 counterforces 13, 15–16, 165–7; see also remedies creativity 15–16, 18–19, 23n3, 34, 144, 162,164 Croatia 101, 140, 144–5, 156n9 custody 29 danger: in family history 146, 160; and fear 98; in fieldwork 98, 122, 128, 134, 156n6, 176; friends in 99; omnipresent 149; for rescuers 34–5, of researcher’s bias 87; from victims’ perspective 39; for witnesses 44 Das, Veena 131–2 debriefing 15, 103, 133–4, 181 dengbej 130 deportation 10, 27, 47, 62, 66, 160

depression : antidepressants 46; and asocial behavior 19; in family 13, 145; and powerlessness 143; refugees’ 30; rescue workers’ 92; researchers’ 93, 142, 150; survivors’ 156n7; as symptom 14, 19; teachers’ 149; and threat to life 92; witnesses’ 44 Derrida, Jacques 48 detachment 14, 20–1, 51, 100, 121, 150 Detroit, Michigan 31 development: in aftermath of genocide 167; of agency 21; of collaboration 94; of commitment 171; dysfunctional 20; of family history 30; of identity 11; of intersubjective relations 10, 101; of knowledge xv, 7, 93, 168–9; local 113; of methodology 8, 10, 16–17, 88, 138, 153, 168; of perpetrator policies 25, 54n4, 67; psychological 140, 143, 149, 154, 167–8; of researchers xiv, 16–17, 22, 30, 140, 149, 153–4, 168; of responsibility 85; of self-reflection 10, 22, 154, 178; of survivors 167; of symptoms 143, 156n7, 165; of students 18, 30, 154; of theory 10, 127, 138 diaspora 91, 94–6, 99–101, 106 diet 19, 178 discourse: hegemonic 129, 133; political 130; public xiii, 113; socially acceptable 26; on trauma 105; of victimhood 130, 132 disillusionment 14, 143 dissociation 14, 62, 70, 150, 162, 174 distance: analytical 117, 127, 137; from content of research 6–7; cultural 116; emotional 6, 12, 14–16, 21, 98, 132, 134, 136, 165; in fieldwork 127; geographical 6, 12, 132–3; healthy 162; from horrors xiv ; from images 136–7; from informants 11; from materials 11–12, 15–16; from overwhelming and traumatic experiences 15, 162; through photos and notes 16; physical 6, 14, 42, 57; professional 137; of safety xiv, 98; temporal 6, 14–15, 120, 133; ways of achieving 11, 14–15; from work 21, 40; see also numbing distress: and identification 180; informants’ 20, 84 ; of others 34–5; personal 176, 182; physical 34; psychological 10, 35, 76; researchers’ 20, 22, 40, 96, 102; societal 91 dreams 9, 14, 46, 54n7, 98

Index Eastern Turkey 12, 128–9, 132–4 education: aims 2; of children 28; choice of institution 27; contexts 43; higher 147, 182; Jewish secondary 28; radio programs 38–9; responsibility to 17; sector 112; self 178; systems 105; tours to post-conflict countries 38; trauma 178; western 116; see also teaching educators 1–2, 44, 51, 54n5; see also teaching Eisenberg, Richard (rabbi) 29 embodied knowledge see knowledge embodied experiences see experiences; see also body emotions: of assistant 121; associations through 9; difficult 12, 16; “echoed” 98; expression of 163; in fieldwork 134, 138; fluctuation of 167; in genocide studies 155, 168; guiding 150; of horror 20; immersion into 14, 164; and important adults 12; informants’ 3, 98, 121, 131, 138, 165; negative 82, 129; overwhelming 21, 99–100, 118, 146; in performance 130; perpetrators’ 118, 121; positive 16; psychotherapists’ 176; researchers’ 3, 12, 14, 20, 37, 93, 98, 118, 121, 127, 133, 138, 150, 164; and self-reflection 20; shared 163, 165; strong 14, 16, 19, 83, 164; students’ 20; survivors’ 163; and traumatization 96, 181; see also affects, confusion, containing, depression, detachment, feelings, grief, loneliness, mistrust, pain, stress, suffering emotional: acting 141; awareness 148, 166; balance 16, 174; burdens 16, 18, 21; communication 3, 8, 118, 137; content 98; cost 21, 25; demanding materials 5; difficulties 2, 14, 137; consequences 1, 2, 11, 20–21; effects of trauma 22; exhausting 128, 149; experiences 10, 141; fatigue 14; hazards 137; healing 6; help 14; impression xiv; insider 100; intensity 116; knowledge 1, 7, 10, 19, 138, 141, 180; malfunction 148, 156n7; mastery of experience 165; material 9, 16, 52; needs 9; overwhelming experiences xii, 4, 6, 9, 11, 19–21, 141; overwhelming material 12, 16, 153–4; pressure 128; reactions and responses xii, 2–3, 6, 8, 10. 14, 19–20, 74, 79; security 14, 101; sensitive

