Dark Traces of the Past: Psychoanalysis and Historical Thinking 9781845453992

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K Dark Traces of the Past L

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editors: Jörn Rüsen, Allan Megill, and Alon Confino in Association with Angelika Wulff Volume 1

Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate Edited by Jörn Rüsen Volume 2

Identities: Time, Difference, and Boundaries Edited by Heidrun Friese Volume 3

Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness Edited by Jürgen Straub Volume 4

Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds Edited by Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger Volume 5

History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation Jörn Rüsen Volume 6

The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge Werner Abelshauser Volume 7

Meaning and Representation in History Edited by Jörn Rüsen Volume 8

Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age Mihai I. Spariosu Volume 9

Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation Edited by Helga Nowotny Volume 10

Time and History: The Variety of Cultures Edited by Jörn Rüsen Volume 11

Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts Edited by Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock Volume 12

Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Context Edited by Mamadou Diawara, Bernard Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen Volume 13

New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century Edited by Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert Volume 14

Dark Traces of the Past: Psychoanalysis and Historical Thinking Edited by Jürgen Straub and Jörn Rüsen

DARK TRACES

OF THE PAST Psychoanalysis and Historical Thinking

Edited by

Jürgen Straub and Jörn Rüsen

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2010 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2010 Jürgen Straub and Jörn Rüsen

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Dark traces of the past : psychoanalysis and historical thinking / edited by Jürgen Straub and Jörn Rüsen. p. cm. — (Making sense of history ; v.14) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-753-2 (hdbk : acid-free paper) 1. Psychoanalysis 2. History—Psychological aspects. I. Straub, Jürgen, 1958– II. Rüsen, Jörn. BF175.D35 2010 150.19’5—dc22 2010025859

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-84545-753-2 hardback

Contents

List of Figures

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Psychoanalysis, History, and Historical Studies: A Systematic Introduction Jürgen Straub

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Part I. The Construction of Memory and Historical Consciousness Chapter 1. Three Memory Anchors: Affect, Symbol, Trauma Aleida Assmann Chapter 2. Origin and Ritualization of Historical Awareness: A Group Analytic View and an Ethnohermeneutic Case Reconstruction Hans Bosse Chapter 3. Identity, Overvaluation and Representing Forgetting Hinderk M. Emrich

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Part II. Shoah: The Chain of Generations Chapter 4. Transgenerational Trauma, Identification, and Historical Consciousness Werner Bohleber Chapter 5. On the Myth of Objective Research after Auschwitz: Unconscious Entanglements with the National Socialist Past in the Investigation of Long-Term Psychosocial Consequences of the Shoah in the Federal Republic of Germany Kurt Grünberg

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Contents

Chapter 6. Understanding Transgenerational Transmission: The Burden of History in Families of Jewish Victims and their National Socialist Perpetrators Jürgen Straub

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Part III. Case Studies in Psychoanalysis and Literary Critics Chapter 7. On Social and Psychological Foundations of Anti-Semitism Karola Brede Chapter 8. From Religious Fantasies of Omnipotence to Scientific Myths of Emancipation: Freud and the Dialectics of Psychohistory José Brunner Chapter 9. Working toward a Discourse of Shame: A Psychoanalytical Perspective on Postwar German Literary Criticism Irmgard Wagner

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Bibliography

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Notes on the Contributors

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Index

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List of Figures

Figure 3.1. Progression and dynamics of paranoid development

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Figure 3.2. Structural-dynamic model of endo/exo coupling and transition from latent to manifestly active internal structures.

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Figure 3.3. Diagram of information-dynamic model of generation of elementary processes of consciousness, with “translations” taking place between “limbic” inner world and sensory data.

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Figure 3.4. Model of “hippocampal comparator system” (after Gray and Rawlins), with sensory data being compared with “stored regularities.”

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Figure 3.5. Diagram of restricted filling in of final states of evolving nonlinearly dynamic system as a result of impaired development (“trauma”).

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Figure 5.1. Average percentage of superordinate categories of the sub-area Parents’ experiences under National Socialism in both groups.

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Preface to the Series JÖRN RÜSEN

At the turn of the twenty-first century the term “history” brings extremely ambivalent associations to mind. On the one hand, the last decade has witnessed numerous declarations of the end of history. Whether in reference to the fundamental changes in the global political situation around 1989/90, or to socalled postmodernism, or to the challenge to Western dominance by decolonization and multiculturalism, “history” as we know it has been declared to be dead, outdated, overcome, or even a myth at its end. On the other hand, there has been a global wave of intellectual explorations into fields that are “historical” by their nature: the building of personal and collective identity through “memory”; the cultural, social, and political use and function of “narrating the past”: and the psychological structures of remembering, repressing, and recalling. Even the subjects that seemed to call for an “end of history” (globalization, postmodernism, multiculturalism) quickly turned out to be intrinsically “historical” phenomena. Moreover, “history” and “historical memory” have entered the sphere of popular culture, from history channels to Hollywood movies, becoming an ever more important factor in public debates and political negotiations (the discussions about the aftermath of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, European unification, or the various heritages of totalitarian systems, to name but a few). In other words, after “history” was declared to be, like god before it, dead, “historical matters” have come back with a vengeance. This paradox calls for a new orientation or at least a new theoretical expression. Indeed, it calls for a new theory of history; and such a theory should serve neither as a subdiscipline reserved for historians nor as a systematic collection of definitions, “laws,” and rules claiming universal validity. What is needed is an interdisciplinary and intercultural field of study. Hayden White’s deconstruction of the narrative strategies of the nineteenth-century historicist paradigm somehow came to be regarded by many as historical theory’s famous

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last words, as if the critique of the discipline’s claim to rationality could put an end to the rational self-reflection of that discipline—as if this critique were not a rational self-reflection in itself. In the late 1980s the “critical study of historical memory” began to be substituted for historical theory. Overlooked in this trade-off is the fact that any exploration into the ways that historical memory in different cultural contexts not only crosses over into the field of critical studies, but also contains the keystones for a more general theory of history. Analysis of even a simple instance of historical memory cannot avoid questions pertaining to the theory and philosophy of history. And vice versa: the most abstract thoughts of philosophers of history have an intrinsic counterpart in the most secular functions of memory (for example, when parents narrate past experiences to their children, or when an African community remembers its own colonial subordination and eventual liberation from it). As long as we fail to acknowledge the fundamental connection between the most sophisticated historical theory and the process of historical memory most deeply imbedded in the culture and the everyday life of people, we remain caught in an ideology of linear progress which regards cultural forms of memory simply as some intriguing objects of study instead of recognizing them as examples of “how to make sense of history.” The series “Making Sense of History” aims at bridging this gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory. It is not exclusively related to historical studies; contributors, from virtually all fields of cultural and social studies, explore a wide range of phenomena that can be labeled “making historical sense” (Historische Sinnbildung). As such, the series crosses the boundaries between academic disciplines as well as those between cultural, social, political, and historical contexts. Instead of reducing historical memory to just another form of the socio/cultural “construction of reality,” its contributions deal with concrete phenomena of historical memory: it seeks to interpret them as case studies in the emerging empirical and theoretical field of “making historical sense.” Along the same line, rather theoretical essays are also included with the aim of not only establishing new methods and theories for historical research but also to provide perspectives for a comparative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural understanding of what could be called the “global work of historical memory” or the “cultural strategy to orient human life in the course of time.” This does not imply the exclusion of critical evaluations of the ideological functions of historical memory; however, it is not the primary objective of this series to find an ideal, politically correct, ideology-free mode or method of how to make sense of history. The goal is rather to explore the cultural practices involved in generating historical sense as an extremely important realm of human thought and action, the study of which may contribute to new forms of mutual understanding. In an age of rapid globalization that manifests itself primarily on an economic and political—and, much less so, on a cultural level—finding such forms is becoming an urgent task.

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It is for this reason that the series begins with a volume documenting an ongoing intercultural debate. It is the aim of the first volume to question whether or not the academic discipline of “history”—as developed at Western universities over the course of the last two hundred years—represents a specific mode or type of historical thinking that can be differentiated from other forms and practices of historical consciousness. Subsequent volumes present history as a genuinely interdisciplinary field of research. Historians, anthropologists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and literary theorists, as well as specialists in fields such as media and cultural studies, explore such questions as: What constitutes a specifically historical “sense” and meaning? How do different cultures throughout various historical periods conceptualize time? Which specific forms of “perception” inform these conceptualizations, and which general problems are connected with them? What are the dominant strategies used to represent historical meaning? What function does the generating of historical sense fulfill in practical life? Ranging from general overviews and theoretical reflections to case studies, the essays cover a wide range of contexts related to the question of “historical sense,” among them topics such as collective identity, the psychology and psychoanalysis of historical memory, and the intercultural dimension of historical thinking. Additionally, the books of this series address the place of history in the humanitites, and the humanities in general as an essential place for sense generation in modern societies. Even modes of sense generation that are not specifically historical can be dealt with, as long as they share with history the concern for coming to terms with time as it pertains to human life. For the most part, historical memory is not an arbitrary function of the cultural practices used by human beings to orient themselves in the world in which they are born, but covers, rather, those domains of human life that seek to orient existence temporally. These domains demand mental procedures for connecting past, present, and future that became generalized and institutionalized in the West as that specific field of culture we call “history.” The areas of human thought, action, and suffering that call for a specifically “historical thinking” include (1) the construction and perpetuation of collective identity, (2) the reconstruction of patterns of orientation after catastrophes and events of massive destruction, (3) the challenge of given patterns of orientation presented by and through the confrontation with radical otherness, and (4) the general experience of change and contingency. In accordance with the collective aim of the series “Making Sense of History” to outline a new field of interdisciplinary research (rather than to offer a single theory), the volumes in the series are not designed to establish a new historiographical approach; rather, they seek to contribute to an interdisciplinary study of historical cultures and related subjects. One focus, for instance, is on the notion of collective identity. General theoretical aspects and problems in this field are considered, most importantly the interrelationships among

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identity, otherness, and representation. But case studies of the construction of gender identities (especially those of women), of ethnic identities, and of different forms and politics of national identity are also included. The essays on this subject point out that any concept of identity as being disconnected from historical change not only leads to theoretical problems, but also covers over the fact that most modern forms of collective identity take into account the possibility of their own historical transformation. Thus the essays in this series that are concerned with identity suggest that identity ought to be regarded not as a function of difference, but as a concrete cultural and ongoing practice of difference. They show that the production of “sense” is an epistemological starting point, as well as a theoretical and empirical research-field in and of itself. Another volume focuses on the psychological construction of time and history, analyzing the interrelation between memory, morality, and authenticity in different forms of historical or biographical narration. The findings of empirical psychological studies (on the development of temporal and historical consciousness in children, or on the psychological mechanisms of reconstructing past experiences) are discussed in the light of attempts to outline a psychological concept of historical consciousness around the notions of “narration” and the “narrative structure of historical time.” This first volume of the series is dedicated to psychoanalytical approaches to the study of historical memory. It reconsiders older debates on the relation between psychoanalysis and history and introduces more recent research projects. Instead of simply pointing out some psychoanalytical insights that can be adopted and applied in certain areas of historical studies, this volume aims at combining psychoanalytical and historical perspectives, thus exploring the history of psychoanalysis itself, as well as the “unconscious” dimensions underlying and informing academic and nonacademic forms of historical memory. Moreover, it puts special emphasis on transgenerational forms of remembrance, on the notion of trauma as a key concept in this field, and on case studies that may indicate directions for further research. Cultural differences in historical thinking that arise from different concepts of temporality are the subject of another volume. With a view to encouraging comparative research, this volume offers general essays and case studies written with the intention of providing comparative interpretations of concrete material, as well as possible paradigmatic research-questions for further comparisons. In the light of the recent resurgence of ethnocentric world-views, this volume focuses on the question of how cultural and social studies should react to this challenge. It aims at counteracting ethnocentrism by bridging the current gap between a rapid globalization manifesting itself in ever increasing political/economic interdependencies of states and continents, and the corresponding lack of mutual understanding in the realm of culture. The essays illustrate the necessity of intercultural communication pertaining to the various historical cultures and their shared semblances as well as the differences

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between them. Such communication seems not only a possible, but indeed a necessary presupposition of any attempt to negotiate cultural differences on a political level, whether between states or within the increasingly multicultural societies in which we live. The special emphasis the series fixes on the problem of cultural differences and intercultural communication reveals the editors’ desire to aim beyond the realm of merely academic concern. Building intercultural communication represents a formidable challenge, as well as a great hope, to a project committed to general theoretical reflection on the universal phenomenon of “remembering the past.” Despite the fact that “cultural difference” has become something of a buzz phrase since the 1990s, the topic itself is characterized by a paradox quite similar to that underlying the current fate of the notion of history. The past fifteen years have witnessed escalating interference by the industrialized states in the political and economic affairs of the rest of the world, as well as an increased (if sometimes eccentric) appropriation of modern economic and political structures by developing countries, including the former or still officially “communist” states. But this process of mutual rapprochement on the political and economic fronts is characterized by a remarkable lack of knowledge of, or even interest in, the cultural and historical backgrounds of the respective nations. Thus, the existing official forms of “intercultural” communication lack an adequate cultural dimension, leaving the themes and problems analyzed in this series of volumes (identity, memory, cultural practices, history, religion, philosophy, literature) outside of what is explicitly communicated; as if such matters would not have powerful affects on political as well as economic agendas. On the other hand, the currently dominant approaches found among the cultural theorists and critical thinkers of the West either claim that an intercultural rapport concerning the common grounds of cultural identities is impossible—based on the assumption that they have nothing in common (the hypostatization of difference)—or they politicize cultural differences in such a way that they are relegated to mere stuff, out of which may be constructed various cultural subject-positions. Despite their self-understanding as “critique,” these approaches amount to the exclusion of culture on the level of national politics and economic exchange alike. Thus, cultural theory seems to react to the marginalization of culture by way of its own self-marginalization. The series “Making Sense of History” intends to challenge this marginalization by introducing a form of cultural studies that takes the term culture seriously again, without dissolving it into identity politics or into a hypostatized concept of unbridgeable difference. At the same time the goal is to reintroduce a notion of “historical theory” that no longer disconnects itself from historical memory and remembrance as concrete cultural practices, but seeks instead to explore those practices, interpreting them as different articulations of the universal (if heterogeneous) effort to make sense of history. Thus, the series

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relies on the idea that an academic contribution to the problem of intercultural communication should assume the form of an academic discourse newly awake to its own historicity and cultural background, as well as a fresh acknowledgement that other cultural, but nonacademic, practices of “sense-formation” are equally important forms of human orientation and self-understanding (in their general function, in fact, not much different from the efforts of academic thought itself ). Such a reinscription of the universal claims of modern academic discourses into a variety of cultural contexts, the objective of which is the providing of new starting points for intercultural communication, is an enterprise that cannot be accomplished or even outlined in a series of a few books. Consequently, “Making Sense of History” should be regarded as something like a first attempt to map out one possible field of research—the field of “historical cultures”— that might help us to achieve this aim. The idea of the book series was born in the wake of the successful completion of a research project on “Making Sense of History: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Structure, Logic and Function of Historical Consciousness—an Intercultural Comparison.” This project took place at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (ZiF) of the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 1994/95. It was partly supported by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) Essen (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen). The project’s conferences and workshops generated many of the chapters included in the books in this series. The arranging, revising, and editing of the different texts occupied the next several years, with the first volume coming out in 2002. In the meantime the series has enlarged its perspectives by bringing in other projects of the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut and of its partners all over the world. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Center for Interdisciplinary Study at the University of Bielefeld and of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen. I also want to thank the editors and coeditors of each of the volumes in this series and, of course, all the contributors for the effort and patience they expended to make these books possible. Finally, my thanks go to Angelika Wulff for her engaged management of this series and to my wife Inge for her intensive support in editing my texts.

I

Psychoanalysis, History, and Historical Studies A Systematic Introduction JÜRGEN STRAUB

On the Rehabilitation of an Influential Diagnosis The relationship between historical studies and psychoanalysis remains a concern that is open and full of tensions, in both a positive and negative sense. Particularly the question, what would distinguish a psychoanalytically oriented study of historical realities and the consciousness involved with these realities— that is a historical psychoanalysis—upon which this present volume focuses, has not been satisfactorily answered. Scepticism and fear of contact dominate on both sides. Here and there ignorance prevails, and at times there is a definite sense of helplessness concerning how a productive dialogue could even be initiated between historical studies and psychoanalysis, given the still highly infrequent collaborations between representatives of these disciplines. At present, empirical research, formulation of theory, and the development of methods are essentially carried out within conventional disciplinary boundaries. Inherent reasons can hardly be responsible for this, as it is obvious that in numerous questions of great significance regarding our orientation, our individual, social, and cultural practices necessitate both a historical and psychological/psychoanalytical viewpoint—a point on which there is at least a general agreement. Early attempts to design, pursue, or at least consider the possibilities of a psychoanalysis-based approach to historical studies or a psychoanalysis of history were based upon the above insight. Some of these endeavours have led to some well-known reservations or downright negative assessments of any Notes for this section begin on page 14.

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potential that historical studies gain from cooperating alongside the theoretical and methodological tools of psychoanalysis. Thirty-five years ago Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others drew more attention to the dialogue about a psychoanalytical historiography then currently in progress in the United States and France, thus compensating for a dialogic deficit present in Germany at the time.1 Wehler, for his part, warned against having too-high expectations and held the possibility of actually enhancing historical studies with psychoanalytical theorems to be negligible.2 Contrary to other neighboring disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and political science, in historiography (understood as a historical social science) psychoanalysis was assigned only a minor part. Wehler’s activities as an editor did not result in an unconditional invitation to his colleagues to investigate psychoanalysis and examine its potential for historical studies. History approached psychoanalysis, but this advance was simultaneously an act of withdrawal. Wehler believed that “scepticism was still necessary”3 and consigned to psychoanalysis an insignificant role that was, at best, of minor importance within “a comparative analysis of economy, society, and government.” Psychoanalysis was granted only a few clearly delineated areas of historical research within which it could establish itself and successfully operate. As a method to decipher the unconscious motives of the “great men of history” it received a position within historical biographical research, which is capable of uncovering latent structures of significance relevant to the decisions and actions of influential historical personalities and thus contributes specifically to the body of scientific historical knowledge. Psychoanalysis deepens and refines, according to Wehler, the theoretical and methodological instruments of this special approach within the field of historical research and historiography, which moreover in the discipline’s past was of considerable importance and even today is not considered completely obsolete. Psychoanalysis provides (more or less) general theoretical terms that make it possible to extend analyses of decisions and actions based on a biography beyond the subjective experiential background of historians, expanding upon a traditional hermeneutics that would exclusively attempt to reconstruct the actor’s “subjectively intended meaning” to a methodologically regulated depth hermeneutics (Tiefenhermemeutik), making it possible to look behind the scenes at the self-imagery and perceptions of a personal cognitive environment, and thereby rendering hidden motives perceptible. As a science of the subject, psychoanalysis offers access to the latent structures and conditions of the historical practice, and can therefore be suitably incorporated into any research program operating beyond the limits of traditional consciousness philosophy. Insofar as its contribution to historical biographies (despite all objections) maintains its (of necessity limited) value in historical studies, psychoanalysis appears, according to this understanding, to be a theoretically and methodologically attractive alternative to the merely subjective knowledge of human nature rooted in the historian’s everyday reality, intuition,

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and empathy. It could also be attractive to those branches of intentional hermeneutics—contrary to Wehler’s one-sided reception of traditional theories of interpretation—that emphasize not psychic acts of empathy, but rather a rational reconstruction of subjective motives.4 One must concede—though according to Wehler, “reluctantly”5—that psychoanalytical studies such as Erikson’s analyses of the characters and lives of Luther and Gandhi, which Erikson often cited as paradigmatic and are also quoted by the author,6 “have more convincingly explained some questions that have been debated for a quite a while, and that deeper layers of the personality were uncovered expanding the horizon of our understanding.”7 Therefore, “if you have to have a biography, then (do it) with the help of psychoanalysis.”8 Nevertheless, the indicated merit of “giving depth and enhancing the biographies of important individuals”9 is already diminished, according to Wehler, because the study of biographies has merely a subordinate auxiliary function in today’s historical studies, which have separated themselves from the romantic ideals of personality and genius, from “the individuality principle of German historicism,” and finally from every form of interpretation characteristic of the historical-political biography. Modern historical studies thus approach a nomological, subsuming paradigm regarding scientific methodology. The attractiveness, acknowledged by Wehler, that psychoanalysis holds for historical studies dwindles even further considering that the ideal of (genial) “personality” and likewise the principle of “individuality,” which are no longer obligatory and are even criticized in contemporary historical studies, could be surreptitiously rehabilitated by psychoanalysis. As he indicates, “Freud’s system also supports an atomistic individualism”10 that psychoanalysis has not recovered from, even in its most recent past—according to a prevalent judgment. Therefore, a “monadological” approach is of little use in the field of history. The question that suggests itself is, what else could historical studies gain from psychoanalysis? Of what use are the analytical thought patterns, theoretical terminologies, and methodological instruments of depth psychology to historical research and a historiography in which the study of biographies is given only a marginal function? Of course, Wehler also recognizes a potential in analytical social psychology that to this date has been utilized only insufficiently. The bridge taken by Erikson and then Mitscherlich and Brückner, among many others, from the individual to the collective, to society and culture, suggests the empirically based, psychoanalytical construction of a “modal personality,” “to some extent an average personality.”11 Whoever analyzes the “typical or representative aspects of the people of any given period” arrives at such constructs. The methodical instruments of qualitative research procedures that have been refined over the last two decades, along with quantitative tests that can be combined with statistically supported representational models, could enable insights into the historical peculiarities involving collective structures of interpretation, orientation, and action.

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Regardless of the methodological applications involved and the question of whether one is dealing with quantitative, statistical, or qualitative registration of identifiable phenomena, one can maintain collectives of various magnitudes. These in turn may be considered as the subjects of an analytical social and cultural psychology, e.g., groups, milieus, classes, sexes, societies or cultures encompassing any plurality of people who share a specific historical experiential space and expectational horizon, and who (therefore) exhibit common psychological characteristics.12 Wehler further considers the analysis of collective experiences and expectations, personal and general conditions, mental climates or social characteristics, to be the preeminent objective of a psychoanalytically oriented study of history. On the other hand, within the remnants of a framework constructed for the purpose of analyzing the motives of individual personalities, these same individual psychological biographies must now clearly be pushed into the background. But whereas psychoanalysis, according to Wehler’s understanding, was predominantly “individualistically” formulated, for the time being the (careful) usage of psychoanalytical terms, theories, and procedures is profitable mainly in the field of historical biographical research, which today has but a marginal function in the explanation of phenomena within contemporary historical studies as a whole. Therefore, any historian searching the field of psychoanalysis for any potential applications in his own discipline must find the pickings rather meager, all things considered.

