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.
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)
"the traumatic effects of growing up among a generation of children of a perpetrator nation... I am one of the 'children of the enemy,' invoked in Ursula Duba's poem" (178)
"Moreover, it seems important to acknowledge that the German Holocaust, even though unmatched in its cold, mechanistic and industrialized machinery of death, draws on a relentless drive to subjugate or annihilate other people that reveals many affinities to Western colonialism and imperialism more generally. Ultimately one would need to ask where the drive to subjugate and annihilate the other comes from, a question that reaches beyond the scope of this article" (179)
"We know that a pervasive silence weighed on Germany after the war, bespeaking a futile attempt to avoid facing the atrocities of the war. Yet, 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. For the generation of perpetrators, the knowledge of the Holocaust was relegated to a 'tacit knowledge' (Polanyi) that became taboo in public debates in any but the most superficial ways. For the postwar generation, it became something like a national secret, only to be revealed as brute fact, usually in the early teens, in the cold abstraction of history lessons" (180)
"I think we need trauma discourses that look at the dynamic between victims and perpetrators and see that both of them are suffering from the psyche deformations of violent histories, albeit in different ways and with different responsibilities. Pervasive in violent histories is the transgenerational transmission of trauma or, as Abraham and Torok put it, a history of ghostly hauntings by the phantoms of a silenced past. This haunting transmission of trauma across generations will be the more narrowly defined focus of my article" (181)
"This ambivalence is not unlike the ambivalence Fanon describes about the reception of Shakespeare in colonial education. Literature, we need to remember, is a highly ambivalent and risky tool of colonization or re-education since it can so easily be appropriated for a much more critical reception than the one intended by the powers that be" (182)
"The German word Widerrede refers to one of the worst transgressions of children against their parents. The word means 'talking back' or simply 'arguing.' Thou shalt not argue with your parents' as the hallmark of German authoritarian education reaches back of course at least to the Bismarck era. However, this silencing of children took on a new quality and urgency after the war when arguing carried the threat of exposing the parents' active or passive complicity as perpetrators" (182)
"It became nearly a philosophical problem to explore whether language could become a poisonous substance" (184)
"psychoanalysis is invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived, or lived only via the detours of its narrative and psychic transmission across generations. Traumatic historical legaices may be transmitted individually via unconscious fantasies of parents and grandparents as well as collectively through the cultural unconscious. Psychoanalysts have theorized such transmission as a form of psychic haunting, arguing that both children of victims and children of perpetrators of trauma unwittingly live the ghostly legacies and secrets of their parents and parental generation" (184)
"The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok develop their concept of the crypt, that is, a psychic space fashioned to wall-in unbearable experiences, memories or secrets. Abraham talks about the 'phantom effects' that haunt the children of parents who have lived through a traumatic history" (185)
"In violent histories, the personal is inseparable from the collective and the political" (185)
"Abraham's concept of the phantom is particularly relevant for an analysis of the transmission of historical trauma through the cultural unconscious" (185)
"Finally, Beloved demonstrates that trauma cannot be healed individually but needs communal support and a joint effort to face the ghosts of the past. In order to deal with collective historical trauma, we therefore need a theoretical framework with a transindividual perspective. Abraham and Torok's concept of the phantom and of transgenerational haunting not only moves psychoanalysis beyond individual life experiences and their intrapsychic processing, it also deals with the cultural legacies or the unfinished business of one or more generations of a people and their transmission to the descendants" (185-186)
"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. He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic 'cult of ancestors' (as defined by Rand) 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" (186)
"In this case it becomes a tacit knowledge, shared by everyone yet treated like a taboo subject. People who bring it to the surface are often treated with passionate hostility as if they threatened a fragile sense of balance" (186)
"Psychoanalysis is, of course, a practice based on an ethics of contained uncovering. It works with the assumption that violent or traumatic events that are repressed or denied will continue to come back in haunting ways until there is a proper working through. The latter requires both taking responsibility for one's actions and mourning of losses. In uncovering traumatic histories, psychoanalysis at times resembles paradoxical 'unburial', that is, a digging into a community's or a nation's deadly secrets, or into the secret life of a dead person that has never been properly buried" (186)
"The exhumation of the ghosts of the past is, in other words, also indispensable for trying to avoid the repetition of traumatic history or its displacement onto other people" (187)
"Language is the first tool and mode of introjection. Abraham and Torok point out that even the starving infant is less helpless once it finds a way to voice the feeling of hunger, or once 'the empty mouth can be filled with words.' But how can one find a language for something that is unconscious? How can one tell the story of a history of which one is a protagonist without ever having experienced it directly?" (187)