189

family material 13; sensitivity 150; spaces 95; states 4, 9, 159; strains 7, 14, 129; supportive experiences 16; universe 31; well-being 137; work 2, 137, 149, 168, 182; see also attachment, detachment, distance, engagement, numbing, self, stress empathy: diminished 37, 40; emphatic capacity 10, 145, 168; empathic knowledge 1, 10, 138, 141; emphatic presence 177; emphatic strain 176; exquisite 11, 177–8; false 11, 87; general 176; increased 37; with informants 2, 11, 22, 87, 102, 177; informants’ 84; lack of 132; limited 40; kinds of 40; in materials 52; objective 118; with perpetrators 100, 102; in research 40, 100, 133, 146, 177, 179–80; and researcher’s identity 100; researcher’s traumatization 87, 91, 104, 176–7; therapists’ 40, 176–7; with victims 100, 102; see also emotions, engagement, enmeshment, identification, knowledge, listening, privileged understanding, resonance, vicarious traumatization engagement: and addiction 46; altruistic 17, 21; and challenges 36–7, 172; in collective action helping other disadvantaged groups 84; constructive 37; to diminish the consequences of violence 13, 38; disengagement 14, 79, 148; effect on researchers 1, 25; emphatic 163, 171; ethnographic 129, 142; and genocide 1, 17, 19, 22–3, 144, 146; and gratifications 154; and hopelessness 37; by informants 138; with informants 175; intense 38, 127, 133; intersubjective 127, 133; with joyful and creative things 15, 181; long-term 39; and mass political violence 1, 17–19, 23; political 12; as positive experience 39; practical 21; at prevention 2; principled 40; at reconciliation 2; with research 34; in self-care 172, 178, 181; in social relations 14, 174, 181; and stress 18; of students 40; with suffering 40; in teaching 21, 34; and trauma 172; with trauma 19; in study of violence 2, 13, 17, 136; and violence 1, 17, 19, 37, 146; and war 1, 17, 19, 144, 146; with the world 13, 17, 21, 34, 37

190

Index

enmeshment 140, 142–4, 146–7, 149, 151, 154–5, 162 Erlich, Henryk 31 Erlich, Viktor 31 Erlich-Sznejerson, Iza 31 ethnography: and analysis 127, 133, 137; and ethnographer 103, 128, 130; ethnographic focus 131–2; ethnographic imagination 141; ethnographic material 127, 137; ethnographic practice 127–9, 136–8; and fear 98; and intimacy 11; and knowledge 10, 127, 133; and method 127; multi-sited 129–30; see also fieldwork ethical 17, 19, 84, 133 see also ethics, moral ethics xiv-xv, 93, 151, 172 see also ethical, moral exclusive victim consciousness see victimhood experience: adverse 5–6, 143; childhood 12–13, 34–5, 79, 161; collective 74, 82; confusing 47, 78–9, 81, 123, 181; direct 5–6, 8; in dreams 9–10; echoed 98; existential 149, 151; expression of 130; of family members 5, 12, 64, 74, 76, 78, 80, 87, 145–6, 160–1, 181; of genocide 111, 115, 119, 124; group 75, 81–6; historical 85, 112; indirect 6, 100; individual 1, 7, 75; informants’ 6–8, 26, 83, 87, 125, 132, 135–8, 153, 166, 179; intense 80; intersectional 5, 12; as method 141; of others 10–11, 22, 30, 38, 75, 142, 164, 180; out-of-body 14; overwhelming 7, 9, 11, 15, 19–21, 125. 152; of pain 2; peacetime 10, 142; personal 6, 12, 43, 75, 80, 124, 130, 144, 169, 176, 180; of political violence xi, 1, 3, 5, 181; positive 39; private 2, 10; professional 5, 10, 172; psychotic 8, 165; psychotherapists’ 163; research 1, 6, 17, 26, 74, 122; researchers’ 4, 11, 12, 37, 81, 87, 94–6, 98, 100–4, 113, 115–20, 133, 167–8, 179; sensory 119; sharing 15–16, 154, 165, 182; secondary 6, 8, 75; shameful 134, 181; students’ 18, 21, 166; of suffering 133; supportive 16; survivors’ 7, 160, 165; symbolized 4; transformative 2; traumatic 2, 4–6, 12, 15, 74, 82, 96, 103, 107, 162, 165; vicarious 6, 8, 10–11, 82; of victimization 26, 81; visceral 97; visual 97; of war xi, 10, 143;

see also communication, emotional, fieldwork, representation exposure: to cruelty 37; to dangers 146; to difficult emotions 12, 128–9; to difficult materials 15, 44, 51, 178; to evil 16, 39; group’s trauma 103; of informants 166; involuntary 5; to narratives of trauma 74–5; to others’ trauma 3, 5, 164; overexposing others 21; of readers 20; of scholars 179; to shame 103; in trauma therapy 176–8; to violence 3, 11, 91–3, 95–8, 102–4, 159; voluntary 5; see also symptoms family: background 18, 69, 74, 160–1, 163; history 2, 13, 30, 79, 146–7, 169 ; stories 6, 11, 57, 69, 75, 79, 84; see also experience, identity, memory, silence, trauma fantasy 13, 60, 64, 165, 167 see also imagination fear: in family 5; informants’ 96, 118, 122; overcoming 34; in research 6, 14, 93, 96–8, 129; researcher’s 150; see also horror feelings see affects, ambiguity, emotions, fear, horror, humiliation, loss, rage, paranoia, shame, sorrow feminism 177 feminist standpoint theory 75, 84, 86 fieldwork 127–9, 133–4, 138, 140–3, 155n3; existential crisis 127; experiences 3, 6, 117, 128; failures 138; harsh 128–9; insights 3; intimacy 11; leaving 15; method 10, 138; multi-sited 129–30, 134; requirements 127; as rite of passage 141; traumatic content 164; see also anthropology, emotions, enmeshment, ethnography, method, participant observation Finnström, Sverker xii, 23n9, 141 flexibility 154 Flight from the Reich 29 frames 142; see also boundaries frustration 8, 14, 83, 96–7, 143, 151, 156; see also aggression, anger, rage Geertz, Clifford 141–2 genocidal violence see violence genocide: fascination with 148; obsession with 9, 14–16, 19–20, 148; spiral of 15, 70, 148–9, 167 see also experience gentleness 154–5