Widespread Objections to Psychoanalysis Considering these essential objections to the application of psychoanalysis within the field of historical research, which Wehler only discussed in part, his skepticism would seem to appear justified, if not immutable. The potential allure at first sight of psychoanalytical thought, to which a too-hopeful professional historian could quickly succumb, can be compared with any series of seductive pitfalls and dangers. There are well-founded doubts as well as overly generalized objections that do not do justice to the manifold narratives contained within psychoanalytical theory. The most common of these are listed, without intent to examine their validity, as follows. (1) Topping the list of potential pitfalls and dangers to avoid will almost always be the alleged tendency of psychoanalysis toward the individualization or personalization of historical situations, events, and developments. Psychoanalysis often stands accused of casually manufacturing cases for the doctor’s consulting room out of social and political problems through the rather questionable appropriation of psychopathological examination techniques intended for the analysis of individual personalities. In this manner the National Socialist tyranny can be transformed into “Hitler’s Problem” (and his accomplices’), thus not only abbreviating every specific historical question beyond recognition but

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also putting back into force a theoretical concept of history from which modern social and structural history, and even the historiography of events, has been separated. By no means is it the intention of modern historical studies to ascribe historical occurrences and developments to individual “great men,” and some have justifiably corrected this viewpoint. (2) The psychoanalytical approach to history is often found objectionable based on the highly problematic and very often unreflected application of a terminology created principally in order to describe the individual’s interaction with social and cultural collective phenomena. Terms, theories, and methods that were essentially developed and tested in the course of direct work with individuals within the context of therapeutic sessions were often, in a depersonalized context, overlaid onto hypostatized collective subjects to which hardly any of the characteristics that distinguish the individual experience were applicable. (3) No matter how the psychoanalytical interpretation of historic events and developments is constituted, it is understood as reductive by its many critics. Occasionally the (alleged or actual) mono-causal structures of these psychoanalytical narrative accounts are rejected; therefore, within such narratives, the critics argue, all other conditions are either pushed into the background or hidden from view altogether. (4) For some of us at least, the perspective within which most or even all motivation that stems from the unconscious—irrational motivations for decisions, actions, emotional debths and their aftereffects—appears much too narrow in focus. That which is commonly understood as the cogency of psychoanalysis can too often be interpreted as one-dimensional in outlook; in such cases alternative theories that place particular emphasis on those interpretations appealing to the (subjectively) rational aspects of thought, feeling, and action are to be preferred. (5) The various methods of approach must be accounted for, regardless of whether interpretations based upon psychoanalysis are centered on the individual or the collective experience. The information can be obtained either through conversations with an actual person, or via textual analyses/analogies or any number of meaning-carrying devices. Critical reproach is often levelled at the fact that the means of data collection are often left unconsidered in the direct “applications” of psychoanalysis to history. Whereas in the first instance the accuracy of a psychoanalysis-based understanding of a given case can be (and must be) bound to the analysand’s agreement with the diagnosis, in the second instance this is obviously impossible. It is important to show that the differences do not primarily originate from the fact that certain people are still alive while others are deceased. Only the first situation is immediately concerned with the psychological analysis of the (actual) relationships of one person, his or her self-image and perception of the world. The therapeutic setting combined with the intrinsic process of eventual recall, repetition, and

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treatment of the analysand’s (traumatic) experiences is the paradigm for this. The analysand’s free associations, transference, and resistance are as constitutive as the interpretations offered by the analyst. In the second case, to the contrary, none of this is left in its original form. Even if psychoanalysis-based interpretations of texts are based on dialogues with actual people (i.e., interviews or group discussions with individuals who witnessed certain periods), this information must be segregated from interpretations originating in a therapeutic setting. By making use of a strict methodology coupled with practice that distinguishes itself by the correlation of research and application, the knowledge thereby gained using historical-psychoanalytical research based on the interpretation of texts (or text analogies, etc.) is hermetically sealed off from the talking cure employed for the relief of acutely suffering individuals. Insofar as the vocabulary is not modified, the meaning of the terms used for these different applications is not the same. Consider the meaning of “cross transference” in a therapeutic context and “cross transference” during the reading of a text. Consider the “emancipating” intentions of a therapy and the “emancipating” intentions of psychoanalytical social and cultural critique—and so forth. Particularly the discussions concerning the application of psychoanalysis to the interpretation of literary texts have elucidated the necessity of a differentiation that critics have justifiably demanded, especially from a psychoanalysis-based study of history.13 Historical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented historical studies deal primarily with textually objectified experiences, expectations, orientations, emotions, causes, and effects within their respective significant contexts. Inferences regarding the relationships of individuals—of the author of a text perhaps—to themselves and the world are of a highly speculative nature and are difficult to verify with any degree of methodological accuracy. (6) Criticisms of the insufficiency (or complete lack of ) a historicized equivalent of the theoretical lexicography of psychoanalysis is widespread. Although the numerous terms and basic theories conceived by Freud, which are still accepted to date, were intimately interwoven with the (mainly bourgeois) collective unconscious of late nineteenth-century Vienna, psychoanalysis was nevertheless regarded from its inception as a verbal expression of a universal blueprint of the psychic structures, functions, and developments of human beings in general. According to critics, the empirical justifiability of this claim to universality is at least as questionable as it is in the case of other psychological/ social theories. Additionally there are some questionable aspects concerning a psychoanalysis-based anthropology; for example, theories about what drives us, and of the belief in an immutable human nature. (7) In some cases the somewhat faith-based claim of universality, resting on an insufficient empirical foundation, provokes further attacks of (implicit) psychoanalytical anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, or (even) cultural imperi-

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alism. From this perspective psychoanalysis appears as a repressive ideological instrument of power and domination; of nolens volens serving the purpose of conforming individuals to sociocultural norms. (8) The use of psychoanalytical methods remains dubious to numerous critics precisely because its application depends upon the analyst’s experience and, furthermore, subjectivity. An oft-raised criticism is that there is no place for subjectivity in the process of acquiring scientific knowledge, particularly when the validity of such knowledge is itself in the process of being established. Other, similar objections that are expressed in this area are committed to a certain—by no means generally accepted—interpretation of science. One need only recall the widespread criticism that the psychoanalytical procedure is not rationally comprehensible or in any case is inadequately transparent and therefore inutile as a scientific method. It is this fashion that audacious and/or arbitrary interpretations are often held at bay. (9) The presumed or actual self-immunizing strategy of psychoanalysts that construes all contradictions against their own interpretations as the critic’s psycho-dynamic resistance is sharply disputed. (10) There are reservations concerning the great effort and expense demanded by a psychoanalytically oriented study of history, alluding on the one hand to the vast amount of time and energy that the interpretative practice of psychoanalytical research can consume, while on the other raising doubts as to whether it is worthwhile to go beyond possessing solely the tools necessary for historical studies and be trained as a psychoanalyst. But this would definitely forestall charges of dilettantism in a field of interest trying to be taken seriously as a discipline. Extra training in psychoanalytical theory is therefore inevitable, and a certain amount of self-analysis is necessarily involved as part of the overall training protocol. This double qualification, emphasized by Loewenberg or Gay,14 is the reason for Wehler’s concern that in the end the great effort and expense of mating psychoanalysis with historical studies would probably not be recompensed.15

An Overview of Recent Academic Questions and Research Opportunities Critical judgments such as the ones listed above have not remained unchallenged within historical studies; however, most of the representatives of the field are still in agreement with these negative assessments. Recent efforts have been aimed at developing a foundation for a psychoanalysis-based branch of historical studies that is both practical and theoretical in its application and backed by empirical evidence. These attempts have unfortunately not been successful in modifying these assessments, which continues to be the case even though the various approaches and investigations discussed in this volume have

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received attention, thus reinforcing the demand for a closer collaboration between history and psychoanalysis. This is especially true regarding theoretical considerations and empirical studies in the field of Holocaust research. Studies made of the conditions, praxis, and transgenerational effects of the Nazi extermination of European Jews raise additional questions alongside the numerous psychological ones. Psychoanalytical theory would then appear to be of great, if not indispensable, benefit to the investigators of these questions. This is equally true for other aspects of this period and its legacy. Several of the treatises collected in this volume not only refer to relevant empirical research but are based on such investigations or reflect the results thereof (see particularly the contributions by Bohleber, Brede, Grünberg, and Straub). This is not the only subject through which the proponents of historical psychoanalytical theory have attempted to prove its worth during the last two and a half decades; in the meantime it has undergone further theoretical and practical refinements that set it apart as a unique discipline. Almost all of the contributions in this volume expertly demonstrate this trend, but due to the limitations of space they can consider only selected aspects of the constantly branching areas of psychoanalytical theory (see the essay by Bosse as an empirical example, or Wagner’s investigation of German postwar literature; also see—along with the works mentioned above—the contributions of Brede, Emrich, and Straub concerning the theoretical and practical aspects of this development. Beyond that, Brunner’s contribution discusses some basic concepts of historical psychoanalytical thought. Finally, Assmann deals with the theoretical questions of memory and recall, of equal interest to psychoanalysis and historical studies). The essays collected in this volume demonstrate in completely different ways that whoever perceives the dangers and difficulties as mentioned above still does not have to see sufficient reasons therein to disconnect from psychoanalysis as completely as has been the case to date. Almost all of the criticisms given can be dealt with.16 Psychoanalysts have formulated new answers for each of these problems, even though the traditional concepts persist, causing harm wherever they alight. The potentials of psychoanalysis in the field of historical research appear to be in the most rudimentary stages of utility, and indeed, these potentials have not even been sufficiently defined. Wehler’s assessment can be considered out-of-date, as in the meantime various developments and trends in psychoanalytical research (and within the general discussion of theoretical and methodological questions in the historical, social, and cultural sciences) have emerged, apparently indicating the advisability of a redefinition of the relationship between history and psychoanalysis. The contributions to this volume substantiate this, though they do not aspire to cover the whole spectrum of historical psychoanalysis. As space does not permit an overview of the latest developments in the areas of research, theory, and method, in the following I will merely attempt

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to designate some of the questions and research perspectives that are relevant to historical studies, and for which psychoanalysis is of importance. Thus, contrary to the functions ordinarily focused upon, a considerably expanded scope of functions for psychoanalytically oriented historical studies is opened, designating potentials of psychoanalysis that historical research and historiography will not be able to ignore at length without disadvantage. Without claiming to be complete, the following possibilities can be distinguished with the intention to systematize how psychoanalysis17 and historical studies could perhaps begin a dialogue and actually establish a functioning research collaboration. (1) As mentioned above, psychoanalysis elucidates the causative motives of historical agents. The question of the psychic considerations determining particular actions, understood as historically meaningful actions, is the central question of this research method. In this process the (superficial) cognitive reasons for actions, as delivered by the agents themselves (for example) or those persons identifying with the agents, are challenged. As a rule, cognitive reasons are examined in their resistive function as understood psychoanalytically, i.e., as repressive, identifying, projective, rationalizing, or sublimating functions. In the process of analyzing particularly the affective, emotional aspects of the action in question, the cognitive reasons are confronted with competing interpretations. This kind of psychoanalytical interpretation is aimed at the latent motivational background that can impart its specific drive structure, characteristic, and identity to historically relevant actions. In this manner, to use an example selected by chance, institutionally embedded administrative acts become unconsciously motivated acts in the service of power and omnipotence fantasies. Contrary to traditional historical-political biographies, this perspective is no longer utilized only in the analysis of decisions and actions of especially influential historical personalities who controlled central positions of military, administrative, or economic power, but for all members of a society on principle. This expansion of visional range can informally be associated with contemporary “everyday history.” As far as these analyses can be based upon interviews with people who witnessed certain periods and similar material, psychoanalysis can be supported by empirical surveying procedures (such as narrative interviews and group discussions). Furthermore, all sources that provide insight into the motivational and meaningful structure of any historical agent’s actions represent constructive empirical data. Within the framework of such analyses, both the actions of individuals and of collective agents can generally be considered, that is, the particular actions of individuals and also the activities of many like-minded people. (For the sake of simplicity, “collective agent” designates a plurality of people that act together more or less synchronously and coordinately, and also people who concurrently commit or omit like-minded or otherwise similar actions.) Hitler, for example, belongs to the “historical individuals” who have been exceptionally scrutinized by psychoanalytical biography and motivational research. Disregarding the dif-

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ficulties of rudimentary typification and categorization, the investigation of the perpetrators, supporters, and victims of the National Socialist tyranny can be understood as exempla for the analysis of collective behavior. The same applies to research in the intergenerational tradition of patterns of thought, speech, feeling, and behaviour of the collectives mentioned above. The analysis of collective behavior does not have to begin with an individual case and arrive at a typification, which is empirically valid for a majority of people, by means of a contrasting comparison of cases. Social and mass psychological considerations can also be of great importance. Regardless of whether the case concerns the motives of individual agents or socially and culturally obligatory motives that determine the thought, speech, emotion, and action of many persons, psychoanalysis of the motivational background and driving force responsible for the behavior of historical agents is always directed toward a depth hermeneutic explication of the meaning and significance of manifested behavior and also a motivational psychological explanation of the same. The psychoanalysis of the behavior (commissions and omissions) of historical agents is uno actu explicative and explanative. (2) Along with those individuals “making” history, psychoanalysis is, of course, also interested in those who experienced history as suffering that determined (nolens volens) their own thought, emotion, desire, and action, at least as an experiential background. Those works studying traumatic historical experiences such as the psychic effects of persecution and war can be understood as paradigmatic for this category. The most prominent example for this research is the investigation of the consequences of persecution (Folgen der Verfolgung), from which the victims of the National Socialist tyranny, and particularly of the Holocaust, are still suffering to date. In this category belong recent disturbing studies indicating that it was not only those who directly experienced the violence in the streets and camps who were permanently afflicted, but their children and grandchildren as well. In all of these cases the psychic structures and functions are not formed by the conscious knowledge that an individual has acquired in the course of his life, but much more through experiences, of which, at the most, “dark” vestiges remain. Historical events and the individual experiences interwoven therewith constitute the subject of a psychoanalytical research endeavoring to discover the subconscious consequences of these experiences, whether they are one’s own or a significant other’s. As mentioned, more than one contribution to this volume is dedicated to this theme. When we understand historical formations and constellations, events, and developments as the constitutional condition for manifold individual and collective experiences and identity-forming processes, we can say in summary that psychoanalysis investigates the historical, determinative reasons for the thought, emotion, desire, and action of individuals and collectives in their respective biographic, subjective, and socially and culturally given forms. The family serves

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as an important, but by no means the only, intermediary instance emphasized in psychoanalytical research. The analysis of the transgenerational effects of specific historical events appears to be a special case of more general psychological processes in which members of a younger generation integrate the experiential vestiges of an elder generation in their own identity development. And it is not only this process that remains subconscious: the multifunctional role that the children (grandchildren, etc.) play in this process for the parents (grandparents, etc.) also remains hidden from the consciousness of those involved. Whereas the research perspective given under point (1) is directed at the drive structure and motivational impulses of those who form history through their commissions and omissions (in the sense of collectively meaningful events), the field of research considered here is concerned with the analysis of the unconscious consequences that historically caused experiences have for the thought, emotion, desire, and action of one or many. It is understood that not only negative critical life experiences, particularly traumatic experiences, must be examined. Every aspect of a historical experiential space and expectational horizon is capable of determining the self-image and worldview of individuals, their affects and emotions, desires and anxieties, hopes and misgivings, and finally their activities in general, and this often takes place beyond the awareness of those involved and their partners in communication and interaction. The psychoanalytical contribution to historical studies interested in psychological clarification as sketched above is by no means completely expended by the “dichotomous” perspective of human beings as authors and victims, agens and patiens, of history. (3) History is of interest to the psychoanalyst not only as a psychically meaningful phenomenon, but also as a specific method (imaginative, cognitive, or linguistic) of constructing and representing reality. In this regard psychoanalysis is not solely interesting as a cultural study engaged with the interpretation of historically relevant objectifications, monuments, architectural and other characteristics of particular buildings and sites, political rituals and symbols, and so forth. Historical constructions or representations are made by socialized subjects as demonstrated in point (4) below. (4) It is not intrinsically human to represent historical realities, to attempt to understand oneself and others in the light of historical experiences, and to thereby gain an orientation for ones own thoughts and actions. Nevertheless, especially in our modern Western culture, it is an empirical fact that decisively influences the actual self-image and worldview of at least the majority of people. “We” just happen to think “historically” by differentiating “time”—in the simplest case—in past, present, and future. We operate with this differentiation interweaving (interrelating) pasts, presents, and futures within the framework (especially) of a narrative designation of meaning integrating these stages of time into a uniform progression, i.e., the narrative in the sense of represented

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history. Biographical subjectifications of the self are formally and structurally analogous to historical concepts of reality, and biographical and historical representations are often closely interwoven. In both cases the narration of stories has a decisive function. This special form of structuring and designing time, which constructs and represents (imaginatively, cognitively, and linguistically) reality, is a competence that “must”18 be acquired by every individual in the course of his socialization and enculturation. Observing the difference between (individual) biography and (collective) history, one can speak of biographicnarrative competence and historical-narrative competence within this context. Relevant psychoanalytical considerations are concerned with the historicalnarrative designation of meaning, or imaginations and fantasies, communications or discourses in which the ability to thematically represent one’s life within the context of historical circumstances is necessary. Psychoanalysis can examine more than who represented history in which manner at a given time in a given place or attempts to exclude it from the present consciousness (and why or for which reasons this is done, which psychic function it serves). Beyond that it could be interested in a general theory of narrative competence, which could explain the structural and functional aspects of the designation of historical meaning and meanwhile endeavor to illuminate the ontogenetic development of this ability. What, then, does this ability to temporally structure reality consist of, what purpose does it serve, and how does it actually originate and develop? The question relates particularly to the ability to think of time as history, and also the ability to situate oneself and others along its horizon. Even to these questions, psychoanalysis has some at least rudimentary answers in store, such as when it emphasizes the significance of adolescence—from the specific experiences and developments of youth—as crucial for the genesis of historical consciousness.19 (5) When we consider historical-narrative competence as the ability to construct and represent reality in a specific manner, it is self-evident that we are not only speaking about an ability belonging to the everyday, common world that is acquired by the members of various cultures and that they rely upon in order to orient themselves in their everyday lives. We are ultimately discussing the very ability utilized by historians making “history” out of events understood as the construction of meaning or as a representation of temporal processes. Of course psychoanalysis can also examine the professional historical designation of meaning as regards its motivations and psychological functions. Even the most elaborate historical constructions may not only satisfy cognitive curiosity and explanatory desires, thus opening the way for a rationally oriented (political) approach, but can at the same time also, sometimes primarily, serve other motives and needs: historical sources frequently function as a projective surface for personal desires, fantasies, and fears, which are finally worked out or repressed in a scientifically sublimated form.

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(6) Besides analyzing and uncovering situations as just mentioned, psychoanalysis could also be implemented in the professional work of historians as a reflexive method to control subconscious forces. This is certainly not easily realized. The idea does not appear to be completely infeasible and unpractical: in supervision groups created especially for this purpose the researchers’ emotional and affective responses to the respective historical sources could be treated as a constitutive element of the scientific, historical development of experience and knowledge. Psychoanalysis would serve the purpose of integrating the individual subjectivity into a process of scientific reflection in which the influence of subconscious psychic forces would be recognized, made conscious, and controlled to the extent possible. Precisely this application of the psychoanalytical theory and method, in which not only the objects of scientific research—i.e., the thought, emotion, desire, and action of others—but the originators of insight themselves are also scrutinized in psychoanalytical reflection, seems to offer a path that the rationally oriented historical profession has not yet taken but could follow in the future—at least in those cases in which the theme of the intended historical study is so “emotionally charged” that this approach suggests itself. There is no doubt that this self-reflexive application of psychoanalysis is not only time-consuming but stipulates a number of psychological prerequisites. Those who do not suppress or repress their own affects and emotions but acknowledge, reflect, and to a certain extent utilize them as a medium of the historical process of developing experience and insight, “work” on themselves. To prevent misunderstanding: this self-analysis is extremely partial and not a purpose in itself. It serves the methodical control of subconscious elements of the historian’s personality that impede or facilitate the scientific process of developing experience and insight. The latter is in any event the exclusive purpose thereof. The practice of historical studies is, even in those areas where it is supported by psychoanalysis in the manner sketched above, certainly not a therapeutic event—it cannot and should not be. “History” is the subject that is handled and that the historian intends to teach his addressees about. Psychoanalysis nevertheless supports the productive insight that “history” and those representing it, even in a functioning scientific context, are never completely independent from one another—even if those involved are ordinarily not aware of this, and cannot be aware of this per se. (7) Finally, an oft-mentioned observation remains to be made that history and psychoanalysis both operate as “thought of the times.” Even if this thinking is quite different in the details of many aspects, there are notwithstanding obvious common characteristics suggesting a dialogue about pertinent basic theoretical terms. Consider for instance the narrative structure of the historical and psychoanalytical designations of meaning. A further example taken by chance might be the principle of “belatedness” (Nachträglichkeit) as

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Freud coined it, which is of remarkable relevance to all historical thought patterns.*

Notes * Translated from the German by Richard Friedberg 1. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Geschichte und Psychoanalyse (Cologne 1971; reprint Frankfurt/ M., Berlin, and Vienna 1974). In the following quotes are taken from the edition published in 1974. 2. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Psychoanalyse,” in Wehler, Geschichte und Psychoanalyse, 7–26, and Wehler’s “Introduction” to the same volume, pp. 5–6. 3. Wehler, “Introduction,” 6. 4. Consider the influential work of von Wright, in which the understanding and explanation of actions is a methodic reconstruction of the subject’s intentions controlling the action as a schema of a reversed practical syllogism: Georg H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca and New York 1971). 5. Wehler, “Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Psychoanalyse,” 18. 6. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York 1958); Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth (New York 1969); along with a number of other works by Erikson the following two are of interest: Dimensions of a New Identity (New York 1974) and Life History and the Historical Moment (New York 1975). 7. Wehler, “Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Psychoanalyse,” 18. 8. Ibid., 22. 9. Ibid., 19. 10. Ibid., 17. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. See Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Erfahrungsraum’ and Erwartungshorizont’ – zwei historische Kategorien,” in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 4th ed. (Frankfurt/ M. 1985), 349–375 regarding the terms “experiential space” (Erfahrungsraum) and “expectational horizon” (Erwartungshorizont). 13. In the mean time this separates the practical therapeutic individual and group psychoanalysis in general from psychoanalytic social research and cultural analysis, as indicated particularly by Lorenzer: see perhaps Alfred Lorenzer, “Der Gegenstand psychoanalytischer Textinterpretation,” in Sebastian Göppert, ed., Perspectiven psychoanalytischer Literaturkritik (Freiburg i. Br. 1978), 71–81; Lorenzer, Kultur-Analysen: Psychoanaltische Studien zur Kultur, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt/ M. 1982). 14. See Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford 1985). 15. Wehler, “Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Psychoanalyse,” 15. 16. Some of the complaints given are discussed in Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians in a passionate vindication of psychoanalysis. The author attempts to discharge objections and to completely refute the specter of a reductive, naïve, coarse, and mono-causal explanation of history by presumptive psychoanalysts. The mistakes of “psychohistory,” for example, that have bloomed since the 1950s are relentlessly revealed by Gay (see 195ff.). But Gay is too bold at times and accepts simplifications in the process. What is of greater importance to the relevant subject, as my differentiation of possible psychoanalytic accesses of history demonstrates, is that Gay’s concept of the use of psychoanalysis for historical studies is too narrow. Beyond that it is evident that Gay’s efforts are impaired by a fixation on Freud. Although he does not consider Freud’s theory as the totality of psychoanalytic thought, he nevertheless does not mention more recent developments.

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Gay thus unnecessarily limits his defense of psychoanalysis, making it more vulnerable than it would be if contemporary positions and developments were incorporated. 17. It is self-evident that the term “psychoanalysis” is applied as a collective singular term under which a great diversity of theoretical and methodological variants of psychoanalytical thought are understood. 18. On the foundation of “historical consciousness” in narrative theory and other modes of historical symbolization in ordinary and scientific contexts see Jörn Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens (Frankfurt/ M. 1991); Rüsen, “Historische Sinnbildung durch Erzählen: Eine Argumentationskizze zum narrativischen Paradigma der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Geschichtsdidaktik im Blick auf nicht-narrative Faktoren,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 18 (1996): 501–543; Klaus E. Müller and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Historische Sinnbildung, Problemstellungen, Zeitkonzepte,Wahrnehmungshorizonte, Darstellungstrategien (Reinbek b. Hamburg 1997); Jürgen Straub, “Telling Stories, Making History: Toward a Narrative Psychology of the Historical Construction of Meaning,” in Jürgen Straub, ed., Narrations, Identity and Historical Consciousness: The psychological Construction of Time and History (New York and Oxford 2004), 44–98. 19. The essay from Bosse offers some indications of an answer to the question outlined. See also Mario Erdheim, Die gesellschaftliche Produktion von Unbewußtheit: Eine Einführung in den ethnopsychoanalytischen Prozeß (1982) (Frankfurt/ M. 1984).

