“My mother and grandmother’s stories about the war have merged with my childhood memories. Memory implants that I retain as the first inscriptions of my history”
-home is usually the first historian individuals encounter
“My memories of these stories have an almost eerie quality of a lived reality. I remember them differently from the way I remember other stories. Almost as if I had lived through them myself, I remember concrete images, details, fragments of a history I must have hallucinated at the time, thus processing my family’s stories as psychic reality.”
-at what point does a memory transform into a process of psychic reality? What are the key features that capture this intergenerational transmission of trauma?
“as I see the coverage of this new war, memories resurface, the atmosphere of fear and terror, the starvation and despair, the stories of which marked my early childhood years.”
-triggers that may not only impact the survivor but all those who recognize the signs of what these triggers represent and meant form oneself or family
“Denying Germany the status of the ‘civilized world,’ it aligns the German people with a discourse of savagism and barbarism. This discourse continues a familiar legacy of colonialism, casting Germany as the first instance of a ‘barbarism’ that emerges from within the civilized world. While the rhetoric of barbarism suggests that Germany broke away from the values and achievements of Western civilization, the NSDAP in fact, as Agamben and others have convincingly demonstrated, worked within the logic of modernity and used deeply modern elements to generate the Holocaust”
“However one interprets the Nazi assault on the values of Western civilization, the Allied sign challenges the developmental thesis implied in colonial narratives of civilization and progress, raising not only the question of what causes civilization to be undermined from within, but also another question regarding the role of the Allied forces in relation to the people under occupation whom it declares as ‘un-civilized.’”
“What Germany witnessed after the war was rather a pervasive cultural re-education and imposition of the values of the occupying forces.”
-exactly, and when it’s an occupation providing the education what value does it hold and is it lasting? US occupation has rarely (if ever one could argue) been a success for the people whose land they occupied.
“Denying Germany its status as a civilized nation rests on a claim that the persecution of Jews and other minorities, the camps and the Holocaust were aberrations from the values of Western civilization.”
“Exceptionalism rests on the assumption that Germany was either never part of or fell away from mainstream Western civilization because it never took the political turn toward democratization (or French republicanism) or the philosophical turn toward humanist rationalism.”
“it matters whether or not German people see themselves as a deviation from Western civilization when they face or refuse to face their own role in a nation of defeated perpetrators”
“one cannot escape collective shame and guilt and their transmission across generations. The more the acknowledgement of shame and guilt was silenced in public debates, the more they migrated into the psyche and the cultural unconscious.”
-or the denial of that shame and guilt like in the US in response to history of slavery
“The psychic economy of Germany’s isolation from the rest of the West is rather transparent, since it allows other countries more easily to avoid confronting their own violent histories and legacies of colonial atrocities and genocide.”
-Yep
“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”
“In some of its aspects, the parental generation displaced this fear onto the generation of postwar children. The parents’ fear that the children would take over was, in turn, intimately related to the fear that the silenced history might surface and lead to a confrontation by one’s own children—a fear that eventually turned real in the 1960s and 1970s and that gave the student movement in Germany its particular transgenerational dynamic.”
“Psychically, these efforts served a veritable manic defense, mobilized to ward off unbearable feelings of loss and defeat, guilt and shame. This manic defense went hand in hand with the ghostly silence about the war atrocities that descended on the defeated nation, a silence that, in turn, generated the crippling ‘inability to mourn’ that Frankfurt School psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich analyzed in their book with the same title. The German people after the war had become hardened to a point where they were unable to mourn not only the loss of the six million lives in the camps they had caused. They were equally unable properly to mourn and acknowledge their own losses. How after all can one mourn the loss of a few lives in one’s own family if your people were guilty of trying to exterminate a whole other people?”
“But since one couldn’t make them disappear either, they were repressed, split off, and pushed into the cultural unconscious.”
-intrigued by this idea of a cultural unconscious in response to trauma; particularly in how it informed parent-child dynamics
“In violent histories, the personal is inseparable from the collective and the political.”
“Traumatic amnesia seems to become inscribed as cultural practice. Yet, trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously. Suggesting that the silence intended to cover up a traumatic event or history only leads to its unconscious transmission, Abraham speaks of a haunting that spans generations.”
“Traumatic narratives can become charged melancholic objects that sustain the tie to old traumatic injuries while deflecting from the urgency of addressing new violent histories in the present. This is why it becomes increasingly important to address violent and traumatic histories across national, ethnic and cultural boundaries and across the divide of victims and perpetrators.”
