Education as a tool for reconstructing postwar Germany and German subjectivity
“The only open critics of such a refashioning of Germany were the teachers of German literature who shunned the Anglicization of German language and forbade us to use ‘foreign’ words. They also lamented the fact that postwar children grew up without German literature after it had almost instantly been replaced in school curricula with those allegedly ‘uncultured’ books by new American authors such as Hemingway, Steinbeck or Pearl S Buck.. This deep ambivalence is symptomatic of the transformation of German culture after the war. Our teachers resisted the colonizing impetus of the American re-education program, but they did so in terms of an old and problematic nationalism. While we students, by contrast, resisted our teachers’ nationalism and actively embraced foreign cultures, we also unwittingly submitted to the propagandistic aspects of the re-education program.” (182)
Silencing and Speaking
“Used to thinking of myself as ‘the girl without words,’ it still haunts me to this day. Now I feel the effects in displaced forms, the most insidious being the guilt and fear associated with claiming a voice as the descendant of a perpetrator nation. The more distant a topic from my own history and concerns, the easier it becomes to speak.” (184)
“My town’s erasure of history had caught up with me despite the fact that, as soon as I learned about the genocide of Jews and the concentration camps, I was shocked into defiance and suspicion against my country, my parents and teachers, and the people of my childhood town. And yet, I had never given a thought about what happened to the Jews, simply assuming the town had always been as it was when I grew up.” (193)
A Foreign Presence in the Self as the Site for Healing
“Abraham argues that a person can manifest symptoms that do not directly spring from her own life experiences but from a parent’s or ancestor’s psychic conflicts, traumas, or secrets.5 Speaking of a phantom, a haunting or a phantasmatic haunting, Abraham uses a rhetoric of ghosts to suggest a foreign presence in the self.” (185)
“He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic ‘cult of ancestors’ (as defined by Rand)7 that allows the dead to rest and the living to gain freedom from their ghostly hauntings. Yet, to achieve this freeing from the past requires one first to awaken the dead and to revisit the trauma. This process in fact is what we commonly call mourning. To facilitate a collective mourning, communities and nations develop the need to establish a culture of memory. Recognizing the psychic life of our ancestors in our own psychic life means uncovering their unspoken suffering and secret histories, as well as their guilt and shame, their crimes.” (186)
“an archeology of the psyche is indispensable for allowing the children of perpetrators to address the unfinished business of their parents. Only then can they gain the agency to deal with the past in their own terms. Without such agency they are bound to remain unconsciously fixated to their parents’ traumatic deformation.” (187)
