Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust 978-0-19-937257-7

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Foreword......Page 10
Preface......Page 15
Acknowledgments......Page 19
Introduction - Limits of Understanding......Page 22
1 - Refuge or Exile? Searching for a New Home......Page 46
Between Hope and Despondency......Page 48
Beginnings......Page 51
Belonging......Page 56
Shared Traumatic History......Page 59
Encounters......Page 62
The Collision......Page 69
2 - Confronting the Legacy of My Grandparents......Page 73
Being and Not Being German......Page 76
Living With Discomfort......Page 80
Psychoanalytic Reflections......Page 83
The Past Endures......Page 86
Struggle With Shame......Page 88
Fear of Self-Disclosure......Page 91
3 - Shaped by History, Caught by Language......Page 94
Dancing Around Difference......Page 98
Silence or Curiosity?......Page 100
Confronting the Past......Page 102
Language and Historical Trauma......Page 104
Negotiating History......Page 108
Postscript......Page 109
4 - Whose Suffer? Narratives of Trauma......Page 112
German Suffering?......Page 116
Familiar Stories......Page 121
Hanover......Page 124
The Bomb......Page 127
The Bomb Shelter......Page 129
Hanover's Jewish Community......Page 133
Felt Memories......Page 141
Contextualizing the Past......Page 143
Peenemünde......Page 145
Trauma and Victimization......Page 150
5 - Living with the Nazi Past......Page 157
Indifference......Page 160
Continuity......Page 170
Responsibility......Page 173
Moral Obligations of Memory......Page 176
Memorializing the Holocaust......Page 179
Ambiguous Remembering......Page 184
Learned Awareness......Page 187
6 - Knowing and Not Knowing......Page 191
Remembering and Forgetting......Page 195
The Memory Gap......Page 198
Silence and Dissociation......Page 203
Seeing and Not Seeing......Page 206
Letters from Germans......Page 210
7 - Breaking the Silence......Page 216
Sitting in Judgment?......Page 218
My Grandmother......Page 225
Past, Present, Future......Page 231
Remembering and Responsibility......Page 233
Coda - Finding My Grandfather......Page 238
The Nazi Party Membership Pin......Page 241
Forced Labor and the Armaments Industry......Page 244
Military Service......Page 248
Notes......Page 253
References......Page 277
Index......Page 287
About the Author......Page 310

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Advance praise for Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust “Searingly honest, multi-textured, and beautifully written. Roger Frie’s riveting exploration of intergenerational war memory and submerged guilt will be read as an instant classic.” —Erna Paris, author of Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History

“Not in My Family is a book of outstanding importance. Roger Frie blends personal memoir, psychoanalytic insight and deep historical scholarship, and draws out the complex web of emotions that surround German identities in the wake of the Holocaust. This profound, moving and beautifully written work looks unblinkingly at the hidden and denied effects of Nazism on German society and shows how facing responsibility for historical crimes is at once a social, family and personal responsibility. This is a book both for scholars and for everyone who cares about the shadows cast on the present by the horrors of the past.” —Stephen Frosh, Professor and Pro-Vice Master, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London “This book is so remarkable because it accomplishes the nearly impossible: acknowledging German pain, while keeping in constant focus the unimaginable suffering and pain Germany inflicted. Frie ardently and generously opens his own mental processes for the reader to examine and to know. He reaches into the deepest recesses he can access, in a continuous process of self-search and self-reflection. It is a search for ‘a lived historical truth’ in himself, the truth of his beloved maternal grandfather, a member of the Nazi party, and the latter’s complicity in the crimes committed by the Nazi regime.” —Dori Laub MD, Yale University School of Medicine and CoFounder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies “Remembering and forgetting are not only about cognition and neurology but also about emotions and moral engagement, about taking a stance. Roger Frie makes clear that when autobiographical and social memories of the Holocaust are passed on to the next generations they are never ‘pure memories’ but inextricably caught in

a cultural web of narrative, history, and moral interpretation. From the unique perspective of a cultural psychoanalyst-philosopher, this book gives us a compelling picture of the intricacy of this web.” —Jens Brockmeier, Professor of Psychology, The American

University of Paris “Not in My Family brings the personal and the academic into conversation with one another in a productive, human, and moving way. This book not only demonstrates the power that history exerts over human beings, but also reveals how we can process that history in a way that is both personal and transcends the individual, that combines emotional and intellectual work. Roger Frie works through the impact of the Holocaust on his family and on himself as a way to consider its effects on humanity, including—specifically--on the readers of this gripping and important book.” —Thomas Kohut, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History, Williams College “This book breaks the spell of the past and points the way to a future that preserves our shared humanity. Frie’s painstaking and frank narrative relates the personal to collective memory and shows how the effects of Nazi history must concern us all to this day. His comprehensive, thought-provoking account of the past is deeply honest, future—oriented and inspiring.” —Alexandra Senfft, author of The Long Shadow of Perpetrators: Descendants Face Their Nazi Family History

“Bringing the unspoken into words, the breaking of taboo and, in the process, exposing one’s vulnerability, is not easy work or for the faint of heart. Reading this book kindled many memories of my own history growing up, where there was rampant anti-Semitism, in a neighborhood where there were very few Jews. I grew up with an ever-present sense of fear, inherited from my family’s history, and frequently heard derogatory remarks that often kept me from disclosing my Jewish identity. This is one of the powers of Not in My Family. Reading Roger Frie’s story compels us all to remember our own. Moreover, it helps us in learning how to situate and inform our memories and understandings within the broad context of history, moral responsibility, and the current world. This is a remarkable wor .” —Jeff Sugarman, Professor of Education, Simon Fraser

University “Not in My Family illustrates the work that is required if we are to honor our responsibility to remember. As the author, psychoanalyst

Roger Frie, explores what discovering his grandfather’s Nazi affiliation meant to him, this book emerges as a gem for examining the transmission of memories related to the Holocaust and the moral obligations of memory. Anyone interested in the impact the collective memory of historic events can have on individuals should read this moving story.” —Vam1k D. Volkan MD, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and author of A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering through Action

“This masterful and emotional book needs to be widely read. Finding the Nazi past in his own family, Frie calls on Germans, as well as others, to feel the responsibility to remember the collective crimes of the past. He bravely shares his personal story and in so doing invites all of us to recognize how the traces of atrocity remain within us.” —Yecheskiel Cohen, Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Tel Aviv

University “Both a soul-searcher and an interdisciplinary scholar, Roger Frie asks us to face the unavoidable: how are we responsible for what we only

half know, and may not have personally lived? His determined confrontation with the dark times into whose shadows and crimes he was born challenges the reader emotionally, intellectually and ethically.” —Donna Orange, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Not in My Family

Explorations in Narrative Psychology Mark Freeman Series Editor

Books in the Series Speaking of Violence Sara Cobb

Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life

Molly Andrews Narratives of Positive Aging: Seaside Stories Amia Lieblich

Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process Jens Brockmeier

The Narrative Complexity of Ordinary Life: Tales from the Coffee Shop

William L. Randall Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists Laura Otis

Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience Edited by Brian Schiff, Sylvie Patron, and A. Elizabeth McKim

Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust Roger F rie

NOT IN MY FAMILY German Memory and Responsibility

After the Holocaust Roger Frie

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017

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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this on any

acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978—0—19—937255—3 eISBN 978—0—19—937257—7

same

condition

For Elena and Andreas, with love and admiration

CONTENTS Foreword by Anna Ornstein, MD Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Limits of Understanding 1. Refuge or Exile? Searching for a New Home 2. Confronting the Legacy of My Grandparents 3. Shaped by History, Caught by Language 4. Whose Suffering? Narratives of Trauma 5. Living with the Nazi Past 6. Knowing and Not Knowing 7. Breaking the Silence Coda: Finding My Grandfather Notes References

Index About the Author

FOREWORD “What does it mean to be caught in a web of history, to be part of a traumatic past over which we have no control?” Roger Frie responds to this question in the form of an autobiography that includes his family’s history for the last three generations. Born in Canada to immigrant German parents, speaking in accent—free English, Frie had no compelling, externally determined reason to engage in an emotional struggle related to his German heritage. He could have lived with the myth, accepted by the majority of the German population today, that the planners and executors of the Holocaust were properly punished for their crimes in Nuremberg and that there was no reason for subsequent generations of Germans to feel guilty for their forebears’ crimes. The honesty with which he describes the guilt and shame he continues to feel is not idle self-indulgence but the strong and wellreasoned voice of a philosopher-psychoanalyst inviting his fellow Germans to recognize the moral dimensions that remembering the Holocaust has for his and future German generations. Frie’s book powerfully illustrates how memory is shaped by our historical and cultural past and filtered through our current political circumstances. Using himself as the subject of his research, Frie makes a valuable contribution to the complex and mostly unconscious process of the transmission of traumatic memories. As a member of the third generation, with frequent visits to Germany as a child, he delighted in his grandfather’s attention; when events of the war were discussed in the family, they concerned themselves with the times spent in bomb shelters and the loss of his mother’s home to Allied bombing. What was not spoken about was the fate of the Jews: What happened to their neighbors who kept disappearing over the years? Family conversations tended to focus on German suffering; as Frie states, “there was little motivation to address participation in and support for an immoral regime or its genocidal policies” (ch. 4, “Familiar Stories”). Convinced that “cultural and historical realities both define and burden us,” the author of this book makes no attempt to run away from his own cultural and historical reality. Discovering that his beloved grandfather had joined the Nazi Party, he asks himself: Can I still love and admire the Grandpa I have loved and admired all my life? And am I able to be empathic with his time in history and accept his choice of joining a party in full knowledge of what that party stood for? Very

few Germans ask themselves such questions, though they all must realize that without the support and collaboration of everyday Germans, the systematic killings of millions of people during the Third Reich would not have been possible. Frie’s ruthless honesty encourages readers to become introspective and ask themselves how they may have been affected by their national history and cultural heritage. I found myself reflecting on my own background and childhood experiences. I grew up in deeply antiSemitic Hungary, where Jews were subjected to persecution and were deprived of their civil rights in keeping with the anti-Jewish measures passed in the Hungarian Parliament during the 1930s. Soon after the German occupation of the country in 1944, my mother, my father, my grandmother, and I were deported to Auschwitz, where my father and extended members of my family were murdered. My two brothers, ages 20 and 22, did not survive the hardships of the forced labor battalions. I had to ask myself: How was it possible, after such devastating losses, that I and many other survivors could go on living and were able to create well-functioning families and become useful members of society? How did the history of the Jewish people—more specifically, my cultural heritage and what I personally experienced in my family—affect my ability to survive with a relatively intact psyche? As the smallest social unit, the family has always been recognized as the mediator between society and individual members of the family. Not only does the memory of traumatic events find its way to subsequent generations, but also it is within the family that cultural patterns containing deeply held beliefs and value systems are transmitted from generation to generation. It is within the family that values and ideals become internalized through mythology, ideology, and religious practices even by its youngest members. By observing centuries-old traditions, continuity is established between generations, and the most fundamental values of a culture are preserved. Most Jewish holidays are observed in the home. In my own childhood, we celebrated the holidays that were observed in all Orthodox Jewish homes. Sitting around the table, stories were told about slavery and deliverance, about suffering and redemption, and about miraculous escapes from total annihilation. The Holocaust, more cruel and devastating than any previous disaster, appeared to be the direct continuation of all earlier attempts at the total annihilation of the Jewish people. In my family there were also lively discussions about books my parents and my brothers read, music they wished they could hear. And then there were the heated discussions of the dangerous political situation in Europe, my uncle’s escape from Vienna, the concern about our relatives in Slovakia. What was communicated to us children was that knowing our own history and that of the world in

we lived had extraordinary importance; the message, that education had priority above all else was inescapable. My seeming resilience and my life after the Shoah confirm Saul Friedlaender’s (1979) words: “The more time passes, the more I feel that it is there, in these earliest settings of my life, rather than in the terrible upheavals that followed, that the essential part of myself was shaped” (p. 32). The author places his narrative lens on high power that permits the examination of the process of transmission of traumatic memories at a close range. This would not be possible with the broad brush strokes of the historical-cultural narrative that proved to be so helpful in my emotional survival. The close examination of the last three generations offers readers the opportunity to trace the verbal and nonverbal aspects of trauma transmission, specifically, how the selective silence of the “first generation,” the generation of the perpetrators, affected their children, the “second generation,” and eventually the grandchildren, the “third generation,” to which the author belongs. The perpetrators themselves had good reason not to speak about their experiences; their future depended on how well their innocence and their own victimhood during the Third Reich could be maintained. Having grown up with Nazi ideology and having fought for Adolf Hitler and German glory following the country’s shameful defeat in the First World War, they had to cast themselves in an ideal light after the war. When individuals who were involved in the atrocities were interrogated in 1945, few denied their actions, but all insisted that they did not feel guilty then or afterward; many showed genuine surprise that anyone could consider their actions criminal (Sereny, 1983). In the legal sense they were right; the actions for which they were tried did not involve the violation of the law, and individual conscience rarely overrides state—sanctioned ideology. Considering the power of ideology, in order to prevent mass killings and genocide, the study of resisters could prove to be more useful than what can be learned about the psychology of the perpetrators. Difficult as it is to understand the psychology of perpetrators and bystanders, understanding the psychology of resisters to autocratic regimes presents a still greater challenge. From Frie’s account and based on my own observations, I believe that it is “the second generation,” the children of the perpetrators, who constitute the lynchpin in the transmission of traumatic memories. For many, their perpetrator parents’ stories conflicted with what they had leamed about the Holocaust. Only few confronted their parents and researched their own families about what by the 1960s and 1970s had become increasingly obvious: the Holocaust was too widespread, the concentration and extermination camps too numerous within Germany and the occupied territories to maintain the myth that the German population was not aware of them. Most members of the second

which

generation appeared to have made a psychological compromise: in order not to bring their love and loyalty into question, they joined their parents in their silence. One reason for the silence in individual families may have been the fact that traumatic disillusionment with one’s parents exacts a heavy price on children by depriving them of the most important source of their self-esteem. The children preferred to think that their parents were heroes on the front rather than that they had participated in deportations and mass killings. Frie describes the nature of the communication between him and his second-generation parents, which illuminates the complex nature of the transmission of traumatic memories. Because his account is an excellent description of this process, I will quote him in full: “When I was a child and first learned of the massive crimes of the Shoah from my parents, this knowledge seemed less real than my felt-awareness of the immediate struggles of my parents as children. With the benefit of hindsight, this was clearly a form of emotional dissociation, grounded in confusion about hearing of the horrors perpetrated by the generation of my grandparents in the same cultural lifeworld in which I was raised. As I look back, I think the dissociation I felt in hearing about the Shoah was also a reflection of my parents’ shame and struggle to share and discuss what had unfolded when they were children, as well as their subsequent attempts to make sense of what they saw had seen and heard in the world around them at a young age” (ch. 4, “Felt Memories”). Having grown up in North America and being aware of his own parents’ struggles with these issues, Frie had become fully aware of the nature of the crimes that were perpetrated by his grandfather’s generation; he now experiences the guilt and shame that belonged to the perpetrators but that they themselves were unable to feel. Guilt and shame affect Frie’s work as a psychoanalyst, especially in relation to his Jewish patients. While listening to a patient who is the child of a Holocaust survivor, he finds his mind drifting to the suffering that his own family endured during the war. Readers witness the struggle as he wonders when and how to disclose his identity, his “Germanness”; they will be deeply appreciative of the opportunity to follow the description of the intimate encounters in which the psychoanalyst’s and patient’s subjectivities become revealed and both members of the dyad have a chance to work through their respective historical legacies. Such a process of working through, however, is only possible when the psychoanalyst is able to maintain his empathic immersion in his patient’s inner world while remaining introspective at the same time, a condition Frie has no difficulty meeting. One of the most important messages of this book is the moral demand Frie makes on his generation of Germans to remember the Holocaust even beyond the time that the Jews may no longer

remember it. In reality, this is unlikely to happen, since perpetrator nations are eager to forget and the Shoah is likely to become one of the Jewish holidays, like the destruction of the second temple. However, fulfilling this demand offers the opportunity for moral rehabilitation that, in my view, Germany has not yet achieved. As Frie and other young Germans realize, this requires that members of the second and third generations research their own families’ involvement in National Socialism, a demanding and difficult task, as one is likely to be ostracized for such efforts. The commitment to remember has the power—at least potentially— to redeem the crimes committed by a previous generation. Frie’s commitment to remember the Holocaust is an act that in my view transforms his inherited guilt and shame into a sense of moral responsibility. With this act, Frie seeks to reconcile himself with the past he was bequeathed and thereby take ownership of it and transform it.

Anna Omstein, MD

PREFACE Few subjects have been as extensively studied or as rigorously researched as German memory and the Holocaust. The unspeakable nature of the crimes and the human cost of the catastrophe continue to hold our attention. Despite the distance of time emotional scars and traumatic memories endure, illustrating the extent to which we live our lives in the larger dimension of history. As the son of German parents who were bom in the midst of the Third Reich, and as the grandson of Germans who were active in the Second World War, I have always felt the Holocaust to be a haunting presence, connected with the history, culture, and language in which I was raised. Yet I grew up in Canada and am not a German citizen. The sheer geographical distance between the location of my childhood and the crimes committed in Europe seemed to provide me some measure of emotional shelter, keeping worrisome thoughts about the Nazi past and the actions of my family members at bay. Over time my attempts to maintain an emotional distance from the Holocaust ran up against my experience of living in different cultural contexts and interacting with individuals who had been directly affected by its traumas. The more aware I became of the prevalence of traumatic memories in others, the more I sensed their presence in my own life. At some point I realized that the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust could not be eluded, that the intersection of history, culture, and memory in my life and the life of my family would need to be addressed. There may be little I can say on this topic that has not already been written about. But what I can add is the distinctiveness of my own experience, the inherited memories I grew up with, and the narrative I now live: my ongoing personal life amid German and Jewish contexts and my therapeutic work with the descendants of Holocaust survivors, all inextricably connected to traumatic memories of the past. I undertake this study in full awareness of the sensitivity of the subject matter. The Holocaust challenges our capacity to understand more than seven decades later. The study of memory and its transmission should not in any way neglect the indescribable suffering that occurred. How we talk about and consider the meaning of the Shoah is important, lest calls to remember result in fatigue or neglect. Its psychological effects across generations are not imagined, but real. This book is motivated by a lived recognition of those traumas and

above all by a moral obligation to remember. Writing about one’s own family history in relation to such a challenging and solemn topic is not an easy or risk-free undertaking. Despite this I believe that first-person experience can illustrate the sheer complexity of memory. I use my story, the story of my family, and the stories of others to engage in a series of reflections about German remembering and forgetting in the wake of the Holocaust. The stories I recount are evocative as they powerfully demonstrate the shaping and reshaping of German memory over time. I consider what these lived experiences tell us about the formation and maintenance of memory and thus combine stories of lived experience with discussion about the effects of historical trauma. 1 have purposefully avoided using technical language in this book. I prefer to allow the lived experiences I describe speak for themselves rather than impose a theoretical framework upon them. Detailed historical and theoretical discussion can be found in the endnotes. My hope is that the autobiographical perspective I use will lead readers to reflect on their own family narratives and on the importance of remembering the past. I define narratives as the stories we tell to make sense of our experience and communicate with others. We typically recount our memories through acts of narration. Over the course of our development family members share stories that capture a particular moment or moments in time and shape what we know about our history. These narratives reflect the views of the storyteller and the cultural contexts in which they are expressed. The role of narrative in the formation of memory is evident in the way that German families recall their history. As a nation, Germany has done much to atone for its terrible crimes. Public memory in Germany assumes guilt and responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Private memory is more ambiguous. Families often know little about what their relatives actually did in the Nazi past. By telling one set of stories and not another, they navigate between emotionally acceptable and unacceptable memories. Over time this creates a movement between remembering and forgetting that is fluid and dynamic in nature. In relation to the topic of the Nazi past and the Holocaust, the limits of a single narrative compel us to examine multiple perspectives. We need to consider counternarratives that challenge our accepted views of the past. This book evolved out of a period of intense personal reflection following my recognition of a chapter in my family history that had remained unspoken. I begin with an account of this discovery and then use my own family narrative and the stories of others to address the nature of memory and the importance of remembering. Given the autobiographical character of this book, I could not have written it without the express support of my family members and other relatives.

Indeed, the stories I describe involve all of them to a greater or lesser degree. I am grateful first and foremost to Emily, who in the context of our shared life has helped me to see and understand in new ways. This study would not have been possible without her. The thanks I express does not begin to capture the affection and gratitude I feel. Our two children, Elena and Andreas, have grown older over the years of researching and writing this book and have been incredibly understanding throughout. My family provided me with the supportive and caring environment that allowed me to engage a topic that was always challenging and often upsetting. This is ultimately a book about our shared journey, and I count myself truly fortunate to have such wonderful partners on the voyage. It is to our children that I dedicate this work. I hope they will find what I say helpful along their way. The story I describe connects five generations of my family. My great-grandfather lived a long and varied life and died shortly after I was born. I knew my grandparents when I was young and carry their memories with me. Their experiences are present throughout these pages. My parents shared their memories and supported me unreservedly in undertaking this project. I grew up in a house full of German and English books, and my parents taught me the importance and love of knowledge from an early age. This book is my attempt to apply that understanding to the complexity of our family history. I conferred with my sister about our memories growing up and came to appreciate how much her life and that of her family mirror my own. Her support has always been meaningful. In order to reflect as accurately as possible a history that began long ago, I communicated with family members in Germany, who shared their experiences and memories, and I am grateful to them all. Writing this book has created a new family dialogue about the past. Yet the story I present and the way in which I describe our history is inevitably through the lens of my own experience. Indeed, I fully recognize that no two people ever hear or see an event in the same way and, at least in this sense, the memories I write about are entirely my own. Each of us has a unique understanding of the past, especially as it relates to the painful subject matter I address in this book. Though the road was hard to follow, I believe we are better off for having traveled

it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In writing this book I have been fortunate to have the support of friends and colleagues in Canada, the United States, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom. I have incurred many debts that are both personal and intellectual in nature. A number of individuals gave generously of their time to meet with me, describe their experiences, and read my work in whole or in part. In the process they have become my interlocutors, and I bring some of their voices and stories to bear in my discussion. Jorg Bose has been a source of friendship and support over many years. His astute observations as an immigrant New York psychoanalyst who was born in Germany have been immensely helpful to me. My friend Donna Orange was encouraging throughout, and the idea for this book emerged from our ongoing dialogue on the topic. Donna’s sensitivity to the suffering of others continues to inspire. In Tel Aviv, Yecheskiel (Chezzi) Cohen kindly read my work, provided reassurance, and shared his personal history with me. I write about the tragic interconnection of our family histories in this book. Chris Jaenicke and Hilla Jaenicke hosted me in Berlin on numerous occasions, and I am appreciative of their friendship and the knowledge they have shared. Raphael Gross, director of the German Historical Museum in Berlin and a friend going back to our student days at Cambridge University, provided valuable insights. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Anna Omstein, whose support has enabled me to complete the book. Her story is truly one of courage and resilience, and I am grateful to include her remarkable voice. My work has benefited from the friendship and intellectual fellowship of Mark Freeman, Jens Brockmeier, and Jeff Sugarman. Their scholarship in narrative psychology and the sociocultural dimensions of human experience has enabled me to develop a framework for what I write about. Mark’s compassionate discussion of my work and his enthusiasm to take on this book in the Oxford University Press series he edits provided the impetus to undertake the project. I am indebted to Jens for sharing his expertise in narrative hermeneutics and for his hospitality and enriching conversations during my regular visits to Berlin and Paris. Jeff has been a loyal friend and colleague over many years, and I have learned a great deal from him that has inspired what I say here. I am appreciative of the many individuals who discussed, read, or commented on different parts of the book over the course of its

preparation. I thank Karl Figlio and Thomas Kohut for their time, effort, and guidance. I also thank Anton Scamvougeras, who has been a source of friendship and humor throughout the long joumey. In addition, I want to acknowledge friends and colleagues in the interpersonal, intersubjective, and self psychology communities and beyond. In Vancouver, I thank Susan Baum, Colin Cash, Margo Genge, Martin Howard, Margaret MacKinnon—Cash, Jack Martin, Max Sucharov, and all my relational reading group friends. In New York, I thank Philip Blumberg; Doris Brothers; Cynthia Field; Ruth Imber; Elliot Jurist; Emily Kuriloff; Robert Prince; Katharina Rothe; Pascal Sauvayre; Ilya Weiner; the members of my New York psychoanalysis, social theory, and philosophy reading group; and in memoriam, John Fiscalini. In Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle, I thank Bill Coburn, Philip Cushman, Jack Foehl, Lynne Jacobs, and Margy Sperry. I am grateful to my many discussants and interlocutors in Germany, and especially thank Tilman Habermas, Martin Gossmann, and Janet von

Stillfried. I would like to express my appreciation to colleagues in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University and the Department of Psychiatry at University of British Columbia for the welcoming academic homes they have created since my arrival from New York. At the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre I was generously assisted by the education director, Adara Goldberg. I likewise thank the helpful staff at the Bundesarchiv and the Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt) in Berlin. For permission to reproduce photographs I thank Katharina Walter and the Museen fiir Kulturgeschichte der Landeshauptstadt Hannover, the photo archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The German historian Michael Grube gave me access to an important local photograph in Hanover. Over the course of writing this book I have had the opportunity to present my work in many different locations. I thank David Goodman, director of the Psychology and the Other Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who provided a supportive venue to talk publicly about the narrative of my grandfather for the first time. I was kindly invited to present my work at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt by its director, Marianne Leuzinger—Bohleber. She and her husband, Wemer Bohleber, were exemplary hosts. During my trips to Frankfurt I had the pleasure of exchanging ideas with Kurt Griinberg and Friedrich Markert, whose research on the psychological traumas of the Holocaust intersects with what I write about in this book. When I presented in Jerusalem I was honored to have Chezzi Cohen discuss my work. He and Hanoch Flum extended their hand of friendship and shared their German—Jewish family histories. Many more people have told me their stories of loss and trauma connected to the history of

Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Some cannot be named, and others I do not know by name, but I wish to acknowledge all of them and their courage for articulating their memories. I owe intellectual debts of a different nature to three authors whose writings on the Holocaust are important to the perspective I develop in this book: Zygmunt Bauman, Eva Hoffman, and Primo Levi. Each of them addresses the painful subject of the Holocaust using a sophistication of analysis that eschews simple or reductive renderings of traumatic history or human motivation. In addition, my exploration of the unspoken histories of German families has benefited from Erna Paris’s insightful examination of the unassimilated histories of perpetrator nations. This project also intersects with a diverse body of work on trauma and history carried out by such authors as Dan BarOn, Cathy Carutl1, Stephen Frosh, Sue Grand, Marianne Hirsch, Dominick LaCapra, Dori Laub, and Vamik Volkan. In the German context I want to acknowledge the study of family memory undertaken by Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall and the work of tl1ird-generation German authors such as Alexandra Senfft, who have courageously written about their own families. The traumatic history of the Nazi past and the Holocaust is a vast, multidisciplinary area of research, and there are doubtless other works that parallel what I say in this book. To those authors whose work I may have overlooked, I can only express my apologies. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from German in this book are my own. When appropriate, I have also changed existing translations to provide a more accurate rendering of the original German. Finally, I could not have written this book without the significant efforts of individuals at Oxford University Press. I thank in particular senior editor Abby Gross, who has been an enthusiastic supporter of this project from the beginning. I am indebted to her for her knowledge and editorial suggestions. Assistant Editor Courtney McCarroll was unceasingly helpful and patient as she answered my many questions. I developed this book over a number of years and through an intense period of scholarly work on the subject of German memory and the Holocaust. As such, this book draws on a number of articles that were previously published. None of the book duplicates that work, but there is some overlap with earlier publications (cf. Frie, 2011b, 2012b, 2012c, 2013, 2014a, 2014b).

INTRODUCTION Limits of Understanding I recognized his face, but the image was unfamiliar. The photograph of my grandfather lay on a table with a host of letters. I was in Germany recently to visit with family, and my relatives were using the opportunity to sort through old documents, choosing which to keep and which to discard. Looking at the photograph, I felt an immediate sense of unease. My grandfather appeared to be wearing a uniform. I associated his face with the kindness he had shown me when I was a child, but his military bearing in the photograph was strangely alien. The image left me confused and unnerved. Was my grandfather uncomfortable? Or was I experiencing my own discomfort at being confronted with an unspoken family history? I was familiar with a photograph of my grandfather in the uniform of the German Luftwaffe, but this was different. He seemed younger, proud, and I imagined altogether more impressionable. What does it mean to be caught in a web of history, to be part of a traumatic past over which we have no control? We are born into history and culture, and it is through our family that we are connected to these larger dimensions of experience. Our families provide us with narratives, stories that enable us to make sense of the past. These narratives become an integral part of who we are and how we view the world. They provide a compass by which to navigate our lives, shaping us in the process. At some stage, or at some point in life, we may be able to reflect on certain aspects of the narratives we inherit and begin to question them, thus revealing new ways of seeing the world around us. I say “may,” because a reflective understanding of our situation is never a given. At other moments we may be confronted with alternative narratives that demonstrate the limits of our understanding and challenge our accepted view of the world. Initially, at least, our place is made for us, structured by the language we speak, the history we inherit, and the culture and traditions that constitute who we are. The history of war became evident to me early on through a gap in my family. While one grandfather was present, the other was absent. I learned at a young age that my paternal grandfather had died fighting as a German soldier on the Russian front, but his loss was rarely talked about. I know little about him, and he exists primarily by way of old photographs and a wooden tennis racket that was passed down to my

father, a remnant of a life once lived. The stories of both of my grandfathers belong to the painful history of my parents’ childhood in Germany, which spanned the years of the Third Reich and the Second World War. My history, and the history of my family, is intertwined with the reality of war and Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust. As the son of German postwar immigrants to Canada, I grew up in two cultures, spoke German before I spoke English, and was keenly aware of both belonging to and being separate from Germany and its traumatic past. The absence of one grandfather added meaning to my relationship with the other. The geographical distance between us generated a longing for connection that was satisfied only by occasional but extended visits, telephone calls, and letters throughout the course of my childhood. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of long vacations spent visiting my grandparents in the city of Hanover. My grandfather was an artisan who created beautiful objects made of wrought iron, brass, and copper. I would watch him work and marvel at the way he could take a mass of metal and fashion it into a piece of art, much as a sculptor chisels marble or a potter molds clay. His skills were recognized, and in the difficult years that followed the war he was able to provide for the family. As I grew older, my grandfather showed me his craft and taught me some of the skills of metal work. He died quite suddenly when I was only 15, and I mourned the loss of opportunity to do more with him. Later I used my grandfather’s workshop to practice some of what I had leamed from him. To this day, working with my hands can evoke tender recollections of the time we spent together. These memories are connected to a sense of belonging, of a place of family and culture that became an integral part of how I understand myself. Yet I was always sensitive to the differences between the cultures in which I lived. As a child I was particularly struck by the fact that each day my grandfather would get on his bicycle and ride to a local market to buy groceries. He would fill his basket and his bags, hanging them precariously on the bicycle handlebars, and then carefully ride home. When I was visiting my grandparents I would join my grandfather on his daily venture and carry what little I could. Growing up in North America amid the large cars and wide avenues of the 1970s, the image of my bicycle—riding grandfather also filled me with curiosity. It seemed to me that his life would be so much easier if he could load up a car with groceries; he could carry more and go less often. I remember asking my mother a host of questions. Why was it that my grandfather did not drive? Why did he not have a car? She recalled that he had once ridden a motorcycle when she was a young child, and that he and his brother had belonged to some kind of “motorcycle club.” I found this appealing: my grandfather on his motorcycle, clad in a black leather jacket. It seemed to lend him a

daring side, and that image stayed with him over the years.

me as

I grew up and visited

There is an earlier photograph of my grandfather, this one taken in 1928. It shows a dapper young man in Berlin. My grandfather is in the prime of his youth, with a hat and cane, a man about town. There is a series of photographs of this nature, all set in recognizable Berlin locations. Each time my grandfather holds a different pose, his cane at a rakish angle, standing with a group of friends or in front of a smart automobile. Some of the images were transferred onto postcards and sent home to his mother in Hanover. On the back of one photograph is a personal greeting, confidently signed “your handsome and well behaved son.” Nothing in these photos suggests the kind of life I imagined my grandfather to have led. Was he emulating his wealthier family members professors and opera singers? Family matters can be exceedingly complex, and there is much that remains unknown. Who, after all, was my grandfather (see Photo 1)? Born in 1906, my grandfather grew up in Hanover and moved to Berlin in the mid—1920s, where he lived and worked until the early 1930s. Berlin was in its heyday, the European center of culture, leaming, and the arts. It was a vibrant and artistic place, known for its cabaret and its theater, its left-wing politics and its decadence. It was the city before the onset of the Nazi regime, before Joseph Goebbels and his brown shirts could implement their racist policies at will. Yet there were ominous signs of the evils to come: pitched battles between the communists and the Nazis were increasing in frequency, and antiSemitic attitudes were becoming more overt and virulent. Even as a child it was obvious to me that my grandfather considered his years in Berlin a high point in his life. He loved to tell stories about the city and engage in the kind of humor that was characteristic of Berliners. My grandfather could be a masterful teller of jokes. Once he returned to Hanover he married my grandmother, built a house, and started a family. He never went back to Berlin, not even to visit.