Index goals: 18, 40, 53 see also intention gratification 3, 6, 16–18, 148, 150, 154 grief 79, 145, 174–5; see also sorrow Grossman-Weil, Sara 32 growth: personal 6–7; posttraumatic 17, 81–2, 99, 179; vicarious posttraumatic 75 Gruszwica, Ukraine 31 guilt: collective 81, 101; in family 145; informants’ 18; in materials 52; perpetrators’ 118, 122; researchers’ 14, 18–19, 56, 93, 143–5, 150, 180; survivors’101, 144, 156n7 Haggadah 25, 32 harmdoing 34–5, 82 helping 34–9, 93, 167 helplessness 141, 146, 165 historical imagination see imagination history 25, 36, 48, 56–7; of the Holocaust 25, 27–32; life 11, 167, 169; oral 26, 32, 62; personal 181; see also family, trauma Holocaust: hiding during 31, 35, 169; historians of 25; memory 53; survivors 8, 78, 103, 156n7, 161, 165; see also history hope 34, 65, 68, 143, 152, 171, 174, 178 hopelessness 14, 17, 37, 143 horror: as emotion 14, 20, 120, 144, 153, 174–6; of genocide 15, 20, 38, 111, 113–14, 116, 119–20, 125, 176; of killings 121; of separation 10; little horror stories 20, 152; of violence 181; of war 134; see also fear horrors: xiii-xiv, 16, 20, 111–12, 121, 145 humiliation 82, 143, 146, 150, 153, 167–8; see also shame humor 13, 45, 136, 145, 150 Hutu 38–9, 95, 97, 99–102, 105–6, 116, 118 hyperarousal 174 identification: with historical actors 32; with informants 6–7, 10–14; managing 178; and over-involvement 176; with patient’s emotions 165; personal 25; social 76, 82; with victims 76, 100; see also empathy, projective identification, vicarious identity: assistant’s 121–2; ethnic 80, 91, 98, 121; in family 78; intersectional 94,

191

96; and meaning 8; personal 91, 96; researcher’s own 11, 43, 57, 80, 91, 96; social 76, 91, 96; and suffering 132; survivor 166; of victim 132, 166 imagery: genocidal 10, 148–9, 151; intrusive 174, 179; objectifying 70; trauma 178; see also images images 45, 172, 174; of battle 26; of camp inmates 45; of deportation 27; of genocide 6, 9, 111, 149; haunting 148; memory 161, 163; of starving children 85; of torture methods 136; of violence 176; visual 9, 137; see also imagery, photographs imagination: associative 100; bureaucratic 30; ethnographic 141; and fantasy 11, 16, 48, 79; genocidal 154; historical 25 imagining: others’ situation 37, 133, 180; in the field 136; genocide 140; genocide in the field 81; and reading 136; in research 91, 104 immersion 16, 127, 138, 171, 179; see also identification individual differences 176 informants 7–9, 11, 16, 106, 124–5, 156n7, 163, 165–6; see also collocutors, experience, interlocutors, interviewees, participants inheritance: and choices 12, 146; of emotionally charged experiences 146; experience of threats 153; family 12, 145; intergenerational 142; reactions to 145; and research 13; of trauma 146; of violence 5 inner world 4, 7; associations of 10; and choices 146; containing research materials 15; differentiation of 10, 143; enmeshment 143, 151; extreme imagery of 151; logic of 8–10, 14; merging of experiences 140, 144, 155n1; patterns of 10 institutions: and authorities 124; creation of 37; of “Holocaust memory” 53; psychotherapeutic 16; rehabilitation 137; research 8, 16–17, 21, 179, 181–2; social 91 intention 18, 21, 44, 180 interaction: affected by experiences 98; in the field 174; freedom in 97; personsituation 176; power differences 81; researcher-participant 101; sensitive 154; social 141