Part I

CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

CHAPTER

1

Three Memory Anchors Affect, Symbol,Trauma ALEIDA ASSMANN

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. —Beckett, Proust: Three Dialogues In his novel Das Geisterfest, the Hungarian author György Konrad writes: “I animate the stories that have survived in the amber of time.”1 To this description I would like to add the question, is there such a thing as an “amber of time”? Or to put it in less poetic words: are there such retentive milieus for our memories? If so, one can surmise only in very exceptional cases; for our memories, as neurologists continually remind us, are generally transient, plastic, and unreliable. In response to such fleetingness, various cultures throughout time have invented stabilizing devices, from physical or pictorial mnemo-techniques to writing and other anchors of memory. But such external stabilizers are not the focus of my discussion here; I am interested rather in those psychological mechanisms that work against the general tendency toward forgetting, rendering some of our memories more unforgettable than those that, sooner or later, slide into oblivion. From a certain theoretical perspective, my use of the term “anchors” could be viewed as problematic. Indeed, neurophysiological research into brain and memory function has argued from about 1970 onward, for a memory hypothesis “in which the major determinant in information retention is the ‘flow’ of neurological impulses.”2 This discrediting of the previously dominant model of localization has since been dramatized by constructivist theorists as a paradigm Notes for this section begin on page 31.

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shift, with the previously sanctioned metaphors of memory as inscription and retention being thrown out as inadmissible fallacies. In opposition to the static retention paradigm, constructivist researchers in the human sciences posit a dynamic model of continuous reconstitution, whereby the memory of past events is related in a successively elastic fashion to the present.3 Given such theoretical qualifications, it might seem that my essay is mistitled insofar as the abandonment of the retention metaphor would deny memory any sort of stability in the name of an unlimited transformational engine. Convinced as I am about the necessary construction, and attendant conditions, of memory as a synchronic phenomenon, I find it equally hard to resign myself to the consequent hypothesis that memory is solely determined by the present, and not merely reliant on the past.4 The idea that the past is assembled from unrelated memory fragments through continuous acts of volition strikes me as tantamount to its elimination as an existentially concrete expression of ongoing unresolved issues. Concepts such as blame or responsibility would thereby lose their foundation, and the past—yet another virile phantasm?—be entirely subjected to the power of the will. In my continuing search for intrapsychic memory anchors, I arrived at the three key terms that make up the subtitle of my essay: affect, symbol, trauma.

The False Memory Debate Before addressing these terms in greater detail, however, I want to briefly touch on a recent controversy that has made headlines in the U.S. as the so-called “false memory debate.”5 At the heart of the debate is the question of the reliability or unreliability of personal memories. But in this particular instance, a professional controversy has triggered an open legal battle in the society wherein two parties have become locked in belligerent opposition. On the one hand, we find those psychotherapists concerned with multiple personality disorders involving the pathological disintegration of personality components. One of the most noteworthy causes of such disintegration is post-traumatic stress disorder. Originally recognized in 1979 when the term appeared for the first time in the American Handbook of Psychiatry, it refers to the severe mental disequilibria that appear as long-term effects of earlier traumatic experiences. There were immediate legal consequences of this recognition. In 1980, the seven-year statute of limitations on certain lawsuits was lifted in twenty-one states. Affected above all were those cases in which the victims were children rather than persons legally classified as adults: victims, in other words, who as a result of enforced silence and decades of self-repression had not been in a position to institute any legal action against their assailants. Thus a de facto open season against the prosecution of early-childhood incest/sexual abuse cases was removed. Paralleling the legal recognition an “incest recovery movement” came into being—a full-fledged civil

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campaign aimed at unearthing repressed memories by means of therapy sessions and self-help groups, and even through books, articles, and TV programs.6 The opposing party is constituted by an organization called FMSF, or the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. This group is primarily made up of the parents of the children bringing suit against them for sexual abuse, who in turn reject the charges as they are filed. In their view, this latest disclosure movement is a contemporary witch hunt in which the sodality of psychotherapists, rather than an Inquisition, is pulling the reins. They charge this professional cadre with inducing rather than curing psychological diseases, and claim that therapists “confabulate” (as the catchword has it) with their clients in creating fictitious memories as a generic but at the same time incisive explanation for their current miseries. The exposure of early-childhood incest experiences is then conveniently levered into place as the therapeutic solution for any future crisis in orientation or behavioral disorder, covering everything from an unhappy marriage to general depression to temporary anorexia or bulimia. Upon the advent of this oppositional dynamic between parents and children, with its engaging of legal intervention as well as mobilization of the media, one can recognize an identifiable schism within the white middle-class American family. My focus here, however, is not the politicization of this subject but rather the various memory theories to be encountered in the ensuing controversy, for the FMSF counts among its members not only those parents immediately affected by this and other disclosure movements, but also memory researchers and critics who bring a broad-scale attack against what they term “the myth of repressed memories.” Elizabeth Loftus, one of the prominent co-founders of the organization, is not among the accused but has joined forces with the movement as a memory researcher. Her research emphasis however, is cognitive psychology rather than psychotherapy; she also ranks as the primary authority in the U.S. in the field of experimental memory research, having been called upon in legal cases to determine the truth content of witness testimony. Her particular emphasis is the unreliability of remembrances as supported by ongoing laboratory evidence. As a result, she has not only been able to establish the inexactness, mutability, and impressionistic nature of human memory, but has gone on to implant a false memory into an adult subject during a laboratory experiment, whereby he then believed himself to have been exposed to a traumatic event, apparently experienced at the age of five.7 To be sure, it is inevitably the case that in psychotherapy, as in every rapidly developing discipline, instances of malpractice will occur. These outgrowths, insofar as they have aggravating human or social consequences, should be sharply criticized, not least for the sake of those actually affected. But it is another aspect of the problem that interests me here: its evidence that memories are obviously reconstructed in certain institutional contexts and are thereby liable to produce conflicting accounts under different circumstances.

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Turning to such contexts, there is the therapeutic frame, which is characterized by a style of fundamental openness, cooperation, and “disinterested” empathy. The well-tempered skepticism of the analyst does not attempt to unravel the client, but rather to unveil the therapeutic method. It concerns itself with the freeing of the subject’s authentic self from the psychic blocks and evasions that serve as objective badges of suffering. The most important criterion for uncovering authenticity is the force of this suffering, which is not least of all to be evaluated by standards of human empathy. The legal frame, on the other hand, as evidenced in its public focus, is replete with suspicion and censure. The prolegomenon for such a discourse is the explicit either/or structure of truth or falsehood, to be anchored in empirical evidence and for which a final judgment constituted in terms of guilt and non-guilt has to be pronounced. In other words, the legal framework allows no therapy to be carried out and the therapeutic model allows no verdict to be enforced. Memories are reconstructed differently in different institutional frames, each forwarding a different ethos. This point was well expressed by a psychotherapist who found it necessary to defend himself against the stipulation “no memories but in things”: I have no interest in such a task. I am a therapist, not a detective. When clients come to me and genuinely risk disclosing and exploring their life’s issues, the therapeutic relationship must be, as it always has been, a sanctuary – confidential, private and safe. I work in the aftermath of shattering experiences. I am less interested in the pinpoint accuracy of every detail of my client’s memories than I am in the chronic, debilitating after-effects. It is well beyond the usual clinical covenant for therapists to enter into their clients’ lives as researchers, detectives, solicitors, or professional chroniclers.8

This review of a contemporary debate indicates that even the most private of memories can have marked social and political consequences when reconstructed within a given institutional frame. It also showcases opposing viewpoints on the history of the ‘art of memory.’ Trauma therapists assume that memories are in fact preserved over decades and are capable of being reactivated, whereas cognitive psychologists fully deny the possibility of such permanence, stipulating (as constructivists do) an unlimited range for memory composition and transformation—all of which leads me to the first of my headlined categories.

Affect In the history of mnemonic devices (which I have expressly excluded from this investigation), emotional affect plays a pivotal role. But insofar as artificial memory must rely on the resources of biological memory, it takes on many of its characteristics as well. Thus the great anonymous master of classical rhetoric,

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whose magnum opus has come down to us under the title Ad Herennium (first century B.C.), had already classified “affect” as the most significant memory anchor: When we see everyday things that are petty, ordinary and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time. … We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we invent similarities which are as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active [imagines agents]; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, … or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint. …9

What is conspicuous in this mnemonic treatise is the instrumentalization of affects. Memory and affect value do not automatically adhere to each other in this instance, but are yoked together with the highest degree of caprice. This changes when we pass from artificial mental aids to individual experiences and their reconstruction as memories. In the latter case, memory and affect melt into an inseparable aggregate. The affective quality of individual memories is beyond our control; their emotional activation in certain instances cannot—and this is the point—be deliberately instigated. It was precisely this inability to manipulate emotional response that made it into such an important memory anchor for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He seems to have been among the first to confront himself with the question of his own probity in the act of writing autobiography, a genre that relies on memory recall as its most important source. Autobiographical memories require the setting down of one’s life story to bring forth evidence in a personal court of appeal. But in cases where there are no witnesses for a given event, and no external evidence by which its recall might be judged accurate or inaccurate, how can one erect a standard for memory reliability? It was in the quest for such a standard that Rousseau discovered the affect. It was clear to him that the subject matter of past experiences could not be reduplicated in memory, and he therefore rejected from the outset any objective truth-claim for his remembrances. Instead, he laid stake to the legitimacy of a given memory’s affect value, locating this in a “chain of emotions” (la chaine des sentiments): All of the written evidence I had collected to extend my memories, and which has directed me in my project, has been transmitted to others. It will never be mine again. I have only one unfailing guide that I can count on and that is the chain of emotions that has accompanied my self-development and provided me with those experiences that were their cause or effect. My unhappiness is quickly forgotten, but I cannot forget my errors, nor still less my pleasurable feelings. Their retention is simply too valuable to allow them to disappear from my heart. I can accept factual inconsistencies, dismiss reality from my mind, or misread evidence, but I cannot deceive myself about what I have felt.10

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From affect as a calculated ingredient in classical memory technique, we move to Rousseau’s positioning of it as the hard core of remembrance. As Jean Starobinski points out: Emotion is the indestructible core of memory … the truth that Rousseau wants to communicate to us doesn’t concern the exact positioning of biographical facts, but rather aims at the relationship that he has to his past … this presents an inclusive form of truth that escapes, however, the laws of empirical verification. We thereby leave the realm of truth—the verified account—and enter that of authenticity.11

There is yet something else beyond the distinction between objective truth and subjective truthfulness that strikes me as noteworthy here. Affect-memory is a psychosomatic experience that not only escapes empirical verification, but also internal mental auditing. This can be instanced in another writer of autobiography who has likewise addressed the question of memory reliability: Mary Antin. Born in 1881 in Polotzk (Belarus), she immigrated to the U.S. with her family at the beginning of the century. Here she wrote, in 1909 at the age of twenty-eight, her autobiography—including that irrevocably closed chapter of it that ended with emigration from her Eastern European Jewish milieu. Her own memories begin at the age of four with the burial of her grandfather. After sketching out the scene of the wake, she abruptly interrupts her account with the question, “But do I really remember this particular event?” And she continues: Perhaps I heard it described by some fond relative, as I heard other anecdotes of my infancy, and unconsciously incorporated it with my genuine recollections. … It is more likely, however, that I took no intellectual interest in my grandfather’s remains at the time, but later on, when I sought for a first recollection, perhaps, elaborated the scene, and my part in it, to something that satisfied my sense of dramatic fitness. If I really committed such a fraud, I am now well punished, by being obliged, at the very start, to discredit the authenticity of my memoirs.12

This ironic commentary, however, cannot disguise the fact that even Antin herself believes in the faithfulness of her memories. She goes even further than Rousseau by claiming that such fidelity may indeed be counterfactual, setting itself against empirical evidence. This issue is illustrated by a particular memory instance: the blood-red dahlias that are supposed to have bloomed in a neighbor’s garden. As Antin explains: Concerning my dahlias I have been told that they were not dahlias at all, but poppies. As a conscientious historian I am bound to record every rumor, but I retain the right to cling to my own impression. Indeed, I must insist on my dahlias, if I am to preserve the garden at all. I have so long believed in them, that if I try to see poppies in those red masses over the wall, the whole garden crumbles away, and leaves me a grey blank. I have nothing against poppies. It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality.13

Poppies or dahlias? Why does Antin stress this minor issue, being as it is fully irrelevant to the flow of her story? I hesitate to classify her as an advocate of a postmodern epistemology, subordinating an objective, empirically certain

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world of experience to her “own” subjective truth. It is more likely that her remarks apply not to the structure of reality, but to that of memory. By insisting on her dahlias, she throws into relief the apodictic quality of affective memories. These are not subject to correction, for they stand or fall with the intensity of the animating reference, the sudden impression. And to abandon such impressions is in fact to be left with nothing at all. The proof for such a living connection to the past also has a historical function as testimony, although a different one from that of the historian, with whom Antin compares herself: You may make a survey of Polotzk ever so accurate, and show me where I was wrong; still I am the better guide. You may show that my adventurous road led nowhere, but I can prove, by the quickening of my pulse and the throbbing of my rapid recollections, that things happened to me there or here; and I shall be believed, not you.14

Excurse: Memory and History—Criteria for the Credibility of Memories in Oral History Whereas Mary Antin could well accept this division between objective verifiability and subjective truth, such an insistence would be unworkable for a recent professional subdivision of memory specialists whom I now refer to: the historians of oral history research. These specialists, who have extended historical sources to personal memories, and who, with the “memory interview,” have created a new research instrument, also need to submit memory material to validity criteria for the development of relevant verification procedures. They must therefore perform the sleight-of-hand necessary to play both of the roles that we found irreparably bifurcated in the false memory debate. On the one hand, one is required to behave with empathy toward the interviewees in creating an atmosphere of trust; on the other, one must conduct oneself scientifically in testing such material for its truth content. “Memories,” as Lutz Niethammer, the leading German exponent of this brand of historiography, remarks, … are not objective mirror images of a lost reality or transitory perception. The memory interview is far more decisively determined by the mind’s active choosing and summing up; by the reformulation of memory elements according to an intervening interpretive model; and by their capacity to be influenced by alterations in social values and the socio-cultural interaction of the interview itself.15

As criteria for memory verification, Niethammer suggests the following: (1) Inconsistencies or a striking discrepancy between exactitude on the one hand and contextual framing on the other can be understood as indicators of the spontaneity and authenticity of a so-called “encapsulated memory content.”

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(2) Episodes in which something was experienced for the first time—such as the first kiss or the first day at work are considered to retain more accuracy and vividness than ordinary events. (3) But also quotidian experiences are valued by oral historians in spite of their routine and repetitive character. In this case, it is their apparent insignificance, their absence of thematic focus, which keeps them in a state of latency that guarantees a certain “purity” of memory.16 (4) An elaborate formulation, on the other hand, indicates a reformulation of memory recall through a retrospective reworking of its material and the accommodation to currently accepted standards of value. For the oral historian, therefore, the reliability of memories is intimately connected with the status of their retention. As with the psychoanalyst, so with the historian: the memories least affected by conscious influence—those stabilized through their latency or affective content— prove to be the ones most useful. With my next category, symbol, I would like to turn to that which the oral historian so conscientiously filters out of his material: the processes of a retrospective constitution and reconstitution of memory recall. My aim is to show that such a reconfiguration is not necessarily equivalent to a falsification, but contributes in its own right to the anchoring and stabilizing of said memories.

Symbol In his pioneering study on memory and its social conditions, Maurice Halbwachs notes that “every individual, and every historical occurrence is indeed transformed into a doctrine, concept, or symbol when appropriated by the collective memory; it acquires a social significance, it becomes an element of a given society’s ideational system.”17 What Halbwachs says of “collective” (i.e., socially shared) memory is also applicable, I believe, to individual remembrances. In his “Recollections of an Elderly Person,” the Polish writer Andrej Szczypiorski has detailed the function of symbols as memory stabilizers. The “elderly person” is in fact the Capuchin father Anicet, born Albert Koplin in 1875 in the East Prussian city of Friedland. In 1893 he took orders in AlsaceLorraine, his ordination as priest following in 1900 in Krefeld. Transferred to Warsaw in 1918, he remained there as an elective Polish national (Wahlpole). He was active in charity and other social service, and was counted among the most respected priests in Warsaw. In 1940, he identified himself to the Nazi administration as Polish rather than German and was deported one year later to Auschwitz, where he died in the same year in the gas chamber. As he indicates in the introduction to his work, Szczypiorski set down his recollections in a very specific institutional framework. A memorial confer-

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ence in Poland’s Primate’s Palace had as an implicit motive the petitioning of the Vatican for Father Anicet’s beatification. Szczypiorski first met Anicet as a young lad and assisted him as altar boy in the final years of his service (1938– 1941). Knowing nothing of his background, origins, or significance, his images, scenes of, and conversations with Father Anicet were confined to a boy’s perspective. But the limited amount of memory data is inversely related to the importance that Anicet came to play in Szczypiorski’s retrospective examination of his life. He therefore warns his readers from the very beginning: “Everything I am about to relate here is on the order of a confession, a depiction of my spiritual life story.”18 Szczypiorski fastidiously differentiates his recollections as a youth from those of the aged, gray-haired adult he has become, one who, as he repeatedly remarks, “carries a sack-full of memories on his back, having completed the greater part of his mortal life.”19 With respect to these early recollections, he remarks that [t]he experiences that I had in early youth indeed continued to live on in me, but well-hidden in the crammed and dusty attic of the mind which is rarely inspected … Father Anicet was certainly also in residence there, but inconspicuous, silenced over the years, not needed. In my remembrance … he was, if there at all, a physically small man bowed with age, not particularly neat in appearance, with sandals covering bare feet. And that was quite literally all I knew of him.20

The attic is a vivid metaphor for latent memories. Disorganized, forgotten, strewn about, they collect as waste: discarded matter without use or function. Like trash, such latent memories exist in an intermediate state from which they may either sink into complete oblivion or else emerge into the light of recall. Each one of the individual episodes that Szczypiorski can still relate is stamped with a certain affect: ambition, humility, surprise, wonder, and mystery all influence the transmission of perception into memory. Returning to his later recollections, those carefully differentiated from the ones collected in youth, Szczypiorski continues: Only in a later phase of my life did Father Anicet return. Today, he remains a central, in any case very important, figure in my spiritual adventure … one could in fact claim that Father Anicet, as he appears in my memory, functions as a kind of a retroactive hero in my personal and spiritual maturation. He fills, as it were, a gap in my imagination rather than in my experiences as I lived them, thereby fulfilling a certain spiritual need—a kind of moral imperative—in my admittedly rather complicated life.21

Just as the memories of youth are served by the emotionally-charged affect, so are those of maturity by the symbol. These are stabilizers of a very different order. A memory acquires the force of a symbol if it is to be incorporated into the process of retrospective self-assessment, and thereby positioned within a given configuration of biographical meaning. Szczypiorski relates in detail how the Father Anicet of this memory processing is in no way to be equated with the historical person. It is not, he remarks,

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his life, activities, or influence [that I reconstruct] but rather Anicet as a symbol, someone fatefully elevated in my imagination into the rank of a symbol … that which I carry with me, that which is important to me, is my Anicet, not the fleshand-bones Capuchin father who once passed through the streets of Warsaw and lost his life behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz.22

But it would be premature to label this constellated symbol as a fiction and therefore a lie merely because it deliberately distances itself from the historical facts. The importance of such an intervening reconstitution of memory material should not be underestimated. As opposed to the affective anchor, symbolic meaning is reactively established. The perseverance of a significant number of our memories, in fact, depends on the possibility of creating such a meaning, and the attempt to bring this about is a feature not merely a human need but also human nature; not merely a question of accommodation but also one of self-determination. “Everyone responds to the question of the meaning of life with a c.v.,” writes György Konrad in the novel cited above.23 But whereas a curriculum vitae is composed of verifiable biographical data, one’s historia vitae is rooted in reinterpreted memories welded into a memorable and meaningful narrative. We refer to such “form-giving” as sense which serves as a mode for processing disparate experiences.

Trauma The literary critic Lawrence Langer would quite possibly classify Szczypiorski’s transformation of recollection into symbol as a form of “heroic memory.” Heroic memory opposes itself here to an “unheroic memory,” the former presupposing an integral self composed of self-respect, free will, mental flexibility, positive values, and a rhetoric of redemption, whereas the latter remains irreversibly severed from such resources. Langer identifies this unheroic memory as characteristic of a “diminished self,” a being that has been deprived of all control over his or her environment, and whose discourse has been etiolated of all connotations of active authority. In the testimonies of Holocaust victims, he found “an abandonment of the entire vocabulary of the integral self, anchored in such terms as choice, will, the power of deliberation, and future security.”24 The unheroic memory, as Langer documents it, is incapable of a retrospective mastery of traumatic experiences because it lacks the necessary mental and spiritual resources and values, which have likewise fallen victim to the Nazi terror. Instead of a therapeutic rehabilitation of the damaged patient, Langer is interested in granting it an independent existential status: “this diminished self calls for an entire complex of redefinitions and new perceptions, a modernized or modernistic view of ethical discursive possibilities and limits that need not confine themselves to the reality of the Holocaust.”25 The unheroic memory and the diminished self relate to traumatic experiences that Holocaust victims

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(and others in similar situations) are not able to transform into redemptive or otherwise meaningful symbols. At this point we find ourselves returning to the central opposition in the false memory debate. The differences, of course, between the personal, biographical trauma induced by child abuse and the historical, collective trauma of the Holocaust should not be blurred. The Holocaust allows for empirical verification, and whereas its victims were often unable in subsequent years to find an adequate way of relating their experiences, they did not as a rule suffer from memory loss requiring therapeutic intervention. Yet there are significant parallels: as a result of experiences that exceed the limit of psychosomatic assimilation, the individual’s capacity for self-integration is destroyed. In both instances, trauma anchors an experience inaccessible to conscious influence, acting as a latent presence outside the reach of psychological appropriation.26 The stabilizing effect of the trauma is precisely what Jean-François Lyotard has emphasized in his psychohistorical essay on the Jews in Heidegger et ‘les Juifs’. Addressing the issue of the (mis)appropriation of the Holocaust in historical narrative and collective remembrance, Lyotard takes up Freud’s well-known insight into repression, which posits it as a particularly resilient form of conservation rather than a means of forgetting. But whereas Freud wanted to overcome repression in the name of its therapeutic cure, Lyotard sets it in relief as the only adequate response to Holocaust events. He regards symbolic and material representations as strategies of forgetting, for whatever has been systemically inscribed may just as easily be deleted. That which has never acquired the status of a sign, however—never congealed into a symbol for memory recall—cannot, argues Lyotard, be either disavowed or forgotten. I quote from a relevant section of his argument: In representing something a content is received in memory, and such an inscription may appear as a solid protection against forgetting. I believe, however, that the opposite is true. According to common knowledge, only that can be forgotten which had been inscribed before, because only what had been inscribed, can be effaced again. What, however, was never inscribed anywhere—due to a lack of material carrier, a lack of place and duration in which to situate the inscription,—what can not be presented neither in space nor in the time of domination, nor in geography nor in the history of a self-assured spirit—, let us say: what is not a possible stuff of experience, … this can therefore not be forgotten. It elides the process of forgetting and remains “only” present as something which was affected, though it is not clear how to qualify it, as a state of death in the midst of the life of the spirit (—comme un état de mort dans la vie de l’esprit).27

This catalogue of negativity comes to a head in the mystical formula of death-in-life, which evinces a certain religious foundation and serves in its own right as a symbol: a symbol in this case for the resistance to any palpable meaning, for an indissoluble “supplement,” in what Lyotard terms an “oubli inoubliable.” In this, his understanding of trauma clearly differs from Langer’s. Whereas the latter focuses on concrete trauma cases and the diagnosis of the “shattered”

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memories of Holocaust survivors, Lyotard, through his paradoxical gesture of a “prescribed illness,” recommends trauma as a collective stance to the crime and experience of the Holocaust. In this way, what is otherwise viewed as the very definition of an act of extreme disempowerment is presented by him as a cultural norm. Sublimated and collectivized, Lyotard’s concept of the trauma experience becomes paradigmatic, paving the way for its assimilation into literary theory, where it points to a general “crisis of representation.”