Photo 1: My grandfather in central Berlin, 1928.

As I reflect on the history I have inherited, I am confronted by the dramatic contrast between my grandfather’s joie de Vivre in 1920s Berlin and the stark image of him in uniform from the late 1930s. Might the two photographs of my grandfather reflect the sharply

divergent political contexts in which they were taken? In view of my unsettling discovery, this question takes on a more urgent and personal meaning. Following the First World War and the abdication of the German Kaiser, the democratic and liberal outlook of Weimar Germany shone brightly. Despite the promise of a new and different era, the fragility of the republic soon became evident. It would last only from 1919 to 1933. Once Hitler and the Nazi regime attained full power in March 1933, the ideals of the Weimar Republic were quickly extinguished, replaced by the hateful and belligerent worldview of National Socialism. How do I understand the different lives my grandfather led, the choices he evidently made? Over time the images and stories of my childhood would run up against the complexities of history as I leamed about the war, the Holocaust, the horrors perpetrated by Germans under National Socialism. As I grew older I began to question the activities of my family members and in particular those of my grandfather. I learned that he was a civilian worker involved in the fabrication of airplane parts before being called into active duty in early 1944. As a member of the Luftwaffe he worked in the aerial armaments industry and participated in the production of the V rockets. Late in the war my grandfather seized a chance to visit his family. Rather than return to the war effort, he went into hiding, and a short time later his unit was bombed and destroyed. This, then, was the narrative of my grandfather. He was a fashionable dresser with a penchant for nights on the town and reminiscing with friends. He was caring and kind, was artistically gifted, and somehow maintained a sense of humor in the face of the destruction and hardship wrought by war. Although I knew early on that my grandfather had belonged to the side of the perpetrators and fought for a tyrannical regime, I was always relieved that his history, and by extension my own, was not one of perpetration. After all, my grandfather was not a Nazi. Or was he? The silence surrounding family participation in the Nazi past leaves traces, hauntings that are transferred from one generation to the next. The paramilitary look of the image of my grandfather, lying on the table with a host of other photographs, crystallized my sense of unease. Before I inquired I already half—knew the answer. Indeed, I may well have known it for some time, though I was not able to articulate it. My grandfather participated in the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK), a paramilitary organization concerned with the operation and maintenance of automobiles and motorcycles. The NSKK existed from 1931 through the war’s end, and its mainly middle-class membership grew from seventy thousand in 1933 to roughly half a million by 1940. Both during and after the period of National Socialism, the NSKK was perceived as a largely apolitical

organization, akin to the motoring associations of other countries. In postwar West Germany, this perception enabled NSKK members to efface their Nazi past and achieve prominence in the highest sectors of society. Recent historical research has shown that this long—accepted view of the NSKK is a convenient myth, generated and maintained by a postwar culture that sought to distinguish so-called ordinary Germans, beloved everyday family members, from Nazi perpetrators. In fact, the NSKK was an integral part of the Nazi regime, founded on a racist policy of exclusion and discrimination. Its members participated in crimes against German Jews during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938. Once the war began they provided support for the Nazi state’s war of annihilation. According to a public statement made by a NSKK group leader in 1935, the year botl1 of my parents were bom, it was essential that “the NSKK man be one-hundred percent a Nazi and one-hundred percent an anti-Semite” (Hochstetter, 2005, p. 415).2 This was my grandfather’s motorcycle club. The man whom I loved and whose memories I cherish was a Nazi, a supporter of the regime that orchestrated the Holocaust.

HISTORY AND BELONGING Do we belong to history, or does history belong to us? What do we inherit by way of culture and family, and what do we contribute to the course of our lives?3 The history of my family, like that of so many German families, calls out to be examined. I have an obligation to remember the past and understand my grandfather’s role in the dark events that precede me. It is a responsibility born of a traumatic past that I never knew directly. I was bequeathed a German family history that requires me to grapple with the nature of memory and the legacy of National Socialism. And yet I hesitate, faced with the prospect of finding words to fill the memory gap that has appeared. The anxiety I feel points me in the direction of unimaginable crimes. Despite the passage of time, the Holocaust defies any rational comprehension and demonstrates the limits of our understanding. In a nation of former perpetrators, family histories often remain unknown, perhaps even unknowable. What has been remembered, and what has been forgotten? Looking back, I am confronted with the unspoken contexts of my life. Given what I have leamed about my grandfather, how do I make sense of the memories I hold? My attempt to answer these questions is likely to begin in a process of selfreflection. What was my role in sustaining the familiar family narrative? But I also need to cast a wider net. After all, memory is not simply a product of the individual mind. Our memories are generated in the presence of other people, by what is seen and not seen, said and

not said, known and not known. We are shaped by collective stories, our relationships with others, and by what came before.4 Most of the time we perceive history as a series of distant occurrences, a part of the ongoing nature of our lives. At other moments, our awareness of history shifts into the foreground, enabling us to discern its formative impact. History’s presence is particularly visible in the lives of those who experience trauma. Historical traumas like the Holocaust leave an indelible mark on the individuals who endure them. The emotional resonance of these traumas reaches beyond the victims and survivors to include their descendants. In After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, Eva Hoffman sheds light on the power of traumatic history to shape future generations. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman elaborates the degree to which the lives of “the second generation” are circumscribed by the historical trauma that preceded them:

by

A consciousness of war, in its most extreme and cruel manifestations, seemed to come with the first stirrings of consciousness itself. And yet I had no direct experience of extremity or collective violence.... The paradoxes of indirect knowledge haunt many of us who came after. The formative events of the twentieth century have crucially informed our biographies and psyches, threatening sometimes to overshadow and overwhelm our own lives. But we did not see them, suffer through them, experience their impact directly. Our relationship to them has been defined by our very “post-ness,” and by the powerful but mediated forms of knowledge that have followed from it. It is perhaps simply this that defines us as “the second generation.” (2004, pp. 25-26)

Hoffman illustrates the way in which our sense of ourselves cannot be meaningfully detached from history. The second generation became bearers of the traumas of the Holocaust, even though they had no direct experience of it. As Hoffman observes, she was unable to keep the history of the Holocaust at bay: It is for these literal descendants that the legacy of the Holocaust is felt in its most intimate form; and it is here that the delicate issues of transferred trauma and deferred mourning are felt most poignantly. In a sense, the elusive, deeply subjective experience of the Shoah’s heirs is also an acute example of a broader phenomenon: the bequest of historical experience from one generation to the next. (2010, p. 406)

Traumatic histories are transmitted from one generation to the next, their meanings implicitly communicated in family narratives and codes of silence, or more directly through the emotional experience of one’s elders, conveying a message of what may or may not be talked about. Despite their radically different histories, the aftermath of the

Holocaust suggests a way in which German and Jewish lives have become paradoxically intertwined. The German—Jewish historian Dan Diner (1986) has defined the relationship between Germans and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust as a kind of “negative symbiosis.” Diner introduced this concept to describe the tragic and systematic reversal of the “German—Jewish symbiosis,” which had been so optimistically anticipated during the Age of Enlightenment. As Diner states: Since Auschwitz—what a sad twist—one can indeed speak about a “German-Jewish symbiosis.” Of course, it is a negative one: for both Germans as well as for Jews, the result of a mass annihilation has become the starting point for their self-understanding. It is a kind of contradictory mutuality, whether they want it or not, for Germans as well as Jews have been linked to one another anew through this event. Such a negative symbiosis, constituted by the Nazis, will stamp the relationship of each group to itself, and above all, each group to another for generations to come. (1986, p. 9)

Today, German and Jewish lives are challenged by the traumatic effects of a past that is not of their making: postwar generations of Germans are confronted by family histories of perpetration and support for the crimes of National Socialism and by the effects of wartime trauma; descendants of Holocaust survivors are haunted by legacies of enormous loss and by memories of unimaginable cruelty and suffering that were endured before they were born. Because dialogue between the actual perpetrators and the victims of the Holocaust was unthinkable, possibilities for mutual understanding of the past began only with the second generation.5 From her perspective as a second-generation Holocaust survivor, Hoffman is able to reflect on the experience of second-generation Germans. Taking a courageously empathic stance, she states: The Germans born after the war, I began gradually to realize, are my true historical counterpoint. We have had to struggle, from our antithetical positions, with the Very same past... While the conflict for children of victims is between the imperative of compassion and the need for freedom... How can you ever come to terms with the knowledge that your parents, your relatives, the very people for whom you have felt a natural, a necessary affection, are actually worthy of moral disgust? That the relative who was fond of you, or a neighbor who treated you nicely, or indeed your mother or father, may have performed ghastly deeds? Or that the whole previous generation, which has served as your first model of adulthood, is tainted by complicity with such deeds? (2004, pp. 118119) .

.

Hoffmann suggests, the parallels between contemporary generations of Germans and Holocaust survivors are necessarily

As

limited and cannot be universalized. Their psychological experiences may initially appear similar. Both groups struggle with family secrets, silences, and dissociations about the past, giving rise to fearful thoughts and fantasies about what could have happened. Yet each is forced to address the legacy of the Third Reich and the Holocaust from radically divergent, historically determined perspectives. In the most basic sense, survivors remain silent to keep haunting traumas at bay and protect their children from the burdens of painful memories, whereas perpetrators remain silent to deny the past or avoid accusations and the loss of affection from their children or grandchildren. While the children of Holocaust survivors often experience fear, the children of German perpetrators may experience guilt on behalf of their parents.“ Such differences work against any attempt at creating equivalency in the postwar German and Jewish experience. It was support of everyday Germans for the policies of National Socialism that enabled the Holocaust to occur. Crimes against humanity were not limited to fanatical supporters of Hitler but were willingly carried out by ordinary German soldiers. There was no substantive German opposition to the Nazi regime, and it was ultimately defeated only from without. Even the terrible firestorms that resulted from Allied bombings and engulfed cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, and about which so much has been written, followed on the heels of Nazi acts of aggression. Discussion of traumatic histories among Germans during and after the Second World War must thus be premised on responsibility for the Holocaust and the war. Anything less neglects the issue of moral accountability. My own understanding of the past is from the perspective of a “third—generation German.” As much as I might want to step out of this historically defined position, I am unable to. Because my parents were children during the war and my grandparents were participants in the war, I am defined by my past and by what it means to be someone who is third generation. The notion of “generations” has become central to the study of German and Jewish experience in the wake of the Holocaust.7 Memory is constructed and maintained within a particular generation and also across generations in a process known as the “intergenerational transmission” of memory. Each generation responds differently to the past, depending upon its current circumstances. The “first generation” refers to Germans who participated in the Nazi era as adults. These were the perpetrators, bystanders, and witnesses of the Holocaust. “Perpetrator” is a term used to describe the group of persons who organized and committed the heinous crimes of the Third Reich, whereas “bystander” refers to those who stood by. Using the terms perpetrator and bystander side by side can create the

false impression that the two can be neatly divided from one another. on a continuum, and it is widely acknowledged today that the crimes of the perpetrators could not have been committed without the active support of the bystanders.8 The “second generation” refers to the children of first—generation Germans. They were born in the years directly before, during, or after the war and are also known as the Kriegskinder, or “children of war,” a label that refers to the growing discourse about wartime trauma experienced by this generation. The grandchildren of first—generation Germans, like myself, form the “third generation.” The notion of successive generations linked by history to a traumatic past is similarly evident in the discussion of Holocaust survivors and their descendants.9 The children of European Jews who survived the Holocaust are referred to as the “second generation” of Holocaust survivors, while their grandchildren are termed the “third generation.”1° The fact that I am a tl1ird—generation German certainly limits my ability to speak to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Yet the historical juxtaposition of the German and Jewish experience is not only very familiar to me; it has played a fundamental role throughout my adult life. While my family background is German and most of my family continues to live in Germany, I am married to someone who is Jewish. 1 met my wife when we were both university students in England, at a time when my parents resided in Germany. My wife and I sought to come to terms with our different cultural backgrounds and the meaning of history in our evolving relationship. Frequent trips from England to Germany meant that we were confronted head on with the historical reality of GerInany’s perpetration of the Holocaust. The shared process of negotiating this traumatic history made me appreciate how readily the painful past can appear in the present: that we are situated in dimensions of history and trauma that shape our lives in ways that are often beyond our awareness. I have always sought to deal responsibly with my position at the intersection of history and culture. Being of German descent, this meant being aware of my family’s past, the extent to which my family members may have participated in National Socialism. My wife’s presence in my life has undoubtedly shaped my perception of German history and of life in present-day Germany. My first-hand experience of what it can mean to be Jewish has made me sensitive to the historical, political, and psychological dynamics at work in the German and Jewish experience. But despite this ostensible sensitivity, or perhaps precisely because of it, I found myself suddenly upended. Recognition of my grandfather’s identity as a Nazi meant that my position in the web of history had shifted, that my understanding of the past had definitively changed.

In fact, they exist

MORAL DEMANDS OF MEMORY Saul Friedlaender, the well—known historian of the Holocaust and a child survivor, has noted that Germany’s struggle with its Nazi past may actually stem from an inability to remember.“ What is remembered—and what has been forgotten? At the level of collective public memory, certainly, Germany has done much to acknowledge and atone for atrocities of the Holocaust. There are few, if any, democratic nations today that live so closely with the painful reminders of their history in order to help them act more humanely. In contrast to some of its European neighbors, contemporary Germany has generously welcomed refugees, a stance that many see as a shared response to the country’s history of perpetration. But at the level of private family memory, which is the primary focus of this book, knowledge of the Nazi past often remains grey and murky. Over time the question of how to address a national history of perpetration became a leitmotif for postwar German society. In contemporary Germany there is widespread condemnation of antiSemitism, a reflection of the democratic political landscape and collective culture of remembrance and responsibility for the Holocaust.” The German education system ensures that all its students leam about the Holocaust and graduate from school with an informed understanding of the terrible wrongs committed by an earlier generation. Outside of Israel, students in Germany tend to know more about the Holocaust than any other nation. The hope is that by learning of the Holocaust and the lessons of history, current and future generations of Germans will be able to recognize and protect the rights of all peoples. The importance of this educational goal is beyond doubt and is reiterated on the level of national politics. In addressing the topic of German memory and the Holocaust, my aim is not to engage the policies of German education or the politics of remembrance, though there is much that can be said on both counts. Rather, I want to explore the distinction between what I refer to as “learned history,” which comprises our factual knowledge of the past, and what I call “lived history,” which is inherited by way of family narratives, memories, images, and sensations. I have found this distinction to be useful because it points to the question of “how” we remember historical trauma.13 When we look at the Nazi past and the Holocaust as a chapter in a history book to be dutifully studied or a memorial site to be visited and acknowledged, we neglect the extent to which historical trauma continues to pervade individual lives. Traumatic histories and the obligations of memory cannot be

consigned to books. The past that we are bequeathed exists beyond the walls of the museum or memorial site. I suggest that in contrast to learned history, lived history tends to be “felt” rather than “known.” Lived history refers to the direct

experience of an event through the emotions and the body or the indirect experience of that event through inherited memories and the experience of one’s elders. Long after the end of the Second World War, descendants of Holocaust survivors are affected by traumas they did not experience themselves, in a process referred to as the “transgenerational transmission of trauma.” Descendants of German perpetrators and bystanders often grow up with family histories that evade the Nazi past. In each case, family narratives provide an emotional link to a lived history that is mediated and encoded. Any suggestion that the past might be concluded neglects the nature of inherited memory and the lived history of trauma.1 The unbidden recognition of my grandfather’s image in the photograph illustrates the process of remembering and forgetting at work in many German families. Public acknowledgment of guilt and responsibility for the Nazi past vies with private family memory that selectively accounts for the actions of individual family members. Once I came to understand this tension within my own family, I recognized that I would need to address the silence about my grandfather. The fact that my grandfather appeared to be a “minor Nazi” was hardly consoling. My childhood image of him as an ordinary soldier forced to support a tyrannical regime had been quashed. I am the inheritor of a tainted history, connected however directly or indirectly with the perpetration of heinous crimes. 1 would need to struggle with the past in a different way, begin a new process of confronting the Nazi past in my family. I was initially at a loss about how to respond and was confronted only with a series of seemingly unanswerable questions. Had I been complicit in denying historical facts as a way of maintaining intact memories of my grandfather? To what degree had I sought to avoid uncomfortable family discussions about my grandparents and the Nazi era? How might my family narrative be representative of countless other German families and reflect the broader cultural narratives in which memory was maintained? Perhaps most fearfully, what would a fully informed narrative of my grandfather actually look like? I felt obliged to find out, but did I really want to know? As I reflected on these questions, I found myself wavering about whether to engage the past. After all, my grandfather’s actions took place long ago, in an entirely differently time and place from my own. How was his political allegiance, his support of an immoral regime, possibly connected to me? In a purely chronological sense, I am one of those who “came after,” and as such bear no direct responsibility for what happened before me. But any attempt to erase or to relativize the meaning of history in this way, is surely motivated by a singular wish for an unburdened past, a wish that must ultimately fail. The way in which we respond to our contexts suggests that history

and culture not only define us, they also challenge us by way of moral understanding. I believe that the injunction to remember is ethical in nature. Present and future generations of Germans have an obligation to renew the memories of the Holocaust and its victims. Yet the question of how to respond to a traumatic past that is not of one’s making can be difficult to answer. In a given sense we are positioned in history and culture before we are born, a fact that can be hard for some to bear. Third- and fourth-generation Germans increasingly express a wish to focus on the future, rather than on a history of perpetration that is growing ever more distant. As understandable as this sentiment might be, it runs up against the lived history of the Nazi past. Let me tum to a personal illustration to explain what I mean. My wife and I lived in Berlin for a time and often met with friends and family members there. I remember how over the course of a particular conversation with a relative, the issue of the Nazi past and the question of German identity came up, as it sometimes does when Germans and non-Germans converse. My relative is a committed pacifist, progressive in his political outlook and personal beliefs. As a German he felt shame about the horrors perpetrated by Germans under the Nazis. But he also felt torn about the issue of responsibility and did not want to feel obligated to wear a badge of guilt. When I asked him to say more, he explained that he did not choose his past, that he did not participate in a war that occurred well before he was born. Nor did he did understand how the previous generation could possibly have supported the Nazis or condoned the genocide. My wife listened carefully and was respectful of my relative’s views. After a pause she pointed out that while Germans born after the war might well feel frustrated at inheriting a terrible history that was not of their making, the question of choice seemed misplaced. She did not choose to learn as a child that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust simply because they were Jewish. Although she is not a descendant of Holocaust survivors, the reality of the Holocaust casts a shadow, a haunting reminder of what was or could be, a feeling shared by many. What is it like to grow up knowing that entire Jewish communities and worlds, regardless of nationality or language, whether religious or secular, orthodox or assimilated, were systematically exterminated in an organized, state—sanctioned genocide? This is a felt legacy that can be neither rationally comprehended nor simply overcome and swept aside. The British social theorist Zygmunt Bauman reflects on the traumatic nature of this memory:

Mind-boggling and spine-chilling as the Holocaust was, one could still measure the scale of its fiendishness by counting the corpses and weighing the ashes. But how can one measure the damage done by the memory of the gas chambers and crematoria? That memory pollutes

the world of the living, and the inventory of insidious poisons seems anything but complete. We are all to some degree possessed by that memory, though Jews among us, the prime targets of the Holocaust, are —understandably—more so than most. (Bauman, 2000, p. 233)

As the exchange between my relative and my wife suggests, we cannot meaningfully detach ourselves from our history or our contexts. We cannot “choose” to stand outside of the past that we are bequeathed. It is perhaps the very need to engage memories that are not our own that connects succeeding generations of postwar Germans and the descendants of Holocaust survivors despite the manifest

differences.” The German sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal (2010) has tackled the lament expressed by many postwar Germans about inheriting a terrible past in which they played no part. She points out that it would be wrong for Germans to see themselves only as passive recipients of history. They are also active agents in terms of how they respond to the stories their parents and grandparents tell them. Being an active agent, engaging our family’s history and choosing to remember, is not easy. It involves entering into dialogue with voices from the past that have shaped our understanding in the present. Being engaged in this kind of historical inquiry requires us to see beyond our immediate concerns. Speaking from an awareness of our own historical formation is very different than speaking from a place of distant observation about events that occurred “back then” or “over there.” It requires us to delve into histories that can be truly painful. It means challenging what we take for granted or hold dear, creating anxiety and worry about possible repercussions for family relations. In addressing the question of German memory and the Holocaust, it is important to stress that I am not suggesting we should remain entrenched in the past. Rather, I believe that historical reflection of the kind I am describing is necessary to develop a meaningful personal and political awareness in the present. The kind of approach I have in mind recognizes the lived history of trauma and remains oriented toward the future.” I fully acknowledge that such an approach is difficult to maintain in relation to the massive horrors and traumas of the Holocaust. The sheer scope and nature of the crimes easily overwhelm us, leading to different kinds of responses. Whereas some may seek distance from the catastrophe through a process of dissociation, others may overidentify with its traumas or even use it for political ends. Reflecting on these responses, the historian Dominick LaCapra (1998) suggests a perspective on the Holocaust that is similar to my own: “There is much that can be reconstructed and remembered with respect to the Holocaust and other historical ‘catastrophies,’ and the challenge is not to dwell obsessively on trauma as an unclaimed experience but rather to elaborate a

mutually informative, critically questioning relation between memory and reconstruction that keeps one sensitive to the problematics of trauma” (p. 183).

MEMORY AND ITS TRANSMISSION In the decades after the Second World War, the horrors of the Holocaust were often met with outward silence, if not denial. This period of forgetting was as present in North America as it was in Germany, though for different reasons. The lack of social discourse about the Holocaust supported a generalized avoidance of the past, but it did not ease the emotional burdens of individual survivors and their families. Nor did it lessen the obligations of Germans or their families to acknowledge guilt and take responsibility for the Shoah. It was not until the late 1970s that Holocaust memories became part of a common culture of remembrance, both in North America and in West Germany, leading to the establishment of memorials and museums and to sustained collective reflection on the meaning of the catastrophe and its perpetration.” How the traumas of the Holocaust are remembered points to the nature of collective memory.18 Every society constructs collective memories that focus on some elements of the past while neglecting others. In this sense collective memory cannot be separated from social and political developments or from the interests of each succeeding generation. The needs of the present always affect how the past is remembered, whether collectively or individually. The social memory process I am describing is illustrated by the shifting German perception of the NSKK, the organization in which my grandfather participated.

Initially the NSKK was believed to be apolitical in nature. This perception was strengthened by the fact that after the war the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared that the NSKK was not a criminal organization. In the years that followed, acts of perpetration were believed to be limited to the Nazi elite and the Schutzstaffel, or SS, the murderous branch of the Nazi regime.19 It was not until much later, beginning in the 1990s, that studies of Wehrmacht soldiers revealed the crimes that “ordinary Germans” were capable of. Even then NSKK members were often identified only as car and motorcycle enthusiasts. Today the involvement of ordinary Germans like my grandfather in the workings of the Nazi machinery is more widely recognized, though by no means universally accepted. The issue continues to provoke debate. Indeed, it has taken many decades for German society to examine the broader organizations of the Nazi regime and acknowledge the degree to which these structures were complicit in the legislated policies and perpetration of the

Holocaust.2° As a result, there was little initial impetus for investigating participants in the NSKK or talking about what they did during the Third Reich. In a related sense, the dominant memory discourse in German postwar society tended to focus on national guilt and responsibility, not on private family memory or the beliefs and actions of ordinary Germans. My family narrative thus emerged out of a postwar memory discourse in which silence about family history was the norm, and speaking out or questioning was unusual.21 I am not suggesting that the view of memory as a social phenomenon makes the silence about my grandfather any less disconcerting, or that it decreases the moral obligation to remember my family history and confront questions of guilt and responsibility. But in contrast to the notion of memory as an individual achievement, the perspective I am outlining allows us to consider the social and political forces at work in our understanding of the past. It suggests that what we remember or forget is inextricably linked to the broader contexts in which we live out our lives. There is also another important factor at work in the process of remembering, namely our emotional relationship to family members and to our shared history. For many postwar Germans, belonging to a nation of former perpetrators and having a family member who is either directly or indirectly connected to the crimes of National Socialism presents powerful emotional challenges. The guilt and shame about the perpetration of the Holocaust creates obstacles for open discussion of family participation in the Nazi regime. In an attempt to counter these effects, families often use narratives as a means to reveal some elements of the past while concealing others. The narratives we inherit and the stories we tell are shaped by our relationships to other people. Older generations use narrative as a means of generating meaning in their lives. What they say or do not say, how their story is told, is a reflection of the social context in which the narrative is created and the emotional needs of the storyteller, particularly the wish to be seen in a positive light. In turn, the younger generation who listen to the narrative take up and reinterpret these stories in a manner that makes sense to them, based on their own contexts and their emotional attachment to the storyteller. The stories my grandfather and grandmother told of the years of National Socialism and the war were no doubt selective and focused on the hardship and suffering the family endured. When my mother and her siblings listened to their parents, they will have heard and registered particular aspects of what was said and then selectively shared those memories with me. In turn, my received memories are a reflection of what I was told and what my emotional understanding enabled me to hear and see, what I consciously acknowledged or

filtered out and dissociated. The intergenerational transmission of memory in many German families often includes unspoken experiences of the Nazi past, what the French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham (1994) once described as “the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (p. 171). Intergenerational secrets may be sensed long before they are consciously known. They make their presence felt in silences that are transmitted between generations. As a result, succeeding generations may inherit unprocessed emotional dynamics from their parents or grandparents. The unspoken experiences of first-generation Germans were passed down to their children and their grandchildren, who covered them over with feelings of guilt and shame and maintained a community of silence. Of course even when the past is shrouded in silence, it does not disappear. We are burdened by histories that remain unsaid. As psychoanalytic scholar Stephen Frosh (2013) observes: “What is left unresolved in history works its way into the present as a traumatic haunting that is profoundly social yet is lived out in the deepest recesses of individuals lives” (p. 44).

REFLECTING ON THE PAST As will by now be apparent, this book is not a traditional work of psychology. Too often, accounts of German memory and the Holocaust are developed within the boundaries of single disciplines, be they historical, sociopolitical, or psychoanalytic. I believe that psychology can benefit from a cross-disciplinary approach that draws on each of these perspectives in some measure and allows us to probe more deeply into the lived experience of the past. Acknowledging historical and cultural factors at work in the formation of memory enables us to recognize the link between our psychological experience and the relationships in which we participate. However, the complex emotional dynamics at work in the process of remembering also suggest the need for an approach that emphasizes personal experience. I am referring to autobiography. There are admittedly risks involved when choosing an autobiographical stance. A work of autobiography can appear selfindulgent, and its conclusions are not easily verifiable. I nevertheless believe that the use of personal experience and the recall of memories, whether my own or others, whether from the past or in the present, can give rise to a kind of reflection and immediacy that would not otherwise be possible. My hope is that my use of autobiographical reflection may help readers to consider their own histories and what is involved in the construction of memory. While the hazards of isolated self—reflection are real, so too is the potential for a richer understanding of the present.22 At the same time, writing

autobiography is inconceivable without a lifetime of human relationships to reflect on. I believe that it is through dialogue with other people that we are able to grasp, or at the very least glimpse, the meaning of our history. I am referring here to the kind of empathic relationships that are at the heart of the therapeutic endeavors I describe in this book. In this sense, my approach combines the sustained self—reflection of autobiography with the relational understanding we achieve through our meaningful interactions with other people. As I grappled with my grandfather’s narrative, it became clear to me that I would need to reflect on the way in which my own outlook had impacted on my ability to comprehend my family history. I would need to consider my development across different cultures and languages and understand my role in maintaining the family narrative. My knowledge of German history was first and foremost a felt awareness that I received from my parents. They were both born in Hanover, Germany, in 1935 and lived out their childhoods during the period of National Socialism and the Second World War. In the postwar years they joined a host of other Germans who immigrated to Canada in search of a new beginning. I was born in North America in 1965, 20 years after the end of the war, and attended school in Canada. My learned perspective on German history thus developed in the collective, cultural memory of a country that was at war with Germany and became a destination of hope for many Holocaust survivors. When I was turning 17 years old my parents retumed to Europe, first to Switzerland, where I also lived for some years, and then to West Germany, before the reunification of East and West in 1989. My parents moved because my father was employed by a Swiss company, but moving also enabled them to be closer to family members in Switzerland and Germany. It was only after they returned to Europe that I came to know German collective memory more directly, despite the extended visits of my childhood years. While I spent my childhood in Canada, I lived my adult life in other countries, chiefly Switzerland, England, and the United States. Each of these cultural contexts has shaped howl approach the topic of German memory. After living in Switzerland 1 attended university in England. I was in London and Cambridge for almost a decade and became a philosopher and historian by training. It was in Cambridge that I met my wife, who is American, and this eventually led us to move to the United States. We lived first in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I taught at a university, and then moved to New York City and settled on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. 1 retrained as a psychologist and a psychoanalyst and for some 15 years combined a life of professional practice and academia. Today we reside in Vancouver, the place where I lived many of my early years and the city to which

my parents originally immigrated before I was born. I therefore come to the topic of German memory and the Holocaust as someone who is not a German citizen by birth, but who also, by birth, inherited a German family history of participation in the Third Reich. My relationship to Germany is undoubtedly linked to the time I have spent there. The first of many trips to see my grandparents in Hanover took place in the late 1960s when I was two years old. As I grew older I would stay for extended periods of work or study, particularly after my parents moved back to Germany and lived in the city of Aachen. Germany remains a place I visit often, especially Berlin, which is one of my favorite cities. But because I have never lived any major segment of my life there, I have always had the status of an outsider looking in. German was my first language, but I grew up in a community of German-speaking immigrants in Canada. Germany is where most of my family lives, but Germany was never my home, even if at times I wished it to be when the familiarity of family and language called out to me. I believe the tension between belonging and not belonging, of being both of German background and yet not being German, allows me some limited room for reflection. At the same time, any reflection I achieve is only possible through the lens of my present experience. My relationship with my wife and her family has helped me to appreciate the emotional forces at work in German and Jewish responses to the traumatic history of the Holocaust. Indeed, this book has emerged from my lived experience of navigating between these cultural worlds.