192

Index

interlocutors 6, 12, 128–30, 134; see also collocutors, informants, interviewees, participants intersectional traumatization: and analysis 104, 106–7; concept of 5, 91, 93, 104; healing from 17; in genocide studies 18 intersubjective: encounters 8; engagement 127, 133; ethnography 127, 134; field 132, 136–7; phenomena 155n1; relation 10; research 8, 127; see also communication interviews; with children 99; discussing material from 103; focus group 84, 86; follow-up 166; in-depth 83, 166; life-history 11; with perpetrators 9, 120–2, 125; with refugees 99; with teenagers 165; with torture survivors 136; video-recorded 159, 161, 164, 166; with witnesses 130 interviewees 116, 159–160, 166, 175; see also collocutors, informants, interlocutors, participants intimacy 11–13; with informants 134–5; in life-stories 17; of memorial 120; of participation 127; in public space 23; and violence 92; see also connection, ethnography, relationships intrusion 160; intrusive body reactions 14; intrusive experiences xii, 7; intrusive knowledge 11; intrusive materials 16; intrusive phenomena 4; intrusive symptoms 92; intrusive thoughts 174; of smells 120; see also imagery, memories Iraq war 29, 141 isolation 14–15, 26, 52, 175, 178, 180–1; see also social withdrawal Jewish school 28 joy 15, 27, 148, 150 Keegan, John 25–6, 32 Kenya 111, 113, 115, 117 Kertész, Imre 145, 149 Kigali 98, 101, 105, 112–13, 117, 119–21, 125 knowledge 7–13; direct 7–8, 150; holistic 7, 10, 154; inner 7, 11; and intense engagement 127, 133, 137; intuitive 10, 154; insufficient 111; of language 61, 77–8, 111, 118, 121; second-hand 150; social 84; wordless 3, 8, 16, 119, 124,

134; see also bodily, embodied, emotional, emphatic, memory, privileged understanding, researcher, self, torture, understanding Kobylanski, Moishe 31 Kundera, Milan 36 Kurdish: conflict 127, 129, 132, 138; Worker’s Party PKK 129, 135 Kurds 12, 128–31, 134 legitimacy: in expressing pain 132; political 105–6; in research 74–5, 81, 84, 87 Levi, Primo 103, 156n7 limits: of exposure to traumatic material 21, 178–9; of knowledge xii; of language competence 121; psychic 4; of research 22; of research questions 12, 34, 147; of research results 12, 53, 140; of researcher 14, 16, 21, 40, 46, 128, 136; of trust 96; and vicarious traumatization 175; see also boundaries listening: ability 131, 134; avoidance of 48; and documenting 124; and emotions 163; emphatic 132; and exposure to violence 96–8; as help 162; and intersectional traumatization 91, 103–4; intimacy of 11; to narratives of violence 91–3, 95–6, 103; objective 118; and personal growth 3; psychoanalytic 3, 8, 13, 159, 163–5; and researcher´s experiences 100, 102; to silence xiii, 111, 117, 124; to testimonies 123, 165; to traumatic experiences 15, 26, 43–4, 87, 93, 96, 104; and vicarious experiences 8, 103–4; and vicarious traumatization 100, 102, 104, 106; see also detachment Lithuania 31, 159 loneliness 6, 79 loss: of childhood 27; of children 10; of community 27; coping with 156n7, 168, 181; existential 9; exposure to128; of family 27, 96, 166; fear of 6, 174; of friends 27, 96; of hope 174; of identity 8; of meaning 8, 19, 172, 174; nonpolitical 12; of omnipotence 14; performed 130; and political discourse 130; relived 131; researcher’s sense of 150; of the self 19; to society 182; survivors’ 159; traumatic 12; see also separation

Index March ’68 77 Marcus, George 130, 141 Marek, Hannah 27, 29 Marek, Miriam 27–9 materials: ambiguity of 18; archive 50, 52; attraction of 16, 146; containing of 21; coping with 91, 96, 98, 100–1, 179; distance from 6, 11–12, 15, 137; distressing 20; emotionally demanding 1, 5, 9, 154, 175; emotionally overwhelming 12, 16, 149, 152–3; emotionally sensitive 13; ethnographic 127, 137; identification with 6–7, 99, 179; interaction with 98; interpretation of 12; intrusive 16; painful 175; paranoia in 19; psychiatric medical records 52; processing of 127; reactions to 8; and researchers’ experiences 103; and time 123; traumatic xiv, 2, 5, 92, 98, 101, 163–4; about traumatic experiences 154, 171, 175, 177–8; understanding of 177; and vicarious traumatization 103 meaning: and connection 180; creating 169, 178; disrupted 171; of family stories 57, 65; of forgiveness 124; of holocaust and genocide xiii; implicit 8, 14; lack of 53, 91; loss of 8, 19, 172, 174; meaningfulness 12, 17, 21, 84, 174, 178; meaninglessness 17, 19, 83, 143, 151, 174; of pain 181; of reconciliation 124; of researcher’s experiences 34; of smell 119; beyond words 10, 133; of work 181–2; see also spirituality meaninglessness see meaning meditation 5, 19, 23n5, 140, 154, 180–1 memorial 76, 112; book 53n2; days 53; mass card 60–1; museum 65; site 53, 113, 115, 118–20, 124 memory 3–4; conscious 52; of the dead 47, 52; family 64, 66, 79, 145, 160; fragmented 12–13; and Gacaca 123; intrusive 11; knowledge and 3, 52, 123; overwhelming 146; perpetrators’ 121–2; researcher’s 50, 78–9, 111, 118–120, 122, 160; social 98; survivors’ 159; and trauma 159, 161; remembering see also Holocaust, images mentalization 167–8 method: anthropological 141–2; conscious and reflexive ethnography 127; and