Conclusion To better depict the flashbacks occasioned by her traumatic experiences, a victim of child abuse resorts to metaphorical language: “Throughout such memories I am there, not here … reliving something clearly not understood, not given meaning—just lived and recorded, as if in amber, now suddenly cracked open.”28 The aim of my essay has been to address the question of how such suggestive metaphors should be treated and what memory mechanisms, if any, operate within them. The three terms under investigation—affect, symbol, and trauma—suggest three different forms of memory anchoring and can be triangularly arranged from a pathological external orientation to free self-determination. The affect as perceptual magnifier preserves details that are freely juxtaposed as unrelated fragments or micro-narratives within memory. Such preverbal, proto-narrative components occupy a place halfway between physical imprinting and symbolic codification. In the case of symbolic coding, complex arrangements of biographical episodes charged with strong affect are intergrated into a meaningful narrative structure. When the affect exceeds a certain affective limit, it loses the power to anchor memories, shattering them instead. This is what happens in trauma: the body is converted into an emotional target board as experience is stripped of its relevant interpretive mechanisms. Trauma is the impossibility of narration. Nonetheless, insofar as the historical trauma of the Holocaust finds utterance, such verbalizing approaches testimony (Zeugnis). Testimony differs from anecdote and narrative in the rarity or uniqueness of its articulation, thereby undercutting their repetitive and formulaic character.29 To return once again to our opening question regarding the stability or unlimited mutability of memories: we have been able to identify the protean nature of remembrances, which leads to the conclusion that not only do memories operate under the pressure of present circumstances, but they are reconstructed in specific institutional frames that determine their selection and sculpt their contours. Our survey has touched upon the specific features of legal, therapeutic, historical, autobiographical, and ecclesiastic frames. Given the erratic structure and overdetermination of memories, however, they are

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not likely to be ever fully contained in social and cultural frameworks. In addition to their plastic quality, we must consider not only their unwieldiness but also their charge of an excessive affect, which will continue to undermine new homogeneous constructions of a collective past.30 For some memories generate an energy that prevents closure and demands the reinterpretation and renegotiation of the past.

Notes 1. György Konrad, Das Geisterfest (Frankfurt 1989), 7. 2. Hinrich Rahmann, “Die Bausteine der Erinnerung,” Bild der Wissenschaft 19, no. 2 (1982): 75–86, here 84. 3. Jürgen Straub, “Kultureller Wandel als konstruktive Transformation des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Zur Theorie der Kulturpsychologie,” in Christian G. Allesch, Elfriede BillmannMahecha, and Alfred Lang, eds., Psychologische Aspekte des kulturellen Wandels (Vienna 1992), 42– 54, here 50. 4. Ibid., 52. 5. Therapy Networker (special issue, September/October 1993); Leon Jaroff, “Lies of the Mind,” Time, 29 November 1993, 42–47; Carol Tavris, “Der Streit um die Erinnerung,” Psychologie Heute, June 1994, 20–30. 6. Ellen Bess and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Woman Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, 3rd ed. (New York 1994). 7. Elizabeth Loftus et al., “The Reality of Illusory Memories,” in Daniel L. Schacter, ed., Memory Distortions: How Minds, Brains and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 47–68. 8. David Calof, “Facing the Truth about False Memory,” Family Therapy Networker (September/October 1993): 39–45, here 44. 9. Quintilian, Ad Herennium, III, xxii: The Art of Memory, transl. Frances Yates (London 1966), 26. 10. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Die Bekenntnisse, vol. 7 (Munich 1978), 274; see Jean Starobinski, Eine Welt von Widersprüchen (Munich 1988), 294. 11. Starobinski, Welt von Widersprüchen, 294. 12. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston 1969), 80. 13. Antin, Promised Land, 81. 14. Ibid., 84. 15. Lutz Niethammer, “Einleitung”, in Niethammer, ed., Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll: Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet: Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930–1960, vol. 1 (Berlin and Bonn 1983), 7–30, here 19. 16. Niethammer, Die Jahre weiß man nicht, 29; Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato, eds., Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern. Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930–1969, vol. 3 (Berlin and Bonn 1985), 392–445. 17. Maurice Halbwachs, Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen (Frankfurt/ M. 1985), 389–390. 18. Andrzej Szczypiorski, Notizen zum Stand der Dinge (Zurich 1992), 224. 19. Ibid., 225. 20. Ibid., 225. 21. Ibid., 225f. 22. Ibid., 226f., emphasis mine. 23. Konrad, Das Geisterfest, 7.

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24. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven 1991), 177. 25. Ibid. 26. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York 1992) and “Childhood Trauma in Borderline Personality Disorder,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 146, no. 12 (December 1989): 490–495. 27. J.-F. Lyotard, Heidegger und ‘Die Juden’, Edition Passagen 21 (Vienna 1988), 38. 28. Roberta Culbertson, “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self,” New Literary History 26 (1995): 169–195, here 187. 29. See Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: The Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York and London 1992). 30. Straub, Kultureller Wandel, 52.

CHAPTER

2

Origin and Ritualization of Historical Awareness A Group Analytic View and an Ethnohermeneutic Case Reconstruction HANS BOSSE

A Short Note on Truth and Error in Case Reconstruction The authenticity of psychoanalytic knowledge can be measured by the change in awareness of the person being analysed,1 just as the verifiability of group analytical findings is measured by the changes in the group with whom the group analyst works. That is why psychoanalytic or group analytic theory formation has to be related to case studies in order not to be speculative. Due to the brevity of this chapter I cannot undertake any full, systematic ethnohermeneutic reconstruction in the way I would prefer; therefore, I will have to confine myself to proposals, to some case studies published,2 and to my monograph on Papua New Guinean youth The Stranger Man: Anxiety and desire. Explorations in Papua New Guinea, which appeared in German in 2010.3 This monograph contains numerous other case reconstructions of how an ethnic monoculture is radically transformed into a modern society, with particular reference to the mental processing of historical experience; it also includes a full explication of my research and interpretative method, which I have termed ethno-analysis and ethnohermeneutics.4

Mythifying and Demythifying Forms of Historical Awareness The case material cited below derives from a longitudinal case study based on three field research trips and group discussions with young men and women Notes for this section begin on page 44.

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from the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. Each trip lasted several months and took place between 1984 and 1991. These young people came from small, formerly stateless communities of gardeners and fisher folk, hunters and gatherers. In most cases they were the first of their ethnic group to leave their village and culture to attend English-medium primary and secondary schools. A total of twelve years spent away from home at a boarding school, learning in a foreign language, will take them into the modern working world—a world introduced about 100 years ago by colonial missions/schools that constitutes the present structure of Papua New Guinea, which became formally independent in 1975. In the first part I would like to describe how historical awareness arises during adolescence. The case-related proposition of this essay is that the de facto transition from traditional/ethnic to professional culture, beginning when a child is seven (the first year of school), is not consciously realized until adolescence, i.e., seven to nine years later. This awareness comes in the form of a traumatic shock, coinciding with the emergence of an individual and collective historical awareness. Allow me to briefly explain my meaning. The adolescents become aware of a significant fact of a biographical rupture. As children they went to primary school and in their early teens to secondary school, throughout which they believed that their school life was only a commission, an assignment entrusted to them by their parents and clans. They had expected continuity and lasting bonding. Now they realize that their lives in the more or less intact ethnic community—so distant from high school, town, and their future urban training and workplaces—are definitely over. They wanted to conquer the modern world, but as representatives of their clans, receiving their continued support—not cut off from them, as it now turns out. Here a chronological dimension is added to this traumatic personal experience: for the first time they realize that tribal culture, with its ideals of manliness and what a woman’s role should be, is a historically antecedent form and as such is facing its ultimate demise. They thus construct the ethnic way of life as a potential past. This cognitive discovery of discontinuity and thereby of historicity can be explained and understood in three ways. My first explanation relates to understanding the inequality or heterogeneity of the developmental paths taken by individual cultures. In this dimension the young people become strongly aware of the fact that centuries of Western rationalism and modernization, as described by Max Weber, have led to Western social structures dominating present-day Papua New Guinea. They understand their own future professional lives as the product and expression of this dominance. As soon as they experience this dominance at close quarters they comprehend their own ethnic identities for the first time. Only then do they develop an awareness of history as being characterized by fractures and discontinuity.

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Following Bat’eson,5 there exists in ethnic societies a historical awareness that we may perhaps conceive of as religious or “mythifying” (not to be confused with mystifying). The awareness of one’s own ethnic group seems to me marked by the assumption of a past-present extending back into the mythical past. The clan’s possession of a “garden” is traced back over generations and then linked directly to the mythical ancestors and thereby to the mythical origins of their own world. Mythical past is at the same time present; the garden is inhabited by the spirit of the mythical forebears. For the clan to survive, its representative has to know the legends related to the garden. In a society without written property registers this serves as a document of ownership in land disputes. Breaks within precolonial history—migratory movements, forced resettlements, etc.—are collectively preserved as historical events through being tied into origin myths. Colonialism with its present consequences, which have led to a heterogeneity of material and cultural “production,” is now likewise integrated into this fascinating formation of historical awareness;6 it is here linked with an event in the legendary mists of time. In this way postcolonialism takes on a meaning guaranteeing the continuity and discontinuity of the most recent events. This seems to me a brilliant cognitive feat. Yet the mystifying type of historical awareness is less in a position to process the historical repercussions of colonialism without a defense mechanism, i.e., making unconscious the traumatic shock. Ritualizing or ritualized awareness of the past can do this better. For example, a recent myth from the Sepik highlands, published by Tuzin in 1980, updates an old myth of about the origins of work. It stems from the Ilahita Arapesh. In mythical times the older brothers committed a dreadful offense. Consequently, a wave swept the innocent youngest son off to America, while the mother of humanity allowed herself to be killed, thereby abruptly ending her magic preservation of the world without the existence of work. The “clever” youngest brother came back from America in recent times and brought back all the goods of the whites and had become white himself in order to share what he had acquired in distant lands with his Sepik brothers. Colonialism is here seen as a gift from the rich to the poor, yet it actually involved the “theft” of their ethnic culture, e.g., the destruction of the central male ambition to be a ritual warrior or the female design to become economically independent. Reducing colonialism to a story about restitution and gift-giving is a way of eliminating it (and its negative associations) from consciousness. Historical awareness in this first mode therefore means that decisive recent historic events that lead to disruptive structural change can be seen as elements of a mythical timeline extending into present reality. My second explanation of the origins of historical awareness in adolescence stems from an analysis of the sociocultural milieu of the adolescents I talked with. Opting for high school graduation and tertiary education is the key to the definitive move from ethnic, village life to the modern, urban professional

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culture—as seen by adult eyes in present-day Papua New Guinea. Anyone, at least in the Sepik provinces, who continues their schooling after Year Ten and so goes for a modern career is “marked” for a magic murder or assassination by way of “payback”—retaliation and compensation for the break with the life plans of father and mothers, brothers, sisters and neighbors.7 The saying that young people who proceed beyond Year Ten are doomed to die by way of “payback” is bandied about everywhere in Papua, and the young people have been familiar with it for many years. But only when going on from Year Ten to Year Eleven—the phase in which these group discussions take place—does this saying take on vital significance for all young people. After all, once Year Eleven opens the door to high school matriculation and a profession, there is no turning back. In this respect historical awareness of a fundamental change of societal values, brought about by the radical new concept of the individualization of life prospects, is transformed into an awareness of an eternal religious law—that of instant retaliation for breaking with the traditions of communal cohesion by individualizing oneself. My third explanation comes from developmental psychology. Adolescence research starts from the assumption that the second awakening of psychosexual drives in puberty and the accompanying genital maturation first enable people to mentally grasp the possibility of love relationships outside the family. The idea that they could themselves take the place of their father as a man and husband, or of their mother as a woman and wife, conjures up the mortality of their own parents. And if parents can die, then their culture can also “die,” thus parents and parental culture itself are now grasped as potentially superseded.

An Ambivalent Discovery of the Historicity of One’s World The cognitive discovery of the historicity of the ethnic world may spark strong feelings, since it is still linked to the awareness of the loss of the world of one’s childhood. This development becomes a trauma when it heightens intolerably the adolescents’ ambivalence toward their personal transformation and changes in the world around them. This now brings us into the psychoanalytic field. Adolescence is, universally, the phase most marked by violently contradictory desires for maturation and for regression. In the ethnic world the exodus of young people from the villages of their parents and clans is a big mythical theme. Yet in the myths this exodus is punished. Initiation rituals still exist for both sexes in Papua New Guinea, and in cyclical ritual reenactments of the venturing forth of boys and men, of girls and women, the actual venture is prevented.8 Myth and ritual arouse both the desire to become a mature person and the regressive need to remain connected to family and community—and balance

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them both out. This balancing is fostered by the systematic generation of fear of punishment and rejection as the direct consequence of a personal decision to leave, and by the generation of shame and disappointment coupled with the fear of a constrictive motherly embrace as a result of an overlong, regressive bonding to the significant others of one’s childhood. The school as a modern institution nurtures young people’s desire to grow up by encouraging intellectual achievement and promising them careers of their own beyond the control of the village. But it cannot deal with the fears of punishment and rejection arising through the systematic production of fantasies on a grand scale—terrible fantasies of being severed from clan life forever. Nor can it attempt to cope with regressive needs for home, care, and protection, which are needs that are also typical of adolescence and meant to calm the fears of punishment and rejection by their families. So the school experience infinitely heightens the normal, mixed feelings adolescents have about their own transformation and entry into modern institutions.

Inventive Youth: The Discovery of Informal Rituals In this precarious situation the young people seize upon rituals that are not formally and officially put into action but created by themselves. They are designed by the adolescents to regulate the extreme ambivalence toward modernism and the departure from the tribal culture that was once their world. These informal rituals link up with traditional rituals. Both the institutionalized rituals of ethnic society and the informal ones of modernized youth are places, institutions, and processes where personal and historical symbols develop. The concept of the informal ritual that Bettelheim9 coined “spontaneous ritual” designates symbolic, collective acts that are similar to established, traditional rituals but occur “spontaneously.” They are generally performed by young people and not according to a pattern prescribed by the experts of their society. Ritual theorists to whom I shall return, who only see the rigid, stereotyped, repetitive aspect of ritual, will not like Bettelheim’s concept, but they overlook the fact that the classical expert ritual, besides and within its described process, frequently involves one-off, spontaneous scenes. These are readily illustrated in the ethnography of female and male initiation rituals. One of the most exciting discoveries of my last three field trips in Papua New Guinea was the fact that the people in the process of “modernization,” even those who have fitted themselves precisely into modern institutions, still have recourse to traditional ritual. They do so spontaneously and imaginatively, without any prior decision or agreement. Old sources of symbols from the ethnic past are thereby used in order to work through new historical experiences.

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Ritual as an Institution Contributing to Historical Meaning: Dealing with Ambivalence toward Change Ritual is one of the four great institutions of conflict regulation, alongside warfare, debate, and litigation. Like debate and litigation, ritual is a cultural institution for settling crises through symbolic communication.10 Psychoanalysis, or, as in my case, ethnoanalysis, explores a question that has become important for historical studies: the question of how rituals, being so central to the forming of historical symbols, deal with historical situations that cause great ambivalence on the part of the subjects. Two ways of handling ambivalence are possible: it can either be dissolved through the suppression of one of the two opposing positions, or it can be integrated into a consistent awareness combined with a high tolerance of ambivalence. This awareness goes with the ability to allow conflicting needs, emotions, and ideas to coexist and to work them into a consistent picture of object relation and object. So what is required here is not making unconscious but symbolization, a lively awareness of the chaos of experience and ideas, and the ability to integrate ambivalent attitudes. It is my contention that, in contrast with the usual understanding of rituals and also of strong currents in psychoanalytic and ethno-psychoanalytic, ethnological, and sociological theories of ritual discussed above, this understanding is precisely characterized by the fact that it can represent ambivalence toward personal and historical experience. Thus the individuals involved can put up with a sense of history that constantly reminds them of the real ambivalence of their feelings, instead of easing their emotional burden by excluding them from consciousness.

A Case Study Here is an example of the ritual integration of the ambivalence felt by young people from the Sepik region toward their transition from the ethnic/tribal to the modern world. It describes a spontaneous ritual involving a research group and the participant, Aika, who belongs to the Nukuma ethnic group from the upper reaches of the Sepik. I have taken this case from about eighty two-hour group discussions, many of which ran along ritual lines. A few days after he had returned to visit his home village before starting Year Eleven at a national high school, Aika’s mother died. Thereupon he spontaneously decided to give up his plans to complete secondary school and embark on a career: “I gave up.” In the way of his clan and others, Aika wanted to explore the mystery of death and organize the funeral ceremonies in his role as the eldest son (his father was very old). After that, he wanted to stay in the village forever. For a brief moment the regressive desire to remain gained the upper hand. Aika said of his mother’s death:

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“She left me.” In my interpretation, he was already feeling abandoned as he prepared to enter the new school and modern society, and his mother’s death triggered these and still deeper feelings. But then, he continued, he realized that if he remained in the village he “would be a nothing.” He remembered the words of his old headmaster, an Australian Catholic priest, that after Year Ten the successful students had no option other than to keep going. So, leaving his clan behind him in disarray, he moved to the remote new high school, which is where I met him. Aika had only just given himself this name. In the Nukuma language he was now called “man without a mother.” My interpretation of his sudden decision to forever leave the village, and with it his dead mother, is that he was not strong enough to endure his mixed feelings about life in the village and also his ambivalence regarding his career in PNG’s modern sector. In general, he felt ambivalent about the abrupt historical realization that he could live only in one or the other world. He had a choice: to take refuge in absolute regression, stressing the bond with his mother and his village, which would mean discontinuing his plan to become a modernized professional, or to flee into absolute progression. He saved himself by moving forward. The village and the life he had forsaken seemed for the first time to be the “nothing” that he had to leave behind in order to be able to live. It is interesting to observe the development of this group discussion—the very first one I conducted during my 1984 field trip with my co-worker Werner Knauss. Of the ten boys and girls we expected, the first discussion was attended by “only” three young men, two of whom—one of them having already been initiated—pushed Aika to the center. He wept as he told his story. The talk was like a spontaneous ritual, above all serving as a container11 for the most varied feelings, emotions, and needs. One of the tasks of ritual is to make room for contradictory expressions of needs and fantasies, affects and feelings. In this spirit, the group enabled Aika to express his feelings of being abandoned due to his mother’s death. At the same time he almost shouted his sense of liberation: he would finally be able to forget her after sacrificing to her for a year through not eating certain foods, etc. With a sigh of relief he also described how, after this customary year, he would bury his mother for the second time, and this time forever. Only then would he have discharged his traditional duties. I asked him whether his mother still secretly talked to him, and he then described how she appeared to him during the day as a bird, in the evening as a glow-worm, and at night as an adviser in his dreams. As an individual, Aika had, for weeks since the death of his mother, felt only pain at the loss of a loved one; the desires for bonding that were so abruptly disappointed had thrust themselves to the fore. Now, for the first time, the aggressive desires for separation from his mother were able to surface—through the ritual of the group. And when the relation to his mother finally appeared in all its ambivalence, it became possible for him to express and

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tolerate the ambivalence he felt about living at home in his ethnic culture and also about modern life. This was assisted by the ritual transformation of his personal trauma into a historical, social drama. A ritual apparently creates a special kind of historical awareness enabling the expression of conflicting, and thus also ambivalent, feelings and affects, ideas and fantasies, as well as needs connected with historical experience. This contrasts with the individual’s own personal awareness of history and with that which is normal in modern society.

Theories of Ritual In view of the brevity of this chapter I have only highlighted one aspect of ethnoanalysis: the connection between cognitive and affective-emotional processes, i.e., the handling of ambivalences in traumatic personal and historical situations. Ritual here proves to be a collective process of meaning generation that is either institutionalized or spontaneously contradictory; it also covers aspects of symbolic experience and, alternatively, of eliminating experience from consciousness. The theories of ritual portrayed in psychoanalysis, ethnology, and sociology follow two contradictory directions. Both abolish the connection between symbolization and suppression in ritual. One school of thought, represented in the classical psychoanalysis of Freud, in the ethno-psychoanalysis of Devereux and Erdheim, in social anthropology according to Durkheim and Douglas, and in the sociological hypotheses of Bernstein and Habermas, stresses the way ritual limits reflexive and self-reflexive symbolization, or renders it unconscious.12 They define ritual as involving the following: 1. A rigid pattern of action consisting of stereotyped enactment and repetition. 2. Fixation on certain instinctive needs and forms of satisfaction. 3. A compromise between suppressed infantile desires and imposed social prohibitions on wish fulfilment. 4. Anxiety development, in the case of deviations from ritual. 5. The tendency to extrapolate from simple to complex ceremonies when defense mechanisms fail.13 The other school, represented in psychoanalytical theories of Lorenzer14 and in social anthropology as interpreted by Turner,15 stresses the specific symbolization processes in ritual performance. They see it taking place in an expressive instead of argumentative discourse such as debate or lecture. Meaning, they argue, is created through enacting emotional scenes involving all the senses and a free play of otherwise forbidden drives. It is therefore not cognitive recognition but visual perception and physical sensation that lead, via the accompanying emotions, to decoding the meaning

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of actions by the participants. Turner’s and Lorenzer’s deviation from the mainstream view points to a second type of ritual; building on this, I would define this type of ritual in the following way. 1. “Play” and “flow”16 as the action type; creativity in the production and performance of scenes; repetition of basic patterns expressing the transformation of emotional chaos and disturbed order into social dramas. 2. Sensory presentation and expression of unambiguous or ambiguous symbolic actions and ambivalent affective relations; acts enabling tolerance of ambiguity and ambivalence. 3. Expression of drives and forms of satisfaction considered inappropriate or taboo in individual daily life, in collective action and in the context of social power structures; liberation of normative structures of everyday life. 4. Intensification of feelings and affects expressing regression “in the service of the ego”; temporary mixture of reasonable fears and instinctive fear. 5. Periodic return to ritual after its effect has receded or in the event of new individual or collective crises. The authors of the above two schools of thought respectively misunderstand the other of these two dimensions of ritual, reducing it to one aspect—either the suppression of historical or personal experience, or alternatively, the expression of the purely symbolic. However, we should conceive of two types of ritual since they define different logics of expressing collective meaning. While in both cases the researchers ignore a central aspect of meaning formation in ritual, I hold that a given form of ritual has first to be subjected to an empirical analysis in order to identify its type.

The Ritual Transformation of Individual Traumatic Experience into a Historical “Social Drama” I would like to borrow the term “social drama” from Turner17 but use it a bit differently. Aika, the “man without a mother,” speaks strangely about her death: “My mother left me.” An overwhelming emotion organizes the way meaning is formed. His mother’s death means he has been left behind. The trauma of death sparks what is perhaps his first historical experience. From this day on the ethnic group has ceased to be a source of care, shelter, and bonding. Therefore, in order to continue, he must now live in the alien, imported modern world. The historical symbolization here closely follows the pattern that the young man has found for an experience in his own life. Just as he felt abandoned forever by his mother, he now feels rejected by his ethnic group, which suddenly seems to have no more life to offer him: he will only be empty a “nothing” if he stays in the now empty bosom of the ethnic group.