"In 'Notes on the Phantom,' Abraham speaks of this language in terms of a 'staging of words' that speak traumatic experience... "We must not lose sight of the fact that to stage a word - whether metaphorically, as an alloseme, or as a cryptonym - constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm"" (187)
"The 'staging of words,' while it may contribute to socio-psychic health, is not yet a solution in itself and may, in the worst case, obscure real political processing. 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" (188)
"Perhaps because I have experienced the guilt of claiming a voice, I have come to believe that both the descendants of victims and the descendants of perpetrators need to break the silence. They also need to escape their mutual isolation and begin talking about their different traumatic histories together, thus creating a dialogue that may help to trace what Abraham calls 'shared or complementary phantoms'" (188)
"In his pathbreaking study on the psychology of colonialism, Ashis Nandy points to that, while the broad psychological contours of colonialism are now known, the concomitant cultural and psychological pathologies produced by colonization in the colonizing societies are less well known" (188)
"Abraham and Torok define encryptment as a psychic response to trauma in which an intolerable experience becomes walled in, silenced and removed from consciousness and the public sphere. Such intolerable experiences can occur on the side of victims who cannot face unbearable loss, humiliation, destruction, torture or genocide. They can also occur on the side of perpetrators who cannot face their own violence, guilt or shame" (189)
"Ultimately, she took revenge on me for having lost him because I did not bring him back" (191)
"Only those who dig deep into the archeology of this town's cultural unconscious can see what the plates tell without telling, the town's hidden history of genocide" (194)
Schwab (2004) wrote about trauma from the complicated position of oppressors. Schwab opened up about the ghosts in his family tied to the violence of his hometown, in post-war Germany. Schwab emphasized the importance of reparative work and open discussion to address the ghosts that many families keep after traumatic periods of history. Ultimately, Schwab’s piece challenges the binaristic categories of oppressor and sufferer by detailing the legacies of trauma for those on seemingly opposite sides of violence. Below were some thought-provoking quotes from this article:
186 - “Most cultures share a tendency to silence traumatic histories. 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. “
188 - “The damages and cultural deformations of these violent histories of colonialism, imperialism, war, genocide and slavery manifest themselves on both sides of the divide, and only if both sides work through the legacies of these histories can the vicious cycle of repetition be disrupted. Recent postcolonial theories as well as critical race theories have argued in a similar vein.”
Questions: I enjoyed reading this piece because of how it challenged static notions of aggressor and oppressed/victim/survivor. In times of collective or systemic violence, there are multiple registers of trauma. It actually reminded me of a recent article I was reading about PTSD in those who have administered the death penalty or were involved in the administration of it. What are the multiplicitous traumas that arise out of systemic, state violence? What is at stake by using binaristic frames (oppressor and victim) for understanding systemic violence?
As the only theory able to trace the effects of unconscious experience, psychoanalysis is invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived, or lived only via the detours of its narrative and psychic transmission across generations. (184)
This dynamic also underlies, I believe, the psychological deformations of perpetrator cultures more generally. One of the most common deformations is the internalization and hence internal repetition of patterns of violence in the perpetrator culture. (188)
To account for this psychological deformation of perpetrators and their children, it is necessary to expand Abraham and Torok’s notion of the ‘crypt’ to include cultural or national crypts. Abraham and Torok define encryptment as a psychic response to trauma in which an intolerable experience becomes walled in, silenced and removed from consciousness and the public sphere. Such intolerable experiences can occur on the side of victims who cannot face unbearable loss, humiliation, destruction, torture or genocide. They can also occur on the side of perpetrators who cannot face their own violence, guilt or shame. Just like intrapsychic crypts, cultural and national crypts harbor the repressed or denied memories of violence. Once the latter are walled off from a conscious politics of remembrance and public debate, they can no longer be worked through and transformed into a politics of redress. Collectively established crypts become the sources of a cultural and national haunting that cannot be addressed unless the crypt is opened and the silence broken.
Perhaps it is important to stress here that silence need not be complete in order for this dynamic to operate. There may even be—as there was in Germany after the war—an open politics of acknowledgment of war crimes, including the Nuremberg trials and the process of ‘de-Nazification’ as well as the monumentalization of victimage and official politics of reparation. But unless these acts include a psychosocial politics that addresses the responsibility, complicity, guilt, shame and psychosocial deformation of the culture at large, it in fact only helps to perpetuate a politics of silencing and denial. In the worst case, historical monumentalization may even aggravate such politics by providing a safely contained outlet to alleviate unconscious feelings of guilt and shame. (189)
--> what is harm if to cause harm or be complicit is also harmful?
“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.”