THE PLAN OF THE BOOK The topic of German memory and the Holocaust has been addressed in various ways. A great deal has been written from a third-person perspective. Historians have helped us to understand the nature and scope of the horrific events that occurred. 1 could not have written this book without benefiting from their expertise. But this study is not a standard work of historical scholarship. Others have focused on experiences of survivors and perpetrators, as well as on their descendants, and give voice to their memories. The road I am choosing is perhaps less traveled. In developing an autobiographical perspective, I use the particulars of my own story as a site for the exploration of such issues as memory, trauma, and responsibility. I begin each chapter with a series of personal reflections on my family history that set the tone for the discussion that follows. While my family narrative offers a starting point, I focus equally on the stories of other people, all set against the irreducible traumas of the Holocaust. I intersperse the memories I inherited with those of

Germans of different generations and of German-Jewish and nonGerman Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In the first half of the book I draw from my life amid different cultural contexts and from my therapeutic work with patients who have been affected by the traumas of Nazi GerInany’s criminal history. In the second half of the book I use my family narrative as a means to address the controversial discourse of “German suffering,” the moral demands of memory, and the possibility of simultaneous knowing and not knowing. The chapters that follow are interrelated, yet each stands on its own and explores a particular theme in the German and Jewish experience. How do we respond to a history that calls out to us? Can we ever truly leave the past behind? In chapter 1, “Exile or Refuge? Searching for a New Home,” I address the relationship between memory and trauma in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazi Germany. My discussion traces the radically divergent yet paradoxically connected paths that led Holocaust survivors and postwar Germans to North America. The new world was often seen as a place of refuge. It could equally be experienced as a place of exile, magnifying the terrible losses that had already been suffered. I tum to Eva Hoffman’s immigration narrative in her autobiographical text, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), which can be read as a meditation on unspoken trauma. I juxtapose Hoffman’s account with my parent’s own immigration narrative, memories of dislocation and loss that have been handed down to me. Such a comparison may seem surprising, even arbitrary, were it not for the fact that Hoffmann and my parents arrived in the relatively small city of Vancouver within a year of each other and settled in the same geographical area. I use examples of encounters, hidden legacies and collisions between Holocaust survivors and German perpetrators and bystanders and their descendants, to consider how each group remembers its past. I describe what it was like to grow up as the child of German immigrants in Canada and suggest that what we remember or forget reflects the particular memory practices of the communities

in which we live. The stigma attached to being German has receded with time. The challenge of being identified with GerInany’s dark history and recognizing the Nazi past in one’s own family has not. In chapter 2, “Confronting the Legacy of My Grandparents,” I explore the struggle to acknowledge the implicit meanings of my family history. I engage in some autobiographical reflection to show that our understanding of the past differs depending on the people we are with and the situations we are in. This can be especially true when confronting the reality of the Shoah and navigating between German and Jewish contexts. Tuming to my psychotherapy practice, I suggest that how my patients

perceive me, whetl1er as Canadian or as German, creates different possibilities for reflecting on the lived experience of history and trauma. 1 consider the notion of inherited guilt and shame connected to my German background and trace its impact on my personal life and professional identity as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst.23 My hesitancy to confront my family history leads me to examine the psychoanalytic profession itself, which has struggled to address the legacy of the Holocaust and its impact on the field. How has psychoanalysis responded to this traumatic history? What are the challenges for second- and third-generation German psychoanalysts or for psychoanalysts who are the descendants of Holocaust survivors? Can we recognize the legacies of trauma and violence that continue to haunt us long after they happen, leaving unmistakable traces in their wake? In chapter 3, “Shaped by History, Caught by Language,” 1 deepen my examination of what it means to live amid different historical, cultural, and linguistic worlds. I begin with a series of personal reflections on the German and Jewish experience of the past. Using examples from my family life, I explore the important question of how to bridge the historical divide between Germans and Jews. I extend this line of inquiry by turning to an illustration of my therapeutic work with a German-speaking Jewish man who is the son of Holocaust survivors. My discussion centers on my struggle to acknowledge my family history in his presence. The inherited guilt and shame that led me to remain silent creates challenges for our work together. My patient and I each try to manage the upsurge of powerful emotions connected to the painful and forbidding history of the Shoah. Shifting from speaking German to speaking only in English provides us with a measure of emotional distance and safety to talk about the past. I go on to focus on the German language itself and the meanings it can evoke in the wake of the Holocaust. When Germans talk about the war, whose suffering do they remember? Discussion of German wartime suffering has gained traction over the past decades and continues to be a prominent cultural theme. But it also raises important questions: After the Holocaust, is it possible to talk about “German suffering?” When Germans focus on wartime trauma, do they neglect the terrible suffering their nation inflicted on others? In chapter 4, “Whose Suffering? Narratives of Trauma,” I begin with a personal account of the World Trade Center bombing when I was living in New York and then refer back to my inherited memories of the Allied bombing of Hanover. I use my family narrative of the war as a means to explore and understand the discourse of German suffering. I examine the debate about the bombing raids on Germany and give voice to the Germans’ preoccupation with their own experience. The formative event in my

family narrative was the bombing and destruction of my grandparents’ home. I consider the emotional ramifications of the bombing and trace these traumatic memories back to their historical origins. What I find is that my family’s account of the bombing occurred side by side with the simultaneous annihilation of Hanover’s German-Jewish community. The juxtaposition of my family’s experience with that of local GerInan-Jewish families provides an illustration of the moral challenges inherent in German memory. It is difficult to question that individual Germans experienced wartime trauma, but how do you talk about it? And if you do, can you still account for the simultaneous horrors that were committed and supported by the same suffering Germans? With these questions in mind I discuss the diverse meanings of the Allied bombing campaign from different cultural perspectives, using my years of living in England as a guide. I contrast the narrative of my grandfather’s involvement in the aerial armaments industry with the eyewitness narrative of the French concentration camp survivor Michel Fliecx, who was forced to work in the production of the V weapons. I suggest that the focus on universalized “suffering” in Germany over the past decades has created an environment in which memories of wartime trauma become inherently politicized. It is all too easy for universalized suffering and individual trauma to be conflated, as the recent emergence of a national conversation about the children of war in Germany suggests. In chapter 5, “Living with the Nazi Past,” I explore the powerful but elusive wish for a family history that is free of any association with the Nazi regime. I begin with a personal memory of my grandfather to address the ambiguity of memory in postwar Germany. I use the context of my grandparents’ lives in Hanover to challenge the longstanding notion that ordinary Germans “did not know” about the unfolding crimes in their midst, and I dispel the myth about the innocence of the NSKK. I examine the support for, willed ignorance of, and indifference toward the legislated policies of the Holocaust and draw on accounts given by Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt. The limits of compassion that were so powerfully at work in Nazi Germany lead me to examine the ethical nature of our responsibility for others in the writing of Emmanuel Levinas. Following the war, the Allies fostered a new national identity for Germany based on democratic ideals. This led to the establishment of an official culture of remembrance. Postwar West Germany struggled to atone for its crimes at the level of public memory and more often than not evaded guilt and responsibility at the level of private memory. After the generational shift of the late 1960s, the recognition of guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust in West Germany would become the dominant discourse in the newly reunified Germany in the 1990s.

Yet contemporary German debates over Holocaust memorial sites and education suggest that the ambiguity of memory evident in the decades after the Second World War never fully disappeared. I draw on interviews with third-generation Germans and consider what meaningful remembering of the Holocaust might look like. In order to move beyond an understanding of the past based chiefly on “leamed history,” I point to the importance of alternative forms of remembrance, so-called countermemorials. I suggest that the effectiveness of remembrance and education lies in their ability to evoke the “lived history” of the Holocaust. Can we know and not know something at the same time? How do we make sense of this seeming paradox? In chapter 6 I explore the possibility of simultaneous “Knowing and Not Knowing” and reflect on the relationship between remembering and forgetting. I begin with a cherished childhood memory of my grandfather and then examine the psychological dynamics at work in postwar German memory. I discuss the notions of silence, dissociation, and shame that sustain a stance of “not knowing” and consider the connection between seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing, which has come to define the transmission of memory in so many German families. Drawing on Levi’s final chapter, “Correspondence with my German Readers,” from The Drowned and the Saved, I examine the tensions at work in German accounts of the Nazi past. I recount Levi’s story of his main correspondent, Mrs. Hety S., and reflect on my own struggle to know my family history. How do we find words for that which has remained unspoken? In chapter 7, “Breaking the Silence,” I reflect on what it means to articulate a family history that has remained ambiguous and out of reach. Throughout the book I have tried to make sense of my unbidden recognition of my grandfather in the photograph. Now that I am ready to “know” I am faced with the challenge of whether to empathize with him. Can I recognize myself in my grandfather? Can I seek to understand his choices? Moving from a position of blame to one of empathy is difficult but important. I turn from a focus on my grandfather to an account of my grandmother, who remained in the background until now. What I recount complicates any simple renderings of the past. Shifting from a stance of “not knowing” to one of “knowing” has led to the need for a different family narrative. I describe the participation of my parents and my children in the evolution of this new narrative and what this can tell us about the shaping and reshaping of German memory. I embarked on this book after recognizing that my family narrative did not correspond with the history I had discovered by way of a photograph. Four years later I set myself the onerous task of visiting the historical archives in Berlin that house the records of the Nazi

regime and the actions of its military and paramilitary organizations. In the coda, “Finding My Grandfather,” I explore what knowing about my grandfather’s actions means in practice. Who was my grandfather in a “documented” sense of the word, and what did he really do? Am I prepared to know the factual history? What do the documents, letters, and photographs I find tell me? When all is said and done, do the memories I have inherited correspond with the history of the time? And what, ultimately, does the German responsibility to remember involve? I ask many more questions in this book than I can answer. To make sense of the past, we need to be curious. The questions I pose are chiefly psychological in scope, yet historical facts matter, particularly when it comes to the perpetration of the Holocaust. I believe that any notion of the past being “behind us” fails to recognize the powerful emotions that shape German memory and responsibility. The Holocaust not only challenges our understanding of what humans are capable of, it requires us to see how the past shapes the present and how lived experience is passed from one generation to the next. Just as the Holocaust continues to affect the lives of survivors and their descendants, I maintain that contemporary Germans must claim their family histories. History’s traumas call out to be known, and we are obliged to remember them.

CHAPTER

1

Refuge or Exile? Searching for

a

New Home

As the son of recent immigrants, I sensed from a young age that my family and its history were fragmented. It was an inchoate sensation, tinged with sadness, and made more real by photographs that chronicled my parents’ journey from afar. During my childhood these images provided me with a means to understand my mother’s longing for her family and my fatl1er’s status as a newcomer in his adopted country. I knew that my parents had left a community and culture behind, perhaps even a place that had once offered them a feeling of belonging. Germany was the location of their early lives and of difficult childhoods shaped by war. I learned of this history through the stories my parents told and the memories they shared. I was aware that their emigration could be connected to the Second World War and its aftermath, but it would take time to unravel the formative events and longer still to grasp their forbidding meaning. Tales of immigration to the “new world” often focus on untold possibility, ocean crossings that are full of promise. The voyage can appear manifestly different when it is the result of historical trauma, when fleeing for one’s life and finding a new home follow the destruction of the old or the loss of all that is familiar. In the wake of the Holocaust and the devastation of war, paths of immigration provided avenues of hope. But for many the memory of traumas in Europe would reach across time and place, connecting the old world

with the new and the past with the present. The legacy of the Third Reich is especially evident in North America. Following the war, the United States and Canada welcomed the highest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. After the horrors they had experienced, these European Jewish refugees often struggled to integrate into a different culture and North American Jewish communities. They contended with the challenge of new lives amid recollections of unimaginable loss. Families had been torn asunder, whole communities ruthlessly murdered. Those who survived the ghettos and concentration camps had experienced indescribable suffering, death marches, and the devastation of all they once knew. Following the war they lived as refugees in “displaced persons” camps, waiting for a chance to begin anew. Although they would travel halfway around the world, they could not escape traumatic

memories that remained imprinted upon them. In what can only be described as a cruel twist of history, North America also became the terminus for a wave of postwar immigration from Germany, the very nation that was the cause of the terror and trauma that the European Jewish refugees sought to leave behind. The shifting geopolitics of the postwar world meant that the Soviet Union was now the enemy, and Germany had become a friend. Some of the German immigrants were from the generation of perpetrators and bystanders, but most, like my parents, were descendants of the first generation, having been children or young adults during the war. They looked for opportunity abroad following experiences of displacement and dislocation. Some sought to evade history. Others wanted only to forget. All sought shelter from the physical ruin and emotional scarring of the war. The fact that so few Holocaust survivors remained in Germany and so many Germans chose to live abroad points to the relevance of examining memory and trauma beyond the boundaries of present—day Germany. The two groups of immigrants were linked by a terrible history, a paradoxical connection that captures what Dan Diner (1986) meant by a “negative symbiosis” in German and Jewish life after the Holocaust. The juxtaposition of Holocaust survivors and postwar German immigrants was particularly poignant in Canada. In light of Canada’s comparatively small population at the time, each had a considerable impact on the growth and composition of existing communities. My discussion begins by examining the immigration narrative of Eva Hoffman and her family, who in 1959 reached Vancouver, the same city to which my parents had immigrated a year earlier. Despite its distance from Europe, Vancouver became a microcosm of the dynamics at work in the formation and maintenance of memory in the decades after the war. I counterpoise Hoffman’s autobiographical account with my own family immigration narrative to illustrate how Holocaust survivors and postwar Germans each sought shelter from the past and the memories they carried with them. That Hoffman’s family and my parents would find their way to Vancouver was not obvious given the social forces of the time. Canada’s staunch antiJewish immigration policy and its long war to defeat Germany seemed to work against the arrival of these different groups of Europeans in a decidedly Anglo—Saxon city located on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. As Hoffman says of the city, prior to her family’s arrival there: “We only know that Vancouver is very far away” (Hoffman, 1989, p. 99). Once in Vancouver, Holocaust survivors and postwar German immigrants often lived side by side, leading to interactions that reveal the emotional nature of memory and its intergenerational transmission. The two groups developed inherently related yet radically separate

narrative trajectories that were dominated by the struggle to belong. The ability to remember the past and commemorate its traumas came later. The decades following the Second World War were the so-called latency phase of memory, when the Holocaust was often met with outward silence, if not denial. The lack of social discourse about the Holocaust resulted in a generalized avoidance of the past, but it did not lessen the emotional burden of the traumas for affected individuals and their families. It would take more than three decades for Holocaust memories to become part of a common culture of remembrance in both North America and Germany, leading to the establishment of memorials and museums and to sustained reflection on the meaning of trauma.

BETWEEN HOPE AND DESPONDENCY Many countries refused to provide shelter for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Europe, but Canada did less than most, allowing only 5,000 to enter between 1933 and 1945. Some refugees came before the start of the war, while others were granted temporary permits late in the war. The remaining number, some 2,000 male Jewish Germans, Austrians, and Italians, were sent by Great Britain to Canada in 1940. They had been classified in England as “friendly enemy aliens,” but upon arriving in Canada were deemed to be “enemy aliens” and placed in prisoner of war camps. Not only did they endure the emotional pain and indignity of incarceration, the were also forced to live in camps with German prisoners of war. Thus, while the Holocaust was unfolding across Europe, Jewish refugees to Canada were placed on an equal footing with Nazi persecutors by a country that was meant to provide them a safe haven. Canadian authorities were soon informed that they had received innocent refugees, rather than enemy aliens, but it would take until 1943 for all of the interned refugees to find new homes. The extent of Canada’s shameful, discriminatory policy toward Jewish refugees from Europe was revealed by the Canadian historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper. The title of their book, None Is Too Many, refers to a statement made by a senior Canadian government official in 1945 when he was asked how many of the refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war. At the time the govemment of Prime Minister Mackenzie King saw the acceptance of large numbers of Jewish refugees as a threat to Canadian society, and many Canadians viewed them as being “inassimilable.”2 This prejudicial attitude was fed by anti—Semitic caricatures of European Jews living insular lives in tiny rural villages.3 In fact, Jewish communities in interwar Europe were largely urban and sophisticated. Even when the war ended and the full evidence of the death camps became clear,

there was no immediate lifting of immigration barriers.4 In 1947, facing mounting pressure from a debate over Canada’s role in accepting people displaced by the war, as well as a growing economic need for more immigrants, King finally announced a change in Canadian policy. Once the Canadian government eased immigration regulations and instituted antidiscrimination laws, thousands of Jewish refugees waiting in Europe’s displaced persons camps could begin

their journey. From 1947 to 1955 approximately 35,000 Holocaust survivors and their dependents entered Canada, though many more requests were denied.5 Their primary destinations were Montreal and Toronto, cities that had the largest and most established Jewish communities in Canada. Vancouver’s Jewish community, which had grown in size through diverse immigration in the decades leading up to the war, also welcomed increasing numbers. In 1948 the first groups of Jewish refugees, including orphaned children, arrived in Vancouver. Initially some five hundred documented Holocaust survivors (not including dependents) found their way to Vancouver, and there would be many more who did not self—identity with the community of survivors. Indeed, Holocaust survivors were a highly diverse group, as reflected in their different levels of religiosity, education, and countries of origin. Those who arrived after the war also had different experiences and expectations than those who stayed in Europe and arrived in the late 1950s and 1960s. In her autobiographical memoir Lost in Translation.‘ A Life in a New Language, Eva Hoffman (1989) provides a glimpse into a postHolocaust immigration narrative. She devotes the central part of her memoir to her arrival in Vancouver in 1959. Hoffman’s early life took place in Poland. She was born in Cracow in 1945 to parents whose families were murdered in the Holocaust. Hoffman grew up hearing about her parents’ harrowing struggle to survive, a legacy of trauma that was passed down to her. Her parents’ survival had depended on the Polish and Ukrainian peasants who were willing to help. They hid first in a forest bunker and then lay concealed in a peasant’s attic among the hay bales, cold, shivering, and always hungry. The risk of being caught never diminished and Hoffman’s parents were betrayed several times. They ultimately survived because of the courage shown by a few individuals. When the war ended, the region in which Hoffman’s parents lived became part of the Soviet Union, and they fled to the Polish city of Cracow. Hoffman describes her childhood in Cracow in idealistic terms. Their lives were not easy, but they were part of a community of individuals who had also suffered and together created a new life amid the memories of trauma and loss. With the rise of anti—Semitism in Poland, the family was ultimately forced to leave. A contact in

Vancouver encouraged them to move to Canada, which was hardly an obvious choice. Most Holocaust survivors preferred to go to Israel or the United States. Canada became the third destination, though its name was already familiar to some by way of a tragic association. In Auschwitz, the Germans had named the warehouse where the belongings of new arrivals were confiscated and sorted “Kanada.” Hoffman’s identity, indeed her life history, was marked not only by the events of the Holocaust, but also by the experience of immigration at the age of 13. She arrived in Vancouver in 1959 in a state of utter confusion and desolation at the loss of her childhood home in Cracow, forced to start anew in a foreign language and strange city. Hoffman devotes the second section of her memoir, entitled “Exile,” to her time in Vancouver, the period between her idealized portrayal of her childhood in Cracow, “Paradise,” and her subsequent emigration to the United States, “The New World,” where she pursues the life of a New York intellectual. Hoffman’s arrival in Canada begins in Montreal, following a voyage by ship from Poland. The subsequent train ride to Vancouver introduces her to the natural landscapes for which Canada is known, but which she sees only as “vast, dull and formless” (Hoffman, 1989, p. 100). Even the majestic and rugged mountains in the west are “too forbidding,” the result of which is that “they hurt my eyes—they hurt my soul” (Hoffman, 1989, p. 100). For the young Hoffman, the contrast between the familiar world she has left behind and that which is unknown is too vast to comprehend. The eventual arrival in Vancouver is described as “a bit of nowhere” in which “everything is the colour of slate,” sheer “bleakness” (Hoffman, 1989, p. 101). Hoffman is describing the soul of the immigrant who has been thrown into a radically unfamiliar environment, whose state of being is characterized by loss and longing for the familiar. Whereas her father looks with optimism to the possibilities of a new life in this faraway city, Hoffman seems to become the keeper of that which has been lost and left behind. Hoffman’s portrayal of Vancouver is unsettling, and her descriptions of the cityscape and its natural setting are colored by despondency. Her interactions with the Polish—Jewish community in Vancouver cannot replace what she has left behind. She describes Vancouverites as “a different species” who live in houses with interiors that “seem oddly flat, devoid of imagination” (Hoffman, 1989, p. 102). Nor can she identify with Vancouver’s natural beauty: “It is the prevailing opinion of humankind that [Vancouver’s natural setting] is beautiful, breathtaking. But my soul does not go out to these spectacular sights, which rejected me, because I reject them... [T]hese mountains look like a picture postcard to me, something you look at rather than enter, and on the many cloudy days they enclose .

Vancouver like gloomy walls” (Hoffman, 1989, p. 134). The trauma of immigration and emptiness she feels overwhelms her. But there is another dimension to Hoffman’s experience that remains unspoken, if not altogether unsayable. Her depiction of Vancouver as a place of “vast emptiness,” “silence,” and “blankness” coincides with the sense of a memory hole that can afflict the children of Holocaust survivors.“ In fact, there is little mention of the Holocaust in Hoffman’s memoir, and it appears only toward the end of the book’s narrative arc. Hoffman describes visiting her parents after she has moved to the United States. Sitting at the kitchen table, her mother reveals a previously unknown family memory. Hoffman’s mother tells a story about how her father’s sister and nephew were exposed to the Germans by a man who was attempting to save the lives of his own family. While Hoffman’s aunt survived, German soldiers murdered her son. As Hoffman observes:

All this time I have done my father the injustice of not knowing this story, and now I can hardly bear to hear it... Indecent to imagine, .

indecent not to imagine. Indecent not to say anything to my parents, indecent to say anything at all: pity is too small for this. We stop, and go on to talk about something else, in normal tones. Later, in the upstairs bedroom with the powder pink wallpaper, I see the scene after all, and thinking of its weight on my father’s soul, I allow myself to cry. (1989, pp. 252-253)

Hoffman acknowledges the power of these memories to “overshadow everything else, put the light of the world right out” (1989, p. 253). These memories haunt Hoffman, though they are not her own. She has become the inheritor of her parents’ traumas, a state of “postmemory” that characterizes her life as a second-generation Holocaust survivor.7 Her parents remain behind in Vancouver, and she returns to a life of optimism in “The New World.” Yet as Hoffman’s later works reveal, there was ultimately no way to escape her parents’ Holocaust memories, which by extension had become her own.8

BEGINNINGS My history and that of my family

is profoundly different from Hoffman’s, bound up in Germany’s war of aggression and the perpetration of the Holocaust. At the same time, Hoffman’s narration of a life between two cultures, of inherited memories of trauma and loss, and of the long journey from central Europe to Vancouver, is strangely familiar to me. I am hesitant to make too much of this familiarity lest I be seen as creating equivalence in our experiences. In the wake of the Holocaust any attempt to create equivalency between

German and Jewish experiences must be questioned, because it neglects Germany’s moral accountability and effaces its history of perpetration. My concem is to show that the descendants of victims and perpetrators are each forced to contend with legacies of trauma and violence from their respective historical positions. In this sense the losses and dislocations experienced by my parents have shaped the memories I carry with me today. What I remember is both a reflection of my childhood participation in immigrant German communities in Canada as well as the historical trajectory of the German family to which I belong. I want to provide an account of my family’s history as I have learned it through the stories that were shared and more directly through interactions with family members in Germany when I was a child. My grandparents are no longer alive, and I have become a holder of their memories. These memories, like my own, were formed in particular historical and cultural contexts. The chapters that follow examine those contexts; here I set myself the task of recalling the inherited memories and lived history that constitute my parents’, and by extension my own, immigration narrative. My father traveled to Vancouver by way of a stormy ocean voyage in a ship full of European immigrants, all hoping to find a new life of promise. His lengthy train journey from Montreal to the west coast was interrupted by a train derailment somewhere in the prairies, the overturned train cars adding yet more days to an already bewildering experience. Upon arriving in Vancouver he was met at the train station by someone from the German community and began the life of an immigrant. Six months later he borrowed one of the large American cars of the time and picked up my mother from the airport. Together they struggled to learn a new language and, like so many other immigrants, find a sense of belonging in an utterly foreign place. Given the long and bitter war with Germany, Canadians were understandably wary of German immigration. The anti—German sentiment that swept Canada during the First World War had been quickly reawakened at the start of the Second World War. When the war ended, the revelation of Nazi atrocities strengthened suspicions, making the image of the “bad German” difficult to elude. Canada’s economic need for new immigrants, together with Germany’s changing status in the postwar world, eventually led to the readmission of German nationals in 1950. The pent-up desire among postwar Germans to leave their country created a wave of immigration that totaled almost a quarter million by the early 1960s. Vancouver became a common destination, and eventually there were some 50,000 postwar German immigrants to the city.9 Becoming Canadian provided many Germans with a means to escape the past and leave difficult memories behind. For most, the push toward assimilation was strong.

For my father Vancouver was a new and exciting world, the unfamiliar landscape, mountains, and wilderness beckoning to be explored, a welcome solace from the physical and emotional desolation of his childhood years. Vancouver came to symbolize an opening up of future possibility and a demarcation from his past. For my mother the manicured beauty, symmetrical layout, and wealth of the city were disorienting. The disparity between Vancouver and the wartime destruction of Hanover was hard to make sense of. The loss of home and culture gave way to nostalgia, a melancholy longing for that which had been left behind. The longing for what had been was connected to the wish to return to the relative innocence of the time before the war. I say “relative” because both my parents were born in 1935. Their early childhood spanned the years of the Third Reich, the face of Hitler emblazoned on the stamps my father collected as a child. While they were shielded from the turbulence of the time, it was an illusory refuge from the massive loss of life and destruction to follow. As I gaze at the early black-and-white photographs of their childhood, I can’t help but wonder about the lives of countless Jewish children throughout Europe who would be ruthlessly murdered in the Nazi regime’s reign of terror. The photographs of those children look no different than the photos of my parents. They were killed in concentration camps or executed by gunfire with their families outside towns and villages. Those who survived were sent abroad in the so-called Kindertransporte, distraught parents depositing their children on trains destined for safe havens in the desperate hope of keeping them out of the Nazis’ reach. My parents spent their childhoods seemingly unaware of the plight of their Jewish neighbors. But for my father and mother alike the war would prove formative, resulting in the loss of their childhood homes and the security of family. Wartime childhoods meant that adolescence occurred in the midst of a ruined cityscape and postwar deprivation. During the first half of the 1950s, before the so-called economic miracle in Germany, the prospect of future opportunity was dim. My parents met during this time while each was completing an apprenticeship in Hanover. My father received a position at the accounting firm to which his father had belonged, while my mother trained as a purchaser in a department store. Attending university in Germany was not an option for them, though the opportunity presented itself later in Canada. My parents worked in the bombed—out center of the city, which was slowly being reconstructed. Together they made a plan to immigrate to Canada, which had become a major destination for postwar Germans searching for a new home. Emigration was motivated by economic need, but was equally defined by the wish for a place free of destruction and reminders of painful childhoods.

My parents’ different accounts of immigrant life and the contrast between their impressions of Vancouver are a reflection of their early experiences. Whereas my father said little about the past, my mother openly shared her memories. From a young age I tried to imagine what their lives must have been like as children. What I leamed fflled me with anxiety. My father was six years old when his own father died in early 1942, killed by shrapnel while fighting on the Russian front south of Moscow. Following his death my father lived with his mother and younger sister in the house provided by the company that had employed my grandfather. However, in 1944 they were suddenly made homeless. A German soldier who was guarding forced laborers discovered my grandmother giving food to a prisoner.” In retribution, she lost the job that had enabled her to provide for her children. The family was ordered to leave the house in which my father had grown up, a place associated with his absent father. After a frantic search for housing, the three of them spent the remainder of the war and the immediate postwar period in shared rooms in a neighboring town, where they were watched over by a local Nazi leader. My grandmother sought to make ends meet, and her need for work during the challenging postwar years led her to go wherever she could find it. She took my young aunt with her, while my father went to live with a series of relatives in different parts of the country. During the war my patemal grandfather’s family struggled with loss. My grandfather was the eldest in a family of five children consisting of four boys and one girl, who was the youngest. The family owned a sizable farm south of Hanover, and although my grandfather had left and became an accountant, the other sons still lived nearby. The four sons were all drafted into the Wehrmacht, or regular German army. To my knowledge, none was a member of the Nazi Party. For my young father, the loss of his own father was compounded by the disappearance of his uncles who had all been an active presence in his early life. Not long after my grandfather was killed, the second eldest brother died on the Russian front, in 1943. The third brother went missing while fighting on the eastem front in 1944 and was presumed dead. There was no further contact with him, though he was actually captured by the Russians and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Siberia, where he spent the next eight years. When he was released in 1953 and made his way back to Germany, he found that his wife had remarried many years earlier. The youngest brother was captured while fighting the British in North Africa and was sent first to England and then to the United States as a prisoner of war. He returned to Germany in 1947. My grandfather’s only sister survived the war and gave birth to a child by a Polish forced laborer, with whom she developed a relationship while he was working on the family farm. In the eyes of Nazi authorities who were responsible for

maintaining “racial purity,” this was an offense punishable by death for both involved.“ When Germany was defeated the Polish laborer was liberated along with other forced laborers in the area and returned to Poland. My father’s mother also had two brothers who fought in the war; one lived while the other died of injuries after being drafted from university late in the war. I know little of the beliefs and activities of my father’s uncles during the war. Yet their location on GerInany’s “eastern front” must give rise to questions about their role in the systematic massacres of the Final Solution. Did they participate in the ghettoization and savage murder of Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities or the brutal treatment of the Polish and Russian peoples? Did they know and look away? How could they not have known? Research into the role of Wehrmacht soldiers in the extermination of European Jews has shown that the killings were carried out by soldiers of every rank and service.” Given the complicity of the Wehrmacht, what might my own relatives have seen or done? When the war ended, did they experience regret? Did they feel shame or guilt? I can’t recall any mention of this dark history during the sporadic family reunions and visits of my childhood. The single memory I have is of my great uncle who was imprisoned in Siberia speaking about his struggle to find enough food to survive. There wasn’t any talk of responsibility. My mother’s family shared in the experience of wartime loss. My grandfather survived the war, but his only brother was killed fighting against the Russians in the Crimea. Both participated in the NSKK before the war. My grandmother’s siblings were considerably older and did not participate directly in the war. The destruction of my mother’s house in the midst of the war proved the most challenging experience for the family. My mother lived in Hanover and their home was destroyed in 1943. Whereas my father lived south of the city, my mother and her family were more directly affected by the Allied bombing campaign over Hanover. Her memories of the war were shaped by childhood years spent in a bomb shelter. For my mother, the immediate postwar years were a time of coping with destruction and poverty. My grandfather built a small house out of the wreckage of the original, and together the family sought to move forward, trying to make ends meet. As difficult as their lives were, my motl1er’s decision to leave Hanover for Canada was not easy. Whereas my father’s experience of being emotionally and physically uprooted at an early age created a sense of restlessness, for my mother immigration meant leaving a struggling but intact family behind. My parents were welcomed to Vancouver by the German community, who helped them master their initial sense of disorientation. Much of the German community at the time was

organized around a network of German-speaking churches that offered assistance to new arrivals. These churches were in effect social and cultural institutions that provided an organizing structure for Vancouver’s burgeoning population of Germans, which expanded exponentially during the 1950s and 1960s. For my parents as for other German immigrants, social life was bound up with the activities of the local German-speaking church and became a central means of remaining connected to their culture. My father found his first employment through a congregation member, which in turn solidified their participation. Church ministers were German nationals who trained in Germany and moved to Canada to lead congregations, a process that lasted until the early 1970s, when German immigration slowed considerably. Sunday moming services were offered in German, but my parents, like many other recent arrivals, chose to attend the English-speaking service as they sought to integrate into Canadian society.