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Is this the moment in which an individual historical awareness arises from the meaning of a personal traumatic event? I shall not attempt to answer this. It is, however, interesting to see what the group collectively does with Aika’s trauma while he sits there crying. The other boys interpret the death of his mother not as a natural event but as the result of a social drama played out from inside the ethnic group—just as the clan had always interpreted it—and more particularly, of the pronouncement of the sorcerer or healer consulted for the occasion. According to the group, the mother was punished for breaking the rules of her clan. This is a case of collective memory: the death of his mother becomes a meaningful event within village history. A second argument, concerning land between Aika’s and another clan, is named as the reason for her death. Eighteen months later, when I returned on a second field trip, the group staged a similar spontaneous ritual enabling Aika to address his own modernization—his career as a future graduate—as the third reason for the actual or alleged poisoning of his mother. The ritual thus achieves two things. While left to himself, Aika can only grasp his induction into the modern world as the consequence of a traumatic personal loss. However, the group understands this loss as his part in village history. It puts on record the fact that Aika’s parents were the only ones in the village to send two of their children to a modern high school. That disturbed the social order; thus his mother had to die as compensation for this offense.18 Meanwhile, Aika flees when he becomes aware of the irrevocability of his separation from his tribal culture on entering Year Eleven. Seeing himself as abandoned by his mother and the village, he has no choice other than to grapple with modern society without any support from his ethnic group. In a psychoanalytical way he thereby denies his aggression toward separation. In symbolizing his departure as passive emigration, enforced by circumstances, he remains unaware that he has long since distanced himself from the life plans of his contemporaries in the village. The group, by contrast, in re-enacting his departure, symbolizes his unconscious activity. Now he can finally say that when he has sacrificed to his mother for a year and then buried her for the second time, as is customary with the Nukumas, he “will forget her.” He can now express his personal aggression about his mother’s leaving him because the group has, via the ritual, linked his individual aggression with the collective outrage of his clan. The sending out of sons has been given a historical meaning—it is a crime against village tradition and has to be paid for.19 Like the villagers, the research group also understands the historical act from its emotional aspect: as a distancing of the clan from the life projects of the other clans in the village. Postcolonial society offers tremendous new personal freedoms but also fierce competition, which questions previous life projects and ultimately challenges ethnic society in general. Perhaps it will eventually destroy it. This is a central historical experience of all Papuans. Ritual now allows the symbolizing

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of this experience while individual awareness, as in Aika’s case, is forced to keep central elements of this experience unconscious. Aika’s personal illusion is that modernization is a fate imposed from outside, to be suffered passively. Ritual gives the departure from the village another meaning: it can now be understood as the result of an “internal modernization,” an identification with the apparently all-powerful creators, the managers and beneficiaries of modernism.

Ritualized Historical Consciousness: Suppression and Symbolization of Historical Experience in the Scapegoat In the last few years I have reconstructed dozens of initiation rituals of Papuan societies and dozens of spontaneous youth rituals in my research group. In all cases ritual creates a scapegoat.20 In Aika’s case it is the dead mother whose death is subsequently stylized into a just punishment for the offense on the part of a clan. No ritual can manage without the devaluation of an absent third party. We tend to interpret the scapegoat psychoanalytically as the product of a projective defense against intolerable personal fears and socially illicit, though instinctive, needs. What is split off from our own range of conceptualization and experience is displaced onto a person who is at most only nominally present. This reconstruction is correct in many cases21 but still remains one-sided. The production of scapegoats appearing in the rituals of traditional as well as transitional societies is characterized by an artfulness. The stigmatized object is largely revaluated and rehabilitated, just as at the end of that group discussion the dead mother was resurrected as a good spirit. Aika’s dead mother even becomes the protector of the now-certain internal and external modernization of her son. She becomes the patron of a successful crime against the history of her clan—she who sent her son out—for which she “had to die” in compensation. Through her supposed sacrificial death in his stead the historical crime is recognized, atoned for, and legitimized. In this case, a realistic historical symbolization is enabled only by means of ritual symbolization, with the help of the subsequent creation of a scapegoat. It enables the actual destruction of ethnic society and its heroes’ removal to the modern age to be kept in collective awareness. After all, this move conflicts with the standards of a society whose members used to be relatively equal22—it is a crime that, according to the old rules, has to be atoned for in each and every case. Ethnic culture is under threat and may be destroyed, not just from outside but also from within via the identification of its members with the heroes of the Western world. This possibility is not suppressed by means of ritual. On the contrary, it becomes part of a new, supra-ethnic, national awareness of history.

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Notes 1. Alfred Lorenzer, Die Wahrheit der psychoanalytischen Erkenntnis (Frankfurt/ M. 1976). 2. Hans Bosse, “A Group’s Bad Self in Papua New Guinea: A True Home in the Modern World?,” Group Analysis 26, no. 3, Special Section “Anthropology and Group Analysis” (1993): 325–340; Bosse, “Die Bedeutung moderner Rituale für die Entstehung männlicher Lebensentwürfe,” in Vera King and Karin Flaake, eds., Männliche Adoleszenz: Sozialisation und Bildungsprozesse zwischen Kindheit und Erwachsensein (Frankfurt/ M. 2005), 341–361; Bosse, “Der Forscher wird eingesperrt,” in Alfred Schäfer and Michael Wimmer, eds., Rituale und Aktualisierungen (Opladen 1998), 129–163. 3. Hans Bosse, Der fremde Mann. Angstund Verlangen – Gruppenanalytische Untersuchungen in Papuà-Neuguinea (Gießen 2010). 4. At this point I would like to thank the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for enabling me to spend a sabbatical in summer 1992 writing up case material from my research in Papua New Guinea, and exploring the meaning of ethnic-ritual tradition in the modern age. 5. Gregory Bateson, Naven, 2nd ed. (Stanford 1958). 6. Bob Conolly and Robin Anderson, First Contact (New York 1987). 7. Trompf ’s extensive work on “payback” in Papua New Guinea covers the whole range of meanings of this concept. G. W. Trompf, Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions (Cambridge 1994). 8. Bosse, Der fremde Mann, 59ff. 9. Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (New York 1954). 10. Gerd Spittler, “Konfliktaustragung in akephalen Gesellschaften,” Alternative Rechtsformen und Alternativen zum Recht, Jahrbuch für Rechtssoziologie und Rechtstheorie 6 (1980): 142–164. 11. Wilfred R. Bion, “The differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities,” International Journal of Psycho Analysis 38 (1957): 266–275 (reprinted in Second Thoughts 1967). 12. Siegmund Freud, Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen (1907) (Frankfurt 1972); George Devereux, Normal und Anormal (Frankfurt 1974); Mario Erdheim, Die gesellschaftliche Produktion von Unbewußtheit: Eine Einführung in den ethnopsychoanalytischen Prozeß (1982) (Frankfurt/ M. 1984); Emile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1915) (Paris 1968); Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London 1973); Basil Bernstein, “Ritual in Education.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Series B (London 1966); Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt/ M. 1981). 13. Ludwig Eidelberg, ed., Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (New York and London 1968). 14. Alfred Lorenzer, Das Konzil der Buchhalter (Frankfurt/ M. 1981). 15.Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York 1982). 16.Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre:The Human Seriousness of Play (New York 1982). 17. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 18. See another case in Bosse, Der Forscher wird eingesperrt. 19. Bosse, Der fremde Mann. 20. Donald F. Tuzin, The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion (Berkeley 1980). 21. Bosse, A Group’s Bad Self. 22. D. B. Gewertz and F.K. Errington, Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System (Cambridge 1991).

CHAPTER

3

Identity, Overvaluation, and Representing Forgetting HINDERK M. EMRICH

Introduction The act of remembering does not necessarily relate to what has actually taken place; it has a peculiar, intrinsically metaphorical quality of “as if.” Remembering is a process of representing that does not merely involve calling up data as if playing back a tape recording or running a CD-ROM. Rather, representing something by remembering it creates an experiential context along the lines of “Things are just like they were back then.” Genuine remembering is a process of transporting oneself back, of retrieving a past emotional situation. We are what we are because of our past experience; our existence is always a matter of prior coming into existence based on the contexts within us that generate significance. Subjective reality—a classic example being Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, with its constantly changing enchanted forest that brings forth a whole series of different witnesses—stands for identity as a process.

Internal Balance of Values and the Compulsion to Confess Interpersonality and System of Values The disturbances of the inner equilibrium of the components of the self that shape identity, brought about by the process of representing by remembering, and the consequences these disturbances have, make clear the potential for explanation inherent in a theory of the processes of identity formation that is based on the psychology of self. As Levinas in particular has shown, however, Notes for this section begin on page 64.

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this cannot be restricted to a theory of the structure of the “self ”; rather, it must take account of interpersonality, the existence of others (the “trace of the other” referred to in the title of Levinas’ book).1 Any attempt to describe the danger to processes of identity formation posed by the existence of the other from the perspective of the psychology of self—that is, to reconstruct the threat that the other constitutes to the identity of the self—must take account of the “ontology of the in-between”2 already developed by Martin Buber. As Theunissen demonstrates in his major work on intersubjectivity, taking the other seriously in its own being involves transcending the intentionality mode. In his chapter on “Buber’s destruction of the intentionality model,” Theunissen speaks of the “rebellion of the I/you relationship against the structure of intentionality” that results from the “ambiguous essence of speech … which, although basically closely attached to intentionality, at the same time defends itself as ‘address’ against the intentional schema.”3 The “ambiguous essence of speech” results from the parallelism of “addressing” and “talking at,” which “allows itself to be fitted into the intentional schema without any difficulty.”4 “Talking at” means “depersonifying,” whereas “addressing” involves recognizing. The result of recognizing the other is, however, a removal from time in the sense of the genesis of “the present,” which gives the “non-concreteness/ non-objectivity of the You a concrete-positive sense.”5 The result of the transition from “talking at” to “addressing” is meanwhile a process of seeing the self in relative terms, for dealing with the other as an other and allowing oneself to be surprised by it are thus the same. The uncertainty about what is to come which arises from allowing oneself to be surprised, the openness to all eventualities, makes one much more radically aware of the specific sense of the future than the relative certainty which predicting design can only give me because it takes the spur of the surprising away from the future. Such an actual future is however at one with the actual present.6

But this type of presence of the other means a threat to the self—a threat to its identity. Subjects have a variety of ways of dealing with these risk-filled threats. They can, like Cain, “cast down their eyes” and “be hidden from the face of the other” (Martin Buber).7 They can, as mentioned above, change from the address mode to that of “talking at.” However, they can also transfer to a special type of defense against the threat to identity, namely a type of aggressive overvaluation. The psychic condition of “overvaluation” can also be seen as a “selfrelativizing deficit”8 in that subjects have learned, in a one-sided, unthinking manner, to make themselves “autonomous.” They have not developed a relationship to the “interpersonal self ” that lies at the basis of their psychic structure.9 The philosophical/psychological concept here referred to is based on the assumption that components of a person’s self can manifest themselves in others and can exist further in them. The basis of this primary interpersonal constitu-

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tion of the psyche is the mother/child dyad of early childhood. We know from the systematic theory of family structures that people often live in a doppelgänger situation with respect to one another. In other words, they function as a substitute for one another, and in doing so they delegate components of the self to the other person. When this happens, a kind of “self-diffusion” into others can take place, as described by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. On the other hand, when the process of detachment from the mother/child (or father/child) dyad takes place, there is never complete detachment of components of the self from this interpersonal shared world. In a way, people unconsciously always retain parts of their childhood dyad “within them,” although they nevertheless consider themselves to be ego-centered “individuals.” In a system of ideas in which the cogito is identified with the empirical ego, the “interpersonal self ” cannot be conceived. This primary (but extremely repressed or internally never realized) interpersonal constitution of the self has consequences for how people deal with what is familiar and unfamiliar, both in the other and within themselves, where aggression is concerned. Christian Scharfetter,10 referring to Graumann’s theory of subjective perspectivity,11 rightly refers to the fact that precisely the most intimate personal area of a person, his own unconscious, constitutes an alien entity, an unfamiliar area of sinister, threatening mystery. Scharfetter puts this as follows: The other is not simply an alien entity, however. The other may very well be familiar; it can be close, it can be experienced as analogous (not homologous). Indeed, the alien is able to strengthen and reinforce the self. It is through the “You” that the “I” recognises itself. This is an important factor where psychotherapy is concerned: where there is great suffering, duality provides the therapeutic space within which the process takes place The alien entity (the alienum, xénon or allótrion) is the unknown, the unfamiliar, whether it be within oneself as the unconscious, as the life one has not lived, which one has been afraid to undertake, or whether it is outside oneself or within non-human “objects”.12

However, confrontation with the alien within the self is painful; it requires not only cognitive efforts (Hegel’s “strenuous toil of conceptual reflection”), but also psychological effort of coping with crises in identity development. An extremely effective defense mechanism here is that of “projective identification.” This means that the unknown, the sinister, within the subject is discovered in others by projection and combated there. Streeck-Fischer says, for example, that “the confrontation with the alien has become a shock experience, one which hampers successful interaction with the alien. The alien is threatened as a means of stabilizing one’s own threatened self.”13 As StreeckFischer shows, this mechanism becomes particularly effective, is in a sense multiplied enormously, when one’s own position is not only under pressure from the danger posed by crises in the formation of identity but is also reinforced because of social pressure. Social devaluation of specific features of the self can significantly increase projective identification in the sense of the development

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of aggression. Hans-Joachim Maaz, for example, shows how in East Germany, “social constraints under a repressive authoritarian system led to the self becoming alien and the alien becoming one’s own.”14 Maaz describes the resulting aggression as follows: Violence and hatred of other people are always evidence of internal tensions within someone, of his no longer being able to find and develop the self and the essential but of having to live a life too much of which is imposed by others. The inevitable aggression associated with and justified by this situation must however be brought under control; it is ultimately repressed and is practically just waiting for external events to provide a seemingly justifiable pretext for affective abreaction.15

Maaz goes on to show how the “current situation can be overlain by old forgotten affects.” He traces the development of “brutal destructive impulses” to the “existentially threatening quality of pent-up feelings.”16

Overvaluation and the Development of Paranoia A particularly striking example of the psychology of overvaluation from the perspective of the development of aggression is to be found in Heinrich von Kleist’s story “Michael Kohlhaas.”17 However, Kleist’s story also concerns itself particularly with the aspect of justice, which for him—like patriotism for Schiller (in The Maid of Orleans)—can degenerate into a dominating idea, an absolute that may ultimately turn upon those overcome by it. Indeed, Kleist makes this clear at the very beginning of the story/novella: Around the middle of the sixteenth century there lived beside the River Havel a horse-dealer named Michael Kohlhaas, the son of a schoolmaster, who was one of the most honourable as well as one of the most terrible men of his time; … he had not a single neighbour who had not benefited from his generosity or his fair-mindedness; in short, the world would have had good reason to revere his memory, had he not pursued one of these virtues to excess. His sense of justice, namely, turned him into a robber and a murderer.18

Kohlhaas’s sense of justice is activated—eventually to excess—by a series of insults done to him. These occur in such a way that they lead first to Kohlhaas taking legal steps to defend himself, then to his taking the law into his own hands and finally to his developing fanatical delusional (“overvalued”) ideas and megalomania. Figure 3.1 shows these four steps in the form of a graph, with the first step being the “normal” process of coping. The instigation for this escalation of violence is a relatively harmless one. Kohlhaas wishes to pass along a road close to the castle of Junker Wenzel von Tronka with some horses he intends to sell in the nearby town. The Junker’s warden demands that he present a permit, without there being any legal basis for this demand. Because Kohlhaas is unable to comply, some of his horses are confiscated until such time as he can do so. The second insult consists of

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Figure 3.1. Progression and dynamics of paranoid development.

these animals being mistreated and the groom Herse—whom Kohlhaas has left behind to look after them and who behaves perfectly correctly—being “beaten black and blue and driven away.” The third insult occurs when Tronka makes use of his influence at court to ensure that the legal proceedings that Kohlhaas has initiated are dismissed. The fourth and decisive injury is when Kohlhaas’s wife Lisbeth, attempting to submit a petition for redress to the Elector, is knocked to the ground by one of his bodyguards and injured so severely that she later dies. The subtlety with which Kleist describes the various different phases of Kohlhaas’s psychological development is remarkable. At first Kohlhaas yields to force and is overcome by a feeling of “powerlessness.” The narrator tells us that “[h]e realised that he would have to give way to force and decided that he had no choice but to do as they demanded.” We also hear that “Kohlhaas cursed this shameful, premeditated outrage, but—with a sense of powerlessness—suppressed his fury.” Kleist gives a precise description of the internal “court case” that then takes place within him: “Nevertheless, his sense of justice, which was as fine as a gold-balance, still wavered; at the bar of the court within his own heart he was still not entirely certain that his opponent was really at fault.” The injustice done to Kohlhaas as an individual is later generalized and raised to the level of metaphysics: He then told his wife Lisbeth the full details of the events which had taken place, declaring that he was determined to seek public redress in a court of law. … She said that many other travellers—perhaps less patient that he—had to pass by the castle and that it would be doing God’s work to put a stop to such abuses.

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In the ensuing stage there is a subtle description of Kohlhaas’s inner psychic perspective, with his feeling of having been wronged becoming a kind of “contentment”: “and in the midst of his grief at seeing the world in such monstrous disorder, an inner sense of contentment arose within him at finding his own heart in order.” Finally, there is a scene in which Kohlhaas’s dying wife points to a verse in the Bible: “Forgive your enemies, do good to them that hate you.” Shortly after, “pressing his hand, she gazed at him with the deepest emotion and passed away. Kohlhaas thought to himself ‘May God never forgive me as I forgive the Junker!’” He in fact adopts precisely the opposite position to forgiveness. As soon as he has buried his wife, we are told that “he immediately set about the work of vengeance.” The brutality of his violence is described with an eye for detail: Kohlhaas burst into the castle to find Junker Wenzel. It was as if an avenging angel had descended from heaven. … Entering the hall, Kohlhaas seized Junker Hans von Tronka, as he came toward him, by the breast and hurled him into a corner of the chamber, dashing out his brains on the stones. As his men overpowered and dispersed the other noblemen … he demanded to know where Junker Wenzel von Tronka was.

Soon after, we are told that “[w]ith shouts of triumph, Herse hurled the bodies of the warden and steward, and those of their wives and children, from the open windows of the tower.”19 The story obviously intends to put the sense of justice into perspective. In his film Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Rainer Werner Fassbinder has one of the characters say something to the same effect: “Being in the right is always at the expense of others, isn’t it?” In Michael Kohlhaas, Kleist has created a monument to the phenomenon of overvaluation in the form of paranoia. He shows us a classic example of so-called “querulatory delusion,” a type of mania development that can be analyzed psychologically and whose inner dynamics we will now examine. I shall cite a clinical example taken from a psychiatric report that I was required to draw up on a patient suffering from this type of paranoia: The subject is a customs officer against whom disciplinary proceedings have being instituted. During the examination he stated: “The concentrated witch hunt has died down, particularly in the last six months, but if I am to assert my rights at all I will obviously have to talk about things which I would in fact prefer not to mention. … Although the intention was unmistakably to get rid of me, I did not succumb to the temptation of paying back these cliques in their own kind. I want no more than my own rights. … On a legal pretext, they have persecuted someone whom the law says is entirely innocent. I am referring to the charge of incitement to make false statements. I received serious advice not to trust the matter to luck, and the report which I originally intended giving to you [i.e., the investigator] will now be presented to a parliamentary commission for its decision.”

The case history revealed that the patient, who had originally been a saddler, had had youthful ambitions to become a pilot. He also had joined the Hitler Youth and had a particularly significant experience as a youth when Hitler,

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who took him for an Austrian citizen, shook his hand in 1938 on the occasion of the Anschluss. On the same occasion, Göring too shook his hand. By 1942 he had become an expert glider pilot, and in that same year he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe. In 1944/45 he flew a total of sixty missions at the front, being shot down six times and wounded twice. I quote from the report: Soon after being shot down for the final time, in Czechoslovakia on 19 April 1945, he was interrogated by the SS, who suspected him of desertion. He recounted these events in a state of extreme agitation, being hardly able to speak for weeping and convulsive twitching. The SS interrogated him alongside a group of trees from which the bodies of a number of highly-decorated officers were hanging, and they made a game of literally playing poker to determine whether he too should be hanged. After ten hours of extreme fear, his statements were corroborated by his air force unit and he was released. He could hardly walk and he secretly renounced the Nazi regime, which he had hitherto served without reservation. In the years after 1945, this experience constantly pursued him in his dreams, so that he frequently woke up in a state of terror because of his fear of death and because of the cynicism of the SS men.

The patient later, as a customs officer, was a witness to numerous cases of embezzlement by his colleagues, who not only went unpunished but even encouraged one another in this behavior. In connection with their own misdemeanors, other officers managed to shift the blame onto the subject, leading in 1951 to lengthy interrogations. During the course of these he was overcome by the same “feeling of powerlessness” he had experienced when at the mercy of the SS in 1945. As in the case of Michael Kohlhaas, he was subjected to a number of humiliations and came to develop a fanatical delusional idea with a tendency to simply take matters into his own hands. It was this that ultimately led to the disciplinary proceedings against him. The basic structure underlying the development of this type of paranoia is as follows. On the basis of a marked sense of justice, a series of narcissistic insults and humiliations leads to the development of a feeling of one’s own powerlessness, followed by overactivation of the sense of justice, namely in such a way that the fate of the individual is mythically identified with the fate of all those who have “had a raw deal.” A sense of mission thus develops, one with metaphysical aspects. In a way, the subject arms himself—like Joan of Arc, and in part Kohlhaas—with God and, like Saddam Hussein, wages a “holy war.” In comparison with such figures, a customs officer who takes his case to a parliamentary commission is harmless. We find the same overvaluation in the case of Niklas Frank, who condemns his own father. Frank becomes excessively identified with his own goodness and—as he says in his book—by “making the death of his father his own” it is as if he projects his shadow onto his father.20 Identity as Dynamic and Compulsion to Confess Our observations up to now have merely given indications of the origin of these forces of overvaluation, which can have such monstrous effects. We have

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not yet provided an answer, however, to the central question of what determines whether these forces are used constructively or destructively. To put it simply, what leads to the construction of autobahns and what to Auschwitz? To answer this question, we must employ dynamic considerations of a particular kind. From a certain point of view of philosophical anthropology, it must be admitted that we no longer know precisely what we are referring to when we use such terms as “identity,” “structure,” or “dynamics.” When we do use them we are simply speaking in metaphors. In this respect, Roy Schafer has called for “a new language for psychoanalysis” in which all “instances” of psycho-dynamics are reformulated as “processes.”21 A more complex type of process is found in the threats to identity posed by relativization of values, in other words, threats to the psychic stability of values within the system from the very nature of the other. This type of indirect threat comes about because a kind of “coalition” with latent inner value concepts is set up between a latent structure in the interior of the system, in the so-called “endo-system,” and the intuitive experience of the “other” coming from outside. This coalition is capable of destroying internal equilibrium (Figure 3.2). In this sense it is possible to interpret overvaluation as a deFigure 3.2. Structural-dynamic model fense against such an inner threat of endo/exo coupling and transition from to one’s own system of values—in latent to manifestly active internal structures. other words, as a defense against the threat of loss of identity. The result of these dynamics is that one has to do violence to oneself. This leads to a change in the climate—or balance—of values and to the development of fanatic delusional ideas, ranging from compulsions right up to the splitting off of components of the ego. The inner dynamics are altered because of a massive enlargement of particular partial values in the form of overvaluation. In their dealings with one another, people frequently have the strange experience—if they observe closely enough—of noticing that “offenders” virtually “admit” that their actions are wrong by sending out direct or indirect signals (even making “Freudian slips”), by using

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gestures, or giving general or specific justifications in a sort of double consciousness. It is as if a second person within them is using subtexts or excuses to bring the distorted internal balance of values back into equilibrium. This “compulsion to confess” is related to Dan Bar-On’s discovery that Nazi war criminals admitted their guilt where minor offenses were concerned so that they could continue to exist as moral persons in their own eyes and those of others, while emphatically denying the actual war crimes.22 The compulsion to confess is a psychological phenomenon that is based on this internal process of bringing values back into equilibrium. We have now reached the point where we can plausibly present the vertical split diagram given in Heinz Kohut’s book on narcissism.23 According to Kohut’s important findings, dealing with the problem of narcissism is essentially a matter of achieving a coherent self. As one of his diagrams shows, in cases of narcissistic personality disorder there are shifts in values in the sense of an “irresistible need for fusion with the powerful object”24 and also fragmentation of the self, which is broken down into components that interact only loosely with one another. The result is that in addition to the classically recognized horizontal separation (the repression boundary), a vertical split is created, causing regressive overvaluation in the form of “openly displayed infantile delusions of grandeur,”25 which in the real ego are equivalent to low self-esteem, a tendency toward shame, and hypochondria. Schiller’s Maid of Orleans provides a clear example, one in which the heroine’s over-identification with her political and military mission leads to the splitting off of her natural feminine identity and simultaneously to delusions of grandeur. The threat to this state of the system constituted by regarding others “face to face” (Lévinas) leads to a threat to identity, one that is psycho-dynamically positive but negative as regards the existence of the system as it actually is at the moment. In order to clarify the problems associated with a theory based on the psychology of the self that aims to explain the threat to identity posed by others—by their pure essence—it is necessary to bring in the concept of the unconscious. The unconscious is something that is mentally active but cannot be accessed by consciousness. In contrast to the extra-conscious, unconscious material is capable of becoming conscious, although complex preconditions are necessary if the dialogue is to be restored between the unconscious and conscious components of the self. Psychotherapy, if it is successful, creates a climate in which unconscious (and perhaps chronically humiliated) components of the self are encouraged, making these compatible with the other components of the self and available—at least partially—to the ego. These components of the unconscious, which have been forced into long-term retreat by continual humiliation, can be caused to reintegrate into the overall structure of the self only by means of “enticement.” Getting the split-off, isolated unconscious to “show itself,” getting it to allow itself to be reintegrated, and enabling these components of the self to “appear” again necessitates lengthy phases of “encouragement.”