193

detachment 14, 98–99; of free association 9; intersectionality as 93–4; for intersubjective communication 8; psychodynamic 142, 155; quantitative 83, 97; for self-care 15; sociological 56; trauma alleviation 105; see also development, ethnography, fieldwork, participant observation Milano-Piperno, Mariella 27–8, 33n2 mistrust 98, 101, 118, 129 moral: burden 17, 151; compass 28; condemnation 16; contradictions 151; correctness 112; courage 16, 39; course 18; disengagement 79; integrity 178; lack of 17; priority 17; order 123; questions18; regulation 65; standards 127, 133; strength 13; support 113; uncertainties 93; values 17; see also ethical, ethics, responsibility motives: of children 13; to help 180; maintenance of 40; original 40; for research10, 15, 18, 34–5, 37, 146; survivors’ 82; unclear 13; for violence 98 munyamahanga see outsider Murambi 118–20 narrating 25 narrative: affective shifts in 164–5; authenticity of 123; client’s 181; content of 161; controversial 102; disorganized 165; and ethnography 130; family 63, 65, 74, 87; group 74, 76, 87, 92; historical 25; identity 43; life 26; meta 53n4; national 100, 105–6; official 106; of perpetrators 123; painful 102; of suffering 104, 106; of survivors 123, 165; and time 124; transgenerational 76; of trauma 74, 76, 83, 87, 93; of violence 102; see also listening narrative repair 181 Nazi: era 26, 29; Europe 27–8, 34, 159; flag 66–7; Germany 49, 51, 54n3; ideology 53n4, 70n7; “Jewish policy” 45; Nazis 54n4, 58, 65, 67–8, 78–9, 160, 169; occupied Europe 75, 159–60; official parlance 49; past 64; police 160; policies 49, 53n4; regime 79; schemes 45; slogan 69; supporter 13; sympathizers 78; terror 43, 49 Nazism 5, 44, 49, 51, 53n4, 68–9 neuroscience 4, 23n5

194

Index

news 26–28, 30, 36, 49, 58, 85, 167 Nordstrom, Carolyn 17, 93, 117, 123, 142, 151 Norway 160–1 numbing 14, 21, 40, 56, 98, 118, 123, 149–50 obsession 9, 14–16, 19–20, 148 omnipotence 14, 19, 21, 143–4, 153, 165 oral history 15, 26, 32, 62, 69, 104, 159 organizational: challenge 16; culture 178, 182; dealing with vicarious traumatization 155; methods 153; milieu150; see also support Oslo 160, 169 outsider: in one’s profession 36; researcher as 38, 81, 96, 104; and insider 100–1, 104, 115, 117–18, 125 pacing 179 pain: in affection 68; bodily 131, 136; avoidance of 175; communication 132, 136; confronting 175; as consequence of research 6; contained 117; as emotional symptom 14, 79; inexpressibility of 131; informants’ 32, 98, 101–2, 117–18, 125, 166; legitimate expressions 132; others’ 131; perpetrators’ 101; protection against 2; in research xiii, 121, 134, 164, 172, 181; research on 75, 168 ; in Rwanda 38; sharing 118; struggle against 17; surviving psychological 168; and trauma 4; of victims 118, 121, 123, 172; witnessed 40, 132; of witnessing 43; see also understanding parallel processes 8–9, 151–4, 156n12 paranoia 5, 13–14, 19, 93, 148, 154 parenting practices 12, 27 participant observation 10, 141 participants 74, 82–4, 86–7, 98, 100–3, 107, 124–5, 173–180; see also collocutors, informants, interlocutors, interviewees, sadness passion 13, 80 Passover 25, 32, 85 performance 136–8, 149 performance theory 137 perpetrator: anger against 101; emotions 118; free after genocide 97, 133; detachment from 100; development after genocide 167; fluidity of roles 81,

91, 163, 166–7; German 25; guilt 122, 151; hostile 122; Hutu as 101; identification with 63, 81, 87, 102–3, 121; individual role of 121; interviews with 121–3, 125, 130; living with 124; official as 51; in prison 113, 120, 122–3, 125; researcher identified with 7, 96, 99, 101; as survivor 124; trauma 92, 101, 106; Turkish policy 25; victim as 39; wives 118; see also prisoner, testimonies personal growth see growth personality 103, 127, 164 person-situation interaction see interaction photographs: of archive documents 52; of battle 26; communication through 21, 26, 119; distance through 16, 23n7; family 60, 65–6, 68; in the field 16, 23n7, 119; of genocide 119; interpretation of 22; and reality 119; traumatizing 175, 179; of victims 22; see also images physical exercise 19, 174, 178 physiological arousal 174, 176; see also physiological dysregulation physiological dysregulation 174; see also physiological arousal Poland 31, 61, 66, 69, 77–8, 159 post-traumatic: flashbacks 11; stress 92; stress disorder 92; syndrome 4; see also growth, symptoms power: of authority 143, of documents 132; empowerment 75, 80, 86; of a parent 143; of stories 57; of terror 98; of UN 143; of words 32 powerlessness 13–14, 21, 143 prejudice 10, 83 prevention xiii, 2, 15–16, 37–9, 179, 181 primary traumatization 5–6, 22, 91–6, 99–100, 102–7, 168 prisoner: anguish of Rwandan 118; Mauthausen 45–6, 65; image of 148, 150; interview with Rwandan 9, 121–2; photograph of 22; political 129; research on 120; during the Second World War 57–8, 62, 66–7, 79; and survivors’ forgiveness 123; see also perpetrator private: antithesis to professional 22; business 147; capacity 117; context 9, 30; conversation 80; feelings 38; individuals xii; life xii, 2, 10, 12, 142;