BELONGING My childhood was thus immersed in an immigrant community that maintained fidelity to German culture and language. My early years were spent in Toronto and its environs, an area known for its high concentration of German immigrants. For my parents the German community provided a sense of belonging, of Heimat, and also, perhaps, a means to lesson their sense of nostalgia, or Heimweh. My childhood memories are of a German-speaking home fflled with members of the community. Meals were typically German and breakfasts long, sumptuous affairs. My earliest memory is of my parents and their closest friends, like them immigrants from Northern Germany, enjoying a breakfast together, gathered around a food—laden table, engaged in easygoing conversation. The memory is associated with a sense of belonging, bound up in my mother tongue. It captures a moment in which there was no tension of cultural difference, no clash of language. The narration of my life is a story of two languages and different cultural identities.” I grew up in a home full of German books. I learned to recognize Goethe’s name at a young age from the spines of books that sat on shelves high above me. Before I learned to read I had already spent countless hours looking at the illustrated stories of Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch. 1 often wondered what my father would do if I ever behaved anything like the characters in the famous 19th-century fable. It was only later that I became familiar with English children’s books, or with Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, to whom my older sister introduced me through her inexhaustible joy of reading. Indeed, it seemed that my sister singlehandedly brought the English-speaking

world into our home, a role often assumed by the eldest child of immigrant families. In everyday life outside our home my parents were defined by their German accents and by mannerisms that stood out in the distinctly Anglo-Saxon culture of English-speaking Canada at the time. I inevitably embodied some of the struggles my parents experienced as I sought to find my own footing. Learning English proved challenging for me. When I was six years old my parents moved back to Vancouver, the city to which they had originally immigrated. I arrived at my new school midway through the year on a wet and dark day, so typical of Vancouver winters. After I was introduced as the “new student,” my teacher began the lesson by writing the word “rhyme” on the board and asking the class what it meant. I sat glued to my chair in a kind of panic, lest I be asked to answer. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what the word meant, let alone how to pronounce it. I feared being judged on the basis of my poor grasp of English. I found myself in a school environment that emphasized cultural assimilation and discouraged bilingualism. I wasn’t Canadian like the English-speaking children around me, because I didn’t speak English particularly well or share their cultural norms. At best I managed. To be sure, being German was a privileged position, to the degree that it meant being able to blend in with the Caucasian norm of Canadian society at a time when racial prejudice was considerably more pronounced than it is today. But as a child of German immigrants I was sensitive to other dynamics. It is difficult for me to know exactly when or how this sensitivity began, but I remember leaming at a young age that there was a stigma attached to being German. Growing up in Vancouver meant that most of my neighborhood friends were the children or grandchildren of Canadian and British soldiers who had fought the Germans in the Second World War. Canada entered the war on September 10, 1939, a week after Great Britain declared war on Germany. When the war finally ended Vancouver welcomed a large influx of British immigrants, adding to its Anglo-Saxon character. They brought with them memories of the conflict, the German bombing campaign (the Blitz) against British cities, and the long struggle to defeat the Nazis. After—school play in the neighborhood usually consisted of street hockey or war games. When it was too wet to play hockey outside, we would reenact stories or scenes of movies and television shows that portrayed the Allied defeat of Germany. Inevitably I ended up playing the role of the bad German. My parents’ cultural background meant that any protests I made fell on deaf ears. I couldn’t escape the historical reality of my past. Whether they were taunts or extensions of the games we played, such terms as Sieg Heil and Achtung were specifically directed at me. I didn’t want to play the bad German, the

Kraut, but I had little choice in the matter, and the fact that I had blond hair as a child did not help. Many years later I worked with a patient who was the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. He described to me the excitement with which his grandparents had welcomed the birth of his younger brother because he had blond hair and blue eyes. For his grandparents, who had survived the concentration camps, his brother’s blond coloring meant that he would be safe, that he could hide in plain sight because he looked stereotypically German. His brother might even be able to help the rest of the family in the event of another catastrophe. My own son is blond and blue—eyed, and I experienced a similar reaction from some elderly members of my wife’s family on the occasion of a family wedding. They commented on my son’s coloring, noting how unusual it was. I remembered being puzzled by their reaction until I thought of my former patient. The experience of being different in my everyday interactions with friends and schoolmates was especially pronounced during Canada’s annual Remembrance Day celebration. The bravery of Canadian soldiers was recounted, and moving stories of their experiences in the war against the Germans were shared. I found myself transfixed by these narratives. Yet at some point I would become aware that the enemy being described was a German solider, someone who could easily have been my grandfather or one of my great-uncles. In these moments I fell into a shameful and fearful silence, lest my cultural heritage become obvious to those around me. I wanted to share the pride that other schoolchildren felt in the courage of their grandfathers. Instead I learned to hide my background.” My wish for a “good past” and for “good relatives” is part of a collective longing on the part of many Germans, members of a nation that struggles to bear the weight of guilt and shame for the perpetration of the Holocaust. The desire for family members to have been “good Germans” leads to the creation of unfocused and idealized images of relatives. Family narratives that bear little relation to facts are created and sustained in the hope of warding off the Nazi past, a process that appears to have been especially true for postwar German immigrants. They bore the stigma of being German and were confronted with the history of the Nazi past in a way that Germans living in Germany typically were not. I recall that as a schoolboy in Vancouver I had a schoolmate who was of German descent and whose last name was Rommel. One day this boy shared with a group of children that he was probably related to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the famous German Second World War commander. Historical facts would suggest the comment had little basis in truth, but its impact was significant. In contrast to other German officers, Rommel is often placed in a separate camp of

Germans, those who opposed Hitler. In war films and in the popular press Rommel is presented as a highly intelligent, if devious, character, someone who ultimately stands up against the tyranny of Hitler and the Nazi regime’s murderousness. The revelation shared by my schoolmate made an impression on us as young boys and became a topic of discussion. I remember some of the English-Canadian boys remarking that it might not be so bad being German if you were related to Rommel. It made me realize how much I hoped for a German relative I could feel good about, someone who had stood up against the Nazis. I may have leamed the negative implications of what being German meant from my interactions with others, but my true sense of discomfort about the past was communicated to me at home. It was my parents who first told me about the horrors perpetrated by the Germans during the Holocaust. I no longer remember the details of what they said or whether I asked any questions in response. Indeed, what I recall today is chiefly their hushed tone, the somber look on their faces, and the overwhelming sense of foreboding I felt. What was being revealed to me was something too horrible to comprehend and,

I came to realize, something that definitively marked my history and theirs. For many years afterward the Holocaust remained for me an amorphous event, marked by a gruesome factual history and beyond articulation. It was a subject surrounded by a fearful emotional weight that made it difficult if not impossible for me to ask questions. My confusion at hearing about the connection between my loving grandparents and the gruesome history of the Third Reich was likely a reflection of my parents’ own struggle to acknowledge the role their parents had played. How do you comprehend the love you have for your parents in the knowledge that they belonged to the generation that made the Holocaust possible? Looking back, I have no memory of engaging in discussion of the beliefs of my grandparents. It seems that while one door to the Nazi past was opened, the other remained closed. The silence about my grandparents can be understood as a form of intergenerational dissociation, in which some aspects of the past were discussed and others were kept at bay. This dissociative process was equally a reflection of the wider German cultural narrative, one in which collective acknowledgment of guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust was cleanly separated from private family memory of the past. as

SHARED TRAUMATIC HISTORY we respond to our inherited memories? What does it mean to share a common traumatic history with others? The connection between our historical formation and how we understand ourselves as

How do

central theme in Hoffman’s later work, which it means to be a member of “the second generation.” In Hoffman’s early memoir, Lost in Translation (1989), the Holocaust remains largely in the background, unspoken but always present. By contrast, in After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust, Hoffman reflects directly on the experience of being a child of Holocaust survivors:

individuals is

a

addresses the question of what

There are so many ways to conceive of our lives, our identities, our stories—to shape memory and biography. It did not occur to me to think of myself as a “child of Holocaust survivors” for many of my adult years. Other threads of causality, influence, development seemed more important; or at least I gave them other names. I think this was true for many of us who grew up in post-Holocaust families and for whom this legacy seemed on the one hand simply normal, and on the other, better not dwelt upon. (2004, p. 27)

Hoffman’s discussion points to the way in which we are indelibly shaped by the historical and cultural worlds into which we are bom. In the process, she demonstrates the inherent connection that exists between shared memory of trauma and individual understanding. As she admits, am congenitally not a joiner of groups; but the phrase “secondgeneration” provided a sort of illumination, and a sort of relief. The phrase suggested there were others for whom a Holocaust inheritance was both meaningful and problematic; that living with it was a palpable enough experience to be overtly recognizable... The Event that preceded us was fundamental enough to constitute an overwhelming given and a life task. The reference points through which we communicate and recognize each other have to do with our location in the dark topography of the Shoah and with the stages of a long and difficult reckoning—with our parent’s past and its deep impact on us. (2004, p. 27)

I

.

Hoffman seeks to transform her traumatic family narrative of the Holocaust into an informed understanding of the past. But her efforts to articulate the lived experience of being a member of the “second generation” can equally be read as a reflection of the shifts in collective memory about the Holocaust that occurred over the course of her lifetime: from a childhood spent in Poland during the immediate postwar years, to her arrival in Vancouver in the late 1950s, to her subsequent life in the United States in the late 1960s. Indeed, in the years directly after the war, there was little sustained reflection on Nazi GerInany’s policy of genocide against Europe’s Jewish communities. If it was considered at all, it was as a single aspect of a much larger trajectory of death and destruction that defined the events of the Second World War.

During the 1950s and 1960s, decades that make up the temporal arc of Hoffman’s early autobiographical memoir, North American society was not yet receptive to information about the horrors of the Holocaust. At the time there was little exploration of the significance of the Holocaust or its wider meaning and implications. Jewish refugees who arrived in North America in the late 1940s and the 1950s were generally discouraged from discussing their experiences or were told that there was little interest in what they had to say. This was as true of life in North American Jewish communities as it was of society in general. It was not until well into the 1960s that it became more common to use the term “Holocaust” or to refer to Jewish refugees who had survived Nazi-dominated Europe as “Holocaust survivors.”15 Over time changes in the collective memory of the Holocaust came to shape how survivors referred to themselves and how they identified their experiences. The growth of Holocaust education and remembrance in Vancouver illustrates this shared and evolving process. In the years following the war, Holocaust survivors became teachers at Vancouver’s Jewish schools. Students were aware of the historical reality of the Holocaust and knew that there were survivors among their teachers, but the trauma of the Holocaust was not openly discussed. Indeed, the Holocaust was not generally taught at Jewish schools until the 1960s. Instead, teachers sought to emphasize more positive aspects of Jewish history.” Over the next decade it was the Jewish community’s direct engagement with the past that increased awareness of the historical significance of the Holocaust within the general populace. In 1976 the first Canadian symposium on the Holocaust held for secondary students took place in Vancouver. By 1984 sustained interest in the Holocaust led to the establishment of the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Education and Remembrance, and in 1994 a permanent home was found with the grounding of the Vancouver Holocaust Education and Remembrance Centre. An integral part of the changing landscape of Holocaust remembrance was the emergence of memoirs and testimonies of Holocaust survivors. By the 1980s the fact that many survivors were reaching the end of their lives lent an urgency to recording the memories of what they had endured. The Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, founded in 1981 by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, was a central part of this collective memory process.” Similarly, the narrative arc of Hoffman’s writings attests to the process of an emer ent self-understanding among the children of Holocaust survivors.1 For many children the reality of their parents’ experiences had always been present, even when it remained unarticulated. For some the terrible past was hidden, and daily life was characterized by anxiety amid codes of silence. For

others the past was continually present in the unimaginable stories and traumatized memories that parents told over and over again.19 As Hoffman’s work suggests, identification as a descendant of Holocaust survivors was initially neither easy nor obvious. Yet this identification could provide a means to grasp the shared emotional experiences that connect the families of many survivors. Hoffman thereby demonstrates the degree to which our sense of ourselves can be shaped by the history and memories that precede us.

ENC OUNTERS For many refugees and immigrants from Europe, the war had created a framework of understanding through which to navigate the passage of time. Prewar lives were separated from the postwar world by the physical and emotional ravages of the war years. By contrast, Vancouver, like so many North American cities, could appear to Europeans like a place without history. But the country in which they arrived was itself engaged in ongoing acts of perpetration. Canada’s systematic abuse and subjugation of its First Nations meant that little of their rich aboriginal heritage was visible to the European newcomers.2° The loss of familiar historical markers must have been disorienting to the new arrivals. They marveled that Vancouver remained untouched by the Second World War. Actually, there was little visible evidence and certainly no physical destruction, but the city was full of veterans who had endured the hardships of the European front. Many lives were damaged or lost in the fight against the Germans. The reality of the war and of Gennany’s perpetration of the Holocaust was perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the geographical proximity between the small community of Holocaust survivors and the growing community of postwar Germans. Whether simply by circumstance or cruel irony, these two communities resided in the same area of Vancouver.” Halfway around the world from the death camps of Europe, they lived through inevitable encounters and collisions. One such encounter is described by a Holocaust survivor in an oral narrative given to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre: son was 7, we had German neighbours. They had a son. My said, “I’m not going to play with him, he’s German.” I said, “No, he’s an innocent child like you.” That really scared me when he said that. We didn’t want to bring him up like that... I was afraid he was going to hate Germans. I didn’t want this to happen to them, to live with this, to hate somebody. I don’t hate them, [Germans] but I don’t know how to love them either. (quoted in Gerber, 1989, p. 55)

When my son

.

For this family,

so

much physical and historical distance from Europe

and the Holocaust had been reduced to a mere fence between two houses. Given the traumas that Holocaust survivors endured, the concern expressed about not teaching the next generation to hate reveals a compassionate generosity of spirit. It also points to the importance of empathy, the ability to use one’s own experience to reflect on what it might be like to be in the place of the other person. Empathy becomes morally valuable when we are able to enter into the predicament of the other person and respond compassionately. This is only possible to the extent that we can acknowledge our basic, shared humanity, precisely the sense of commonality that the Nazis destroyed. The encounter also illustrates how historical memory is shaped in our interactions and transmitted across generations. The interaction raises important questions about how the past was addressed in the German immigrant community and whether, or to what extent, the past was communicated to the children of postwar German immigrants. Would the young German boy have understood why his neighbor did not want to play with him? While the son of the Holocaust survivors clearly understood Germany’s role as a perpetrator nation, was the German-Canadian child aware of the historical legacy of perpetration he had inherited? And if not, when would he learn about the Holocaust, about German guilt and responsibility, and from whom? Collective memory is only possible because a community has a shared history. But what if this history is denied? German immigrants who left for Canada in the 1950s and early 1960s had lived in a defeated country that lacked any cohesive narrative about the collective crimes of the Nazi past. Because blame was apportioned to the leaders of National Socialism who were tried at Nuremberg in the late 1940s, the majority of the German population could remain silent about their role in the horrors of the Holocaust, reinforcing the view that guilt was not collective. During the 1950s the educational system in West Germany failed to address any notion of responsibility for the Holocaust. Indeed, many teachers did not talk about the Nazi past or its victims because they had not disavowed their own Nazi backgrounds. The silence of this era was hard to break. It was not until the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, which began in late 1963, that the wider ramifications of the Holocaust began to filter into public awareness.” In the years that followed, particularly after the student uprisings of 1968, the deeply conservative process of forgetting in West Germany was challenged. Institutions were questioned for the way in which they seamlessly transitioned from Nazism into postwar democracy, and this cultural transformation eventually led to the emergence of mandatory Holocaust education.23 The main wave of postwar German immigration to Canada had already taken place by the time these changes occurred. As a result,

most postwar immigrants missed the opportunity to participate in West Germany’s emerging culture of remembrance. When they arrived in North America they were confronted with a view of Germans as aggressors and perpetrators, in some cases for the first time. The stigma associated with being German in the North American context of the period was real enough and could evoke a sense of contrition for the crimes committed. But without a more personal understanding of the need to remember the Holocaust, there was no sustained engagement with the scope of the crimes. Questions about the involvement of family members in the Third Reich generally went unasked. In Vancouver’s German-speaking churches in the decades after the war there was little if any discussion of the Nazi past. This may seem rather startling. After all, German ministers and their congregations had to a large degree all lived through the period of the Third Reich. They had either been participants in the war or were the children of perpetrators and bystanders. Despite these facts, talk of German guilt and responsibility or even of the emotional scarring and trauma so many had endured was virtually absent. Social discourse focused instead on the issues that mattered most to congregation members: the daily struggle of immigrants to integrate into a new and foreign society. Still, there were allusions to the Holocaust. Like many immigrant families who wished for a sense of community, my family attended a number of German churches throughout my childhood years. I have few memories of the many Sunday mornings I spent there and feel no religious affiliation today. However, a single, dominant theme stood out. I learned in church from an early age that the Jewish people held a special place, that their culture, history, and traditions were to be valued and that the state of Israel deserved support. This awareness had become a part of my worldview even as a young child. In a different context, the celebration of the Jewish people might be explained as a reflection of a specific religious outlook. It is difficult to overlook the fact that these sentiments were shared by German ministers and their congregants after many had lived through the war and were now confronted with revelations of the Nazi atrocities. While it is likely that many congregation members felt guilt and shame in relation to the Holocaust, there was no precedent for speaking aloud about this damning history. The language and impetus to talk about the Holocaust had not yet come about, and it would take until the 1970s for it to become an accepted part of social discourse in North America. Without an active process of collective remembering, the Nazi past became a historical remnant. There were many German immigrants who wished to keep it that way, and their rapid integration into Canadian society allowed the past to slip further and further away.

For the children of German immigrants, the need to assimilate into Canadian society often meant leaving German history and language behind. They embraced the dominant symbols of their cultural heritage but joined their families in turning a blind eye to uncomfortable reminders of National Socialism. Unless the German boy I described above was explicitly told about Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust, he was probably unaware of the reasons for his neighbor’s reaction. The boy likely felt the cultural stigma attached to being German. But did he grasp the concept of historical responsibility? I am not suggesting that the path toward open dialogue about the past and the Holocaust was either easy or straightforward, particularly in the decades that followed the war. However, the lack of concerted intergenerational dialogue about the Nazi past meant that opportunities for reflection, understanding, and a moral accounting were lost. In the absence of such dialogue, collective forgetting inevitably ensued. Silence about historical trauma, particularly in relation to the Holocaust, can have meaningful consequences.

HIDDEN LEGACIES If we listen carefully to what history tells

us, we may hear whispers of unspoken past, of calamitous events that are hidden by silence. In the postwar decades the Holocaust was a haunting presence in many Vancouver families. Looking back on what it was like growing up in her German—speaking family home, my colleague, Margit, remarks: “My mother had a curious relationship with her German—speaking friends. She would complain about them. I don’t think she ever felt she could trust them.” Margit, is describing her mother, a Viennese woman who immigrated to Vancouver in the early 1950s. Margit’s mother was Austrian by birth and had lived with her family in prewar Vienna. In the late 1930s, after the Nazis took power in Austria, their lives were suddenly upended. According to the family narrative Margit had learned while growing up, her mother’s sister was arrested for criticizing the Nazis and sent first to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1942. Fearing for her life, Margit’s mother fled Vienna shortly after her sister’s arrest. She went to Italy, where she lived for the duration of the war and eventually met a Croatian man whom she married. Margit’s family owned a villa in northern Italy, which she converted into a hotel. The region where the hotel was located was ceded to Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War, and the building itself was taken over by the communist authorities. After losing everything for the second time, first to the Nazis in Vienna and then to the Yugoslavian state, Margit’s mother and father ended up in a displaced persons’ camp. They an

decided to immigrate to Canada, where a short time later Margit was born. Margit recalls that history was always a fraught topic, the past shared only in fragments and occasional, disconnected memories. Curiosity was discouraged. Questions were unwelcome. Margit leamed early on that her understanding of the past was limited to what her mother and father were willing to tell. References to what had happened and the meaning behind the traumatic death of her mother’s older sister were few and far between. What mattered was that the sister had died because she spoke out against the Nazis, a tragedy that put into play a series of events leading to the family’s eventual arrival in Vancouver. It was a new life far away, yet embedded in a foreboding and half-spoken history. From her perspective today Margit is able to see the many gaps in the fragmented history she inherited, but as a child she felt only confusion about what it all meant. Margit’s mother was Viennese, yet she disliked and distrusted Austrians and blamed them for the death of her sister. Margit says that her mother once shared a memory of seeing neighbors in Vienna force their way into the homes of innocent Jewish families to steal their belongings. Yet despite her deep misgivings about Austrians, her mother lost none of her Viennese mannerisms and never fully integrated into Canadian society. At home Margit’s mother always expressed herself in German, and the family would answer her in English. It was the language she most naturally spoke, evoking the world she had been forced to leave behind. Outside the safety of their home the German language evoked other feelings. Margit recalls a sense of uneasiness when her mother conversed with other German speakers. The encounters were marked by an undeniable tension. It was only after her mother passed away that Margit was able to piece together her family history. Margit traveled to Vienna with the understanding that there were still some relatives there, though her mother did not maintain contact with them. Margit wanted to see where her mother grew up, but she also had an overwhelming urge to find out whether her mother was Jewish. It was a question that had developed over time, and she had never been able to find out the answer. Margit knew that her mother had a niece, and she hoped that this woman might be able to shed light on the family history. When they finally spoke, Margit’s questions were preempted by the niece’s declaration: “Well, you know me, I am Jewish.” Margit recalls having a dream that night in which her life was threatened by Nazi soldiers. Having been raised as a Catholic by a German—speaking Vienesse mother and a Croatian father, Margit never fully suspected she was Jewish, but it was something she sensed nevertheless. 4 The problem was that she could never ask. As Margit states, “My parents made me feel badly for being curious. Little things would happen and then be

gone.” The fragments of history, like a series of dots, could not be connected. But there were hints. Friday night meals were special for the family, who always gathered to eat together. Once she learned that her mother had grown up in a Jewish family, the reference to the Friday night Sabbath was unmistakable. From early in life Margit was imbued with “an incredible feeling for the Jewish people, for how they suffered.” Despite this intense identification with their tragic history, she was left with the knowledge that “they weren’t me.” Margit’s experience is an illustration of the hidden legacy of the Holocaust and the powerful emotions at work in remembering historical trauma. Despite the tragic and unique nature of Margit’s story, it is mirrored in the experience of other families. The fear of mortal threats, spoken and unspoken, led some Holocaust survivors to shroud their lives in secrecy. The story of Miriam Zimmerman, a Holocaust survivor from Lodz, Poland, who immigrated to Canada, illustrates this process.25 Now in her late eighties, after the war Miriam shed her own name and instead became known as Mary Gale. It was only after a life—tl1reatening illness that Miriam disclosed her tragic past to her daughter. This meant overcoming a lifelong fear that led her to maintain strict secrecy: “It got to the point that, even today, when I had six teeth pulled out at the dentist I refused the anesthetic because to take a needle was to never come back. And that was what being Jewish meant to me—it meant never coming back I saw so many horrible things. I saw so many dead people. It is amazing what seeing these things can do to a mind. I knew I was safe here in Canada. But I just couldn’t say I was Jewish.” As a blond and blue-eyed child, her father had been able to get Miriam a false identity card that enabled her to hide in plain sight. She survived the Holocaust, but her father and other family members were murdered. Miriam kept her Jewish identity a secret for 70 years. Only her Canadian husband knew the truth. He ran the displaced persons’ camp where they met after the war. “I told my husband I was Jewish but that I wouldn’t tell anyone else,” she says. “And he told me it was my life, that I had survived the war, and that I could do whatever I pleased.” The family celebrated Christmas, and Miriam took her children to an Anglican church for confirmation classes. She maintained her life of secrecy, yet her children sensed a hidden truth. After Miriam’s son survived a terrible accident, he converted to Judaism, which provided him with a renewed sense of meaning. Miriam’s daughter admits today that she always suspected her mother was Jewish. Neither child knew for certain what their mother’s unspoken history meant or what might be hidden in the gaps and silences of the past. Margit’s narrative of her mother has many similarities to Miriam’s story. Unlike Miriam, however, Margit’s mother was unable to reveal

her past.26 During the last year of her mother’s long life Margit raised the question directly. Doing so was not easy. She wanted to know if her mother was Jewish, but her mother only looked away and said “no.” It was instead her mother’s niece who recounted the family’s tragic history. Margit’s aunt had been arrested by the Nazis after her employer told the authorities that she was Jewish. When Margit’s mother went to plead for her sister’s life, the guard responded: “Why shouldn’tI arrest you as well?” Margit’s grandfather was able to pay off the guard, and Margit’s mother, her mother’s older brother, and her father all escaped the city. After initially fleeing to Italy, Margit’s grandfather retumed to Vienna to inquire after his daughter and was arrested. He was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in the same year as his eldest daughter. Margit’s grandmother had died earlier, in 1930. Growing up, Margit remembers her mother saying: “Thank God she died before the Holocaust.” It was only after her family history was revealed that the full meaning of this statement became clear. Margit has since learned that some family members escaped to countries like Romania and Great Britain, and others traveled as far as China and Argentina. Those who did not or could not escape Austria were murdered. Margit’s life trajectory is bound up with her mother’s history and native tongue. Like Margit’s mother, her uncle never spoke about being Jewish and retained his connection to the German language. After the war Margit’s uncle converted to Christianity, became a member of the Episcopal Church, and worked as a judge advocate for the US Air Force. Eventually his work took him to Germany, where he resided until late in life. There he married a German woman and remained bound to his central European roots, despite the traumatic losses he had experienced in the Holocaust. After her uncle moved to Germany, Margit was invited to live with him for a time. While she was there Margit met a German man, who would become her husband. She remembers finding the sound of the language her future husband spoke with his mother comforting, perhaps a reminder of the familiarity of her own relationship with her motl1er. When Margit told her mother she was going to marry a German man, her mother “never batted an eye.” After all, her uncle had also married a German woman. Margit returned to Vancouver with her husband, where they raised two children. Her mother was still alive at the time. One of the children was fair-haired and bullied at school, called a “Nazi” in reference to the family’s German and Austrian cultural backgrounds. It was only later that Margit would discover that her mother was actually a Holocaust survivor and that she was herself Jewish. The full extent of the heart-rending twists and turns of Margit’s

family history became apparent on a more recent trip to Vienna. Margit wished to pay homage to her mother and decided to visit the house in which she grew up. There she discovered that the child of the SS officer who had expelled the family in 1938 was still living in her family’s original home.27 How do we possibly make sense of such traumas? What are the historical threads that link the past with the present and the lives of survivors and perpetrators with the generations who came after? Whereas Margit’s story reflects the hidden legacy of the Holocaust within a single family, interactions between members of the survivor and postwar German communities in Vancouver have also resulted in painful collisions.

THE COLLISION The Holocaust belonged to a history that postwar German immigrants hoped to forget. For many of these immigrants the geographical distance from Germany and the adoption of a new culture and language formed an illusory boundary between life in Canada and the Nazi past. Burdensome memories were met with silence. Feelings of guilt and responsibility were kept at bay. Even after German society began to confront its complicity in the Holocaust, there were postwar German immigrants who refused to consider the moral implications of the atrocities or the part played by family members in their perpetration. Sometimes the unwillingness to account for the past was transformed into a questioning of the Holocaust itself. “Many of the people I know, many doctors, are Jewish. And there isn’t one who spares me hearing about relatives who were, you know, treated badly during the war and the so-called Holocaust.” These chilling words were uttered by the renowned photographer and postwar German immigrant Fred Herzog when he was interviewed in 2012 by Marsha Lederman, a journalist for The Globe and Mail.28 After arriving in Canada from Germany, Herzog spent the next decades photographing his adopted city of Vancouver. At the time of the interview Herzog was in his early eighties and had only recently achieved acclaim. Once Herzog’s work reached the public eye, it quickly gained international recognition. A retrospective of his photography was held in Berlin in 2010. Born in Stuttgart in 1930, Herzog’s childhood spanned the rise of the Third Reich and the years of the Second World War.29 His mother was a supporter of the Nazis and took him to one of Hitler’s rallies in 1938. Once the war began, Herzog experienced a succession of tragic losses. His mother died of an illness in 1941 while Herzog was still a young boy. The destruction of his house and all his childhood possessions followed in a bombing raid in 1944. Herzog’s father survived the war and bombing of the factory where he worked, but

died in 1946. Despite the immensity of the events that surrounded him, Herzog describes his school years as being devoid of any mention of the war, the Holocaust, or German guilt and responsibility, a common description of education in Germany at that time. In 1952 Herzog immigrated to Toronto, where he began his career in photography. He moved on to Vancouver the following year and worked as a medical photographer, using his spare time to take the photographs of Vancouver street life for which he is now famous. Lederman interviewed Herzog in his modest Vancouver home. As a joumalist Lederman sought to understand the joumey that had led Herzog from his native country to a life in photography. It was a question about Herzog’s arrival in Canada that led him to speak about the past. Lederman inquired whether Herzog had experienced any prejudice in postwar Canada as a German citizen, notwithstanding the fact that his first employer was Jewish. Herzog responded with his statement about “Jewish doctors” and the “so-called Holocaust.” Lederman must have been shocked, but she did not revisit the remark until later in the interview, when she stated: “You used the term ‘socalled Holocaust.’ Why did you?” In response, Herzog sought to clarify what he meant and what his word choice signified: The Holocaust, I should perhaps not say “so-called”. That there was a principle injustice, and [that it was] indefensible by any standards—that, I have no trouble about. But that people were in such numbers gassed and gotten rid of—that is disputed, depending on where you come from. I don’t dispute it... But there were other books I have read which say much of this was actually delousing... That people were needlessly killed, there’s no doubt. That people died on trains being transported is fact. That people died of hunger at the end of the war is fact. But many people, nine million Germans, were thrown out of wherever they lived. Nine million, and with no place to go. And many of those died of hunger and what not. ..