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The process is similar to what experience with “basal therapy” in intensive care units has shown, namely that it is not “loud bangs,” nor intense pain, but a positive enticing signal arousing curiosity that can awaken coma patients. On analogy with these results of “basal stimulation” in intensive care situations, the components of the self that have been isolated or split off must in a sense be “enticed” to make themselves available for integration into awareness, but they must not be pressed and/or forced to integrate. Arousing curiosity is a more effective method than compulsion.

Identity as Process Identity and Becoming (Deleuze/Guattari) In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, the construction of identity appears as a Nietzschean process of becoming in the sense of deterritorialization.26 People are driven out of their “hard segmentariness” into a condition of deterritorialization as “one who becomes minoritarian.” In their chapter “Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming Imperceptible,” Deleuze and Guattari express this as follows under the heading “Memory and becoming, points and blocks”: White-man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. It is not a question of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how “man” constituted a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority. The majority in a government presupposes the right to vote, and not only is established among those who possess that right but is exercised over those who do not, however great their numbers; similarly, the majority in the universe assumes as pregiven the right and power of man. In this sense women, children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian. It is perhaps the special situation of women in relation to the man-standard that accounts for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman. It is important not to confuse “minoritarian”, as a becoming process, with a “minority”, as an aggregate or a state. Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain conditions, but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes, or allows oneself to be reterritorialized, in a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman. Even Jews must become-Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if this is the case, then becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much as the Jew. Becoming-woman necessarily affects men as much as women. In a way, the subject in a becoming is always “man”, but only when he enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his majority identity.27

Identity, System of Values, and Forgetting It is important to consider the structural principles of forgetting in relation to overvaluation with respect to the stability of “promise contexts.” The sociologist Hans-Dieter Gondek has emphasized the specific value of promise

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contexts in evaluating personal identity,28 something that is essential in connection with the problem of forgetting: a forgotten promise, after all, is not really a promise. To put it differently: how does identity change when forgetting takes place? Identity would seem to imply the promise that one is—and will remain—the person one is at the moment, quite the opposite of Nietzsche’s “You must become the person you are.”29 Of course, people do not generally behave in this way; they do not accept that they and others are, or can be, only what they manifestly are at the present moment. They do in fact intuitively behave in the way Nietzsche demands: they expect developments in others that they assume would also take place within themselves. We arrange to meet the person whom the other person will have become by the time the appointment takes place; at least, we do if we are sensible. We form an opinion of others according to the available possibilities, according to tendencies rather than according to “factualities.” Falling back or surpassing oneself can both occur; both must be possible and are indeed necessary. Within the framework of psychoanalytic therapies, but also spontaneously in everyday life, people can in fact take themselves completely by surprise. During the therapeutic process, it may happen—indeed it is the intention—that alien-image and self-image approach one another or at least interact with one another, which can lead to the most radical of changes. From what we have seen so far, it will be clear that the formation of identity is always accompanied by complex processes of adjusting the inner balance of values, so that it is to be expected that any disturbance of the processes aimed at restoring such equilibrium will lead to psychopathological phenomena. Disturbances in the internal balance of values normally lead to “coping” processes, i.e., processes of management and increases in performance, which ensure that one’s self-demands and one’s self-image fit together better once more. In cases where this is unsuccessful, or where it cannot succeed, a variety of changes in behavior are possible, ranging from grieving, to processes during which the balance of values is distorted, to processes of denial, encapsulation, or repression. Nietzsche’s famous statement is appropriate here: “‘I did this’, says my memory. ‘I cannot have done it’, says my pride, and remains relentless. Ultimately it is my memory which gives in.”30 A special type of distortion of the balance of values is the occurrence of “overvaluation” in the form of fanatic delusional ideas such as those that characterized the psychopathology of Adolf Hitler, up to and including the appearance of so-called “paranoid delusion.” Here, the subject’s entire thinking, feeling, and action are overrun and distorted by fanatical “ideas of justice,” leading to an almost complete distortion of reality and in this sense to a pathological type of “forgetting” (or non-forgetting) in the sense of reevaluation and reinterpretation. From the perspective of the psychology of self, it can be assumed that this “diversion outside of oneself ” comes about in the following manner: it is assumed—given the tendency of the self to continually associate

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itself by identification with alien representations—that in this state of destabilization of the internal balance of values, the “endangered components of the self ” must be identified and combated in others. The starting point for this release of destructive energy is a “state of emergency in the formation of identity,”31 in other words an existential crisis that can no longer be managed by means of “coping processes.” This crisis need not be caused by the “other” actually threatening the self; rather, this endangerment of identity can arise because of the mere existence, the very essence, of the other. That is, the other need not “do” anything in particular but must simply be of such a nature as to induce destabilization within the self. The aura, the “intuitive experience of the other” that the other conveys, causes latent components within the self to resonate, thus endangering the stability of the identity of the self. This leads to a nonlinearly dynamic, evolutive process within the self ’s personality development, in the form of the appearance of “surprises” (to put it metaphorically, to the “transformation of the system,” a type of “phase transition” when swinging toward a new attractor). Such crisislike nonlinearly dynamic transformation processes can lead either to efforts to isolate the system (depressive retreat) or to aggression as a means of refusing the encounter. The activation of “death instincts” that comes about in this way can therefore—adapting Theunissen’s term “otherizing”32—be seen as a “deotherizing” within the self. Viewed from the perspective of the psychology of self, the term “death instinct” here refers to the tendency to deaden something within oneself, to rid oneself of it, to remove it from one’s repertoire. Because the components of the self tend in a sense to be “sticky” where identification is concerned, meaning that they constantly identify with entities within the surrounding environment (i.e., to create internally fixed associations between components of the self and representations of “non-self,” of what is outside), these associations may be destroyed by the eruption of aggression so as to “eliminate” the burdensome components of the self. This type of “aggressive forgetting” represents a vicious circle that builds up of its own accord and can, as Kurt Eissler points out in his book on the death instinct,33 endanger the existence of humanity. The view outlined here is the essence of an interpretation of Freud’s theory of the death instinct from the point of view of the psychology of self. Before giving clinical examples, we will first look briefly at the neurobiology of memory and forgetting. Structure of Processes of Consciousness Formation Modern views on the structure of consciousness-forming processes assume that “consciousness” is not based on a single unified process but comes about through interaction between various subcomponents of neurobiological systems. During the process of “designing oneself ” for the future, entirely different and in part contradictory options for future events are negotiated intra-subjectively

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in what Martin Heisenberg describes as a “lottery of proposals” for future action.34 Holding such a lottery is only possible, however, on the basis of extremely decisive prior experience on the part of the system in many different respects. The various options that biological systems have for doing, planning, or wanting something in one particular direction or in an entirely opposite one are dependent on a whole chain of expectations that link up with particular options within the so-called “model of the world” or “model of reality.” Systems that are involved in managing these interactional decision-making processes are referred to in recent neuropsychological research as “comparator systems.” One way of constructing such a comparator model is the elementary nonlinearly dynamic model of the formation of consciousness shown in Figure 3.3. On the basis of the so-called “endo-physics” formulated by Rössler and Primas,35 contemporary cognition theory has proposed “structural dynamic models” within which the formation of consciousness can be explained. Within this model are two opposing structural components, which can be termed system components. One of these represents sensory data; the other, internal models of such data, i.e., conceptualizations. The dynamics of interaction between these two components are described as a process of “fitting” and seen as an elementary process of perception and thus of processes that are capable of consciousness. This perception apparatus is in contact with two “endo worlds”: Figure 3.3. Diagram of information-dynamic model of generation of elementary processes of consciousness, with “translations” taking place between “limbic” inner world and sensory data.

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“Endo I,” consisting of “externals,” and “Endo II,” representing “limbic” domains of inner emotions and values. The point of this model is that subjectivity appears here as an “interface,” as a world of “translation” between external reality and the internal spheres of emotions. This relates to Wittgenstein’s famous proposition: “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.”36 A neuropsychological approach is to be found in the hippocampal comparator model described by Gray and Rawlins.37 This has the following properties: it is assumed that the “hippocampus region,” which is part of the limbic system, has the functional significance of a kind of “plausibility control” in that it compares the sensory data coming in at any given moment with the regularities that are already stored (Figure 3.4). When significant discrepancies occur, an internal “alarm” is triggered, leading to anxiety reactions and thus to management strategies; the latter, however, can operate on various different levels. One of these is adaptation of the options for the future contained within the system; another, though, has more to do with the “theory of forgetting,” specifically with the reworking of the “internal model of reality.”38 Of Figure 3.4. Model of “hippocampal comcourse, an element of forgetting is parator system” (after Gray and Rawlins), already contained within the phewith sensory data being compared with nomenon of “selective attention”: “stored regularities.” the fading out from perception of sensory data that at that moment are neither repressed nor split off but at first simply “set to one side.” We will come back to this later when we deal with a theory of the processing of “subliminal sensory perception.” An intervention in the behavior of such “comparator systems” that relates back to the past more powerfully, meanwhile, is the reworking of the reality model by means of “active reworking of the memory system”—not as conscious performance but as a complex interactive process involving the various departments of the psychological apparatus. The cases described by Freud in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life,39 for example forgetting people’s names, belong here, with this “reworking

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of memory” serving to avoid painful memories or to avoid a conflict that approaches a complex. The theory of “collective forgetting” expounded by Theodor Reik is also relevant here, with forgetting being viewed as the covering up of a painful conflict but at the same time actualizing it by means of a kind of “exhibitionist covering up” of repressed prostitution fantasies.40 System Theory and Forgetting How should one then—from the perspective of a system theory model—view this process of coping via alteration of the past and thus also the process of “forgetting”? How does such a system behave in a concrete situation when what is involved is effectuating plans and relating them to the past? Suggestions as to such decision-making processes can be found in the theory of nonlinearly dynamic processes. As Friedrich Cramer shows in his book on the theory of time, complex systems that are evolving constantly display successive branching, with “the mutual influence of three aspects of dynamic systems, namely structure, function and fluctuations, leading to unexpected phenomena.”41 If one applies this description of a complex system in the field of physical chemistry as a metaphor for the biographical development of a biological system, one can compose—with Peitgen—a tree diagram in which it is not possible to predict how the final state of the system will actually be filled in. This is because after the evolution of a complex system, a large number of unstable final situations arise whose variety can be greatly reduced by impaired development (“trauma”). Instead of sixteen final situations (as shown in Figure 3.5), only three or four such states can actually be filled in. If one examines this disturbance chronologically, using the metaphor of the “path travelled,” one finds that influences on the system have caused the path to be a specific and extremely Figure 3.5. Diagram of restricted filling restricted one. The question that in of final states of evolving non-linearly arises is how, looking back, one dynamic system as a result of impaired deshould deal with this enforced velopment (“trauma”). path in a “coping” manner. If one decides to use this method of description as a metaphor for the reconstruction of the “path” along which an individual develops from a plurivalent initial situation to a final situation molded by the various factors relevant to development, one can also describe the influences—both favorable and harmful—that have served to determine this path. Early traumas may have had such a powerful negative influ-

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ence on the available choices in a vulnerable phase of development that these events—which are later generally “forgotten”—entirely determine, modify, and restrict the rest of the subject’s life. A whole range of options, lives, and choices as potential system states have thus been eliminated. There are then three ways for the subject to deal with the consequences of this development. The first deals purely with certain points: it is only the result as it actually is that is considered: “one must base oneself on the facts.” The second possibility is—in Hegel’s sense—to consider the truth in the context of both the path and the results. The third and final way of looking at things involves not only reconstructing the path but also reconstructing the other options that would have been possible at each given turn-off. This way of looking at things might be understood in terms of Proust’s “recherche du temps perdu” as an associative recalling of subliminal truths from the past; it is dealt with at length in Michael Theunissen’s book on the “negative theology of time.”42 Theunissen says that “Proust’s ‘spontaneous remembering’ uncovers, to put it traditionally, the eternity element in the past. What he finally calls ‘time regained’ is time only as the self ’s own other.”43 We will now turn to the manner in which a “theory of forgetting,” and particularly psychoanalysis, deals with these three approaches. What is significant in such approaches, however, is that under certain problem-solving conditions—in terms of the nonlinear, dynamic model of the formation of consciousness described above—the imagination that reaches back into the past and the one that reaches forward into the future can offer new internal “model” configurations both for the future and for dealing with the past. Such processes take place under the “pressure of reactive conceptualization,” which arises if the repertoire of hitherto available internal interpretative options for managing a current cognitive or perceptual situation turns out to be insufficient. The new internal models of reality constructed in this way are subject to a complex process of validation and selection, which—in terms of Gerald Edelman’s Neuronal Darwinism44—generates an optimum solution to the problem being faced. In a way, such a creative solution to a problem of dealing with the past can also be seen as a “solution by forgetting.” What is actually involved here? Processes of forgetting can be divided into active and passive. The passive type comes about either through a natural process of deactualization, or it can be related to psycho-organic and medicinal processes, for example aging or treatment with benzodiazepines. Active types of forgetting can be interpreted according to Erich Wulff ’s concept of “disacknowledgement.”45 The essential types here are the defense mechanisms described by Freud, of which splitting off is the earliest and—particularly in the case of borderline patients—most far-reaching, whereas repression and denial are normal, constantly recurring psychological processes, as described by Freud in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life. They play an extremely important role indeed, particularly in neurosis and personality disturbances.

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Balance of Values and Forgetting One can summarize the interrelationship between forgetting and the internal balance of values as follows: the essence of the process of dis-acknowledgement involved in “active” forgetting is disturbance of the “internal balance of values,” which means that the internal model of the world is always also an internal value model—of external objects, processes, and intentional contents but also with respect to self-esteem. Disturbances in the internal balance of values with respect to self-esteem are usually answered—and this is likely to be their “biological significance”—with a “coping strategy,” in other words with an active compensatory increase in performance. If such an increase in performance is not possible for external and/or internal reasons, the question arises as to how to deal with the negative internal balance of values. Three “active” (but no doubt essentially unconscious) dis-acknowledgement processes are available. The active dis-acknowledgement of past reality is therefore linked to the internal balance of values. It offers, for one thing, denial as a mechanism: here the internal psychological mechanism consists of removing a fact from the balance of values and more or less “encapsulating” it. The memory material actively committed to the process of forgetting remains present intra-psychologically and basically also remains accessible; it can thus be remembered, but it plays no role in determining the balance of values because it is “denied.” The Israeli philosopher and psychologist Dan Bar-On, as already mentioned, has demonstrated in a large number of studies that, for the reasons described, Nazi war criminals remember minor offenses—indeed, they remorsefully accuse themselves of them—even as they deny guilt in much more serious matters concerning both themselves and others. Bar-On’s deep insights into the structure of the internal balance of values in these persons make clear that they display “improper forgetting.” Another, more energetic means of eliminating memory material from the balance of values takes the form of repression. Following Heinz Kohut, we need to distinguish between the vertical and horizontal boundaries.46 In repression, memory material is submerged below the horizontal boundary. This material is no longer accessible to consciousness by means of active remembering; irreversible active forgetting has taken place. However, shocks and psychoanalytic techniques allow this seemingly irreversible process to be reversed. One example—caricatured somewhat—is to be found in Hitchcock’s film Spellbound. Elimination from the balance of values can, however, have even more radical intra-psychological causes, namely splits in personality in the sense of the vertical boundary described by Kohut. Here, particularly in “borderline personalities,” fracturing and segmentation of the personality take place, with whole components of intra-psychological activity being on the one hand removed from consciousness while on the other reappearing as intact personality components. Other ways of coping with deficits in the balance of values are

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to be found in various types of delusions, whose essence is the appearance of “falsifications” within the balance of values, with the “internal court of judgement” (cf. Kleist’s play the Broken Pitcher)47 applying various different criteria, enlarging certain positive components while reducing negative ones. Representing Forgetting Following Theunissen’s concept of “resistance to the dominance of time,”48 we will now deal with another type of “active” dis-acknowledgement as a type of “forgetting process,” namely dis-acknowledgement in the sense of forgetting as creatively interpretative representing. What is involved here is a means of dealing with the past by using the imagination to access the path that lies behind one while including all the options that were not chosen and by using the imagination to bring to life subliminal “experiences” in the context of the “processes of choosing” that took place during the journey along this path. One might term this the “Proustian method.” Theunissen describes it as follows: Proust is able to recall “regained time” precisely by shattering it. Memory, which functions as an organ of reconciliation, is spontaneous in that it leaps out from the solid context of occurrences and opens itself to the unique in which the subject perceives the internal subjective world which he has continually suppressed on the basis of what appeared to be external. In that it tears open the surface of memory in which we normally drift around, it has something of Hegel’s “re-collection”, of the internalisation of existence into that entity which Hegel explains as indicating the past tense “been”.49

Just what is this concept of internalization within this conceptualization, and how does it relate to a theory of forgetting? The experience of a philosopher friend of the author may be illuminating. When asked how one can regain something that has been literally “lost” in time, he recounted the following anecdote. He and his family were booked on a holiday flight to Karachi the next day, but when he came to look for the vital airline tickets they were nowhere to be found. The family searched the whole house but were unable to locate them. My friend decided to meditate, and suddenly his inner eye saw the title of a particular book. Although he thought this was an absurd result for his meditation to have produced, and was even irritated, he nevertheless decided to take the book down from the shelf. Lo and behold, there were the tickets between the pages. His explanation was that a visiting friend had been browsing in his library the day before. The tickets had been lying on the desk and the visitor must have used them as a bookmark before replacing the book on the shelf with the tickets in it. My friend must have subliminally seen the book on the desk, and his unconscious must have more or less “known” that it was only in the book that the tickets could be found. However, in order to inform him about this “forgotten material,” his unconscious had to take a roundabout route via meditation and by presenting the title of the book; it could not otherwise have made known the “knowledge” it had at its disposal.

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This anecdote gives an indication of how perceptions that have succumbed to forgetting because of “selective attention” can be reactivated via an indirect route. Bringing subliminal components of the past back to life, components of a life that has not been lived or has been lived only in its incipient form, represents the application of the “Proustian method,” the search for lost time, in a manner that not only implies that truth is in Hegel’s sense the result including the path, but also including all those paths that the path actually chosen has passed by. This way of recalling past subliminal options and possible lives is a process of making time relative, one that Theunissen says is not possible for depressives. It is a process of making the subject autonomous, a process whose energy is derived from representing libido. It therefore lives within the totality of its own life, a remarkable blend of possibility and reality; this type of living would seem to be the only adequate form of forgetting. It is a method of representing remembering that deactualizes what has passed by, integrating what is to be forgotten and made relative within a contact with life in which it has less “time powerfulness,” no longer signifies the projection of the past into the present, and can be left to rest. If this kind of representing forgetting does not occur, if the processing of past traumas through memory does not take place, as is often the case with concentration camp survivors, victims of rape, and other victims of trauma, there is the danger of a “conspiracy of silence.” This is particularly the case within the field of psychotherapy for victims of rape because there is a subconscious inhibition about using the imagination to repeat the humiliation and to allow it to become painful within the transfer/transference relationship. This method of actualizing deactualization of what has passed is the only appropriate type of forgetting in cases of severe trauma. This is because it can be assumed that after representing has taken effect, after the reconciliation of conflicting components of the self, the “Nirvana principle” will come into operation in that the semantic contents of the traumatized area within the self, which hitherto was problematical but has now been reconciled, can be obliterated. This leads—after the “Nirvana principle” has taken effect—to creativity being liberated. To give an example, a patient who had been involved in a relationship that put a sort of “curse” on her further life stated that the psychoanalytic process succeeded in removing the curse by enabling her to go back to the roots to which the curse related ab ovo—to go back in her imagination and discover sides of her self that were free of the curse. In contrast to splitting, repression, and denial, this type of “transformational forgetting” makes psychological forces available for future development. From this perspective, ritualized memory can be seen as a type of unintended and indeed unsuitable, unsuccessful forgetting, whereas proper forgetting constitutes a type of representing within which time is deactualized and made relative. We are dealing here with a type of “actualizing deactualization,” in other words—to speak in Freudian terms—libido and “Nirvana energy” become ef-

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fective simultaneously or successively. To use a technical metaphor, one might say that what has to be “extinguished” must first be activated and “recognized.” The Nietzschean “active inhibitive capacity” can only be applied to something that can be made present, that has made its appearance in consciousness. However, this actualizing deactualization should not be seen as a one-off process but rather as a cyclical, process-like, reiterative progression of remembering and forgetting, of libido and “Nirvana principle.” To put it differently, namely from the point of view of “problem solving”: only a problem that can be “solved” can also be “said farewell to.” To this extent, a type of forgetting that is able to deal with time always consists of two phases: actualization through memory and the subsequent “Nirvana”-related deactualization and rejection. If it is correct that the “Nirvana principle” involves the reduction of internal tension, then “representing forgetting” is able to do precisely this, because the unconscious and semiconscious inner conflicts constitute areas of the psyche that are charged with a very high degree of energy, the “voltage” of which can be reduced by means of representing forgetting.