Index merging with professional 143; organizations 171; orphanage 166; persons 6; preoccupations146; school 28; spaces 125; time 164; weakness 153; see also experience privileged understanding 10–11, 75, 84–7; see also bias projection 8, 164; see also projective identification projective identification 8–9, 137, 142, 151–4 pro-Kurdish activists 129 psychoanalytic: approach 161; concepts 164; help 161; interest 161; listening 3, 8, 163; sensitivity 163; understanding xii, 161; work 13, 161; see also containing psychology: clinical 1, 5–6, 171; concepts 13, 137; departments 36; mainstream 36; of Peace and Violence doctoral program 39–40, 80; Ph.D. in 34, 171; social 1, 5 psychotherapy: case load 171; clinical 2; degree in clinical xi; hardships of 2; insights 166; institutions 16; interventions 4; knowledge of 137; literature 2; one’s personal 142, 175, 178, 180–1; practice 147; as profession 171, 179; relationship in 5, 8; responsibility in 5; supervision of 9; see also containing, countertransference, parallel processes, sublimation, transference psychotherapist: counseling with 20–1; and distance to trauma 107; use of empathy 40, 176–7; and generational linking 165; harming clients 171; help for 13, 179; help to patients 165; and intrusive imagery 179; licensed xi, 140; personal experiences of 144; and psychodynamic phenomena 153; self-care 172; self-reflecting 164; trauma 3, 15, 20, 75, 91, 140, 155, 172, 174; uncharacteristic reactions 8; see also countertransference, growth, parallel processes, secondary traumatization, transference, vicarious traumatization quantitative methods see method race 5, 81, 86, 94, 96, 98 racial laws 27–8

195

Radio La Benevolencija Humanitarian Tools Foundation 38, 80 rage: in audience 137, 153; and disillusionment 14; as group emotion 82; parents’ 5; patient’s 165; in research process 150; in stories 52; see also aggression, anger, frustration reconciliation 2, 16, 34, 37–9, 80, 116, 123–5 re-enacting 127, 133, 135 regulation: Jews in Poland 77; moral 65; Swedish 165; see also affects, balance, emotional, self, vicarious traumatization relationships: family 63; with informants 11, 93, 101, 164; intimate 11, 148, 154, 174; between narrator and audience 132; personal 35, 174; productive 11; professional 5; psychotherapeutic 8, 20; in stories 69; trusting 101, 148, 154; see also countertransference, transference remedies 4, 15, 70, 172; see also counterforces, trauma antidotes remembering see memory representation 14, 23n3; dominant 133, 138; of experience 164; of knowledge 3; mental 164; in research 117; social xiii; of suffering 106, 138; of victimhood 133; visual 119; see also photographs research see agency, ambiguity, anger, anxiety, avoidance, body, bodily, choice, commitment, compulsion, containing, context, contradictions, distance, empathy, engagement, experience, fear, imagining, inheritance, inner world, institutions, intersubjective, legitimacy, limits, motives, pain, prisoner, rage, representation, resilience, stress, support, torture, trauma, trust, vicarious traumatization researcher see ambiguity, balance, bias, compassion, coping, danger, depression, development, distress, emotions, empathy, engagement, experience, fear, guilt, identity, interaction, limits, listening, loss, materials, meaning, memory, outsider, perpetrator, responsibility, sadness, safety, security, story, symptoms, testimony, trauma, vicarious traumatization, witnessing

196

Index

resilience: and horrors xiii; in Holocaust 27; increase of 3, 15, 167, 178–9; literature 179; obstacles for 167; potential for 22; in research 98 resonance 127, 133, 155, 165 responsibility: of audience 132; of bat mitzvah 70; and compulsion 70; in family 80; limits of work 175; moral 14, 85; of narrator 132; personal 151–2; of researcher 17–18, 21, 173; and survivors 80, 85–6; in teaching 149; and trauma 5; to traumatized clients 163, 171, 174; to witness 17; in working with Holocaust 29 returnee 91, 96, 99, 101, 106, 115 revenge 82, 166–8, 175; spiral of 167 Rhzev 62 risk factors 174–6; see also contributing factors rituals 25, 28, 180 Robben, Antonius 93, 117, 123, 141–2 Rovno, Ukraine 31 Russia 53n2, 59–62, 68–9 Rwanda 38–9, 80–81, 94–107, 111–125, 165–7, 174–5; see also pain, prisoner, silence, trauma sadness: of participants 83, 131; of researcher 6, 96, 164, 181 safety: in academy 154; of children 27, 66; creating 156n6; of creativity 19; distance of xiv, 98; in the field 97, 112–13; in genocide 120; of knowledge 52; preoccupation with 174; of refugees 30, 96; of researcher 56, 95, 97–8, 113, 125; sense of 97; in relationships 154; threats to 96; see also security, trust Sarajevo xi, 1, 140, 142–3, 147–8, 150 Scarry, Elaine 131 schemas see cognitive scholar see boundaries, exposure, researcher Schopenhauer 36 secondary traumatization 5–6, 25–6, 76, 91–6, 100–4, 106–7, 163, 172 security: in academy 155; apparatus 49–51, 129, 135; disrupted sense of 174; in the filed 97, 113; lack of 19; lack of in the field 95–7; longing for 76; and meditation 19; refection and 15; researcher’s 113; researcher’s lack of 81, 101, 153; working for 153; see also attachment, safety, trust