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In the remainder of the interview Herzog was adamant that despite his comment about “the so-called Holocaust” he was neither “against the Jews” nor supported the Nazis, who he declared were “absolutely towards the Gypsies and the Jews.” Herzog’s disturbing comments are an eruption of the Nazi past into the present. They leave us at a loss for words, and one can only imagine what it was like for Lederman. Depending on one’s perspective, what Herzog said conveys either a sheer ignorance of the Holocaust, which is indeed difficult to believe, or a prejudicial unwillingness to know. However one interprets what Herzog said, the comments themselves are inexcusable, especially as they were voiced almost 70 years after the war. To my mind Herzog’s comments evoke the deplorable history of Holocaust denial in Canada, which is today mean

outlawed by hate speech laws.3° For German-Canadians any kind of Holocaust denial is especially shameful, as it harkens back to the racist ideology of the Third Reich that many have sought to confront in the intervening decades. Herzog’s comments also point to a dangerously myopic view of the past among some early postwar German immigrants. Once in Canada, the unresolved legacies of childhoods spent in Nazi Germany, together with the deep-seated need to maintain idealized images of early lives and family members left behind, led some to dissociate historical facts. Instead of accepting guilt and responsibility, they engaged in anti-Semitic prejudice and denial. At the end of the interview Lederman felt compelled to tell Herzog that both her parents were Holocaust survivors. Herzog was taken aback and asked further questions about Lederman’s past. The history of Lederman’s Polish—Jewish family is unimaginably sad. In 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, her mother’s family was forced into a ghetto. Following their imprisonment, Lederman’s mother was separated from her family members and sent to do forced labor at a munitions factory. In 1942 her mother’s parents and younger brother were murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp. Lederman’s mother was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and then endured the infamous death march to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen near Hanover, where she was finally liberated in the last month of the war. Lederman’s father narrowly escaped an eXecution—style death and went into hiding, eventually posing as a Catholic worker for the duration of the war. His parents and siblings were likewise murdered at Treblinka in 1942. Lederman’s parents met after the war and eventually found their way to Canada in 1951. After Lederman revealed her traumatic history, Herzog responded: “I stand corrected. I stand corrected.” Herzog then retrieved a book of prewar photographs of Polish—Jewish life by the photographer Roman Vishniac, which he insisted Lederman take home. When Lederman and Herzog spoke again for the purpose of completing the article, Herzog stated: “If I haven’t fully understood the injustices of the Holocaust, it was probably because I just didn’t want to read about it. I’ve seen the pictures and I know that it happened, but I did not research it and attach guilt to myself.” Lederman replied empathically, wondering if it was the trauma of living through the war at such a young age that had led to his point of view. Herzog acknowledged that “growing up without parents who love[d] me” shaped him more than anything else, and then went on to explain his earlier comments: “When I grew up in Germany after the war, nobody ever talked about the Holocaust. Nobody. Not my boss, not the other employees. Nobody there ever talked about the Holocaust. It was actually a seamless denial. And it was only after I had left Germany, I think there were some trials in West Germany

where the Holocaust problem was driven home to Germans in such a way that they could no longer ignore it.” Herzog provided an apt description of growing up in Germany in the years directly after the war. He recognized that the silence of that era might have affected him, that his views of the Nazi past could be a product of the shared denial that defined postwar German society and education during the 1950s. Postwar German immigrants may not have been aware of the cultural memory shifts that took hold in Germany in the following decades, but the emergence of a collective culture of Holocaust remembrance also occurred in North America, which is what makes Herzog’s comments so difficult to comprehend. Clearly Herzog’s willingness to acknowledge his error to Lederman is important. Whether Herzog would have been willing to confront his prejudices if he had not been interviewed by Lederman, or if she had not revealed her family’s own Holocaust history, remains an unanswerable question. Not knowing the answer to this question will color our perception of him. Interviewing Herzog provided Lederman with an understanding of what it may have been like to live through the war in Germany as a child. Taking an empathic stance, she observed: “I am able, I think, to see it all through Herzog’s battered lens. I see his photography as the expression of a victim whose pain was not deemed valid in light of the atrocities of his countrymen and what others suffered; a young man who came to Canada and had to remain silent, but whose work speaks volumes.” In describing the traumatic history that paradoxically connected them, Lederman concluded: “Herzog’s cozy living room on the west side of Vancouver is a million miles, a million years, from the horrors of the Second World War. And yet, there they were, right in front of us. A wall. A bridge. Fred Herzog and I share a history.”

CHAPTER

2

Confronting the Legacy of My Grandparents Before starting university I lived in Switzerland and Germany. I had just finished school and was in no hurry to begin my studies. I remember looking at a map of Europe and thinking of all the cities I wanted to visit, but first I needed a job that would enable me to pay for my love of travel. I was particularly fond of carpentry and liked working with my hands, an activity I associated with my grandfather. I found employment with my mother’s brother in Hanover and was invited to live with my grandmother. It was 1983 and my grandfather was no longer alive. My grandmother was ailing, yet she insisted on spoiling me. It seemed special to spend time with her and we got along well with one another. My grandmother still lived in the house that my grandfather had built after the war and I did what I could to help with the upkeep. It was a place full of memories and I knew it well, having visited often over the years. My mother and her siblings had all grown up there.

Working with my uncle gave me the opportunity to interact with people I might not otherwise have met. My uncle liked to introduce me to his German clients as his nephew from Canada. On one occasion, while working in the house of an elderly German man, I noticed several photographs hanging on a living room wall. They were from the Second World War and showed a German U-boat (submarine) and its crew. After several days of working in the house, I gave in to my curiosity and asked the homeowner about the photographs. The man told me that he had been a U-boat captain during the war and was stationed on the Atlantic coast. Following several tours of duty the submarine under his command had been sunk in battle, and he was lucky to survive. After explaining the meaning of the photographs, which appeared to be a kind of memorial, there was a noticeable shift in the man’s tone. With a sudden turn toward me, he came closer, pointed his finger at my chest, and declared in German: “You sank me.” I remember feeling shaken. Evidently his U-boat had been destroyed by the Royal Canadian Navy. I did not know how to respond or whether I even should. I still can’t make sense of what happened. Perhaps the man’s upsurge of anger was connected to an experience that was still deeply emotional after many decades. Maybe it was the fact that there was a

Canadian under his roof who was asking him na'1've questions in it could have been the kind of erratic behavior that sometimes accompanies old age. Whatever the reason, the man simply walked away without awaiting my reply and without a word of apology or explanation. I was confused and highly discomfited. When I shared what had happened with my uncle, he quipped that the elderly man was plainly crazy. I am not convinced that he was. In fact, I think the man was deadly serious. Certainly the look in his eye reinforced my sense that some questions about the past were not welcome. There were risks associated with being too curious. When the work in the man’s house was finally complete, I heaved a sigh of relief. My reaction to his outburst, and the reason I am taking the liberty of recounting the episode, was strangely mixed. In the instant when I experienced the man’s anger I wanted nothing to do with my German past. Looking back, this was probably the most obvious response to having history quite literally shouted at me. After all, I had been raised in Canada, not Germany, and I carried a Canadian passport. But I also had a less obvious reaction that speaks to the nature of my emotional connection with my grandparents. I wanted to tell the man that he had it wrong, that my grandmother lived nearby and my parents had grown up close to where we now stood. By identifying me as Canadian in the way he did, it felt as though the elderly man had assigned me a single, fixed identity that put me at odds with my sense of myself and the history of my family. The impulse to articulate my German background was an attempt to maintain my familial connection. But identifying myself as German in this way carried a price. Being part of the same cultural milieu of language and tradition as the elderly man meant owning, or at the very least acknowledging, the very history that gave rise to his hostility. Indeed, it required me to account for my own family’s involvement in a shameful past and to consider my role in maintaining the silence about my grandparents. It was a challenge I was not yet prepared for. It would take nearly three decades, and many more unpredictable encounters of this kind, before I could recognize the photograph of my grandfather and unravel the threads of my English—accented German. Or

family’s history. Perhaps if I had grown up in Germany I would have accepted the inevitability of my grandfather’s involvement in the Nazi past. I had only recently moved there and was still discovering what living in Germany and confronting its history on a daily basis was like. As a child in Canada I had experienced Germany chiefly from afar. I had leamed early on about the Holocaust from my parents, but in order to safeguard my identification with my grandparents I dissociated threatening images and thoughts about them. I avoided the difficult questions in an environment in which questions were not generally

asked. Maintaining my German cultural identity seemed to involve acknowledging some aspects of the past while keeping others at bay. The interaction with the elderly German man brought these contradictions to the fore. Historical traumas are often surrounded by silence. Yet as the man’s outburst suggests, the past cannot be made to disappear; it keeps coming back, disrupting the present. I am referring to the telltale signs of traumas that mark our personal and cultural histories. They remind us that there is more to say, much in the way that the photograph of

my grandfather revealed an unspoken part of my family history. In this sense historical traumas continue to haunt us, telling us of their presence.1

If we

indeed shaped by traumatic events that precede us, how do we understand this history in the context of our lives? Historian Dominick LaCapra suggests that our response to the Holocaust is related to who we are and how we identify ourselves, to our particular location in history and culture: are

The Holocaust presents the historian with transference in the most traumatic form conceivable but in a form that will vary with the difference in subject-position of the analyst. Whether the historian or analyst is a survivor, a relative of survivors, a former Nazi, a former collaborator, a relative of former Nazis or collaborators, a younger Jew or German distanced from more immediate contact with survival, participation, or collaboration, or a relative “outsider” to these problems will make a difference even in the meaning of statements that may be formally identical. Certain statements or entire orientations may seem appropriate for someone in a given subject-position but not in others. (1994, pp. 45-46)

LaCapra’s views are instructive, and in addition we need to consider how our interactions with other people will vary in relation to the catastrophe. Our perceptions of each other can shape what we talk about, how we talk about it, and to whom we talk about it, a process that is clearly visible in German and Jewish encounters. As a third-generation German, what I see and understand is a reflection of my particular situation in life: the grandson of Germans who were members of the generation that unleashed the Holocaust. My grasp of what this situation entails has changed over time as I have leamed to acknowledge the implicit meanings in my family narrative. Perceiving the past through the lens of a grandson of faraway, idealized grandparents is markedly different than seeing through the lens of a grandson who knows his grandfather was a member of the Nazi Party. How I identify my family’s history today influences how I comprehend the massive traumas of the Holocaust, just as it determines what I write about.2 Writing can enable us to consider new

perspectives by articulating experiences that have hitherto remained beyond reach, much in the way that psychoanalysis can shed light on what has remained unknown. Psychoanalysis seeks to understand the emotional dynamics of trauma, but the field itself is hardly immune to these dynamics. As a profession psychoanalysis has struggled to acknowledge the traumas of the Holocaust in the lives of European Jewish psychoanalysts who escaped the Nazi occupation. For German psychoanalysts the burden of shame about the Nazi past presents a different kind of challenge, yet one that is no less real. As a contemporary psychoanalyst of German decent, the formidable obstacles of addressing the Holocaust are familiar to me.3 Even after many decades, the legacy of the Third Reich can emerge in unexpected ways that may be difficult to master. Using examples from my therapeutic work together with some autobiographical illustrations, 1 consider how the silence surrounding historical traumas continues to shape our responses in the present. 4

BEING AND NOT BEING GERMAN Growing up as the child of postwar German immigrants in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture meant that questions of belonging and language were part of my everyday experience. As I matured, my family seemed to spend less time in the German community and more in English Canadian society. Becoming fluent in English was central to this process. Yet despite my parent’s English fluency, there were still some neighbors who felt oddly compelled to correct their pronunciations. These were poignant moments in which I identified with my parents’ experience of immigration. I imagine that many children of immigrants have similar memories. My own identity as a son of Germans was revealed in many ways, starting with the easily identifiable first names of my parents, HansJoachim and Adelheid. But the pronunciation of my family name proved more meaningful. In German my last name is pronounced “free,” but for English speakers, saying my name often proves a challenge. Some ask how the name is pronounced, but most instinctively say “fry.” At some point I gave up correcting mispronunciations, and over time how my name was spoken became one of the ways I used to understand and gauge the cultural contexts in which I found myself. After attending university in England I eventually found my way to New York City. A longtime immigrant destination with as many languages as ethnic communities, New York remains a predominantly English-speaking city. Yet it was in New York that my name was pronounced correctly for the first time. I took a childlike pleasure in hearing my name spoken without feeling the impulse to correct it or

answer the question of how to say it. In my newly adopted city my name was not only recognized, its pronunciation seemed to lend me an air of belonging. I quickly adjusted to this new situation, but the

interaction of culture and language that could explain the shift took longer to grasp. With time I learned that the Germanic root of my name formed the etymological basis of a number of familiar Jewish family names. In fact, I realized that many people, patients, colleagues, and friends assumed that my surname was Jewish. I had, in essence, moved from being an identifiable child of German immigrants, living in an Anglo-Saxon world, to an implicitly identifiable member of the Jewish community on New York’s Upper West Side. The fact that I became a practicing New York psychoanalyst and that my wife was Jewish seemed to lend this identification a certain credence. From the perspective of German memory and responsibility, being identified as Jewish placed me in an uncomfortable position. Whereas Germans may experience their history as something that is concluded, there are many people in New York for whom the Nazi past and the Holocaust are a lived reality. Living and working in New York meant being mindful of my German background and the meanings it held for those around me. In this sense, whom we interact with and where we find ourselves have a direct effect on how we understand and address the past. Being German in a German context is very different than being identified as German in a non-German or in a predominantly Jewish context. How we are perceived, be it as German or Jewish, can create radically different possibilities for relational interaction and the exploration of memory. In the course of working with patients who were directly or indirectly shaped by dynamics of historical trauma, I became sensitive to how my patients identified me. I was confronted with the meaning of my German cultural background early on. I was still in psychoanalytic training at the time and was working with a patient who was struggling with issues related to living across different cultures. My patient talked at length about how he felt misperceived by one cultural group or the other and the challenge of finding a place where he felt he could belong. He wondered whether part of the difficulty related to his struggle with language. Although proficient in two languages, my patient was not fluent in his native tongue, which was viewed critically by his family and community. They felt he was neglecting his heritage. My patient idealized people whom he perceived as solidly of one culture because he believed they did not have to deal with the kind of emotional challenges he experienced. After revealing this personal struggle, my patient began to wonder whether I could appreciate what he was telling me. He perceived me on the basis of my ability to speak English fluently, as belonging to a

single culture. What my patient did not know is the extent to which his experiences mirrored some of my own. We were both the children of immigrants. Like my patient I existed in a kind of “grey area” between cultures and languages. While my first language was German, I always struggled with languages. Though I did not feel pressured by my family, I often experienced confusion about my cultural identities. As a child I identified with the culture and language of my parents, even though I lived in an English-speaking environment. Moving back and forth between different cultural identities and languages was a familiar, if not always easy, part of growing up. The question of cultural belonging was particularly evident during family trips to Germany when I was young. Whereas my parents were identified as immigrants in Canada, in Germany they suddenly seemed to fit seamlessly into a fabric of culture and language that I knew chiefly from afar. By contrast, in Germany I was an outsider, the North American. My relatives made me feel loved and accepted, but I would feel awkward around German children. When I later lived in Switzerland, my experience was subtly different. I learned that Germans there had a tenuous status. They were identified by their use of High German (in contrast to Swiss German), and being German (even if only of German background) could evoke negative historical associations. As a result I did not feel entirely at home in any of my cultural worlds, always perceiving my surroundings from a different cultural perspective. As much as I might want to identify with a single cultural context, it was difficult for me. In one moment I was someone of German background, in another I was Canadian, but on the whole I felt I existed somewhere in between, waiting to be called out through the use of one language or the other.5 How the other person responds to us can create spontaneous and uncomfortable shifts in our identities. Given my patient’s concerns about whether I could understand what he was saying, I began to wonder if I should disclose some of my own struggle with culture and language. I thought that sharing something about my experience of growing up with immigrant parents could create a sense of safety for my patient to express himself more openly. My patient listened carefully to what I had to say and then fell into an uneasy silence. I awaited his response and remembered feeling anxious; something was amiss. When he began to talk, he chose his words carefully. He said that knowing I was “German” made him wonder whether I could truly understand him. His response left me confused. I was reminded of the awkward, shameful moments in my childhood when I wanted to hide my German background. My self—disclosure was an attempt to make him feel more at ease, yet it appeared, at least initially, to have done the opposite. I had related the challenges I experienced as the son of German immigrants, but it felt as though the only thing my patient

actually heard was the term “German.” I asked my patient if he could say more about his concerns. He told me that he had always perceived Germans as uncaring and overly rational. He admitted that his views might not be fair, but it seemed to him that Germans inevitably placed their own needs before others’. Surely the history of perpetration, the Holocaust and two world wars, were proof of this. He worried that I might also actually be like that. I recall not knowing how to respond. In revealing my cultural background it felt as though I had suddenly become someone else. In that moment the gap between my experience of my cultural background and his perception of me based on a cultural label and historical reality seemed unbridgeable. Under the gaze of my patient I was identified with a terrible history. It was a history I had inherited but not directly experienced or participated in. I felt a powerful mixture of frustration and shame. On the one hand, I wanted to downplay the legacy of my grandparents and their generation. On the other hand, the shame I felt about the horrors that had transpired and my family’s potential participation in them made me want to hide. These responses were knee—jerk reactions to the uncomfortable and unwanted situation I found myself in. But denying what he was saying or redirecting the interaction in some way would be akin to silencing history. It would also foreclose the possibility of my better understanding my patient’s reaction. Our interaction made me sensitive to the strength of my anxiety about being identified with a historical narrative over which I had no control. In order for the work to progress, it was important that I acknowledge my patient’s views. His concerns were historically grounded and could not be explained away as mere transference. Historical and cultural realities are not reducible in this manner. I would need to explore and reflect on the meaning of the past, but my capacity to communicate in this arena was far from adequate. After the initial shock, I shared with my patient that Germany’s history of war and the perpetration of the Holocaust lent credence to his worries. This acknowledgment made it possible to for us to explore his fears about who the Germans were, and by association, who I might be. In the process of exploring my patient’s concerns, I learned more about his family history, which up until that point had remained unspoken. My patient’s family hailed from southern Europe and had endured the Nazi occupation. Many of his relatives had fought in the Second World War, and his grandfather had been a German prisoner of war. My patient idealized his grandfather in much the same way that I had idealized my own grandfather growing up. From a young age my patient had heard stories about the gross mistreatment his grandfather experienced at the hands of German soldiers. Given his family history, it was difficult for him to come to terms with the fact

that I was German, even if only of German background. He said that he sensed I might be “different from others,” that I did not conform to his view of Germans, but he felt unsettled. It was a feeling I certainly shared.

LIVING WITH DISC OMFORT The difficulty in knowing how to respond to my patient’s concerns linked to my struggle to see my grandparents through my patient’s eyes. Doing so meant letting go of my idealized chfldhood images and acknowledging the discomfort I implicitly felt in connection to my family’s history. Let me draw on another example to illustrate this process. During the late 1980s, when I was still at university, I spent time in France to improve my language skills. The language school I attended was located on the west coast of France and composed of Europeans from diverse backgrounds. There was a large contingent of German speakers, and I remember thinking at the time that I was improving my German, but the experience was not necessarily helping my French. I became friendly with two Germans in particular, one a government employee and the other an artist. Our different everyday worlds made our time together enjoyable. It also raised for me familiar questions of identify and belonging. The school was located on a part of the French coastline that during the Second World War had become known as the Atlantic Wall. A series of German fortifications had been built to repel any invasion, and remnants of the bunkers remain to this day. Constructed largely by forced labor, they stand at regular intervals on expansive beaches, a haunting reminder of another time. When the three of us arrived at a particular stretch of coastline and saw the German fortifications for the first time, one of my schoolmates quipped: “Hey, the lads were here before us!” This odd and unexpected remark left me feeling uneasy. On the one hand, I had been identified as a group member. Being identified as a German among other Germans could provide me with a sense of belonging that I lacked growing up between different cultures and languages. In contrast to the Remembrance Day celebrations of my childhood, when I wanted to hide my background, my German schoolmates likely had similar family histories. On the other hand, the remark was deeply troubling because it conveyed a complete absence of awareness of or sensitivity to the historical meaning of the was

fortifications. As in my earlier interaction with the elderly U—boat captain, identifying as German in this context meant ignoring or at the very least effacing the Nazi past. “The lads” that my schoolmate referred to were the German soldiers who were the occupying force in France. The German army had occupied tl1ree-fifths of France, and the

remainder was administered by the French “Vichy regime.” Under the command of the Germans, and with the active participation of the Vichy government, over 75,000 French Jews and Jewish refugees living in France were arrested and deported. Upon arrival at the concentration camps located in the Nazi-occupied Polish territories, most were immediately murdered. Of the total number transported east, only 3 percent would survive the Holocaust.“ The remark made by my German schoolmate illustrates the way in which our social interactions and cultural contexts shape how memory is formulated and expressed. Indeed, being identified as German among other Germans creates specific possibilities and challenges for negotiating memory and history. The German-Jewish psychoanalyst Kurt Griinberg has commented on this dynamic in relation to contemporary German expressions of anti-Semitism: It makes

serious difference whether Germans feel “amongst if they have a sense or even knowledge of Jews being present. If they feel unobserved, then they express their anti-Semitic attitude forthrightly, but in the presence of Jews they are as a rule more careful. Even today, seventy years after the Shoah, the presence of Jews unsettles Germans. And that is why in post National Socialist Germany, Jews are generally “spared” direct anti-Semitic expressions or hostility. (2013, p. 276)

themselves”

a

or

The point I wish to emphasize is that how the Nazi past is talked about and remembered among a group of non-Jewish Germans is often different than if there is a non-German or even someone of Jewish heritage present. Indeed, had I been identified by my schoolmate as wholly Canadian, would he still have made the remark? It was only as a result of being bilingual and bicultural that I found myself in this unusual situation. The statement was made in German, not French. What would it have meant to say these words in French among the locals who were visiting the beach that day? How might my schoolmate have spoken in the presence of a descendant of a victim of Nazi aggression? Would he still have made the remark? Would he have “thought it” but remained outwardly silent? Or would he have been more careful, even empathic? The experience left me with a now familiar sense of discomfort, yet it was not a feeling I responded to. My lack of response raises some important questions: Was I in effect supporting a collective process of forgetting? Had I silently consented to being included as a “member of the gang?” What could I have said to spur a process of remembering and empathy? In hindsight, it was probably easier for me to remain silent. I was uncertain of where the conversation would lead if I had objected. I was on unfamiliar ground. Not knowing how to speak out about the Nazi past made it difficult for me step into the unknown.

seems obvious to me today was at that time still a struggle. There are also discernible parallels to the interaction 1 described with my patient. Both situations threatened my carefully maintained and idealized images of the past. I was forced to contend with the weight of history and the obligation to remember in a manner I was neither expecting nor prepared for. It would not be the last time. During the same trip to France I had an encounter with a friendly older Frenchman who approached me after seeing me get out of my car. The car I was driving belonged to my parents, who were then living in the city of Aachen. Driving a car in France with a German license plate is hardly unusual. What attracted the notice of this gentleman was the regional license plate. He wanted to know whether the lettering referred to Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). After confirming his assumption in tentative French and explaining that I was there to study, he began to tell me his story in a mixture of French and broken German. He explained that he had fought in the war against the Germans. Following Germany’s defeat he had spent time in Aix—la—Chapelle. Despite the war and historical enmity between the French and German people, he remembered the city of Aachen and its rich cultural history with fondness. As he spoke about the past, I thought again of the German fortifications on the beach, and of the fact that this kind man may have fought against my own family members. But our conversation remained focused on the history of Aachen, which had been the center of Charlemagne’s vast empire and the city where the Holy Roman Emperors were crowned. It seemed as though we had found a common bond in a historical narrative that preceded the conflicts and horrors of the 20th century. The wish to see Germany beyond the prism of two world wars and the Holocaust is strong. The desire to engage in this view of history without also acknowledging the Nazi past is often motivated by a belief in the possibility of normalizing, if not altogether effacing, recent German history. When this happens the lasting moral and emotional implications of the Holocaust are shunted aside. Indeed, in hindsight it is possible that my conversation with the elderly Frenchman flourished precisely because it began with an acknowledgment of the reality of the war. It was a reminder to me that Germany’s history of aggression and responsibility for the Holocaust cannot be papered over, be it with off-the-cuff remarks or through a process of collective forgetting. The interactions 1 have described illustrate the shaping of German memory in relation to social location and cultural context. The process of identification itself, be it among Germans or in interactions between Germans and non-Germans, is layered with history. The Israeli psychoanalyst Rifka Eifermann has commented on the challenges

What

inherent in a German cultural identity. After traveling through Germany in preparation to give a lecture, Eifermann reflected on the strength of her feeling in the face of the crimes of the Nazi past: “The massive demonic horrors sanctioned by law and organized and carried out by the Third Reich have rendered Germany and the Germans particularly amenable to such stereotyping” (quoted in Friedrich, 1995, p. 262). German psychoanalyst Volker Friedrich (1995) suggests that this kind of stereotyping is something Germans may use to hide behind and explain their inability to openly confront their past. It is a stereotype that invariably comes to mind when non-Germans meet Germans, a stereotype that can be hard to shake, but one that is grounded in historical reality. For Germans there is simply no way of escaping the fact that a post-Holocaust identity necessarily includes the horrors of the Holocaust.7 The question, of course, is how the wish for a post-Holocaust identity can be achieved, given the powerful desire to elude the Nazi past.

PSYCHOANALYTIC REFLECTIONS The sensitivity I feel in regard to my German family history has ebbed and flowed, but it has never disappeared. I moved to New York in the mid-1990s where I began my psychoanalytic training. I eventually became a member of the city’s psychoanalytic community, and many of my friends and professional colleagues were Jewish. Those who knew me well were aware of my German background, but others were not. Nor was this something I necessarily wished to publicize. On the face of it, I do not appear German and have no German accent. As I have suggested, however, history and identity do not simply melt away. Working as a psychoanalyst was a reminder of this fact. Psychoanalysis in North America is linked to the arrival of European Jewish analysts who fled the Nazis, either directly after their assumption of power in 1933 or in the years that followed. Many of these émigré analysts found refuge in New York and influenced the development of the city’s psychoanalytic profession and institutes. The historical traumas they had experienced in Europe or through the harrowing process of exile and emigration often went unmentioned and unexamined. Indeed, psychoanalysis, both in North America and in present-day Germany, is haunted by a tragic past that is only now being openly discussed.8 In 1930 Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize to recognize his contributions to psychology and German literary culture. Only three years later, when the National Socialist regime came to power, Freud’s books were prominently burned and destroyed. Freud’s response was dryly ironic and portentous: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with

burning my books” (quoted in Gay, 1988, p. 593). With the Nazis in control, psychoanalytic work in Germany essentially came to an end. Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, and Freud’s daughter, Anna, was arrested and detained by the Gestapo. A short time later, after paying a large ransom, Freud and his family left for London, though tragedy was not averted. Three of Freud’s sisters were deported to Treblinka and were murdered in its gas chambers in 1942. Psychoanalysis has its origins in German-Jewish and specifically Viennese culture, but after the Holocaust it became harder to dwell on its German sources. The psychoanalytic profession in postwar Germany has had to wrestle with its association to National Socialism. In 1933, following the emigration of German-Jewish and left-leaning analysts, the remnants of organized psychoanalysis in Germany and Austria were co—opted into the Goring Institute, founded by the psychiatrist Martin Goring, an elder cousin of the Nazi leader Herman Goring.9 The connection between the Nazi regime and the practice of psychotherapy during the Third Reich meant that reestablishing psychoanalysis in postwar Germany proved difficult. The German psychiatrist Alexander Mitscherlich was one of the few members of the first generation who appeared untainted by any affiliation with National Socialism, and he played a key role in reintegrating psychoanalysis into the West German postwar cultural landscape. The confrontation with the history of those German psychoanalysts who lived and worked through the Nazi period was brought about by younger psychoanalysts, members of the second and third generations. In contrast to their elders, they were willing to ask the difficult questions. By the early 1980s German psychoanalysts were openly challenging the involvement of their own profession in National Socialism, starting with the activities of the prominent psychoanalyst Carl Mueller—Braunschweig.1° This process opened up a space for debate and reflection about the interaction of psychoanalysis with the Nazi regime and eventually resulted in the reinstatement of German psychoanalysis in the International Psychoanalytic Association. It was a difficult process, spanning many years, and continues to this day. For many émigré Jewish psychoanalysts living in New York, the Nazi past was consigned to a painful chapter of their former lives. In their newly adopted country the trauma of exile and loss of their home was not openly discussed. Even the political reality and effects of fascism received little professional attention. One notable exception was Erich Fromm, a former member of the Frankfurt School, who fled Germany in 1933 and settled in New York. Fromm addressed the psychological and sociopolitical forces at work in the rise of Nazism in Escape from Freedom (1941). While I was at university I studied Escape from Freedom in the hope that it might explain the psychological motivations behind the German support of the Nazis. In

the development of this work Fromm became increasingly concerned with the primacy of social relations.” His emphasis on the contexts of experience held a strong interest for me. It was through Fromm that I

learned about the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan and the parallels between their ideas.” Following his break from Freudian psychoanalysis, Fromm joined with Sullivan, Clara Thompson, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann to form the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York in 1943. Together, their work is part of the “sociocultural turn” in psychology and psychoanalysis and forms the foundation of the “interpersonal” perspective in which I was trained. Given my experience of living across languages and countries, I was drawn to the idea that our psychology is forged in communal interactions. As I suggest throughout this book, our understanding, indeed our very outlook on the world, is shaped by history, culture, and society. In regard to the practice of psychotherapy, this is as true for the therapist as it is for the patient. I remember a course I took during my psychoanalytic training at the White Institute that highlighted the role of the analyst’s own grounding in history. I found the classes to be both helpful and enjoyable. What stood out for me, and the reason I discuss it here, is the initial group exercise. The instructor invited us to reflect on our cultural backgrounds in the presence of our classmates. We were asked to share our cultural histories and thus to consider the connection between time and place and the process of understanding. Each member of the class spoke about his or her family history, the locations in which that family had lived, and the circumstances that had led to the family’s immigration to the United States. Many of my class members were Jewish, and as they spoke I learned about their family histories. Their families had endured pogroms and prejudice prior to arriving in New York, and some had been directly affected by the Holocaust. Lingering throughout the discussion were the effects of historical trauma. As my classmates took turns speaking about their past, I became increasingly anxious. How would they respond to my background? How could I impose my inherited memories on classmates who had either directly or indirectly been impacted by the horrific events of the Shoah? Some had no knowledge of my German family history, as I had only ever interacted with my classmates in English. They knew only that I was Canadian and an immigrant New Yorker. When my turn came, I shared my family’s story of the war and the narrative of immigration from postwar Germany to Canada. I remember I spoke in a hurried fashion so as to get through the experience as quickly as possible. When I finished, there were some surprised looks, though all were supportive and interested in the story I had to tell. The burden I felt at that moment was triggered by a

particular kind of interaction in the German and Jewish experience, a fear of being associated with the Nazi past in the presence of those against whom, whether directly or indirectly, violence had been committed. My fears were a reflection of what it means to grow up with an inherited history that is bound up with the perpetration of the Holocaust. I was reminded of moments in my childhood when I had wished for a relative who had fought against the Nazis. At least then, I imagined, I might not have to be identified with the side of the perpetrators. But I had no such heroic narrative to tell.