Notes 1. Emmanuel Lévinas, Die Spur des Anderen (Freiburg 1992). 2. See Michael Theunissen, Der Andere (Berlin 1965). 3. Ibid., 284. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 286. 6. Ibid., 297. 7. Martin Buber, Bilder von Gut und Böse (Heidelberg 1986), 28. 8. See Hinderk M. Emrich, “Die interpersonale Struktur des Bösen als Verweigerung des ‘Zwischen’,” in Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der BRD, ed., Das Böse (Göttingen 1995), 261–286. 9. Hinderk M. Emrich, “Die interpersonale Struktur des Bösen”; Robert Kegan, Die Entwicklungsstufen des Selbst (Munich 1994). 10. Christian Scharfetter, “Im Fremden das Eigene erkennen—Erfahrungen aus der Psychiatrie,” in Helga Egner, ed., Das Eigene und das Fremde (Solothurn 1994), 13–27. 11. Carl F. Graumann, Grundlagen einer Phänomenologie und Psychologie der Perspektivität (Berlin 1960). 12. Scharfetter, “Im Fremden das Eigene erkennen,” 17. 13. Annette Streeck-Fischer, “Haßt Du was, dann bist Du was—Über Fremdenhaß und seine selbstreparative Funktion am Beispiel jugendlicher rechtsextremer Skinheads,” in Helga Egner, ed., Das Eigene und das Fremde (Solothurn 1994), 117–138, here 124. 14. Hans Joachim Maaz, “Das Eigene und das Fremde im deutschen Vereinigungsprozeß,” in Helga Egner, ed., Das Eigene und das Fremde (Solothurn 1994), 67–81, here 71. 15. Ibid., 71. 16. Ibid., 72. 17. Trans. of: Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhaas,” in Helmut Sembdner, ed., Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 2 (Munich 1952), 1–106. 18. Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (Munich 1952), 1, same source applies to the following endnotes.

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19. Ibid., page no.’s given in the same order as quotes above, 6, 5, 6, 7, 14, 18, 25, 25, 26, 26f, 27. 20. Niklas Frank, Der Vater - Eine Abrechung (Munich 1987), 8. 21. Roy Schafer, Eine neue Sprache für die Psychoanalyse (Stuttgart 1982), 22. 22. Dan Bar-On, “Did Holocaust Perpetrators Feel Guilty in Retrospect?” in D. Bar-On, F. Beiner, and M. Brusten, eds., Der Holocaust—Familiale und gesellschaftliche Folgen, Ergebnisse eines internationalen Forschungs-Kolloqiums an der Bergischen Universität (Wuppertal 1988), 11–32. 23. Heinz Kohut, Narzißmus (Frankfurt/ M. 1973), 215. 24. Ibid., 28. 25. Ibid., 215. 26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press 1996). 27. Ibid., 291–292. 28. Heinz-Dieter Gondek, “Das Versprechen und seine Verbindlichkeit,” in Klaus Holz, ed., Soziologie zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, Untersuchungen zu Subjekt, Erkenntnis und Moral (Gießen 1990), 39–65. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Wie man wird, was man ist (Frankfurt/ M. 1988), 285. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft,” in Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds., Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5 (Munich and Berlin 1988), 86. 31. I speak here of a state of emergency in the formation of identity and not of a state of emergency in the stabilization of identity because it can be assumed that identity (as a process) is created anew every morning or, to be more precise, even from moment to moment without our noticing it. 32. Theunissen, Der Andere, 85. 33. Kurt Eissler, Todestrieb, Ambivalenz, Narzißmus (Frankfurt/ M. 1992). 34. Cf. Martin Heisenberg, “Über Universalien der Wahrnehmung und ihre genetische Grundlagen,” in Hoimar von Ditfurth and Ernst P. Fischer, eds, Mannheimer Forum 1989 (Munich 1989). 35. Otto E. Rössler, “Endophysics,” in John L. Cast and Anders Karlquist, eds., Real Brains, Artificial Minds (New York 1987), 25–48; Hans Primas, Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics and Reductionism: Perspectives in Theoretical Chemistry (Berlin 1983). 36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werkausgabe in 8 Bänden, vol. 1: Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Frankfurt/ M. 1984), 68, here Tractatus 5.632. 37. J. A. Gray and J. N. P. Rawlins, “Comparator and Buffer Memory: An Attempt to Integrate Two Models of Hippocampal Functions,” in Robert L. Isaacson and Karl H. Pribam, eds., The Hippocampus (New York 1986), 151–201. 38. Wolfgang Prinz, Wahrnehmung und Tätigkeitssteuerung (Heidelberg 1983). 39. Sigmund Freud, Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (Frankfurt/ M. 1992). 40. Theodor Reik, “Über kollektives Vergessen,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 6 (1920): 202–215. 41. Friedrich Cramer, Der Zeitbaum: Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Zeittheorie (Frankfurt/ M. 1993), 89. 42. Michael Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt/ M. 1992). 43. Ibid., 313. 44. Gerald M. Edelman, Unser Gehirn – ein dynamisches System: Die Theorie des neuronalen Darwinismus und die biologischen Grundlagen der Wahrnehmung (Munich 1995). 45. Erich Wulff, Wahnsinnslogik (Bonn 1995), 174ff. 46. Kohut, Narzißmus. 47. Heinrich von Kleist, “Der Zerbrochne Krug,” in Helmut Sembdner, ed., Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol.1 (Munich 1952), 171–258. 48. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit. 49. Ibid., 62.

Part II

SHOAH THE CHAIN OF GENERATIONS

CHAPTER

4

Transgenerational Trauma, Identification, and Historical Consciousness WERNER BOHLEBER

The Holocaust, as well as the fate of its survivors and their children, has made us realize that political and social catastrophes, the so-called man-made disasters, unsettle a society in such a persistent and lasting way that we are forced to concern ourselves over several generations with their traumatic effects, and with identifying those effects still detectable beneath the surface of our own time. Generally speaking, the generations cling together, and in so doing the heritage of the earlier one is taken up and reworked by the next. The concrete experiences of that first generation are what the next will concern itself with in its world of images and symbols. Collective traumatization leads to particular conflicts and forms of identification. Extreme trauma, the unmastered loss, the mute secret: all these belong to the reality of the parent generation but are transmitted into the imaginary realm of their children by means of identification. In the following I will describe these particular forms of second-generation identification.

Transgenerational Transmission of Traumata and Identification Processes in Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors Knowledge of these specific forms of identification was first attained through psychoanalytic research into the second generation of Holocaust survivors.1 The traumatizations suffered by the parents had transcended their ability to psychologically assimilate the past, resulting in these traumata intruding into Notes for this section begin on page 81.

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the lives of the following generation. The trauma of one parent became a special “organizing factor” in the life of his or her child.2 Some Holocaust survivors passed on the results of the horrors they had suffered by continuing to enact their lives under the shadow of persecution. Other children were assigned roles arising out of the traumatic object losses of their parents, particularly when the latter had lost their first-born children to the Holocaust. In some cases these children had to assume the parental functions for their shattered parents. Often the parents tried to defend themselves against the horrific suffering they had endured by going into denial and refusing altogether to discuss their experiences. I will now present a detailed description of the psychological processes that make the transmission of traumata possible. Generally speaking, primitive, archaic affects and parts of the self can be integrated by the child into his or her psychological development, if the child can first project them onto the parental figure. The adult introjects them by means of projective identification, “defuses” and “detoxifies” them, and then mirrors them, transformed, back to the child. The child then reintrojects these altered affects, which are “contained” by the mother, and can integrate them in this way. In transgenerational traumatizations, the parents are only able to perform this “container” function for their children in a very limited way.3 They cannot, within themselves, contain their affects and the imagery of their interior worlds, nor those parts of the self these affects and fantasies have shaped; neither can they be soothed or worked through. Instead, they need their children in order to projectively unburden themselves of an unbearable excess of grief and rage. Unconsciously they expect the child to undo the affectively loaded traumata that have destroyed the parents’ psychological structure. What this means for the child is that in his or her person he or she provides a space for someone else’s wishes, fears, and affects—mental, emotional, and physical aftereffects that do not belong to this generation but are inscribed or overwritten onto their identities. Because of the close parental bond she/he cannot discern these as alien and so maintain mental/emotional autonomy. In psychoanalytical literature two main fantasies are described: one, the child functions as a replacement for another beloved family member who has been murdered; or two, the child is given a special mission: a life goal dedicated to reestablishing the family’s pride and healing past injuries by means of personal achievement.4 In taking on these parental fantasies the child validates the traumatized adults, and trying to help them in this way keeps their close relationship intact. Particularly in cases where parents were able to defend themselves against massive traumatization only by denying their experiences, or derealization, the children intuitively grasped what their parents had suffered, worked on outward signs in their fantasy, and acted out these fantasies in the external world. These children tried to understand what had happened to their parents by recreating their parents’ experiences and associated affects in their own lives.

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However, since these things could not be worked through on a symbolic level, the behavior of these children was marked by a kind of concretism, in which their unconscious identification with the fate of their parents became apparent.5 This externalization was meant to undo or deny terrible truths. These children live in two different realities: their own, and that which belongs to the traumatized past of their parents.

Special Forms of Transgenerational Identification in the Children of Perpetrators Research into the specific identification processes, and into the resulting concretism with which children act out and repeat the past of their parents, has made it possible to apply these insights to other forms of historical traumatization. Investigations into the lives of children of the perpetrator generation led to the conclusion that the psychological mechanisms by which the transmission of historical traumatization is effected across the generations has a structure similar to that observed in their victimized contemporaries, in that the children of the perpetrators must also become carriers of a secret ensuing out of a pact of silence, a secret they are nevertheless aware of and take on unconsciously by means of identification. This secret, however, is different, stemming from an utterly different past that silently yet tyrannically intrudes into the psychic reality of the child. Other than this, the history of victims’ children cannot be compared to that of perpetrators’ children as there is nothing in the experience of those who were responsible to compare with the traumatic effects that the violence of these attacks had on the egos of those incarcerated.6 Dan Bar-On7 has described how it is the untold secret story hidden behind the rest of the family discourse that has the strongest intergenerational effect. And this is not only the case with the descendants of Nazi perpetrator families, but also, as Nadine Hauer8 has shown, in the children of nominal party members. If the parents’ involvement in Nazi times was a taboo subject, this resulted in the children being unable to openly question and come to terms with their parents. Even when they confronted their parents with greater or lesser hostility, parental ties made them respect their taboos, so that in many families there was no footing on which a dialogue could even begin. A complete blackout on the subject was thereby enforced. The psychoanalytic treatment of perpetrators’ children9 has shown how an enduring and persistent inability to communicate across generational lines and thus break the silence is a typical characteristic of the relationship between parents and children in the families of perpetrators, more so than in the families of nominal party members. It was almost impossible for any true communication to take place between these parents and their children. To empathize with the children’s needs was often seen as a sign of weakness. The silence about experiences and involvements with the Nazi

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regime had an almost iron-clad psychological quality. Therefore this era, only just past, was to many represented in this silence, in which something absent is nevertheless experienced as massively present. Every frightening or painful reality seems easier to bear, since it can be understood, thus helping one come to terms with the parental object. Where this cannot occur, the parent/child relationship remains frozen, and an infantile bond of loyalty makes many children into the unconscious accomplices of their parents. The frequently used tactic of opposing parents by rejecting them, undertaken in the attempt to escape, proved ineligible to resolve these deeply rooted and hardly describable relationships. Only by consciously working through these parental identifications on a psychological level would true separation have been made possible. Many Nazi parents expected a particularly high degree of loyalty, misusing their children to affirm their old ideals. Perpetrator parents defended themselves against grief, shame, and guilt by justifying their ideals and their Nazi identifications. Unbearable doubts about oneself and one’s ideals, had they been permitted to arise, would have led to a breakdown, to a depressive deflation and self-accusations. Because the child was an object of the affirmation of Nazi ideals, paradigms, and actions, it was necessary to somehow stunt his or her development. One’s own weaknesses and failures, gnawing doubts, and guilt feelings were projected onto the child, and once abandoned there, they became the object of parental contempt. In this way psychological assimilation was prevented. Stubborn defenses against recognizing one’s own guilt required continual projective externalization. Children usually had no choice but to identify with the traits that were ascribed to them, being utterly dependent on the love and attention of those parents; thus they experienced this displaced, alien guilt as their own. Therefore the past, for which these parents had not accepted any responsibility, penetrated the lives of the children, depriving them of the psychic space in which they could have developed a personal identity free from the alienating power of their elders’ narcissism.10 In consequence, an emotionally responsive attitude, vital to personality development, was blotted out. Thus criminal involvements that were never acknowledged, much less verbalized, and for which no responsibility was accepted, were compounded by accumulated guilt bequeathed as a cast-off legacy, thereby traumatizing at second hand the following generation.

Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma, Violence, Loss, and Guilt by Means of Identification Processes: Some General Characteristics In summary, I will name some general characteristics that distinguish identification processes within transgenerational transmission from other forms of identification:

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1. Identification takes place not only with the person or the traits of the parent, but also with a past that is, partly or wholly, not a part of the child’s generation, occurring before his or her life even began. Kestenberg refers to “transposition,”11 an unconscious identificatory participation in the traumatic upheavals of the parent generation. Faimberg12 characterizes this type of identification as “telescopage,” a telescoping of three generations. Klein and Kogan13 use the concept of the “myth of survival,” which penetrates the psyche of the children as an unconscious phantasm about the parents’ past and revolves around death and life or the roles of “murderer” and “victim.” 2. The identifications developed between child and parents are both primitive and totalizing. On the other hand, these identifications may also have been imposed, as when the parent/child relationship is exploited in aid of maintaining a precarious narcissistic equilibrium. In this case the child is psychologically hijacked: insofar as someone else’s past is projected onto or forced upon the child, so he or she is controlled from the outside, carrying all the attendant feelings of alienation and dislocation within, these identifications cannot be assimilated into the self but are like a “foreign body.”14 Abraham and Torok speak of “endocryptic identification.”15 3. This is an unconscious identification: it comes not from an act of willful repression but, as Cournut16 has described, through direct empathizing with what that parental object harbors: all that is unconscious, unspoken, or has been declared dead. One can call it a secret, or a “phantom,”17 that has embedded itself in the dynamic unconscious of the child. Emotions and behavior turn out to be borrowed, because in reality they belong to the parents’ past. 4. Another characteristic is the children’s relationship to time and their experiencing of it. Living in two realities, they experience the past as mixed up with the present. The result is a diffusion of identity—at least in part—or the feeling of having a fragmentized identity (“all in pieces”). Members of the second generation often feel that time stands still, and they have no sense of what their own lifetime is. 5. The child’s development of autonomy is interrupted or disturbed in important areas of its personality. The child has no psychic space in which to develop its identity free from the alienating power of the parents’ narcissism.

A Case History I wish to show what I mean by presenting some clinical case material from the psychoanalysis of a man who was born some years after the war and was

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thirty years old when he began therapy. The treatment process was profoundly influenced by his father’s Nazi past, which had remained concealed. But the silenced past came out in dreams of the patient, however fragmentary, that did not fit in with the rest of his personal or family history. These observations slowly brought me to the conviction that this man’s father must have had a criminal Nazi past. Mr. A, as I shall call the patient, came to me for psychoanalytic treatment because of a very serious work disturbance that threatened to cause him to fail in his studies of economics. Paralyzed in his activities, he would sit at his desk unable to do anything. Some years ago his father had died of cancer. Since then, time had come to a halt in that he had actually lost all sense of the passage of time. In his descriptions he admitted how he did not feel his age but rather imagined himself to be younger; without a sense of his own lifetime or of personal wholeness. He complained about an incomplete sense of continuity, seeming to himself to consist of nothing but fragments. As an adolescent Mr. A had developed troubling behavior that took the form of chronic lateness. He was unable to plan, and he dealt with time periods in an unrealistic way, often misjudging them completely. He could not keep to a structured time plan and procrastinated on tasks and decision making. In so doing he was identifying with the way his parents used to stall and act as though paralyzed: they too were always procrastinating. Life did not contain any forward momentum for Mr. A, who, in his self-awareness, felt as if he were still twenty years old. His sense of identity was characterized by a complete lack of a personal history. After leaving school Mr. A had undergone vocational training and graduated with a business degree; however, he stopped working after a while in order to study economics. At the start of treatment Mr. A was unmarried and had returned to live with his mother, having no other serious relationships at the time. Here is a summary of some data on his family and personal history, most of which came to my knowledge only in the further course of treatment. Mr. A’s father was a medical doctor. When the Nazis came to power he joined the SS, was made an officer and SS doctor, and worked as camp doctor in a concentration camp for some years during the war. Afterward he was taken prisoner, but he managed to escape and lived outside Germany until the mid 50s. When Mr. A was seven years old his father returned to Germany, where he was subsequently taken to court in connection with his involvement in Nazi crimes but was not convicted due to lack of evidence. When he finally did have himself examined after living a long time in denial about his illness, it was too late, and he died a little while later. After the death of his father Mr. A blamed himself for never having really talked to him. He had wanted to do so very much, especially after the father had fallen ill with cancer, but he had been unable to overcome his inner inhibitions. In this way Mr. A turned his father’s silence into his own problem by making himself responsible for it.

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Mr. A’s parents had remained unmarried for a long time due to the fact that his father was not divorced from his first wife. His mother, a confirmed Nazi, met the future father of her child during the war. Trying to hide her unmarried state during his absences, she led a lonely and guarded existence. A woman with a very rigid, clean, extremely controlling, and reproachful personality, she bound her child very close to herself but was also neglectful, often leaving him alone. Loneliness would become a dominant feature of his childhood, at the opposite pole, she left him no space for exploration or experimentation, devalued his attempts at attaining independence, and also repressed his attempts at social development by criticizing his peer group contacts. This was as much the result of her fear that the past might be uncovered as it was a part of her habitual life pattern, which was founded on half-truths and lies. It seems that as a boy Mr. A could not help but gain the impression eventually that something was wrong with his parents, that they had secrets. During one psychoanalytic session he remembered a particularly important episode: after he had discovered a white dress in his mother’s cupboard, he asked her about her wedding, wanting to know if this was her wedding dress. Instead of replying, his mother started to cry, and the boy never again asked about the wedding. This episode had the character of a screen memory and stood in the place of other, less clearly comprehensible secrets that he was unable to understand. Nothing was ever explained to him. His curiosity and his thirst for knowledge about his parents’ past and their background were suppressed by an inner prohibition. A neurotic limitation of his infantile self was the result. Because of his peculiar passivity, he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as “being of low drive level,” when he was eight years old. The reclusiveness of his parents contrasted sharply with the family lives of his schoolmates. His parents never visited friends or relatives and never went away on holiday. Although they were not officially married, the family nevertheless lived under the father’s name, a deception Mr. A discovered when he was sixteen years old. His mother confessed tearfully that he did not have the same name as his father. Mr. A reported that this did not make any difference to him and that his father had commended him for responding so sensibly. His motto at the time was, “What I don’t know doesn’t bother me.” Consciously, Mr. A was concerned with the secrets surrounding his illegitimate birth. Psychodynamically these secrets acted as screen memories, standing in the place that hid his father’s denied Nazi past. From the case history of Mr. A’s psychoanalytic treatment, I will now select those aspects that are important for the questions under discussion. From the beginning of his analysis, Mr. A was concerned with secrets. However, initially it was not secrets about his family and his father’s past that dominated, but secrets about his own sexuality. He was afraid that I as well as other men might despise him as unmanly for his form of sexual behavior toward women. In this

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first period of treatment Mr. A persisted in a position of narcissistic withdrawal and gave the impression of being in a cocoon. He would arrive much too late for many sessions and sometimes did not turn up at all because he had overslept. He presented himself as a failure and as somebody who had no control over his own behavior. Thus he prevented himself from engaging emotionally and developing an affective relationship with me as his therapist. Obviously, treatment raised a dilemma for Mr. A, though eventually positive transference feelings rushed in and gradually dissolved his narcissistic cocoon. But with this more liberated emotional approach to the analyst, his barrier against the truth about his father also started to give way. Childhood longings for the absent and distant father were reawakened; however, these longings also brought him face to face with his family history. One night, after a session in which I had connected his narcissistic withdrawal from our relationship to the secrets about his family, he dreamed about Archimedes, to whom he ascribed the words, “Noli me tangere.” Signs and information gleaned during analysis increased, indicating that something serious was amiss with the patient, that his father must have been a Nazi. After I finally told him what I suspected, he related some of the facts, to my amazement, with a completely matter-of-fact clarity: that his father had been an officer in the SS and had worked as a doctor in a concentration camp for most of the war. He further maintained that he had told me all this at the beginning of treatment. I was confused. Could it be that I had ignored this statement at the time? The facts Mr. A told me about his father’s work in the concentration camp were the product of an impressive defense fantasy: his father had only worked in the outer area of the camp and not in the inner area. He defended his father, saying that he had had nothing to do with the crimes, that on the contrary, he had been an idealist. In his fantasy Mr. A put up a wall between his father and the crimes, which he located in the “inner area” of the concentration camp. This piece of clarification about the father’s past remained isolated during treatment. Mr. A protected his mother from questions by never taking a closer interest in the past. He knew of a folder of documents in his mother’s possession but never looked into it. Once, when he did want to look into it, she had warded him off: “Oh, that is all past anyway.” She wanted to be left in peace and not to be burdened with these things. He did not ask any more questions about his father, nor did he delve further into the past. Wanting to be content with what his parents had said, like an obedient child, who is not allowed to think for himself, he heard an inner voice saying: “That is something you don’t need to know.” Instead he filled many sessions with the trivial problems he had at the office and his inability to bring any order into his affairs. I found it increasingly difficult to put up with the fact that he did not want to know the truth about his father. Repeatedly I felt pushed into the role of detective. Mr. A had projected this part of his self onto me so that he could

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retain the role of a child who does not ask questions. This was exactly the position his parents had intended and imposed on him, in order not to be put into question themselves. However, his father’s past had, in the meantime, spread itself as a heavy, emotionally potent secret over the whole treatment process, and had increasingly absorbed my image of the son within psychoanalytic treatment. I gained a lasting impression of how potently present absent things can be. Feeling stuck, both in the treatment process and in my interpretations, in the end I followed an impulse I had often held back and looked into the relevant literature, which I had at home. I found his father quite quickly, as well as indications that he had been involved in medical experiments with humans. But what was I to do with this knowledge, how was I to deal with it in treatment? Initially I presumed that Mr. A was unaware of these things. Should I keep this additional information to myself? It was now something that now stood between us, and a few sessions later I told him: “You are always bringing a problem to these sessions in which you portray yourself as someone who can’t make it. It seems to me that the same thing happened when you were a child. You were made responsible for your problems, and then you saw yourself as a failure. But you refuse to look at the enormous problem of your father’s past and what it means for your life.” When, in the course of this session, he presented himself once more as being helpless and needing advice, I referred him to the relevant literature in order for us to be able to talk about his father’s past. I also mentioned books by the children of Nazi criminals, in which they deal with their life histories and their family’s pasts; books, which were causing a public stir at that time. After this he fell ill with a fever. He bought all the books I had mentioned and discovered his father’s name in them, but he talked about them in the next session without showing any emotion, as if this man could not have been his father. Although he was taking antibiotics, he was not getting any better, which his doctor could not understand. During his mother’s absence he used the time to search through all his parents’ books like a detective, making a list of all of those that dealt with politics and science. He wanted to make a sort of psychogram of his parents’ mental world, a plan that seemed to be rather persecutory to me. He was like an investigating judge on a fact-finding mission. He then talked to his mother about their Nazi past. What he told me afterward about his father’s past revealed a web of revelations, half-truths, and excuses to which I reacted with growing disgust. Mr. A set himself against the realization that his father was party to criminal acts, making use of his father’s defense strategy. He showed no emotions; he was merely reporting. When I pointed this out, he said: “All this seems so unreal to me, as if I were looking into the biography of a neighbor. I can’t bring it together in my mind that this is supposed to be my father and that he did such things earlier in his life. It’s as if it were two different people.” He could not believe that it was his father. Yet his father was shown in uniform in a photograph from that time, a picture in which Mr. A

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said his father looked exactly like the disagreeable type of person one imagined a member of the SS to be. Mr. A could not bring himself to associate the father he knew with this SS officer. Even in analysis it was not possible for him to resolve the split. He had acknowledged the truth about his father on the one hand, but simultaneously he kept it separated from himself. In particular, he did not allow his father’s crimes to come anywhere near him. Repeatedly they were present in my mind only—that was how and where they existed. Mr. A told me, “You started on this exposure of my father’s past, but when you don’t talk about it, it is gone again.” He did not seriously occupy himself with his father’s guilt; rather, in its place Mr. A continued to hold on to the idealized fantasy figure father of his childhood, the one who was almost always absent and whom he missed so much. He still blamed himself for never getting to talk to him properly. I cannot describe the further treatment process here. But I do want to point out one more aspect: the often insoluble tie that welds children to their Nazi parents, whom they protect at the cost of developing their own personalities. It is the kind of relationship that has been described as Hörigkeit (bondage), e.g. by Eckstaedt.18 In the course of treatment Mr. A tried once more to talk to his mother and ask her about the past, but for her these attempts were accusations, and she turned on him, blaming everything on Mr. A himself, repeating the old lines about how he had had the chance of making something of his life, but had never taken it. He simply was of a bad character, all to be blamed on biologically determined constitution. Euthanasia was often discussed at home: in nature there was natural selection, but man had set it aside; hence there was a justification for selection. In addition there were examples in nature of mothers killing their children if they were too ill to survive. He tried to argue against these views, but at the same time he wanted to protect his mother from negative emotions. Had he told her that he was undergoing psychotherapy, she would have blamed herself for having failed as a mother, for not having bred a better son. All this he told me without the least emotion, which I felt all the more strongly within myself. Basically he was justifying his mother, making his problems into personal failures so that his mother need not reproach herself and be confronted with the lie she had been living. Mr. A had no more fight in him with which to further his own growth, identifying instead with his mother’s accusations: for all practical purposes, he was self-euthanizing his own future.

