This was a really interesting piece because I have thought a lot about perpetuator guilt, shame, trauma, and the effects of becoming complicit in a historical legacy, regardless of one's true internal politic. Similarly, I spend a lot of time thinking about how Jews, as a people centered around memory and sharing in grief, don't really seem to heal from this practice, or, alternatively, how the process must be so much longer than the span of an individual's life - lending to the idea of cultural transgenerational haunting.
Schwab's identification with Nazi Germany is unsettling, sympathy inducing, bitter, and an attempt at taking responsibility, all at the same time.
"I am one of the 'children of the enemy,'" (178) instilled and reinforced in her by her elders "telling the same stories, over and over again." (178) which she repeats throughtout the article. A repetition of a repetition of a repetition.
I am very intrigued by this idea of psychic haunting, intergenerational trauma, but the way children not only hear their parents stories and respond to their parents trauma-responsive parenting techniques, their language, their behaviors, etc., but also come into a "lived reality" - a sort of intergenerational ghost which they come into possession of through stories, traditions, rhetoric, ideologies. A "processing" of "familie's stories as psychic reality." (178) I am all too familiar with this as the receipient and keeper of my ancestors stories, the fear in their eyes as they would hear the clop of cossack horses, the slash of swords, the way my grandfather's hand would press into his knee as he detailed the weight of his mother's body pressing him into the wall, a fervent attempt to disappear.
It's sort of uncanny how familiar the emotion of Schwab's writing feels, how much I empathized with the telling of these stories, this analysis, the tension of being at once victim and perpetrator.
I think of my own mother's way of excusing her whiteness and the legacy of her ancestors (colonizers, slave owners) by putting on the performance of Judaism when it suits her purposes, assuaging the guilt and shame she can't face as a descendant of violent colonizers. This ethos is pervasive on her side of the family - the phrase "my best friend in school was black" is used by multiple family members who voted for Trump. Twice.
I think of my father rejecting the idea that his ethnicity has ever played a role in his experiences in education or professional work. I think of his father's insistence that his rejection from the University of Pennsylvania was due to an already filled quota of Jews, surpassing which would result in a stain on the admitted class of students. My grandparents' generation was vocal in response to WW2 - we shared our grief collectively and still do. Making pilgrimage to death camp sites to say a mourner's kaddish for the unnamed dead, bringing all those lost into our families, a refusal to let them not be remembered. My parents' generation is more apt to forget, to silence, to insist that we're all over it and have moved on. Then again, my bubbe was apt to remind me that her father achieved his American dream and if everyone worked that hard, they too would never know poverty. My great grandparents were similarly silent. When my grandfather would ask why they left the old country, his father's response was simply that "we don't talk about it anymore. We're American now."
This silence - it seems to haunt all sides. Our last name changed four times, its origins a mystery. The only family "history" an imagined historical fiction courtesy of Uncle Ed, my grandfather's cousin, who wrote down the family immigration tale with as much detail and emotion as if he had lived it. We reeanct our traumas this way, retelling, telling the same stories, over and over. I sometimes wonder if it is unhealthy, whether this "psychic condition" can really "render one virtually insane with impossible mourning." (183)
Schwab discusses this at length - the idea that "traumatic narratives can become chaged melancholic objects that sustain the tie to old traumatic injuries while deflecting from the urgency of addressing new violent histories in the present." (188) She claims that this leads to the importance of addressing trauma across national and communal levels, because the internalization of these narratives cannot be address by the individual - it isn't their trauma, alone, to bear. But she also seems to talk about this process of speaking trauma, externalizing it as a group, as though it will lead to some kind of healing. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this makes sense. Talk therapy is the standard for a reason, because silent rumination only creates cycle of despair.
All of that said, I wonder how these types of ghosts, narrative memories, functionally change when imagined as artefacts, rather than experiences or stories. If national and collective mourning was, in fact, a way of undoing the "treachery of silence", wouldn't we/I feel a bit better at some point? What happens to this process of uncovering secret ghosts when those ghosts are the only things we have left. For so many Jews, these ghosts are the only things that remain of our families. An impossible mourning, to be sure, but also one that I don't know a lot would want to let go of. I suppose Schwab isn't necessarily encouraging this process as a way of letting go, though.
Claiming a voice, on the other hand, is so complicated. I found myself angry at how easily I identified with Schwab's experiences. A child of perpetuators with my own oppression to carry and bear, my whiteness practically luminous in a lot of settings, the weight of genocide I carry simmering gently below the surface. I didn't want to identify with her. And yet I did. Claiming a voice in these spaces can be so precarious when communal dialogue often comes down to identity politics, of who had it worse, of whose issue is the most pressing, the most salient, who needs the most recognition, whose trauma supercedes the rest, whose voice should be heard.
And in many instances, we choose silence. Silence is often encouraged. Listen first, speak last. Listen more, speak less.
I'm losing my train of thought...looking forward to class discussion.