THE PAST ENDURES The sense of discomfort I felt in the presence of my classmates brought to mind an earlier experience that shattered my na'1'veté about the past. When I began university in the mid—1980s I had spent time in Paris with a diverse group of international students, one of whom was a woman from Israel of similar age. We enjoyed one anotl1er’s company, a Canadian and an Israeli, exploring a fascinating city. As our friendship developed we delved more deeply into our mutual identities. Curiosity about each other’s backgrounds led to discussion of our families and their histories. My family was living in Switzerland at the time, so when I shared that I had grown up in Canada but my family was actually from Germany, it created a momentary confusion. This was followed by a shift in the tenor of our dialogue. She said that she had never been to Germany and did not feel she could travel there. She then described her own family history. Her grandfather had survived a concentration camp, but all of his family members were killed in the Holocaust. As she talked about this painful and traumatic history, tears welled up in her eyes. I listened, feeling helpless. I wanted to say something to comfort her, to find words to fill the awkward and painful silence, but this was a terrible history to which I was unalterably connected. In these moments I was transported to a past that was not of my making, but to which I nevertheless belonged. As the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre explains: The story of my life is always embedded in those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past.... What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition. (1981, pp. 205-206)”

After this conversation, I felt anxious whenever we met. It seemed like there was a distance between us. It was likely that neither of us knew how to speak about the upsurge of the past and our historically

grounded differences. There was no indication that my friend harbored resentment against me or Germans of my generation. Nor did she speak in anger. My discomfort was not about feeling threatened; it was about feeling shame in the presence of another person. This sense was similar to what I had felt the first time I studied the Holocaust in school. Whether only in my own mind, or directly in the reactions of those children around me, I became identified with the history of Nazi Germany. I was caught between my desire to reach out to my Israeli friend to comfort her and the realization that this was a part of my own past, no matter how much I wished to be fully English—Canadian in that moment. The sudden collision of historical and cultural worlds and the palpable sadness I felt stayed with me. I had learned about the history of the Holocaust at a young age, but until that interaction I had not truly grasped the depth and nature of the trauma. My sheltered life and idealized views, my longing for faraway German grandparents, ran up against the reality of the atrocities committed by the German nation. Accepting this fact meant confronting the dissociations, silence, and shame within my family. All of the interactions I have described, and which I describe further in the following chapter, took place well before I discovered my grandfather’s membership in the Nazi Party. When I reflect on the intensity of the anxiety I felt, I have to ask whether I may have known at some level all along. To what extent was I dissociating the facts as I experienced them, beginning in my childhood? Did my grandfather’s Nazi past form a kind of disavowed family history? The term “unthought knowledge” is particularly apt in this context. It refers to a dimension of experience that has been lived but never fully known.” The questions I am raising also point to the nature of “hindsight” (Freeman, 2010) about what I see now, looking back. How much has my discovery about my grandfather infused my rendition of the past? Could I possibly have written this book, or some part of it, at the time of the interactions I’ve just described? I am able to see things today that I could not see before. Using my current understanding helps me make sense of the past and draw connections that would not have been possible before. I may even be able to see things in a new light, a process that is at the heart of the therapeutic endeavor. For the narrative psychologist Mark Freeman, hindsight involves a moral dimension: I can think of many, many things that have happened during the course of my life that look very different in hindsight than they did at the moment they occurred... I have gained some perspective, and so, what had seemed at the time to be unequivocally true or right turns out to have been quite false or wrong. Through hindsight I have not only achieved a measure of insight, I have taken a step, however small, in the direction of .

moral growth to those broader spheres of experience (frequently considered under the rubric of “ethics”) that have to do with fundamental questions about how to live. (2010, p. 5)

Seeing the past differently involves unmasking, or at the very least acknowledging, the moral dimension of memory as it relates to my

family’s history.15 Related to the moral dimension is a further issue that needs to be raised before I continue. It is a question that looms large for me, even though I know there is no way to definitively answer it. How might the experiences and interactions I describe have played out if I had “known” about my grandfather? Would I have been able to talk about the past I inherited? It is only conjecture, of course, but it is worth asking how my classmates may have reacted if I had been able to reveal my family history as I know it today or how my Israeli friend would have responded if I had been able to tell her about my grandfather. The difficulty of speaking openly about that which we know, do not know, or “sort of” know points to the powerful emotions at work in confronting and acknowledging the past.

STRUGGLING WITH SHAME In his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi (1988) devotes a chapter to the theme of shame. Whereas LeVi’s (1995) first book, Survival in Auschwitz, provides the reader with an account of the horrors that he witnessed, The Drowned and the Saved demonstrates his psychological awareness and perhaps also a willingness to judge. For many Germans, the experience of shame is a familiar response to the shared history of the Third Reich. But Levi presents a very different perspective, grounded in his experience as a concentration camp survivor and a victim of German atrocities. Levi describes an unbridgeable gap between the concentration camp and the surrounding world, between those who, like himself, suffered and were traumatized, and those who witnessed it from the outside. As Levi says, “We were denied the screen of willed ignorance. It was useless to close one’s eyes or turn one’s back to it, because it was all around, in every direction, all the way to the horizon” (1988, pp. 6566). This gap took on specific meaning when Levi saw the reactions of the first Russian soldiers who entered Auschwitz upon its liberation. He recounts their response to being confronted with dying prisoners and a multitude of corpses: They did not greet us, nor smile; they seemed oppressed, not only by pity but also by a confused restraint which sealed their mouths, and kept their eyes fastened on the funereal scene. It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we

had to witness or undergo an outrage: the same that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense. (Levi, 1989, p. 72)

The particular shame that “the Germans never knew,” as Levi puts it, relates to what it was like to be diminished. This was a shame mixed with guilt, which many felt for having survived when millions died. Shame is a powerful emotional dynamic. As the philosopher Bernard Williams (1993) suggests, “shame is the emotion of self-protection the expression of shame, in general, as well as in the particular form of it that is embarrassment, is not just the desire to hide, or to hide my face, but the desire to disappear, not to be there. It is not even the wish, as people say, to sink through the floor, but rather the wish that the space occupied by me should be instantaneously empty” (p. 89). The need to hide, if not disappear, makes it difficult to face the other person, let alone interact or enter into dialogue. While German perpetrators and bystanders may not have known shame, nor ever felt ashamed about what they had done, subsequent generations of Germans have struggled to confront the shameful legacy they have inherited from their parents and grandparents. In his revealing essay Growing up in Nazi Germany (1991), Luttgard Wundheiler, a German immigrant and psychoanalyst in New York, acknowledges that guilt and shame can make it difficult for Germans to talk about the past. As Wundheiler (1991) notes, “It is painful to be German. Not only do many people have negative notions about the Germans, but I have deep feelings of shame about being German” (p. 186). The problem, as Wundheiler points out, is that “it is in the nature of shame to hide. By definition, one does not, cannot speak about one’s shame” (p. 186). Many postwar Germans break affective bridges to the unspeakable crimes of the Nazi past precisely to avoid emotions such as guilt and shame. However, hiding results only in silence and robs us of the possibility to talk about the past and to try to understand how the generation of perpetrators and bystanders could have acted as they did. The German psychoanalyst Jorg Bose, who became director of the William Alanson White Institute, echoes Wundheiler’s reflections. Born in Berlin in 1938, Bose’s early childhood took place during the era of National Socialism and the Second World War. After growing up and completing medical school in Germany he immigrated to the United States in the late 1960s and settled in New York. He chose to train at the William Alanson White Institute because it seemed less wed to psychoanalytic dogma at the time, having been founded by

psychoanalysts who were not a part of the establishment. Bose has confronted what it means to be German in New York. He carries the weight of a cultural identity and history that is inherently linked with guilt and shame about the Nazi past. According to Bose: as if I am seen, at least at first, as “The German,” and by extension, as “The Nazi.” Being in this country, particularly in New York City, among many Jewish people, and after I developed more of an awareness through analysis, I sometimes become concerned that I would be experienced as an imposition for a Jewish person who had to deal with me. I would think at times, “How could I have been so insensitive to come to this city, when people had fled here to get away from the Germans?” (quoted in Kuriloff, 2014, p. 78)

I fear and sometimes feel

I had the opportunity to speak with Bose and asked him to elaborate on his understanding of the Nazi past and what contending with this legacy has meant for him personally and professionally.15 Commenting on what it is like to be German in a city and profession that includes many whose families were traumatized and murdered by the Third Reich, Bose states that he held back at times so as not to be perceived as aggressive or mean. It hasn’t always been easy, but he also adds that “in all my years in the United States I have never encountered a direct expression of discomfort with me for being German. And in general, as a matter of fact, I have been very positively received by my colleagues in New York.” Bose’s remarks suggest that the unease he experiences is not linked in a direct fashion to the reactions of other people but rather to the continued burden of German history. Bose’s observations are important for a number of reasons. In contrast to Germans who might hide their feelings about the Nazi past, Bose seeks “to be honest with my patients about how difficult life is at times for me, and for all of us, and that shame about it can create such destructiveness... I try to work with some of my patients on understanding and transforming the illusion of superiority I had absorbed as a child, my own sense of German superiority.” Bose sees the delusional belief in German superiority as a direct response to the vulnerability of feeling powerless: “The German experience for me consists of two parts: the first one is the horror of what has been done to the Jewish people, which I believe remains unfathomable; the second is the emotional and delusional cultural ground from which such deeds sprang, in particular the myth of German superiority cultivated by the Nazis, and its historical roots in the earlier myth of the superiority of the German language.” He adds: “I think the notion of seeing of oneself as superior to others still has a seductive pull among some Germans today, albeit this is not a trait exclusive only to that nation. My clinical interest has been to focus on the inhumanity of .

everyday life as it appears when we engage in condemnatory stances toward self and other, in as much as one adheres to an unrealistically inflated and demanding value system, as compared with one that is realistic and compassionate.” Because Bose is sensitive to the situational factors at work in his interactions with patients, he is able to create a empathic context for talking about historical and cultural differences as they emerge in the therapeutic relationship. Perhaps most important, he openly acknowledges the powerful emotions associated with these differences.

FEAR OF SELF-DISCLOSURE I am a generation younger than Wundheiler and Bose and not German by birth. Despite my chronological distance from the events of the Shoah, I still bear a responsibility to remember. I am confronted by the legacy of my grandparents each time I encounter an individual whose family was affected by the crimes of the generation of perpetrators and bystanders. I was particularly sensitive to this history when I began to work with patients who were descendants of Holocaust survivors. What did it mean for me, a descendant of the perpetrator generation, to work therapeutically with someone whose parent or grandparent had survived the Holocaust or whose family members had been murdered in the gas chambers? Many of my patients carried the emotional scars of the earlier generation, even if this was not the reason they sought therapy. Could I be of assistance to them, given my background? I faced the dilemma of whether or not to speak about my past. In contrast to Wundheiler or Bose, whose cultural backgrounds as German immigrants are more obvious to their patients, my identity as someone of German descent often emerges only as a result of particular kinds of interactions. As I have shown, these are interactions in which the sudden upsurge of history can create unexpected responses. In the process, my patients and I may find ourselves in uncomfortable and unfamiliar situations that neither of us is prepared for. I am commonly identified by my patients with the country and culture in which I grew up. When asked by patients where I am from, I generally answer Canada. When asked where I was educated, I answer that I attended university in England and trained in the United States. In New York this made me an outsider, but someone who fit in nevertheless. The implicit assumption on the part of many of my patients at the time was that my family name was Jewish. Some inquired further; most did not. If I was asked whether I was Jewish, I usually answered openly that I was not and then explored what this might mean for our work together. While my familiarity with Judaism may have been obvious to some, further questions about my cultural

background were not generally raised. It is possible that my patients inferred my uneasiness about my background and may have avoided asking questions for this very reason. This points back to the long-debated issue of self-disclosure in therapy, the question of how much psychotherapists should reveal about themselves to their patients. In the history of psychoanalysis there has traditionally been a rule of anonymity on the part of the analyst. According to the classical viewpoint, the analyst seeks to maintain a kind of “blank slate.” Most patients in tum know or sense not to ask personal questions. From a contemporary psychoanalytic viewpoint, notions such as neutrality and anonymity neglect the shared nature of the therapeutic setting, particularly if they are rigidly applied. The fact that there are always two people involved in the therapeutic interaction suggests that both shape what happens. The approach I am describing recognizes that measured and judicious self-disclosure can have an important role to play in the process of therapy.” As a contemporary psychoanalyst, I attend to the lived experience and patterns of relating that evolve in the interaction with my patients. I see the therapeutic relationship itself as a focus for understanding. I tend to be quite interactive and engage my patients in an empathic dialogue of inquiry. But initially, asking questions or revealing aspects of myself did not come easily for me. Given my background in a family and culture where questions were carefully gauged to meet familial norms and social expectations, allowing myself to be actively curious was unsettling. Just as the process of asking questions proved challenging, I struggled with how much of myself to reveal. I readily admit to being hesitant about sharing my past in the presence of someone whose family was affected by the horrors of the Shoah.18 My anxiety had a number of sources, both real and imagined. I had leamed what the effect of revealing my past could be, the consequences it could have for a relationship. I feared the reaction of my Israeli friend in Paris, the depth of her sadness, and my own powerlessness in the face of her pain. I feared being seen as a “bad German” and the potential distancing that this might create. But above all, I think I sensed that sharing my past in the presence of my patients might force me to address my own background and the legacy of my grandparents in a manner I had long avoided. Was I hiding my family’s past by not offering more information when none was asked for? Did I have a moral obligation to my patients to disclose my family history? I have always sought to maintain an informed stance on German history and have felt strongly about my obligation to remember. I have been sensitive to the dynamics involved in German and Jewish interactions. But was this enough? Certainly engaging in this kind of autobiographical writing constitutes a form of self-disclosure quite at odds with the tenets of

traditional psychoanalysis. I find myself wondering how the readers of this book will respond to what they leam about me or my family. As a bilingual child of German immigrants who speaks English without an accent, I learned early on that my family background would remain hidden if I spoke only in English. Language choice can be particularly important for bilingual speakers. If we are fundamentally forged by history and culture, as I have been suggesting, then our identities are also revealed through our use of language. The therapeutic illustrations 1 have described in this chapter took place in English. Thus it was with some anxiety that I began working with a patient who was the son of Holocaust survivors and had asked for a German—speaking psychoanalyst. From the very start of our work together I was defined by my ability to speak German. Yet the mere fact that my patient and I communicated in German did not make addressing the Nazi past and the traumatic history of the Holocaust any easier; quite the contrary. After all, how does one “talk about” the Holocaust? And what might such a dialogue look like when Germans and Jews meet?”

CHAPTER

3

Shaped by History, Caught by Language After the Holocaust, how do

we navigate the divide between the German and Jewish experience of the past? Can such historically determined differences be bridged? When my wife and I first met, our divergent backgrounds seemed of little importance. It was only later, as our relationship developed, that we began to fully comprehend the reality of German history and the Holocaust in our shared lives. Over time we learned to negotiate the meaning it held for us, both individually and together. In the process we came to see the world through each other’s eyes. The early phase of our relationship took place when we were both university students in England and my parents were living in Germany. Traveling back and forth between England and Germany gave us the opportunity to reflect on the past and think about its impact on our lives in different cultures and countries. At times our awareness of the past stood in the foreground, but most of the time it was part of our background experience. But our shared navigation of German memory, the Holocaust, and cultural divergences presented a different kind of challenge for our respective parents. My wife’s parents are American and the same age as my parents. Both sides of my wife’s family originally hailed from Eastern Europe, for the most part from Lithuania. While neither parent had immediate family members who were killed in the Holocaust, they both grew up in communities where many lost loved ones. The Holocaust cast a shadow over their lives, as it did for many in North American Jewish communities who lived in full awareness of Nazi Germany’s policy of genocide. When my wife and I were living in Berlin in the early 1990s, my wife’s mother traveled from the United States to visit us. She had been to Germany many years earlier, but the visit to Berlin was her first extended stay. It was also the first time my mother—in—law met my parents. My wife and I were nervous, as any couple would be when respective parents meet for the first time. But in that moment, we felt the added weight of history as we observed our parents interacting with each other. The dinner took place in Berlin, and we were relieved that the first meeting went well. Talk was of common cultural experiences in North America and of my wife’s father, who was

unfortunately unable to make the trip. The Nazi past and the Holocaust The lack of any mention of the past was surely obvious to all, its absence gratefully accepted. During her stay, my mother-in-law traveled on her own throughout Berlin and the surrounding area while my wife and I spent our days studying at the city’s Staatsbibliothek (state library). At the time, central Berlin was a massive construction site, having only recently been reunified. Potsdamer Platz, known in the 1920s as Europe’s busiest intersection, was an empty space, part of the former “no man’s land” that divided East from West Berlin. Not far away, the so-called New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, originally the main synagogue in Berlin, was awaiting restoration. A smaller synagogue and Jewish cafe were open nearby. To the casual observer it appeared that there was a small but nevertheless noticeable reawakening of Jewish life in what had once been the heart of prewar Jewish Berlin. We met my mother-in-law in the evenings, and she shared with us her excitement about the city. In particular, she had come to recognize that she could understand much of what the people around her were saying and even speak some German herself. She had taken the chance of pronouncing a few German words and was soon having basic conversations with people she met. were not discussed.

My mother-in—law’s ability to understand German was connected to her past, specifically to the fact that she listened to her parents speaking Yiddish at home when she was a child. It was not until she was in a German-speaking environment that my mother-in-law realized she had retained the ability to understand and even speak Yiddish. This recognition was given added poignancy by an outdoor concert we attended together in Berlin’s Tiergarten. A folksinger sang beautiful and plaintive Yiddish songs, a reminder of a once vibrant world that was tragically extinguished by the Holocaust. This trip was to become the first of many that my parents-in-law would take to Berlin, a city they both enjoy. For my mother-in-law that initial visit reawakened her relationship to Yiddish culture and language. She has since immersed herself in the language and in the process I have leamed much about Yiddish, a language rich in history, but also bound up in the indescribable loss and murder of entire communities throughout Eastern Europe. The maintenance of Yiddish today remains an important link to a long cultural heritage. Some years later my wife and I got married. Since our parents still lived a great distance from one another, the occasion of the wedding gave them more time to get to know each other. On the day before the wedding, my parents-in-law arranged a lunch for family members. I sat at a table beside my father and father-in-law, who seemed to get on well with one another. As the lunch wore on, I noticed they were immersed in conversation. I leaned over so that I might hear what was

being said. Their conversation had moved from the present into the past. My father-in-law has always been insatiably curious and was asking my father about Nazi Germany and about what he experienced and saw when he was a child. My father willingly answered my father-in-law’s questions. Perhaps it was the particular context of the interaction, because my father proceeded to share memories with my father-in-law that I had never heard before. To my mind their interaction is an illustration of the way in which the history and culture of both participants fundamentally influence what memories are recalled and the manner in which they are expressed. In contrast to my mother, my father rarely volunteered his wartime memories. When I was young, my father’s loss of his own father loomed large for me. It was painful to imagine what my father must have experienced, and I was always careful not to ask too much, respectful of his privacy. For many second-generation Germans the legacy of loss can be just as great and possibly even greater than the legacy of guilt, pointing to a history of unexpressed emotion about the death of family members during the Second World War.1 I was therefore not only surprised by the conversation, but increasingly anxious as I listened to them speak. I remember thinking at the time that here were two men, one German, the other Jewish, of the same age. How differently their lives would have played out under different historical circumstances. My father talked of the death of his own father and how he spent much of the war in the small town of Benningsen, south of Hanover, where his father’s parents lived. His grandparents’ house was near the railroad tracks that led through the center of the town. My father described how a kind elderly man lived in a small house adjacent to the main railroad crossing. His job was to raise and lower the barriers whenever there was an approaching train. As a child my father would visit the man and would sometimes be allowed to help out, raising and lowering the barriers by turning a large, heavy crank. After the barrier was down my father would stand back as the train slowly moved through the town. As the conversation progressed, my father shared a memory that has remained etched in my mind. On one occasion, the barrier was lowered and a freight train passed by. My father could hear the voices of people inside cattle cars. Even as a young child it seemed strange to him that people would be put inside cattle cars rather than sit in passenger cars. My father’s questions at the time did not yield any answers. It was only much later that he came to understand the dreadful meaning of what he had seen and heard. This memory of my father left me feeling distressed. The emotional distance I had sought to maintain from the horrors of the Holocaust was suddenly breached. It seemed too close, his memory of voices of people locked in cattle

cars too disturbing. I did not share the memory with my wife at the time, and she only learned of it while I was writing this book. The exchange between my father and father-in-law has remained with me, a haunting reminder of my parents’ childhood in Nazi Germany. My parents-in-law have always been accepting of my German family background, and they get on well with my parents, even though they don’t see one another very often. But my German background proved on occasion to be more difficult for some older members of my wife’s extended family. Eyebrows were raised when my wife and I purchased our first car—“Did it have to be a Volkswagen?”—and some invitations by family members were not as forthcoming as they might otherwise have been. At the same time, my own extended family seemed to be alternately hyperaware that my wife is Jewish and strangely ignorant of the fact. I find myself wondering about their possible uneasiness, about whether my wife’s presence may initially have caused them to reflect on our family history in a manner that created uncomfortable feelings. My wife has commented that she is perfectly comfortable in Germany and like me enjoys Berlin, but at times she can be made to feel very self-aware, a Jewish person in a country with few Jewish citizens and a terrible history. This is a seemingly intractable problem facing today’s Jewish community in post-Holocaust Germany. By treating Jewish persons extra carefully, it is almost as though Germans end up re—creating the “us and them” mentality associated with the dark past.2 I began with these personal reflections because I want to discuss the challenge of negotiating traumatic history in the German and Jewish experience. The fact that we never know what will be learned or disclosed in dialogue with another person is especially true when Germans and Jews address the formidable topic of the Holocaust, giving rise to fearful thoughts and fantasies. At the same time, encountering another person provides the possibility for new avenues of knowledge, ways of thinking, seeing, or feeling that may not have been available before. This opportunity for learning is central to psychotherapy. But as the therapist and patient embark on their quest, neither knows in advance what the other person will say or where the therapeutic work will lead.3 It is precisely this “not knowing,” the recognition that experience consists of more than we can possibly “know,” that points to the complexity of human understanding. When we reflect on our lives, what are we able to see and what remains unseen? The creation of personal narratives helps us to make sense of our experience. These are the stories we tell others about ourselves. The psychotherapist comes to know us through the stories we share in the therapeutic setting. But the process of narration is hardly straightforward. There is always more than we are ready to know or able to put into words. This is especially true when our lives

are

inscribed by traumatic histories that we inherit by way of family

and community. I am referring to our lives in culture and of meanings

that remain unformulated, awaiting articulation.4 In the relational interaction of psychotherapy, the history of both participants, the therapist and the patient, can shape what happens between them. I was confronted by the unspoken meanings of my family history in the course of working with a German-speaking Jewish man, who was the son of Holocaust survivors. My patient, whom I refer to as Daniel, had requested a Germanspeaking psychoanalyst. Daniel and I spoke in German as well as English and began to engage in what is commonly known as “language shifting.” These movements, or shifts, from one language to another were a response to the powerful emotions we experienced as we sought to navigate the historical trauma that preceded us. I will draw on aspects of my work with Daniel to illustrate the challenges I experienced in addressing the legacy of the Nazi past—not as something abstract or far away, but directly in the presence of a person whose family endured violence and suffering at the hands of Germans.5

DANCING AROUND DIFFERENCE From the referral I knew that Daniel was older than I was and that he experiencing feelings of depression that he believed could be connected to his family history. Daniel’s parents were Holocaust survivors, though details about their experiences were sparse. Growing up, Daniel did not ask questions. Indeed, curiosity was neither invited nor permitted. Daniel knew that his father had survived the horrors of a concentration camp. When the Soviets liberated the camp, Daniel’s father was offered the chance to take up arms against the Nazis, something he apparently excelled at. Daniel’s mother survived in hiding, though he knew little about the circumstances. Daniel described his childhood in broad terms, ranging from tolerable to miserable. His father was plagued by anxiety, and his mother died tragically early. Daniel said that trusting other people was challenging for him, and he often wondered if he could feel safe in his relationships. Learning of Daniel’s background, I entered the work with a sense of apprehension. I looked forward to being able to speak German with him, but I wondered what pressures might arise as our histories became known. Daniel was a second-generation Holocaust survivor, and I was entering into our work with the weight of inherited guilt and shame connected to my German background. At the same time, Daniel and I shared broad life experiences and interests. Though we had spent our childhoods in divergent contexts and continents, we both grew up was

speaking German at home and then attended university in England. On the face of it, we were both bilingual German—English speakers and immigrant New Yorkers. We were connected by a set of common cultural and linguistic experiences in the present, while our family histories lurked in the background. In our initial session, Daniel asked where I was from and how it was that I came to speak German so well. I explored the nature of the question and answered him, though without going into detail. I explained that I had grown up in Canada, that my family was Germanspeaking, and that I had lived in Switzerland, where my family moved while I was completing my schooling. Having discussed my training background, Daniel also knew that I had lived and worked in Germany as a student and spent considerable time in Berlin. Daniel appeared to take all of this at face value, perhaps not choosing to find out more. Nor did I volunteer further details. When Daniel began to talk about his upbringing, he inquired if I was Jewish. I wondered what meaning my answer might have for him. He replied that if I were Jewish I might understand him better. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure how much it mattered, especially since he was in a relationship with someone who was not Jewish. I left this question unanswered for the moment, not wanting to forestall further exploration of what my identity might mean to him. I remember feeling at the time that I was dancing around our differences, fearing what might happen when my family history became known. Daniel seemed pleased and actually relieved to be able to speak with me in German. There were few people with whom he spoke German, and his emotional and dream life was rooted in his mother tongue. Throughout our early work together much of our communication took place in German, and there was a free flowing back and forth between the two languages. In fact, I was at first uneasy about how Daniel would respond to my German, as I am no longer fluent in the way I was when I was young. During my early adolescence in Canada, a time when I felt a strong need to fit in, I spoke little German and only regained my fluency when I lived in Switzerland. As a result I now speak German with an accent and make mistakes, but like Daniel I shared a sense of enjoyment at being able to speak in my first language. In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, shifting between a first and second language can provide a way to understand and trace emotional states. Language switching often illustrates a powerful emotionality at work in our choice of language, especially when it occurs outside of our awareness. For many bilingual speakers, the first language, or mother tongue, can evoke developmental and interactive experiences with their caregivers. By contrast, speaking in a second language can be a way of distancing oneself from powerful emotional experiences,

especially those that were experienced in the first language. When I reflect on my own life, there are some experiences, often emotional in nature, for which I quite naturally find words in German, and others for which English seems more accessible. In our sessions, Daniel most often used German when speaking about his family. His use of German was notable in the expression of memories, dreams, desire, and spontaneous emotion. I found that my linguistic response to what Daniel said could strengthen or intensify the experience. If my response in German was attuned to his expression of emotion in German, it opened up a space for exploration and reflection. If I responded to Daniel in English, I would redirect away from the emotion. Indeed, in these moments, by language shifting myself, whether consciously or unconsciously, I would join Daniel in constructing a kind of safety barrier against emotions and sensations that were rooted in our mother tongue, but that neither of us was fully prepared to articulate. This dynamic would color the exploration of our divergent family histories. As the relationship developed, Daniel became more trusting of me and seemed more willing to know about me. I carefully followed Daniel in terms of what questions he asked, though I also wondered to what extent my hesitancy to step into the unknown was contributing to the developing relationship between us. Daniel was learning to make more inquires, and I assumed that we would have the opportunity for exploration of our cultural differences and identities once he was ready. Of course, it is important to add that this could happen only once I was ready. To use an oft-repeated phrase, “the patient can only go so far as the analyst or therapist is willing to go.” When I reflect on this early stage of our work together, it is clear to me that my own concem about being rejected in some way, or being seen as a bad German, hardly made me want to take the plunge with Daniel. From the start my anxiety about my background was shaping our interactions. I worried that bringing history into the room might create impassable roadblocks for our work together if it happened too soon. On the other hand, history was very much in the room; it just wasn’t being openly acknowledged. Instead, there was only what seemed to me to be an increasingly loud silence. While Daniel and I were aware of our commonalities, what had yet to be explored was the meaning of our differences. Daniel was the son of Holocaust survivors, and I was the son of Germans.