self: emotional 133; protection of 133; self-awareness 18, 177–8, 181; self-capacities 172–3; self-care 22, 172, 178–9; self-censorship 96–8; self-concept 84, 87; self-criticism 75, 83, 87; self-defense 76; self-destruction 111; self-development 172; self-esteem 167–8; self-healing 4; self-imposed 147; self-indulgence 18, 22, 156n5; selfknowledge 154; self-medication 149; self-reflection 5, 10–11, 14, 18–20, 22–23n9, 87, 95, 141, 155; self-regulation 176; self-report178; sense of the 19, 63, 168, 174; and trauma 172, 174; victimization to the 81 separation 6, 10,25, 27; see also loss shame 5, 27, 52, 69, 103, 134, 150, 166, 180–1; see also humiliation silence xiii-xiv; in audience 45, 59; in family 13, 15, 146; in literature 42; in Rwanda 96, 102, 117–18, 120–1, 124–5; in society 172; and suffering 133; see also communication, knowledge wordless, witnessing sleep 11, 19, 32, 47, 174, 178; see also dreams smell: of death 120; in the field 114–15, 119–20; of informants 134; intrusiveness of 120; as knowledge 7, 26; as means of communication 4; as reminder of genocide 125; as trauma trigger 4, 6, 104 social withdrawal 174 ; see also isolation sociology 1, 56, 63, 77 somatization 1, 142, 174, 176 Sommer, Alice 148 sorrow 14, 115, 131, 150, 165 spirituality 15, 171–3, 178, 181; see also meaning Stein, Elias 30 Stein, Elly 30 story: client’s 11, 177; from the Holocaust 48; informants’ 123–4, 134–6, 138, 159, 165; as material 134; personal xiii-xiv; researcher’s own 75–76, 84; survivor 102; and trauma 154n5; see also family, memory, photographs, power, ritual story-telling 3, 69 stress: dealing with 127, 178–9; stressors 5, 175; in research 14–15, 93, 129, 151, 176; see also distress, engagement, post-traumatic

Index sublimation 13, 18, 144 suffering: hierarchies of 12, 17, 94, 106, 132, 138; spectacular 133, 138; see also altruism, collective, containing, engagement, experience, identity, narrative, representation, silence support: in academy 151, 154; collective 51; collegial 9, 15–18, 21, 138n1, 151, 171–2; from family 13, 112, 178; in the field 97, 113; of former Hutu president 97, 99, 101; from friends 113, 178; informants’ need of 133; material 113; of Nazis 13, 49, 58, 65, 67–8; organizational 93, 175, 178–9, 182; of orphans 118; personal 51; psychosocial 93; from psychotherapy 178; in research 20–1, 44, 51–2, 97, 129, 175, 179; social 178; of students 21, 182; of teachers 21, 182; trauma 105; see also experience survivor see community, concentration camp, coping, depression, development, emotions, experience, guilt, Holocaust, identity, interviews, loss, memory, motives, narrative, perpetrator, prisoner, responsibility, story, Sweden, symptoms, testimony, torture, trauma, witnessing Sweden: compassion in 143; as country of exile 77, 145, 147, 150, 163, 169; Holocaust denial in xi, 48; healthcare 23n11; immigration office 152; Jewish family 160; lobotomies in 52; peaceful 144; press 49; studies in 142, 165; USC Survivors of the Shoah Visual History and Education in 161 symbols 3, 9, 43, 80, 96, 105, 137 symbolization 4, 43, 167, 181 symptoms: of an age 91; bodily 20; of desire 69; and exposure 176; humanitarian workers’ 23n6; measurement of 173; of memory 69; physical 44; post-traumatic 92–3, 174; psychosomatic 142; researchers’ 4, 14, 19, 172; of secondary trauma 76; survivors’ 156n7; of trauma 105, 173–4, 177–8; of trauma therapists 177; of vicarious trauma 173 teaching; as communication 181; and emotions 20, 138, 150; engagement in 1, 21, 34; genocide xi-xii, 1–2, 19, 44, 56, 140, 147–9; and gratification 154; history of the Holocaust 30; through own example 18; philosophy 27;