SILENCE OR CURIOSITY? Throughout the early stages of our work together, Daniel would occasionally refer to me as Swiss or make allusions to my Swiss background. From questions he asked during the first sessions, he

knew that I had lived in Switzerland and had family there. In these moments it felt as though I had taken on the ambiguous mantle of Swiss neutrality.6 Part of me undoubtedly welcomed the allusions. After all, it was easier to be seen as Swiss than German. Despite my growing uneasiness about being identified in this way, I maintained a studious silence. Looking back, did I not have an obligation to Daniel to be more open and forthcoming? I had addressed the meanings inherent in the traumatic history of the past in my marriage and in my relationships with other people, so what was different with Daniel? Like so much that I discuss in this book, the answer is neither simple nor straightforward. Certainly the reasons that led me to disclose some aspects about myself but not others need to be understood in the context of my work with Daniel, the particular constellation of our relationship at the time. Added to this was the question of what and how much of myself to reveal and the potential effects on Daniel. But all theorizing aside, my anxiety was of a very personal nature. There was something about my work with Daniel that challenged my carefully measured stance on the past. With Daniel I was forced to address the history of the Holocaust as a lived reality in the very language in which I was raised and with someone who shared a German-speaking cultural background. Daniel and I could engage in a sense of nostalgia for German literature or philosophy. But this was the same culture and language in which the Holocaust was perpetrated. In a similar sense, I could engage in love for my grandparents, but my loving grandparents were members of the generation of perpetrators and bystanders. Was there any way to make sense of these seeming contradictions? There was uncertainty for both of us about what exploration of our differences would imply. I wondered how his perceptions of me and the experience of the relationship might change in the process. I feared being identified with the legacy of my grandparents’ generation. Above all, I wanted to avoid Daniel’s disappointment, anger, and rejection. The fact that we had common recent life experiences made it easier to focus on these similarities and provided a means, if not a rationale, for keeping history at bay. Perhaps my anxiety also had to do with not knowing “how” to talk about the past. Daniel and I had each leamed to navigate the gaps in our family narratives. Growing up, we had both experienced a code of silence, though from manifestly different historical positions.7 During Daniel’s childhood questions about the experiences of his parents in the Holocaust were met with disapproval. It was as though a fog of silence blanketed the horrors of the past. My own family silence about my grandfather was likely contributing to the nature of our interaction. There had been no attempt in my family to challenge the familiar

narrative of my grandfather’s beliefs or activities during the Third Reich. One could wonder whether either of us really knew how to break the silence. Over time Daniel demonstrated a growing self-confidence and an increased expression of his needs and desires. He began to think about the important people in his life in new ways. As a part of this process Daniel wondered whether he was ready or willing to know more about his distant father. The parallels to his relationship with me seemed palpable. The fact that Daniel, as he put it, “couldn’t say anything” to his father, let alone ask him questions, was an essential part of the dilemma. Once Daniel began to alter his perceptions of other people and to understand the importance of expressing his needs, it meant that he was not only more willing to ask questions, he also expected answers.

CONFRONTING THE PAST I recall that it happened quite suddenly. I had assumed that questions about my “Germanness” would be forthcoming, but they took me by surprise nevertheless. Daniel wanted to know how it was that I spoke German so well if I grew up in Canada. Moreover, he acknowledged that I did not speak German with a Swiss accent. When Daniel asked about my background, I remember having two thoughts: “What took us so long?” and “Here we go.” I explored what it might be like for Daniel to know more about me. He said that he had thought about asking me for some time, but that he also didn’t know if he could ask. Indeed, it is quite possible I had given Daniel that impression. He seemed content to let his expression of curiosity sit without insisting on an immediate answer. We explored Daniel’s questions about me in the context of the new perspectives he had developed in his emotional relationships with other people. Then Daniel brought up the Internet. He said that he knew he could look me up, but that somehow he hadn’t been sure whether he wanted to know more about me. At this point Daniel and I moved on to something else. I remember thinking following the session that my own hesitancy about the subject of my background must be making it harder for Daniel to address the issue. In one of the next sessions Daniel announced that he had looked me up on the Internet. I asked him what that was like. Daniel said he had leamed that I had published on the theme of philosophy and said it felt odd, having spoken with me about that subject. From a cultural perspective, it is worth noting that in these moments I could be seen as the Herr Professor, who in German-speaking culture often wears a crown of intellectual authority. I replied that I had enjoyed our discussions and that we shared an interest in the topic. Indeed,

Daniel’s comments were noteworthy, and I learned a lot from him about different facets of life. He was highly intelligent, a fact that was evidenced in his many professional achievements. Daniel was clearly nervous about what he might find out about me, but this exchange seemed to connect us emotionally, and he felt encouraged to know more.

How was it, Daniel wondered, that I had attended university in England, grew up in Canada, and spoke German? From information in my writing, Daniel sensed that my parents were from Germany. Here we were then. The question, “What did your parents do in the war?” was not far away. I was confronted with how to respond to Daniel’s questions. I had encouraged him to be curious about his relationships and to challenge his accepted views of others in his life. It had been hard for Daniel to do this and harder still to demand responses: to leam how to express his needs and wishes with the knowledge that he also deserved a response. And here I was, waffling on whether or not to answer Daniel’s questions. I had to weigh the effects of answering versus not answering. I feared that by remaining silent I would maintain an emotional distance and could appear to be hiding something. Could Daniel trust me? And in a related sense, could I withstand the questions Daniel might ask of me, questions I might not know how to answer? When Daniel asked about my family’s role during the war, I shared with him that my parents had been children. Daniel wanted to know not only what had happened to them, but also where my grandparents had been and what they had done. I outlined for him what I knew of my family history at that time. It was only much later, following our work together, that I learned of my grandfather’s membership in the Nazi Party. I can only surmise from my perspective today how Daniel would have responded had I shared with him then what I have since learned. My anxiety in speaking of my grandfather today has to do with sharing a painful history. The anxiety I felt during my work with Daniel had to do with stepping into the unknown, not only in terms of the interaction between Daniel and myself, but also in terms of my relationship to my family’s history. My ability to withstand Daniel’s scrutiny about my family history was important. Daniel was willing to see me in shades of grey. Yet I also wondered whether each answer would simply lead to new questions. Daniel appeared to accept what I told him, perhaps not wanting to ask more. What was noteworthy, was not just Daniel’s ability to be curious, to break our mutual silence, but the language shifting that was happening. The exploration of my past and of my identity as someone of German background took place entirely in English. This is significant since so much of our interaction until then had been in German or in a mixture of the two languages. It was

almost as though we both found speaking English easier. In fact, when speaking about the war, the Holocaust, and our different histories, German suddenly seemed out of place. At the time I remember noting with some relief that the “cat was out of the bag.” I wasn’t hiding any longer. But I also wondered with trepidation how Daniel would feel about this new information; my identity as someone who is “German” had become more real. What ramifications would this have for our work together?

LANGUAGE AND HISTORICAL TRAUMA In the following sessions Daniel talked about a number of topics, but he did not return to what he had learned about me. Nor did I bring it up. In these sessions I hewed closely to the psychoanalytic tradition of letting the patient take the lead. What was noteworthy, looking back, was that the interaction between us took place entirely in English. I did not immediately recognize the language shift, and when I did, I was hesitant to share my observation. I did not want to leave what seemed to me to be a place of momentary and relative calm. I wasn’t ready to enter into a renewed discussion of our differences, with the possibility of conflict and disappointment. Yet I felt compelled to observe that we no longer spoke German together. I wondered aloud whether speaking English might have to do with our discussion of the past, of family, Germany, and the Holocaust. According to Daniel, we were both generational descendants, and recent German and Jewish history had been well examined. Knowing of Daniel’s historical awareness, I responded that this might well be, but it still seemed curious that we no longer spoke in German. Daniel and I were engaging in a stance of emotional distancing through our use of language. Shifting into English provided us with a space of relative safety against the emotionally laden and potentially dangerous thoughts and fantasies that had followed the foray into my family background. It felt to me in those moments like we were conducting a unilingual therapy in which the question of German, and “Germanness,” be it history, culture, or language, was entirely absent. I remember thinking that someone listening in on those sessions might perceive us simply as two English-speaking New York immigrants. Whereas English had previously seemed somehow foreign to our interactions, speaking German now felt out of place. During the course of our work together, our shifts into German had been accompanied by a vibrancy of emotion. By contrast, this shift into English was accompanied by a different mood-state, which might best be described as reticent and inhibited.8 While the shift away from German was initially unconscious, our continued dialogue in English was deliberate. Speaking in English

became a means of navigating the forbidding history that preceded us and thinking about its role in our work together. Nor can the meaning that English held for each of us be overlooked. For Daniel, the English language embodied what it meant to live in New York and be in a location relatively free from the lingering anti-Semitism that he had seen growing up. For me, English was the site of my relationship with my wife and the bridging of our cultural differences. Above all, speaking in English provided the opportunity for Daniel and I to reflect on what the German language and “Germanness” meant in our work together. The interaction with Daniel led me to examine the topic of language in the German and Jewish experience more closely. I came upon the following account of a young German-Jewish girl who had fled with her family to Belgium to escape persecution in prewar Nazi Germany. In May 1940 the German army invaded Belgium, and the country that until that time had been a safe haven suddenly became very dangerous. Reflecting on the memory of the experience of living amid different languages, she later states:

My biggest conflict with the German invasion (of Belgium) occurred when I heard German spoken. It felt so much like home, and it was so tempting to speak to these soldiers and befriend them since we all were in a foreign country, except that they could speak to each other in their native tongues out in the open, whereas for us it was not prudent. They Could bring a piece of home with them, whereas we had to give up our language if we wanted to be safe. (quoted in Mehler, 1995, p. 101; emphasis added)

The notion of “giving up one’s language” is unimaginable under any circumstances. Language grounds us and gives expression to our emotional development and history. Like the air we breathe, language is simply taken for granted. The fact that language can be forcibly taken away from us illustrates both our human fragility and our capacity for cruelty. It was one of the weapons wielded by European colonizers in their subjugation of aboriginal peoples, as the cultural decimation of the First Nations in Canada and Native Americans in the United States tragically illustrates.9 Language encapsulates our traditions and identities, indeed, our very outlook on the world. What might it mean not to speak our language any longer, or alternatively, for the language in which we grew up to become so tainted by evil and trauma that we are unable to bear hearing it? For German-Jewish émigrés who were able to escape Germany before the war, the German language was associated with conflicting emotions. As German historian Monica Schmidt suggests in her study of these immigrants to the United States:

On the one hand, it was the language of the family, the language of the culture of which the Jewish part of German society formed an integral and important component, the language of the country to which they belonged, of which they were—or had been—citizens, and toward which many or most had strong feelings of loyalty and patriotism. On the other hand, it also became the language of the persecutor, the language of the laws that were written to exclude Jews from German society, and the language of the SA-men who came to invade the safety of their homes. (2003, p. 134)

Once in North America or Israel, German-Jewish émigrés were faced

with the question of whether or not to continue using German as a means of communication and personal expression. There was no unanimity

this issue. For some the German language remained the language of emotional attachment, learning, and tradition, while for others it represented the persecutory nation they had left behind.” Before the war there had already been a distinction at work in North American Jewish communities between German-speaking Jewish immigrants, many of whom were urban and assimilated, and Yiddishspeaking immigrants who hailed from Eastern Europe and, at least initially, held fast to their traditions.“ In the years after the Shoah these differences intensified. While some postwar German-Jewish refugees continued to use the German language, which they associated with the familiarity of culture in the midst of a foreign country, many non—German Jews had a powerful negative response to hearing German spoken.” From my perspective today I can appreciate the reasons for this visceral reaction. It leads me to reflect on my life in New York as a parent. I would often take my children to the local Jewish Community Center. I have always spoken German with my children, sharing with them the language of my childhood. At some point I became aware that whenever we entered the Jewish Community Center, I would automatically switch into English. My language shifting was no doubt motivated by uneasiness about how my children and I might be perceived. At the same time I was trying to be respectful of my Jewish neighbors. I was concemed about how they might feel about hearing German spoken in their presence. Speaking German continues to be important to me, and I try to speak it with my children even as they get older. My wife also speaks German, having learned it over the course of her university studies. But I imagine it was challenging or at the very least strange for some of her older relatives to hear me speaking German with the children when they were young. There was another instance when I felt hesitant about speaking German, though for a different reason. I attended an academic seminar, in which a number of elderly German-Jewish émigrés were present. I was particularly drawn to one elderly couple, because, as I on

later realized, they reminded me very much of my grandparents. At the seminar 1 observed how they spoke quietly to each other in German. It appeared to be their private language in a room full of English speakers. They were not aware that I also spoke German. I was struck by their voices: the intonations and mannerisms were deeply familiar. I sometimes have this sensation when I hear German; because it is my first language I become immediately attuned to it. But this situation felt different. Though I wanted to speak with them, I held back. I did not feel comfortable breaking in on their conversation. Upon reflection, I think I was concerned about how they might respond to me. In that moment it felt as though theirs was the language of tenderness, while mine was the language of the aggressor. The burden of the past and the legacy of shame can be very real. When I speak on the topic of German memory and the Holocaust to audiences in Canada or the United States, some of whom may be Jewish, 1 am always conscious of the powerful dynamics at work in the sound of the German words I use. Thus it was initially an unsettling experience when I first spoke on the topic in Germany. On the one hand it felt quite natural to speak to a group of Germans and engage them in discussion in their native language. On the other hand, because I was talking about the historical trauma of the Holocaust, which had been perpetrated in the German language, I found myself wondering what might be missed or overlooked without also focusing on the evocations of the language itself. This points to the possibility that memories associated with the Holocaust and its perpetration may be discussed or transmitted differently depending on the language and context in which these transmissions take place. Perhaps the perspective I am offering here is simply a reflection of my own situation as a bilingual speaker of English and German who lives in both German and Jewish contexts. The experiences I’ve been describing lead me to wonder whether Daniel and I wished to remain on a linguistic island of our own making, free of the complexities of history. I can’t speak for Daniel, but this observation rings true for me. Despite the fact that speaking German with Daniel felt entirely natural, the language itself could evoke sensations and memories of the traumatic past and become strained. German is a language of everyday lived experience and leaming, but it is also the language of the perpetration of the Shoah. This is surely one of the paradoxes of German culture in the wake of the Holocaust. How was the language of Goethe and Rilke transformed into the language of Hitler and Goebbels? Which of the two might be heard when German is spoken? It seems to me that the experience of language is always relative to context, to who is speaking and who is listening and to the relationship between them. Having grown up in a German-speaking Jewish community, Daniel’s

relationship to German is uncommon, at least from the perspective of the wider Jewish population today. The fact that the German language could be experienced as both emotionally freeing and historically determined raised the question of what it was like for Daniel to speak German with me.

NEGOTIATING HISTORY initial exploration of the past, it seemed that Daniel needed to relearn a sense of trust in me. And indeed, the objection can fairly be raised that perhaps I should have remained silent and hidden in my “Germanness.” To hear me speak is to assume I am broadly Canadian, with no trace or hint of any second language or culture, save perhaps for an occasional British pronunciation. This points to the many-sided nature of our identities. In my work with Daniel, my fear of being “called out” or of being in some way “othered” was part of what led me to remain hidden. My concern was motivated by earlier interactions of the kind I describe in previous chapters. I had leamed Following

our

that the other person’s response to us can create spontaneous and unwilling shifts of identity. Indeed, it was at the very moment when Daniel shifted only to English, and no longer spoke German with me, that my identity as a “German” became strangely fixed. When I think about my work with Daniel, it is clear that the biggest challenge for me was to endure the shame I felt in his presence. My impulse was to hide by denying any association with my family history and the events that preceded me. It was also clear that I needed to withstand Daniel’s fears, fantasies, and potential recriminations in order for the situation between us to evolve. Toward the end of our work together I had the opportunity to share with Daniel some aspects of the shame I felt. In revealing my own emotional struggle I may have helped Daniel feel that he could talk more openly about what he had learned about me. One question Daniel had was why I had been so reticent. In fact, he had surmised that I wanted to be identified as Swiss. After reading the case study of our work together, he also wondered whether our language shifting wasn’t a consequence of my own unease with history. I think he was right. I had sought to keep my history at bay and maintain an identity based on a measure of control and personal comfort. Being Swiss and “neutral” was preferable to stepping with Daniel into the unknown. Daniel and I worked in English to confront the mistrust that was rooted in the forbidding history that preceded us. The re-emergence of German in our work was very gradual and, like the shift into English, took place largely outside of awareness. I realized at some point that German had become a part of our vocabulary again. When I noted this change to Daniel, he said it felt good to speak German with me.

Whereas Daniel and I had been reluctant to speak German for a time, it felt once more like a part of the everyday. It seemed to both of us that speaking German was no longer determined or dominated only by the past. We had reached a point where we could once again converse in either language. My work with Daniel revealed to me the extent to which history and language can be at once intimately familiar, yet strangely dislocating. English was the language of our current lives, and of our commonly adopted city and immigrant identity. It was the language of the everyday, of learning, education, and work. By contrast, German was the language of cultural background, of family and childhood. German allowed us to think about being different from others in our adopted city. Yet German is equally the language laden with the history of the Shoah. In this sense, German links the past with the present, victims with perpetrators, and traumatic history with everyday experience.

POSTSCRIPT While my family history had been revealed, my personal experience of the German and Jewish question was still somewhat hidden. Our willingness to interact more openly with each other meant that new spaces for exploration were created. Daniel was ready to inquire further. What of my own family, he wanted to know? Daniel knew that I was married, but wanted to know more about my wife. In fact, he wanted to know whether my wife was Jewish. I replied that she was. Daniel’s response, as I remember it was: “Wirklich? [Really?] Wow!” This combination of German and English seemed somehow fitting, even playful. I awaited his reaction to this new information. Daniel said that this knowledge was comforting in some way and that it meant I might better be able to understand him. My relationship with my wife undoubtedly helped me negotiate German and Jewish history with Daniel. With time, my wife and I had leamed to address the differences between us as well as the meanings inherent in our contrasting identities. When I look at her, I don’t see someone who is Jewish, just as she does not see me as someone who is of German background. We respond to each other on the basis of our individual and shared experiences, our inherent understanding of one another’s needs and wishes. Our cultural identities are nevertheless real, and I have learned to be conscious of what is happening when these differences push into the foreground. This points to the way in which such categories as “German” or “Jewish” are open to change, depending on the shifting contexts of our lives. I suppose it was comforting for me to reveal to Daniel that my wife is Jewish. But I remember being puzzled by the emotions I felt. When I later shared my feeling of uneasiness with a German colleague, she

responded that for some Germans the situation of being married to someone who was Jewish might help them allay feelings of guilt. In other words, the fact that my wife was Jewish might imply that I no longer had to experience inherited guilt or shame about the past. My colleague’s response reminded me of my long-held wish for a family member who had stood up against the tyranny and terror of the Nazis. To have such a relative might mean that I could feel differently about the past. Was it a need to appear as a “good” German, rather than revert back to the possibility of being a “bad” German, burdened by the weight of historical guilt? The difficulty, of course, is that our lived reality is never so neat. Our desire for singular definitions and identities can be strong, especially when we want to avoid complex and frequently incompatible feelings about who we are. The complexity of emotion I am describing was reflected in a dream I had approximately a year after Daniel and I began working together. The location of my dream was Hanover and the language was German. I can recall only fragments, and what I remember left me feeling fearful. I was on my own somewhere in the city and being pursued by Nazi soldiers. I was looking urgently for shelter, someplace I could hide and elude my pursuers. They were coming ever closer, and I awoke, shaken. It was the first dream I can recall in which my life was overtly threatened by Nazis. My wife has described having these dreams from a young age once she leamed about the Holocaust. In chapter 1 I describe the dream about Nazis that Margit experienced the night after she found out that her mother was Jewish and a Holocaust survivor. Some observers might consider my dream to be a reflection of my work with Daniel and the experience he described of growing up. For me the significance of the dream lies in the fact that it captures a shift in my felt sense of history. My experience of my German background had begun to change. Through my work with Daniel, I began to comprehend, more clearly than before and notably in my mother tongue, what it was like to be a victim of the Nazi regime. Neither Daniel nor I had lived in Germany, though its history continued to shape our experience of one another. Perhaps Daniel and I had finally come full circle. German was a language that connected us once again, precisely, I believe, because we were able to acknowledge our historically determined differences within it. Over the years I have worked with a number of second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors. If I am asked about my cultural background I am more able to explore and answer my patient’s questions than I was when I first worked with Daniel, whose therapy took place earlier in my career. In situations today I find that sharing my personal familiarity with Judaism can help to create a sense of safety in the therapeutic setting. My work with Daniel has enabled me to speak more openly about my family history, although when faced with

questions about being German in a Jewish context, I find that I am still anxious. I was recently at one of my wife’s family gatherings and was introduced to someone I knew in advance to be a Holocaust survivor. I felt a sudden nervousness, even though I recognized that this kind, elderly man knew nothing about me and was unlikely to have any bias toward me if he did. The burden of history and the traumas of the Holocaust remain; their impact is no less real despite the distance of time. It was a burden I felt most acutely when I first spoke about the Holocaust to my daughter. She was still quite young, and I sought to answer her many questions and to wade through the confusion of our shared and multiple identities. The conversation is ongoing, as it is with my son, and this book is an outgrowth of that shared process. How do we talk about the Holocaust; how do we recognize what its traumas can tell us? History is not only “known,” it is “lived.” As a result of my work with Daniel I am more willing to confront and live with my shame about that history, though it continues to be a challenge.

CHAPTER 4

Whose Suffering? Narratives of Trauma The sound of a plane flying overhead fills me with a sudden sense of dread, an embodied feeling, unmistakable. I am walking down a street close to my former home on the Upper West Side of New York. The sensation begins at the base of my spine and rises up my neck. At that point I reflect on the feeling and remind myself, thinking logically for a moment that it is highly unlikely anything will plunge from the sky, not like on September 11, 2001. The day was remarkable for its early fall warmth, the sky a dazzling blue. I know because I stood outside and often looked up throughout the day, waiting for my wife to come home from work, as she made her way through midtown Manhattan and Central Park, joining a mass of people streaming up from lower Manhattan, searching for a way, any way, to get off the island. I held my eight—month—old daughter in my arms throughout the moming as I altemately watched the scenes unfolding on the television and stood outside, hearing the sirens of emergency vehicles screaming down to the site of the crash at the World Trade Center a few kilometers away—or was it just a crash? Surely the speculation on the television news about an act of terrorism must be wrong. Later that day there is a candlelight vigil around the corner from our apartment building. People stand quietly, in shock. No one says much; what is there to say? Everyone seems to know someone who was in the area that day. My wife, who has come home, describes the screams and then uncontrollable sobbing of a woman at work that morning. Her husband worked on an upper floor of one of the two towers and wouldn’t answer his phone. My wife was supposed to start working high up in one of the World Trade Center towers on January 1, 2002; three and one-half months were all that separated us from tragedy. The next day, September 12, I walk by the long line of people who wait to give blood, though none is needed. There are no survivors. But no one knows that yet. I am on my way to the Red Cross building to see if there is anything I can do. I join a large group of medical workers, all hoping to be able to do something, all feeling utterly helpless. A scuffle breaks out, shouting. Some have been waiting all night to be taken down to the World Trade Center site. They feel that the new arrivals are pushing them out of place. No one knows what to

do with the feelings they are experiencing. Frightened. Powerless. I walk back home some hours later, passing by our local Upper West Side fire station. There is an odd hush in the air, and people are congregating outside. Some are crying. There are missing firefighters. Many. No one is sure yet how many. Photos of some of the confirmed missing have been set up against a wall. Someone has laid flowers down beneath a photo. There will be seven in all. Seven firefighters from “Ladder 25” killed while climbing stairs to rescue those at the top of the towers. This is the same fire station that I will pass by countless times when I begin walking my daughter to elementary school four years later. The station is just down the block from the Jewish Community Center, which soon erects large and formidable barriers along both sides of the building. The danger is amorphous yet real. Four years after September 11 I begin taking my daughter to school. I hold her small hand in mine as we make our way through New York’s busy streets. The sound of planes flying overhead still gives me the eerie yet familiar sensation in my back. I remind myself, as I always do, that it will be OK. I am never certain about that, not anymore, but I hope it. For our sake and for hers. It is not until much later that I become aware of the associations, that I am able to make sense of the links between the past and the present. When I was a university student in London there were bombings in the city: the Irish Republican Army at work. The conflict in Northern Ireland filled the newspapers on a daily basis, and what seemed far away occasionally became much closer. But it was never as close as or evoked in me the dread that I felt on September 11. As a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst working in Manhattan in the months and years following the events of September 11, I saw countless people affected by the traumas of the World Trade Center attacks. The experiences my patients shared with me at some point began to overwhelm me. I kept imagining an overflowing emergency room at the hospital where I worked. I had to limit my exposure, turn off the TV, stop answering people’s questions from afar about what had happened. There is another side to this story. The terrible events of that day had somehow become linked to my past, to a history that is not my own: my mother’s stories of her childhood in Hanover, of bombings and nightly sprints to the bomb shelter trying to keep hold of my grandmother’s sweaty hand. The bombing raids were always at night, a suffocating darkness broken only by tracers and spotlights searching for bombers flying overhead. The memories filled me with anxiety from a young age. The emotions I sensed in my mother’s voice led me to associate images with the stories she told: the drone of the air raid sirens, the rumble of squadrons of bombers, the sound of bombs

whirring down, the impact of multiple, successive explosions that made the dash to safety so difficult, all culminating in the bombing and destruction of my mother’s home. I was shaped by the memory of traumatic events that I never knew directly. It wasn’t until September 11 that I recognized the meaning these memories held for me, their lingering but unmistakable impact. When we moved away from New York many years later I realized that a recurring dream had stopped. I had been dreaming, frequently at first, less often over time, of burning towers. In my dream I would see the towers from afar, sense the danger and the fear but be unable to do anything about it; unable to douse the flames or help those affected. At some point I would awaken from the nightmare. Anxious. The burning towers had come to symbolize the images of my lived experience. Yet my dream had tumed day to night. The flames lashed out yellow and orange against a black sky, the same inky darkness I had long ago associated with my mother’s sprints to the bomb shelter. Sitting in the comfort of my childhood home, I would listen to my motl1er’s memories of the air war and be taken to another time and place. The stories of nightly bombings were all from afar. Though her memories preceded me, they also came to possess me, their reality hardly diminished by the shifting contexts of our lives. Only now, as an adult, have I come to understand and articulate what I already imagined at a young age, transported from the present into the past by the traumatic events of September 11. Today I live in Vancouver with my family, three decades after I first left Canada. Planes fly overhead, and their sound alerts me, but it no longer fills me with anxiety. The recurring nightmare that began after the attack on the World Trade Center finally stopped when I moved to Vancouver, a place of relative calm. The meaning of my memories is different now. Their articulation on these pages makes them less threatening, but the sensations they evoke are still palpable. My inherited memories exist side by side with my experiences of September 11, their conflation, I realize, a source of my anxiety. In her memoir After Such Knowledge, Hoffman articulates her own response to the events of September 11. Living in England, she sees the images of the jetliners smashing into the World Trade Center on her television set. Hoffman worked in New York for many years before moving to London, and the images of unfolding trauma have a powerful impact on her. But their resonance reaches beyond the present moment, into the past, illustrating the power of inherited

memory. As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, September 11 confirms for Hoffman what she has always known implicitly: that there is no way to predict what is to come. Her sense of disorientation at seeing the television footage of death and destruction gives way to a host of

emotions: helplessness and rage. These responses connect Hoffman

with the sensations and memories she received from her parents. The imaginary way in which she had always expected catastrophe to occur is now experienced with a terrifying immediacy. Reflecting on the power of the past to affect how she experiences the present, Hoffman states:

For a person like myself, perhaps for anyone who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and for whom that devastation was the Event, it was hard not to read the tremors of the present through the prism of the earlier earthquake, not to discern parallels, or worry about their implications. Certainly the psychic links seemed inescapable. A daughter of Holocaust survivors told me that September 11 pierced through a carefully erected shield of defenses to awaken disabling anxieties she thought she had long put to rest. A German woman who was a child during the war reported that after the attacks, all those decades later, she began dreaming for the first time about the savage bombardments of German cities she witnessed at the end of the war. It would be selfindulgent in the extreme to think that children of the war were especially affected by September 11; but we undoubtedly have our associations. (2004, pp. 239-240)

I began with these reflections on September 11 because I wish to examine the nature of inherited memories, particularly the narratives of trauma that are passed down from one generation to the next. For me the attacks of September 11 raised the specter of my mother’s experience during the Allied bombing raids on Hanover in the Second World War. For Hoffman September 11 touched on her “subliminal expectation of catastrophe” as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. This juxtaposition of divergent yet seemingly related responses to September 11 suggests that narratives of German wartime experience exist alongside the received memories of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. However, any attempt at comparison between the German and Jewish experience is inherently problematic, even morally suspect. As Hoffman states: “One cannot—should not—draw conclusions from nightmares. For one thing, it would be wrongheaded to bring the same historical analysis to the dreams of a German and a Jewish childhood. The dreams may be equally disturbing; but their larger causes are very different, and taking note of the differences is as crucial for a rightful understanding of events as compassion for individual suffering” (2004, p. 239). The German experience of the Second World War is a difficult and controversial topic. German civilians endured many years of unrelenting bombing that led to widespread death and destruction. Germans who fled the eastern territories in advance of the Soviet army or were expelled from countries in Eastern Europe in the years after the war lost their homes and all physical connection to their past. In

the final year of the war German women were raped in alarmingly high numbers.1 The fact that such experiences could result in trauma is difficult to question. But how does one address the notion of suffering in a nation that perpetrated the Holocaust, orchestrated crimes against humanity on an unimaginable scale, and was responsible for a savage war throughout Europe? The traumas experienced by individual Germans pale in the full glare of the crimes committed by the murderous Nazi regime. After the Holocaust, is it really possible to talk about “German suffering?” And when Germans focus on their own traumas, do they avoid talking about the suffering their nation caused others? The questions I am posing are not rhetorical. They go to the heart of the challenges facing German memory discourse, whether in private families or public discussions about the Nazi past. Drawing on my inherited memories, I suggest that German wartime experience tends to be remembered in isolation from its historical circumstances. When Germans focus on their own wartime traumas, they easily lose sight of the moral contexts in which those traumas occurred. When this happens intergenerational memory discourse in German families gives way to talk of victimization. The kind of moral slippage I am describing creates narratives of the past that are ahistorical. Memories are shared in isolation of the horrors committed, keeping the Nazi past and the role of family members as perpetrators and bystanders at bay. To my mind the issue is not whether individual Germans did or did not suffer during the Second World War. Wartime trauma is real, as are its lasting psychological effects. The problem that concems me is what happens when the traumatic experiences of individual Germans are generalized to a population as a whole. Indeed, the very notion of “German suffering” is highly problematic, since it refers back to a notion of “Germanness” that excludes the experiences of those Germans—Jewish, Roma, Sinti, gays, lesbians, the mentally and physically disabled, and other “undesirables”—against whom a policy of genocide was carried out in the name of the German nation.2 My aim is to address how the traumas that took place in wartime Germany are remembered. I proceed with a measure of caution, respectful of the fact that there are people who continue to feel these traumas. My discussion focuses on what is remembered and forgotten in the intergenerational German dialogue about the past. Because this dialogue often lacks a broader historical and moral context, I examine the experience of my own family side by side with the experience of German-Jewish families, and the wartime narrative of my grandfather side by side with the experience of concentration camp prisoners and forced laborers. In the process I seek to develop a kind of “moral compass” for understanding inherited German memories and the suffering of those who lived through the war and survived the

Holocaust.

GERMAN SUFFERING? The bombing of German cities by Allied air forces in the Second World War has long been a point of contention. The firestorms that followed the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and Pforzheim caused huge loss of life and a lifetime of traumatic memories for those who survived. An estimated 37,000 people died in the port city of Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah, the code name given to several nights of bombing starting on July 24, 1943. The destruction of the historic city of Dresden on February 13-15, 1944 is steeped in controversy and has become a rallying cry for Germans who feel that their suffering is overlooked.3 Over the course of the air war approximately 380,000 Germans were killed.4 The human toll and devastation caused by the

bombings raises questions about a strategic campaign that was ever more focused on the deaths of civilians and the destruction of cities once military targets had been destroyed. Since the turn of the millennium a host of books have been published on the topic of air war, spurred on by a widespread belief that talk of German suffering has generally been avoided.5 In his wellknown book On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald addresses the perceived silence about the air war.5 He suggests that German postwar literature has failed to address the effects of the Allied bombing campaign on German civilians in an act that amounts to a kind of willed amnesia: The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of Vague generalizations. It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness, it has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and it never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country. (2003, p. 4)

Sebald explains the cause of this silence by drawing on a number of well-rehearsed themes in postwar German memory. Silence about German wartime suffering is perceived as the result of the manic, future-oriented work of rebuilding after the war; the desire among individuals to reinvent themselves and their pasts; the difficulty of retelling events that often defy description; and the social taboo on discussing German suffering in the face of the Holocaust, the idea that perpetrators cannot also be sufferers. Whereas Sebald is concemed with the perceived lack of discourse about the bombings, Jorg Friedrich has little difficulty finding words to describe the suffering of German civilians. His book, The Fire: The

Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (2006), discusses the aerial war from the perspective of the citizens of towns and cities that were bombed. It is a veritable encyclopedia of facts and detailed descriptions of gruesome death and mass destruction.7 Friedrich’s accounts of death by incineration, asphyxiation, or melting asphalt, which resulted from the widespread use of incendiary bombs, are terrible to contemplate. By focusing specifically on the experience of the bombed, Friedrich’s analysis creates a kind of memorial to German suffering. This makes his work provocative and suspect in equal measure. Friedrich accepts that once Western Europe was under German control, Britain would use all means to defend itself against German aggression. He also describes the harrowing and increasingly short lives of the Allied bomber crews, whose dangerous missions would result in the deaths of some 55,000 airmen. Yet Friedrich pays less attention to the fact that the Allied bombing campaign, no matter how destructive, followed on the heels of earlier German bombings of urban centers: of Madrid in 1936, Guernica in 1937, Warsaw in 1939, and Rotterdam in 1940; the London Blitz beginning in 1940; and the destruction of Coventry in 1941. These attacks on civilian populations were gratuitous, and as historian Charles Maier (2005) observes, “the Basque city [Guernica] served little military purpose, and victory was already at hand when Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed” (p.430). German bombing raids seemed designed chiefly to terrorize and demoralize the civilian populations under attack. In Friedrich’s description of the air war it is German civilians who are terrorized. The bombed are caught between the horrors of nightly Allied bombing raids and the evils of a National Socialist regime that does not sufficiently protect them in the face of the onslaught. Friedrich’s reliance on eyewitness accounts and local histories of the bombings results in a emotive but one-sided view of what happened. There is little reference to the fact that the victims of the bombings belonged to a nation of perpetrators or that civil society was entirely structured to service the needs of the Nazi state. In Friedrich’s recounting of the events, those who endured the bombings are the victims, and it takes only a small step for the reader to conclude that their victimization is on a par with that of the actual victims of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the most revealing part of Friedrich’s analysis is the language he employs to describe the bombings. Friedrich draws direct analogies to the horrors of the Holocaust when, for example, he likens the cellars under burning buildings to “crematoria” and explains the Allied policy as “annihilation from the air” and as a “politics of extermination.”8 In the process Friedrich’s book gives voice to a longstanding German belief that the aerial bombardment constitutes an unacknowledged “Holocaust” in its own right, unleashed against the

German people by the Allies. Friedrich’s analysis of the bombings supports the view that nationstates behave much like individuals; they inevitably identify their own pain and suffering before they recognize the suffering they have inflicted on others. It is surely easier to focus on the deaths of German civilians in the bombing raids than to think about the six million murdered European Jews, of which over one million were children; easier to see the bombing as a catastrophe that has befallen the innocent than it is to explain the path that led to the destruction of German cities. During the war there were those who sought to challenge Germans to recognize their actions. The Nobel Prize—winning German author Thomas Mann fled his native country when the Nazis came to power. After the war started Mann made a monthly radio broadcast on the BBC, in which he urged his German listeners to resist Hitler. His most famous broadcast took place on April 11, 1942, shortly after the first British bombing of Liibeck, the city of his birth and the location of his well—known early stories. In his broadcast Mann shares his sorrow at the news of the damage to his beloved city, but he also provides his German listeners with a rationale for the attack. He speaks of the Luftwaffe’s earlier bombing raids on cities in Spain and Poland, and above all of the aerial bombardment of Coventry and Rotterdam. Then Mann turns to the question of German suffering: Now the time

nears and is already here when Germany must sob about its sufferings, and this cause for sobbing will increase... Did Germany believe that it would never have to pay for the misdeeds that its lead into barbarism allowed it to commit? It has begun to pay What the Royal Air Force has brought about thus far in Cologne, Diisseldorf, Essen, Hamburg and other cities is only a beginning... In the latest British raids on the hinterland the old Liibeck has been made to suffer. That affects me. It is my native city. It is hard for me to think that the Marienkirche, the beautiful Renaissance city hall or the House of the Shipping Society have been damaged. But I think of Coventry and have no objection to the lesson that everything will be paid for. There will be more Liibecks, more Hamburgs, Colognes and Diisseldorfs for which there can be no objections. (2013, pp. 58-59) own

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Mann’s statement is an important reminder of the need to recognize the reality of German wartime trauma within the broader context of Germany’s war of aggression. Despite the destruction inflicted on German cities and their inhabitants, Mann ultimately believed that the bombings were a necessary means to defeat a criminal regime. A related perspective has been expressed by the German-Jewish writer and publicist Ralph Giordano. He survived not only the bombing of Hamburg, but also 12 years of living under the Nazi

regime. The son of an Italian immigrant and a German-Jewish mother, Giordano was 10 years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He soon felt the effects of the racist policies enacted in his native city of Hamburg. Giordano (2011) states that one of the most painful moments in his life occurred in 1935 when his best friend suddenly told him they could no longer play together because Giordano was Jewish: “Even today, when I relate this story to you, cold shivers run down my spine. Later I experienced horrible things under arrest from the Gestapo. But these words, ‘Ale (my nickname), we’re not going to play with you anymore, you are a Jew’—that was a minute, a second that I will never forget, not even if I were to live to be 150 years old.” In the years that followed Giordano was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo several times and in 1940 was forced to leave school altogether. Somehow the Giordano family managed to remain in Hamburg, where they experienced first-hand the horror of the bombings. Giordano recounts the firestorm of July 24, 1943, in which so many died and much of the city was left in ruins. He and his family lost their home and were lucky to escape with their lives. After spending a year outside the city they returned to Hamburg. Shortly before the end of the war Giordano’s Jewish mother received her deportation order. The family was able to escape the Nazis when a friend hid them in a cellar. In the last months of the war their food supply dried up, and their situation became extremely dire. It was the British capture of the city on May 4, 1945, that finally saved them. As Giordano (2011) puts it, “My family won the race between the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ and the final victory of the Allies only by a hair’s breadt .” Giordano strongly objects to the way the debate over German suffering in the Allied bombing campaign has been carried out. The belief that Germans were victims of an unjust aerial war ignores German accountability for the war. Giordano argues that no measure of talk about German suffering can change the fact that it was Hitler and his mass of supporters who first and foremost bear responsibility, not only for the massive death toll of the war as a whole, but also for the high number of Germans who died in the air raids. Giordano (2003, p. 166) asserts that it is this responsibility, its causality and chronology, that must form the basis for any discussion of suffering. Despite experiencing first-hand the horror of Hamburg’s firestorm, Giordano perceives the Allied bombers as liberators. In a particularly emotive passage he states: Even in the midst of this inferno, those above us remained our liberators. Though it would have been a Very tragic fate indeed to have been killed by our liberators. But the bombs couldn’t distinguish between the persecutors and the persecuted. We were simply lucky... The air raids had a hand in the fact that I am sitting here before you today, and that .

many thousands, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners could also be liberated. (2011)

In the midst of the bombing raids and deaths of so many German children, the Nazi intention to annihilate Europe’s Jewish population continued unabated. Giordano recounts how on February 14, 1945, the moming after the city of Dresden was destroyed in the infamous Allied bombing attack that killed between 25,000 and 30,000 people, the last train transport left Hamburg for Theresienstadt. For Giordano this is not a mere historical fact but a powerful emotional reality. His was supposed to be on that train. As Giordano (2003) observes, “The end of the Third Reich was at hand, everything was falling down about them, yet Eichmann’s deportation machinery was still running” (p. 166).

mother

FAMILIAR STORIES Germans have always talked about their suffering. Any suggestion that there was a social taboo against talk of wartime experience must be questioned. Indeed, the recent shift in German memory discourse is not about filling in a silence but the expression of a narrative tradition that has existed since the end of the war. German memories of suffering were generated and maintained at the local level, in community histories and family stories. In the immediate postwar years most Germans were consumed with managing the emotional and physical costs of the war, giving way to sustained talk about their own plight. The focus on their own suffering meant that there was little motivation to address participation in and support for an immoral regime or its genocidal policies. It was certainly easier to identify as sufferers and victims than to experience guilt and shame for being perpetrators. The local histories of the time reflect this dynamic and concentrated on suffering, not on complicated entanglements in the regime. Until the early 1970s commemorations of the Second World War bombing raids referred to Germans as victims, free of any historical or moral considerations.9 I grew up hearing stories of the bombings and the suffering that followed. This was especially the case when I was visiting Germany and multiple generations of my family gathered. When I was young I assumed the war was a natural topic of discussion. There was a tacking to and fro, as it were, between the present and the past. Stories were shared about the past week, and then conversation morphed into stories from long ago, of suffering and struggle. Even as a young child the emotions inherent in some of these shared memories were palpable to me. They also held a certain fascination because the stories involved both my grandparents and my parents, giving me glimpses into my

parents’ childhoods and demonstrating just how radically different they were from my own. I associated with these felt memories before I became aware of the history of aggression and perpetration orchestrated by Germans and long before I grasped that my grandfather was a member of the Nazi Party. The difficulty, as German social psychologist Harald Welzer suggests, is that German memories of suffering are usually associated with strong emotion, whereas knowledge of the Holocaust is based on a kind of learned, cognitive awareness. This makes it easier for postwar Germans to connect with the suffering of family members than to see these same relatives as perpetrators and bystanders and reinforces the separation of German suffering from its historical context or the questions of morality that necessarily follow. The kind of felt memory I am describing also accounts for the popularity of books such as Friedrich’s, which focus on German suffering in isolation from its context. As Welzer (2005) states: “They are so successful because they are much closer to the felt history of Germans than the official stories of the destruction of European Jewry and other crimes of the Third Reich” (p. 29). My family narrative is hardly unique; mine was not the only family to experience bombings or tragedy and later talk about it. In the decades after the Second World War, the context of these family gatherings seemed to support and foster a singular focus on suffering. The first generation engaged in the telling of familiar stories and was joined by the second and eventually third generations. For many families, it seems, these familiar narratives, stories that were told over and over again, became a means to makes sense of the experiences of war.

In his autobiographical text In My Brother’s Shadow, German author Uwe Timm illustrates how his own family narrated the events of the war. Timm was born in 1940 and lived with his family in Hamburg during the firestorm. His book examines the way in which his parents narrate the bombings and the problematic history of his older brother, a member of the SS, who died when Timm was three years old. Timm’s discussion contributes to the discourse on German wartime suffering, but with an important difference: he retains a focus on guilt and moral responsibility. In contrast to many works in this oeuvre, he does not engage in the familiar sentiment of German victimhood. As a child Timm was haunted by images of fire, memory fragments that were later given shape by his family narrative. The narrative Timm describes constitutes a kind of oral history, communicated between the first and second generations, helping both to make sense of what had occurred. Looking back, Timm notes: Years after the

war

the tales of these events, tales that accompanied me

through my childhood, were told over and over again, gradually taking the edge off the original horror, making what had happened intelligible and finally entertaining: how my sister and my father first dumped our belongings in the middle of the street, then put the child, me, in the pram and covered me up with towels soaked at a burst water main, how my parents and sister, leaving the few things they had saved just where they were in the street, hurried down Osterstrasse in the direction of Schulweg, burning buildings to their right and left. (2005, pp. 31-32)

Timm reflects on the rationale behind the retelling of the story of the firestorm. He suggests that it was precisely the continual retelling, which became a kind of ritual, that made the event less formidable. As Timm observes, “The terror was broken down into details, made comprehensible, domesticated. It was dissipated, usually by anecdotes told in cozy company. Only very seldom, and then very suddenly, did the horror come through” (p. 93). Over time the familiar narrative began to shape how events were portrayed and conceived, structuring what was said and what remained unsaid. As Timm suggests, the process of telling the story of the firestorm made it seem less threatening, even “entertaining,” but involved a distancing from the historical context in which it occurred. Eventually shared stories could make the unimaginable seem somehow commonplace, free of any moral responsibility: These were the everyday stories told after the war, at work, in bars, at home, in dialect or in educated High German, and they ground down and wore away what had happened, and with it the guilt. And you could talk about it perfectly freely, something that seems unimaginable today. The Russians were still the enemy that had raped women, driven Germans out of their homes. They were still starving German prisoners of war, and no one asked questions about guilt, or the chronology and causes of these cruelties. The Germans themselves had only been carrying out orders. From the private all the way up to Field Marshal Keitel, who explained to the Nuremberg court that he was not guilty, for after all, he had been obeying orders. (2005, pp. 120-121)

While the official discourse of postwar Germany banished such talk of suffering and violence, it clearly persisted in private conversations, spurred on by a deep—seated feeling of victimization. It was, in effect, a discourse of grievances. The focus on wartime suffering led inevitably to a blurring of the boundary between victim and perpetrator. Reflecting on his parents’ attitude after the war, Timm writes: My parents’

set phrase for what had happened to them was a blow dealt by fate, a fate beyond the reach of personal influence. Our boy and our home both lost: it was the kind of remark that saved you having to think

about the reasons. You felt that with that suffering you had done your bit for general atonement. Everything was dreadful for the very reason that you had been a victim yourself, a victim of a collective and inexplicable fate. (2005, p. 82)

Timm’s account of his family suggests that the Nazi period lived on in the prevailing belief systems and stories that were told after the war. His parents’ sense of their own victimization, like his brother’s decision to join the SS, remained unquestioned, a vestige of the Third Reich’s values. Seen from this perspective, the compelling question is not whether wartime suffering was silenced, but what has remained unsaid in those familiar family narratives that were told over and over again in the decades after the war. Timm’s autobiographical reflections are supported by the observations of German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who visited Germany in 1950. It was the first time Arendt had returned to her native country after fleeing for Paris in 1933.10 Once the Nazis occupied Paris, Arendt escaped a second time and fled to the United States in 1941. She taught in the philosophy department of The New School in New York, and it was shortly after completing the manuscript for her famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that she visited Germany. In “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,” Arendt discusses the enormity of German denial and indifference, pointing directly at shared evasive techniques: Indifference, and the irritation that comes when indifference is challenged, can be tested on many levels. The most obvious experiment is to state what the other fellow has noticed from the beginning of the conversation, namely, that you are a Jew. This is usually followed by a little embarrassed pause; and then comes—not a personal question, such as “Where did you go after you left Germany?”; no sign of sympathy, such as “What happened to your family?”—but a deluge of stories about how Germans have suffered (true enough, of course, but beside the point); and if the object of this little experiment happens to be educated and intelligent, he will proceed to draw up a balance between German suffering and the suffering of others, the implication being that one side cancels the other and we may well proceed to a more promising topic of conversation. Similarly evasive is the standard reaction to the ruins. When there is any overt reaction at all, it consists in a sigh followed by the half-rhetorical, half-wistful question, “Why must mankind always wage wars?” The average German looks for the causes of the last war not in the acts of the Nazi regime, but in the events that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. Such an escape from reality is also, of course, an escape from responsibility. (1950, pp. 342-343; emphasis added)

HANOVER

I remember standing in Hanover’s “new city hall” for the first time, staring transfixed at giant models of the city. I was a curious 11-yearold boy, a visitor from afar, yet strangely linked to what I beheld. Two of the models showed in great detafl contrasting versions of Hanover, one as the city appeared in 1939, before the start of the war, and the second in 1945, at the end of the war. The models of the city were large-scale replicas, remarkable in their level of architectural detail. The first model showed a city with its medieval center intact and the grand avenues and plazas that surrounded it; the other showed a city in utter ruin, a result of the physical destruction wrought by the bombings. It was very much like looking at a before and after photograph, the architectural rendering adding a further dimension that made a strong impression on its viewers. The designers of the models dared viewers to imagine what it was like to live through the devastation that had transfonned the city to rubble. I found the models engrossing and remember that my parents had to pull me away. My curiosity had to do with seeing a three-dimensional representation of the bombing I had hitherto only heard about. 7

”fir”**

—

Photo 2: Hanover’s bombed city center, with a View of the Aegidien church and the Opera House, early 1945. HAZ-Hauschild-Archiv, Historisches Museum Hannover.

The damage to Hanover was severe. In the city center over 90

percent of the structures were destroyed, including the majestic city hall. Hanover became a major target for strategic bombing during the Second World War because it was a transportation junction and a center of production for war-related industries. As the Allied bombing strategy grew to include civilian targets, residential areas were widely bombed, and some 7,000 people died, of which 1,000 were forced laborers. This was considerably less than in other urban centers of Gennany, in part because there was significant construction of bomb shelters prior to the intensification of the air war. The first bombs fell on the night of May 19, 1940, and bombing raids lasted until shortly before the American anny captured the city on April 10, 1945. Over the course of the war there were a total of 88 bombing raids on the city. Hanover experienced its heaviest bombing on the night of October 8-9, 1943. Massive numbers of incendiary bombs were dropped on the city, leaving approximately 1,250 people dead and a quarter million homeless. When the city was rebuilt after the war a few of the medieval buildings were salvaged or reconstructed, but the 14th-century Aegidienkirche was left in ruins, a symbol of the destruction of war.“ Postwar Hanover retains little of its original historical character (see Photo 2).

Photo 3: A Nazi parade through central Hanover, 1936. HAZ-HauschildArchiv, Historisches Museum Hannover.

My fascination with the models of Hanover was inherently connected to the family narrative I grew up with. Seeing the two models of the city side by side provided me with a sense of what my mother and her family had lived through. The physical destruction of the city was shown in forbidding detail. But the models were also inherently limited because they reduced the complexity of the war to a single dimension: from prewar architectural splendor in 1939 to postwar ruin in 1945. Like the narratives of German wartime suffering, the models seemed to lack historical and moral context. The model of Hanover in 1939 showed no Nazi flags, no Nazi insignias on any major buildings, no men in Nazi uniform, no children in the dress of the Hitler Youth movement or League of German Girls. Indeed, Hanover’s eager and enthusiastic support of Hitler and the Nazi regime was entirely absent (see Photo 3). Nor was there any indication in either model of Hanover where the once—thriving Jewish area of the city was located. The models did not tell the viewers of the terror experienced by the Jewish community or that Hanover’s industries relied on forced labor from seven concentration subcamps and hundreds of forced labor camps in and around the city center. In fact, the persecution and murder of the Jewish community did not result from the Allied bombing campaign but from the hateful actions carried out by the city’s inhabitants before and during the war. These were the same people who lived through the terrible destruction portrayed in the model of the ruined city. No amount of falling bombs, physical damage, or emotional trauma in the midst of war would change the legislated policy of genocide.

THE BOMB It fell on the night of September 27-28, 1943. The bomb struck the back of the house and left a large crater in the ground. It was an explosive charge, not an incendiary bomb. That was fortunate, because my grandfather was in a so-called strong room in the cellar, on the opposite side of the house from where the bomb hit. There was no fire, only destruction. According to the local air raid warden who inspected the house on the same day, if the bomb had been dropped a moment earlier it would likely have fallen directly where my grandfather was sheltered and cost him his life. An oft-repeated story (see Photo 4). My mother had spent the night in the local bomb shelter with her younger brother and my grandmother. There was talk of an unwritten policy that men were allowed into the shelters only after the women and children were safely inside. This meant that some looked for safety elsewhere. When she went home early the next morning she walked around a host of deep craters where bombs had fallen. When they reached the house it looked normal, at least from the front. My

grandfather met his family on the street and took them around to the back of the house, which was no longer there (see Photo 5). For my eight—year—old mother and her six-year-old brother, the shock of seeing their home destroyed was indescribable. My mother remembers shaking with emotion. My uncle still has a distant look on his face when he speaks about the moment he saw it. The relief they felt at knowing their father had survived vied with sadness at the loss of their home and all their possessions. The feeling was above all one of disorientation. They all knew they might lose their home in a bombing raid. It had happened in the center of Hanover many times already, but this was the first time the bombs had fallen in the area where they lived. Their house was the only one destroyed that night. A sobering assessment of the Royal Air Force raid on Hanover on September 27-28, 1943, suggests that “little” was accomplished.” The family would spend the remainder of the war living in small rooms in nearby buildings that had escaped serious damage. Visits to the bomb shelter increased over time. As the war progressed, the family increasingly stayed there from one night to the next. My aunt was born in April 1944 and lived in the bomb shelter for much of her first year, separated from the chaos outside by concrete walls that were over a meter thick. Bombed houses and bomb shelters. Near misses and lucky escapes.

Photo 4: The family home in Hanover in the mid-1930s.

THE BOMB SHELTER Be

play a promment role 1n German memory of wartlme oxmmrb.mfinemml. They were built in urban centers throughout Germany, m

3

and because they are virtually indestructible, many exist to this day. war the bomb shelters were incorporated into West Germany’s civil defense plan. But for Nazi leaders, the notion of building shelters to protect civilians from aerial bombardments ran counter to their ideology; they viewed bomb shelter construction as a kind of passive response to enemy attacks and a symbol of German weakness. It was not until the first British air attacks on Berlin in 1940 that Hitler began an emergency bunker construction program. Despite their widespread construction there were never enough bomb shelters, and the strength of the buildings was often uneven. Reports of bombs breaking through the roofs of shelters and exploding inside were quickly suppressed by the Nazi leadership. Yet this happened with some regularity as the war dragged on and more powerful bombs were deployed. By war’s end some people avoided bomb shelters altogether rather than risk being entombed.

After the

Photo 5: The bomb-damaged family home, September 1943.

The bomb shelter is central to my mother’s memories of the air raids on Hanover. She describes the shrill blaring of the air raid sirens that would awaken her at night and the shock waves of exploding

bombs that made nightly sprints to the bomb shelter so difficult. As a child these fearsome memories left me feeling anxious. I was always relieved to know there was a place that had offered her protection. The bomb shelter held my attention.

Photo 6: The bomb shelter used by my mother and her family today. Michael Grube, www.geschichtsspuren.de.

as

it looks

My mother began to use the local bomb shelter soon after it was constructed in 1942, the year the bombing raids on Hanover intensified. She was six years old at the time. The bomb shelter was designed as a so-called high-rise bunker (Hochbunker) and was built to house several hundred people. Three stories tall, with windowless concrete walls and a red tiled roof, it survives to this day, empty and locked up, an eerie reminder of the Second World War (see Photo 6). Growing up, I created a mental image of the bomb shelter, a dark and frightening place, but also one of safety, with the potential to survive mortal threats. When I was young I re—created the shelter in the form of what I called my “fort” under the stairs. There were of course no bombs falling in the Canada of my childhood. The shelter I built was an echo of another time, a place to keep peril at bay. When I look back at my childhood I recognize an implicit yet unmistakable sense of danger, of a catastrophe waiting to happen. This sensation was reflected in my parents’ anxieties, which always seemed to me to be lurking just under the surface. Of course in hindsight it is easy to draw these kinds of emotional connections. We should be careful not

to engage in reductive psychologizing, because our lives are always multiply determined. Yet the Second World War casts a long shadow, and the traumas of my parents’ childhoods, like the bombings and destruction they experienced, are a part of my history. It would be many years before I grasped the connection between my fort under the stairs and my inherited memories, inchoate sensations of the past that were handed down to me. My attempt to understand what it was like to experience the bombings led me to read widely about the use of German bomb shelters during the Second World War. I imagine that many urban families in Germany have similar memories of what took place; indeed, there is a certain repetitiveness in the stories I read that blunts the gravity of the events described. In a local history book about Hanover I encountered one account that seemed vaguely familiar. I had to read it several more times before I was able to comprehend that the names on the page belonged to my own family. It was the story of my grandmother and my aunt who was born late in the war. The words are unambiguous: The Andresen family is living in the city hall and is awaiting the birth of a new child. The house of the Andresen family was the first in Vinnhorst to be bombed... On the night of April 10, 1944, a girl is brought into the world with the help of a midwife. The birth takes place in a room in the city hall... The air raid siren sounds and everything must be packed up in order to reach the bomb shelter. The newly born infant is put in a carrier as the first bombs fall. Halfway to the bomb shelter cover is sought in a ditch beside the road. The mother and infant reach the bomb shelter unscathed, where they remain for the next nine days, resulting in a widespread rumor that the child was born in the bomb shelter... The Americans enter into the northern part of Hanover on April 10, 1945, the child’s first birthday. (Meyer 8: Klingebiel, 1996, p. 15) .

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The narrative was presumably recorded by a local historian. Exactly where and when is a mystery to me. I find the image of my grandmother in a ditch with my newly born aunt, only a few hours old, while bombers fly overhead dropping their payload, very distressing. I had heard some version of the story before, though from the perspective of my mother. She remembers entering the bomb shelter on April 9, 1945, on the eve of aunt’s first birthday and the day before the Americans arrived. Fighting was raging all around, and as she ran with my grandfather to the shelter the earth was shaking from the many explosions. The next day, when my mother came out of the bomb shelter with her parents, brother, and one-year-old sister, the ground was littered with the dead bodies of Hitler youth who had made a suicidal attempt to stop the American army’s advance over a local bridge. Despite my attempt to keep stories like this at a distance,

the fears and anxieties I feel seem little diminished by time.

HAN OVER’S JEWISH COMMUNITY While my family found refuge and lived to tell their story, there was no safety for Hanover’s Jewish citizens. They continued to be arrested and deported to concentration camps, where most were murdered. Before the onset of National Socialism Hanover had one of the ten largest Jewish populations in Germany, more than 5,000 people.” It was a vibrant community whose roots dated back to the 13th century, well before the construction of the Aegidienkirche. The Jewish community had more than 20 cultural and welfare institutions and was an integral part of the city’s cultural life and urban fabric. The majestic central synagogue, designed by Edwin Oppler in 1870 and built in the neo-romantic style, stood proudly near the city center. Its construction represented the emancipation of GerInany’s Jewish population, an end to centuries of discrimination (see Photo 7). After the Nazi’s election in March 1933 no measure of integration into German society mattered. The laws that protected German Jews were simply ignored and rewritten. No one of Jewish background was safe. The anti—Jewish boycott began when the Karstadt Department store in central Hanover fired all its Jewish employees, the same store in which my mother would apprentice during the 1950s. In May 1933 there was anti—Jewish rioting, and these attacks continued throughout the following years. German Jews were dismissed from their jobs as businesses and professions were “Aryanized.” Jewish school children faced isolation and mistreatment and eventually were no longer allowed to attend “German” schools. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated (see Photo 8). The acts of discrimination and terror came to a head on the night of November 9, 1938, known as the Kristallnacht pogrom. Over the next two days Nazi brown shirts, with the direct and indirect support of much of the population, flooded cities and towns, where they committed widespread violence against GerInany’s Jewish communities. In Hanover the central synagogue became a rallying point for the hatred as it bumed to the ground. The deeply disturbing image of that violent act is portrayed on the cover of this book. The raging synagogue fire is horrific to behold, its juxtaposition to the traditional timbered German houses giving added meaning to the historical and cultural context of the time. The photo was taken from the bell tower of a church that stood opposite the synagogue.15 The two religious structures, synagogue and church, were built on either side of a square, a poignant symbol of the equality that had existed between Jews and Christians in Germany in the decades before 1933.

Hannouer

Synagoge

Photo 7: The central synagogue in Hanover before its destruction, late 1800s. The Archives, Yad Vashem.

The photograph of the burning synagogue (see Photo 9) conveys the sheer and unbridled malice that drove the murderous Nazi ideology. Such images are an important reminder of the violence endured by

communities throughout Germany. The devastation of Kristallnacht was not limited to the central synagogue. Virtually all the stores and businesses owned by Hanover’s Jewish citizens were destroyed, and their homes were ransacked. In response to the unfolding terror some German Jews committed suicide. Others were murdered in the rampage. In Hanover the Nazis arrested 334 men and sent them to the Buchenwald concentration camp, located just outside the town of Weimar, Germany’s historical and intellectual center.” Jewish

Photo 8: A desecrated Jewish cemetery in Hanover, 1946. The Archives, Yad Vashem

Photo 9: Burning synagogue in Hanover on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938. HAZ-Hauschild-Archiv, Historisches Museum Hannover.

By the start of the war Hanover’s Jewish community numbered only about 2,000. Those who could emigrate had already left Germany. In early September 1941 the remaining community members were “ghettoized” and forced to live in deplorable conditions in 15 so—called Judenhduser (Jewish houses) that were spread around the city. Among this number was the Kleeberg family.” Their daughter, Ruth Kleeberg, was born in 1933, which meant that she was only two years older than my mother and father. Despite living in the same city and only a few kilometers away from my mother’s family, the disparity between Ruth’s childhood and that of my mother is vast and chilling. In 1933, a short time after Ruth’s birth, her father, Erich Kleeberg, was dismissed from his banking job because he was Jewish. Over the coming years Ruth’s mother Maria, who was Christian, was increasingly harassed by the Gestapo in an attempt to get her to divorce her Jewish husband. Ruth’s patemal grandparents soon moved in with her parents. The family lived in worry and fear as they watched the events unfold around them. In 1939 all German Jews were issued with identity cards that were stamped with a large letter “J” for Juden. Women were forced to adopt the middle name “Sara” and men the middle name “Israel,” and all were forbidden to leave their homes after 8:00 pm. By 1940 Ruth was no longer permitted to attend school. From September 1941 onward, every German Jew was forced to wear

yellow star with the word Jude imprinted on it. The Jewish badge, as it became known, was one of the most ubiquitous anti-Semitic measures imposed by the Nazis. In the same year the Kleebergs were a

expelled from their home and forced to move into a small space in an overcrowded Jewish house (see Photo 10). In October 1943 the Jewish house in which the Kleebergs lived was destroyed by bombs. The family eventually found shelter in a Jewish house in the district of Ahlem, but disaster struck again. Ruth’s father was arrested by the Gestapo after he was denounced by the wife of a German caretaker. She had seen him gathering up stray kernels of cereal that he planned to feed a rabbit the family was surreptitiously keeping. Ruth had witnessed the Gestapo’s summary executions, and now her father faced imprisonment and deportation. In February 1945 he was put on the back of a truck and sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp. Ruth remembers waving goodbye but not grasping the meaning of what was happening. She was only 11 years old at the time.

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