197

reflection about 18; and second-hand knowledge 150; self-awareness 18; and self-reflection 10, 18; and trauma 3, 168; and vicarious traumatization 23n1; see also educators, organizational milieu, representation testimonies: harrowing 44; of Jews in Hungary xi; perpetrators’ 118,123; prisoners’ 121, 123; researchers’ 181; survivors’ 106, 119, 123, 134, 159, 164–6; victims’ 119; video 165; witnesses’ 44 therapist see psychotherapist Third Reich 56–7, 61–2, 66–7, 69–70n7 time: non-chronological 8–9; see also distance, vicarious time collapse torture: analysis of 136; body 137; consequences of 134; enacting 9, 127, 133, 135; experience 137–8; expression of 137; feeling 46; forgiving torturers xiii; of informants 135–6; knowledge of 134, 138n4; method 135–6; research on 136; stories 128, 130; torturers 136–7; types of 134; vicarious xiii; work with 163; see also suffering spectacular transference 8, 142, 164 trauma: adaptations 172; addressing 37; analyzing 103, 107; antidotes to 19, 105; childhood 161; clinical 5–6; collective 44, 74–5, 77, 82, 84–7; complex 5, 99–100, 104, 106, 174; the concept of 3–4, 23n4, 25, 91–2, 105; counseling 105, 178; cultural 76; direct 172, 174–5; discourse in Rwanda 105; and experiences of violence 5–6; in family 146; genocide 92, 94, 105–6; healing from 4, 146, 166; history 175; and horrors xiii; and identification 6–7, 22; indirect 172, 175, 182; individual 74; intergenerational transmission of 76, 146, 155n1; interpersonal 75; legitimate 106; linking xiv, 162, 164, 167; marginalized 106; multiple 5; network on xi, 140, 155, 182; personal 103, 163, 167, 173–4; peace-time 131; politics of 107; primary 105–6; professional and research-related links to 5, 10, 164, 168, 171; as re-lived 4; repeated 162; researchers’ 99; responsibility to deal with 5; secondary 74–6, 82–3, 87, 103; single 5; studies 75; survivors’ 103, 105–6, 171, 175, 179–80; symposium on xi, 25, 160, 182;

198

Index

transgenerational 74–6; understanding of 93, 99, 161, 167; unimaginable 38; unprocessed 168; victim 93; war 92, 94, 105, 131; see also body, containing, enmeshment, experiences, imagery, intersectional traumatization, isolation, memory, narrative, primary traumatization, psychotherapists, secondary traumatization, symptoms, stress, support, teaching, vicarious traumatization trust: in academy 155; among colleagues 155; and cooperation 101; establishing 84, 101; in the field 97, 118, 129; lack of 98, 101, 129, 149, 174; limits of 96; in oneself 39; of participants 102, 118, 125; in research 101; working for 153; see also debriefing, safety, security truth: ambiguity of 14, 70; assumptions of 134; avoiding whole 124; claim through body 137; floating 69; of the genocide 120; knowing 98; legalist 69; positivist 69; speaking 39; in teaching 57, 69 Turkey 12, 128–9, 132–4 Tutsi 38–9, 81, 95, 99–102, 106, 116, 118–22

generation 74; and secondary traumatization 5, 76, 92, 100–1; symptoms of 62; of therapists 92, 164–5, 171–2; understanding of 93; and vicarious identification 6; see also engagement emphatic, enmeshment, growth, listening, organizational dealing with, teaching, vicarious time collapse victimhood: exclusive victim consciousness 81–2; the figure of the victim 132–3; victim consciousness 74, 80–82, 84, 86; see also collective, coping, danger, discourse, empathy, experience, identification, identity, pain, perpetrator, photographs, representation, self, testimonies, trauma, victim consciousness violence: genocidal 95, 101, 103; see also body, boundaries, collective, context, contradictions, engagement, experience, exposure, horror, images, inheritance, intimacy, listening, motives, narrative, psychology, trauma, witnessing visualizing 176; see also experience, images, representation VT see vicarious traumatization

understanding: of pain 131; wordless 3, 10, 16, 118–19, 133, 137–8, 163; see also cognitive, communication wordless, knowledge, materials, psychoanalytic, trauma, vicarious traumatization

Whitehead, Neil 23n9, 141 Wikan, Unni 133 witnessing: and acting 176; children 105; conscious 54n8; of desolation 43; and detachment 21; difficulty in communication of experiences 7; domestic violence 128; just 121; lack of emotions 120; murders 130; of pain 40, 132; reactions to 19; researcher 132; responsibility of 14; responsibility of researcher of 17, 181; and silence 15; of survivor 23n8; and trauma 4; violence 159; see also testimonies wordless see knowledge writing: and containing 21; criticized 20; as debriefing 133; enrichment through 29; about experiences 15, 81, 103, 133; about family stories 57; leaving by 56; poetry 19; and reflection 15; struggle in 154, 169

vicarious; identification 6; phenomena 154; representation 17; retribution 82; transformation 181–2; see also experience, growth, listening, torture, trauma vicarious time collapse 10, 44, 47–8, 54n7 vicarious traumatization: addressing 37, 177–8; analysis of 94; avoiding 21; benefits of 182; and empathy 176; and genocide studies 56, 92, 128; of humanitarian workers 23n6, 92; and institutions 182; and intersectional traumatization 5, 91, 94–5, 99, 103–4, 106–7; measurements of 173; and obsession 15; overwhelming 2; in professional relations 5; in research 3; researchers’ 93, 96, 99, 164, 172; risk factors 174–7, 181; among second

Yugoslavia 56, 140, 142, 145, 147, 150, 156n9