Discussion of the Case Material and Some General Conclusions During Mr. A’s treatment certain dynamics developed that made the father’s past so completely overbearing that it threatened to overlay the analyst’s relationship with the son as an independent person. The father’s Nazi past effec-

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tively blocked out the perception of actual transference. Generally speaking, the analyst’s own guilt feelings, resulting from Germany’s past as well as his individual family history (even if the members of his family were not actively engaged with Nazism), can lead to an overwhelming need for him to instrumentalize the patient’s history in dealing with the past. From there it can become a real problem to differentiate between his own inner conflict and that of another, making it hard not to impose his problems onto the patient. After all, both analyst and patient belong to the same society and have been shaped by the same history, even if in different ways. To be able to work on identifications, still effective beneath the surface, with Nazi parents, we analysts must, using our imaginations and emotions, approach more closely the crimes against humanity that were committed. We cannot protect ourselves against the terror that grips us when we succeed in visualizing the past as our imagination is repeatedly overwhelmed by the unparalleled crimes of Nazism, preventing us from keeping these atrocities, committed by one human being against another, present within ourselves. This is always the danger: that the past will lose its reality when we deal with second-generation patients whose parents were involved in Nazi crimes. The analyst must be aware of this derealization and inwardly counteract such a loss of reality, so as not to fall prey to it himself. In certain phases of treatment it can become necessary to actively call to mind the vast scale of these crimes and the unfathomable inhumanity represented in material that has been implied or kept secret, in order to make it present in the analytic relationship. Kijak19 has pointed out that every investigator attempting to study Nazism and its consequences must wear “armor” so as not to be overwhelmed by the pain and suffering generated by the awareness of such terrible destructiveness. However, there is a danger that this armor could be taken for granted and subsequently rigidified uncritically into an unconscious, reflexive defense mechanism. Psychoanalysts, too, succumb to the collective defenses that have evolved within German society. The joint processes of maintaining a humane, open, critical attitude and of overcoming inner tendencies to harden need to be actively pursued and require a constant vigilance and a systematic, questioning self-awareness. The inability to ask, a phenomenon that still pervades a large part of German society across three generations, has not disappeared in the light of analytical practices. Not wanting to know is a danger to which we all succumb,20 and analysts (who must empathize with the world of their patients, risking coming into mental contact with these crimes) are particularly prone to adopting such a defense strategy. On the other hand, as professionals, they do have means at their disposal for analyzing this defense critically and working through it. I now want to make some remarks on the identifications and the object relations of Mr. A, and thus take up the points made in the introduction. Mr. A’s parents relieved themselves of their responsibility for the child’s development

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and of all guilt feelings by using Nazi ideas about eugenics and euthanasia to make their child into their scapegoat. The child, thus mentally abused with no way of defending himself, remained entangled in his parents’ secrecy, deceit, and betrayal, and by casting himself as a failure affirmed the identity his parents attributed to him. In addition to this, having externalized their guilt by forcing it onto the child they then turned on him; still later, they put the blame on the adult, holding Mr. A responsible for his inadequacies and failures, completing his humiliation. In this way he was used by his parents throughout his life as an instrument to maintain their own narcissistic equilibrium. To sustain his libidinous ties to his parents, he had no choice but to identify with these projections. The following dream illustrates this hijacking, and the boy’s subsequent battle for selfhood: There is a square where a dance is being held. He is expected to dance, and several women look at him expectantly. He sees himself looking quite dark with black hair; it is then that he dances. In the second part of the dream he is now older, has long, thin, white hair, and whole clumps of it are missing. He sees that on his head there are cuts, as if somebody has tried to scalp him. There are two parallel cuts, as when one cuts into clay. His associations to the dream show how Mr. A’s self is split in two. One part incorporates Mr. A’s real actual self; here he has a future and is sexually attractive and erotically aware. The other part of the dream shows that his father’s past has forcefully entered his head and his self and has occupied it. The cuts in his scalp show how he has identified with the victims of his perpetrator father. This father and the identification with his past have taken the place of Mr. A’s own sense of selfhood; therefore he has no psychic space left to develop his own identity. Such identifications ignore the differences between the generations. While it is a characteristic of oedipal identifications that parents are eventually given up as love objects, narcissistic identifications are characterized by the failure to recognize generational boundaries. The separation of self and object either is lost or has not developed in this part of the personality. In this way the trauma or the crime that one generation has kept secret is unconsciously imposed onto the next. This blurring of boundaries between the generations is also the reason for the fact that such children have a disturbed experience of time, especially in their feeling for and perception of their own lifelines and sense of identity. These children are unable to connect with the life histories of their parents, and their identifications with them, as a basis for creating their own story by means of separation and argumentation. If they did so, their own sense of identity would be the regulatory principle for development. Instead silence and lies undermine the self ’s sense of reality and create a false, nebulous myth-filled concept of the past, the truth of which is hidden behind alienating identifications and screen memories. In these children, it is these internalized parents that have been installed as a psychic organizer.

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It was not possible for Mr. A to separate from his parents as would have befitted his age. He remained loyal to them. During treatment, his early bond to an idealized father image proved to be the rock against which all efforts at coming to terms with the real father’s criminal history foundered. Although he investigated his father’s past like a detective, his longing for the distant, unreachable father remained dominant, and Mr. A continued to blame himself for not having established a close emotional tie to him. He protected this relationship to his father by splitting his father-imagery; one version being the idealized father of early childhood, as he had experienced him in reality or as he had longed for him; the other was the bad criminal father, whom he wanted nothing to do with. Psychoanalytic case histories have shown us how difficult it is for the children of a perpetrator group to truly acknowledge what their parents have done instead of disparaging the facts or splitting them off. Usually at a very early age loving memories are associated with the father, and they are reflected in an unconscious, positive, libidinous tie in the ego ideal. In many cases this infantile, unconscious tie to a beloved authority, to which one must remain loyal, makes separation from these parents extremely difficult, if not impossible. Simenauer21 has described several patients with Nazi fathers, none of whom could ultimately resolve this split between the good father of their early childhood and the bad perpetrator father, although they had separated themselves far away from the world of their fathers in their ego identification and in their conscious attitudes. “The originally positive identifications with the real father or the fantasized image of the father were the economically active forces that determined the dynamic processes in the patients’ psychopathology.”22 The children of Nazi perpetrators find themselves in a deep conflict of loyalties. The result is that the ego ideal and the superego are compromised. Unconsciously the ego of these children is repeatedly in danger of being made into an accomplice. Thus can the historic past be experienced as a burden that one wants to deny or forget, instead of using it as a source of memories and truth, which, though painful and tormenting, might help the individual to achieve personal integrity.

Notes 1. I can only give a selection of literature here: Martin Bergmann and Jucovy Milton, eds., Generations of the Holocaust (New York 1982); Haydée Faimberg, “Die Ineinanderrückung (Telescoping) der Generationen,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 20 (1987): 114–142; Ilse GrubrichSimitis, “Extreme Traumatization as Cumulative Trauma,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 36 (1981): 415–450; Ilany Kogan, “Vermitteltes und reales Trauma in der Psychoanalyse von Kindern von Holocaust-Überlebenden,” Psyche 44 (1990): 533–544; Ilany Kogan, The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust (London 1995); Dori Laub, Peskin Harvey and Nanette Auerhahn, “Der zweite Holocaust: das Leben ist bedrohlich,” PsycheZ Psychoanal 49 (1995): 18–40.

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2. Bergmann and Milton, Generations of the Holocaust. 3. Kogan, Vermitteltes Trauma. 4. Maria Bergmann, “Thoughts on Superego Pathology of Survivors and Their Children,” in Bergmann and Milton, Generations of the Holocaust, 287–309. 5. Bergmann, “Thoughs on Superego Pathology”; Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, “From Concretism to Metaphor,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 39 (1984): 301–319; Ilany Kogan, “From Acting Out to Words and Meaning,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 73 (1992): 455–465. 6. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, “Vom Konkretismus zur Methaphorik,” in M. Bergmann, M. Jucovy, and J. Kestenberg, eds., Kinder der Opfer, Kinder der Täter: Psychoanalyse und Holocaust (Frankfurt/ M. 1995), 366. 7. Dan Bar-On, and N. Gilad, “Auswirkungen des Holocaust auf drei Generationen,” Psychosozial 51 (1992): 7–21. 8. Nadine Hauer, Die Mitläufer oder die Unfähigkeit zu fragen (Opladen 1994). 9. Anita Eckstaedt, Nationalsozialismus in der zweiten Generation. Psychoanalyse von Hörigkeitsverhältnissen (Frankfurt/ M. 1989); Friedrich W. Eickhoff, “Identification and Its Vicissitudes in the Context of the Nazi-Phenomenon,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 67 (1986): 33–44; Friedrich W. Eickhoff, “On the Borrowed Unconscious Sense of Guilt and the Palimpsestic Structure of a Symptom: Afterthoughts on the Hamburg Congress of the IPA,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis (1989): 323–329; Gertrud Hardtmann, “The Shadows of the Past,” in Bergmann and Milton, Generations of the Holocaust, 228–244; Eicke Hinze, “The Influence of Historical Events on Psychoanalysis: A Case History,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 67 (1986): 459–476; Lutz Rosenkötter, “Die Idealbildung in der Generationenfolge,” Psyche-Z Psychoanal 33 (1979): 1024–1038; Lutz Rosenkötter, “The Formation of Ideals in the Succession of Generations,” in Bergmann and Milton, Generations of the Holocaust, 176–182; Erich Simenauer, “A Double Helix: Some Determinants of the Self-Perpetuation of Nazism,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 33 (1978): 411–425. 10. Faimberg, “Ineinanderrückung.” 11. Judith Kestenberg, “Neue Gedanken zur Transposition. Klinische, therapeutische und entwicklungsbedingte Betrachtungen,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 24 (1989): 163–189. 12. Faimberg, “Ineinanderrückung.” 13. Hillel Klein and Ilany Kogan, “Identification and Denial in the Shadow of Nazism,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 67 (1986): 45–52. 14. Mathias Hirsch, “Fremdkörper im Selbst,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 35 (1955): 123– 151. 15. Nicolas Abraham and Marie Torok, Kryptonymie: Das Verbarium des Wolfmanns (Frankfurt/ M. 1979). 16. Jean Cournut, “Ein Rest, der verbindet. Das unbewußte Schuldgefühl, das Entlehnte betreffend,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 22 (1988): 67–98. 17. Nicolas Abraham, “Aufzeichnungen über das Phantom. Ergänzung zu Freuds Metapsychologie,” Psyche-Z Psychoanal 45 (1991): 691–698. 18. See for example Anita Eckstaedt, “Nationalsozialismus in der zweiten Generation. Psychoanalyse von Hörigkeitsverhältnissen,” (Frankfurt a. M. 1989). 19. Moises Kijak, “Psychoanalysts Confronting Nazism and Its Consequences,” unpublished manuscript for the 37th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Buenos Aires, 1991. 20. Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn, “Knowing and Not Knowing. Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 74 (1993): 287–302. 21. Simenauer, “Double Helix.” 22. Ibid., 419.

CHAPTER

5

On the Myth of Objective Research after Auschwitz Unconscious Entanglements with the National Socialist Past in the Investigation of Long-Term Psychosocial Consequences of the Shoah in the Federal Republic of Germany* KURT GRÜNBERG

A child, fond of an innkeeper named Adam, watched him club the rats pouring out of holes in the courtyard; it was in his image that the child made its own image of the first man. That this has been forgotten, that we no longer know what we used to feel before the dogcatcher’s van, is both the triumph of culture and its failure. Culture, which keeps emulating the old Adam, cannot bear to be reminded of that zone, and precisely this is not to be reconciled with the conception that culture has of itself. It abhors stench because it stinks – because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit. Years after that line was written, Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed. That this could happen in the midst of the traditions of philosophy, of art, and of the enlightening sciences says more than that these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to take hold of men and work a change in them. There is untruth in those fields themselves, in the autarky that is empathically claimed for them. All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage. […] Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be. Not even silence gets us out of the circle. In silence we simply use the state of objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more degrading truth into a lie.1

These words by Theodor W. Adorno from his book chapter Meditationen zur Metaphysik (Meditations on Metaphysics) provide an inkling of the personal and Notes for this section begin on page 99.

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collective abysses that may open when, albeit many years after “the deed,” but in the very country of the murderers, one undertakes to examine the legacy of the National Socialist extermination of the Jews; that is, when one gets involved with the Lebenswelt (lifeworld) of Jews—survivors as well as their sons and daughters born after the Shoah, and on to the world of the Nazi perpetrators, along with their supporters, observers, and their children. Roughly sixty-five years after Auschwitz, these second-generation individuals meet in their day-to-day dealings at work, in politics, and in cultural life. They achieve various degrees of closeness and sometimes get in each other’s way. A love relationship probably represents the most intimate contact between the side of the former victims and the side of the perpetrators, or their sympathizers. In my doctoral dissertation2 I explored such second-generation relationships in post–National Socialist Germany in order to gain deeper insights into “culture after Auschwitz.” The true extent and significance of the abyss that did indeed emerge during the course of this endeavor became apparent only in hindsight. A doctoral dissertation is evaluated in terms of various criteria: some good, some less useful, and some downright bad. The assessment always depends on the values attached to a given type of research, but there are no generally applicable criteria. For instance, if one were to focus on the length of a thesis, or the time it took to complete it, one would soon conclude that the number of words or the number of years to completion do not necessarily correspond to its scientific import. It would seem that the scientific and social significance of a problem, the complexity of the subject matter, unexpected results, or the originality of a scientific study are more suitable criteria. At times, the evaluation of a piece of research may be based on something entirely different; for example, on what was not said and not reported. Presumably, the very aspects of a study that have fallen victim to the researcher’s censorship, in a manner of speaking, can themselves lead to fundamental insights into the topic under investigation. One may object that outsiders do not have access to this domain, and this is undoubtedly true. But is it not always the case that the reader of a study is reliant on the author to grant him insight into his or her work? In any event, especially if some time has passed since the completion of the study, the author himself has the option of taking a second look at his own study. I will pursue some of these considerations as I address certain thoughts and feelings I experienced when I submitted my dissertation in 1999 but chose not to make public at the time. I posit that certain experiences that occurred with increasing frequency while I was working on my thesis, as well as during the many years of in-depth engagement with the subject matter, did, at least latently, encroach upon the study and are therefore of considerable significance to its content. A number of factors encourage me to disclose some of my thoughts and experiences regarding certain entanglements and conflicts that arose during my investigation of the psychosocial consequences of the Shoah: the length of time that has passed since completing my dissertation, my own

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work and life experience, and increased freedom, i.e., not being subject to specific evaluation upon which academic qualification and promotion were contingent. I hope to shed light on the fact that, when investigating the consequences of the National Socialist crimes against humanity in particular, striving for purely objective scientific research must necessarily be a myth. This is the case because the individual, familial, and social NS entanglements of everybody involved do not permit a position of non-involvement. At best, the endeavor to objectively study the Nazi legacy may be viewed as a naïve attempt to assume a quasi-dispassionate perspective in order to avoid becoming infected with the Nazi horror. More likely, however, such an approach will lead to serious distortions and misrepresentation. Relative to the far-reaching significance that the break with civilization that occurred at Auschwitz has for the life “afterward,” this stance will merely scratch the surface. It will not meet Adorno’s challenge to allow a genuine engagement with “culture after Auschwitz”3 and the “terror without end,”4 a manifestation of a horrific facet of an epoch that, through the millionfold systematic murder of a people by means of a type of hydrocyanic acid originally produced for pest control, most profoundly marked the past century. I shall begin by addressing questions about the design of my study of the psychosocial consequences of the Shoah. I shall then focus on the “independent third-party rating” procedure employed and on the conflicts that arose within the group of researchers, which eventually caused our collaboration to fail. These conflicts are understood as a confrontation of two partially subconscious lines of tradition, which ultimately underlie the German-Jewish relationship in post–National Socialist Germany: the transmission of the trauma of Nazi persecution in the Second Generation on one side, versus the transmission of Nazi support by non-Jewish Germans on the other. Finally, I shall describe a dispute that arose with a university lecturer who declared that the Jews who were persecuted under National Socialism were “unconscious accomplices.” I shall explain this scenario in terms of the social generation of anti-Semitism. Here, too, dissociated fragments of the National Socialist legacy become evident. Both these controversies must be viewed as part of Adorno’s “culture after Auschwitz.”

Issues of Study Design When I began my investigations of Liebesbeziehungen der Zweiten Generation in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Intimate Relationships of the Second Generation in the Federal Republic of Germany) in 1986, I soon realized how difficult it was to find interviewees who were prepared to participate in my study, namely Jews, daughters and sons of concentration camp survivors, who were born or at least raised in Germany, and a comparison group of non-Jewish

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Germans matched for gender, age, and occupation. This alone disrupted my original time frame, since it took me more than a year to recruit the control sample. My first supervisor had become somewhat impatient and thought that I should content myself with what I had. I had planned to interview at least twenty Jews and the same number of non-Jewish Germans. Some prospective interviewees initially confirmed their participation in the study only to withdraw from it just before the interview. Yet I was not deterred from pursuing my original goal, even by the discovery, in the course of seven interviews, that some individuals did not meet the criteria for participation in the study, though I had been previously led to believe they did. For example, one individual who had been introduced to me as a Second-Generation Jew was not even Jewish. The parents of other interviewees were not concentration camp survivors, etc. Apart from my own stubbornness, however, there were other reasons for holding on to the original plan of study. I remembered all too well the reaction of the chairman of the graduate seminar in the psychology department at Marburg University, where in the early 1980s I presented my diploma thesis Folgen nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung bei Kindern von Überlebenden / Juden in der BRD (Consequences of National Socialist Persecution in Children of Survivors/Jews in the Federal Republic of Germany).5 To my knowledge, my thesis was one of the first to use a qualitative approach in the department in Marburg, which adheres to “academic psychology.” The head of the graduate seminar simply refused to accept a diploma thesis that did not conform to the standards of “proper” study design, involving an experimental and a control group. He was outraged that I even seriously considered this. The expert assessor of a foundation where I applied for a doctoral grant was similarly disparaging. His statement, “No doctorate in this area of research without a control group,” still resounds in my ears today. These experiences left me feeling unable to do right by anyone. Some critics were extremely skeptical of a research approach they considered entirely speculative with many confounding factors and with variables that could not be properly operationalized. Others criticized what they considered a nitpicking approach: did I imagine that I could arrive at important insights that way? Years later, a famous psychoanalyst was full of praise for my work—the statistical part, however, apparently meant “nothing at all” to her. I, on the other hand, wanted to create a dialogue of opposing study procedures. I had hoped to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches, because I believed that proceeding multi-methodologically would lead to deeper insights into my chosen research topic. I was also of the opinion that empirical proof and mere assertion were two different things. Whether the above critical objections represented attempts at avoiding confrontation with a bothersome research topic will not be addressed at this point. Sometimes, methodological inquiries are part and parcel of a process of collective resistance, a means to avoid getting involved with uncomfortable and tormenting questions. After all, engagement

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with the Shoah in Germany entails not only confrontation with the painful and unbearable reality of the experience of persecution by the victims. It also involves confrontation with one’s own family’s direct and indirect entanglement in the process of marginalization, persecution, and extermination of a people, a crime against humanity committed by Nazi perpetrators, Nazi supporters, and onlookers—who wanted what they did.6

“Independent” Third-Party Rating? In this section I shall discuss a controversy that arose within the research team during the stage of data analysis. This conflict is part of what I later called the “Marburg chapter.” In the end, there was a rather unpleasant hearing before the district court, which ended with a settlement. Certainly, the most important insights did not pertain to the outcome of these proceedings, but to a deeper understanding of the significance of the conflict in the context of the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish researchers in a study on the psychosocial consequences of the Shoah in Germany. In order to elucidate these problems, I shall first deal with the methodological issues of combining qualitative and quantitative research approaches within this study. In order to match the complexity of the issues to be examined, the methodology employed was conceptualized as requiring continuous changes in perspective. First, this concerns the question of interdisciplinarity: in order to arrive at a comprehensive picture of the topic under investigation, insights into National Socialism and the continuing effect of Nazi persecution were to be derived from various scientific disciplines such as psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and political science as well as historical and literary studies. Second, the imperative of a multi-methodological research strategy was to be reflected in the use of diverse methodologies. In addition to publicly accessible reports from specialized literature and the daily press, subjective impressions and experiences from the perspective of the Second Generation also played an important role in the conceptualization of the life experience (Lebenswelt) of Jews in Germany today. In addition to employing standardized surveys that assess personality traits (Freiburg Personality Inventory-Revised FPI-R) and analyze relationship behavior in current intimate relationships (partnership questionnaire PFB), I also designed and employed rating scales to evaluate relationships with parents and the autonomy of intimate relationships. The qualitative evaluation of the semi-structured in-depth interviews was based on verbatim transcripts of the three- to nine-hour conversations, which produced about four thousand pages of material. In the final part of the interviews we used a projective sentence completion test. The only limitations, placed on two detailed single case analyses,7 were that all insights and interpretations had to be related to specific passages in the text.

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The content analysis and evaluation of the interview transcripts using independent third-party raters served to render the study more objective. Three advanced psychology students who were employed as student assistants functioned as third-party raters. Like the interviewees, the third-party raters were not informed about any details of the study or its hypotheses. At the beginning of the interview, the interviewees were told the following: “I am conducting an investigation of intimate relationships at the department of psychology at Philipps University Marburg. … A further component of the study is an examination of family of origin. This also includes parents’ life experiences.” At a later stage of the interview, interviewees were asked about parents’ life experiences “in the 30s and 40s.” National Socialism was not explicitly mentioned because it was important not to place interviewees, especially non-Jewish Germans, in a position of defensiveness or resistance. The “30s and 40s” could be understood in terms of whatever significance the various families attributed to this era. Presumably, it was more important for the Jewish participants to see the interviewer as “one of their own,” in order to be able to be open about extremely difficult or intimate topics, and to feel understood. However, I did not explicitly mention my own background even to the Jewish interviewees. The Jewish participants probably knew implicitly that I myself was Jewish and part of the Second Generation. I was hoping that both the investigation and the comparison group would express their views based on trust. The offer to conduct the interviews in people’s homes, which was taken up by most interviewees, further helped to build trust. The third-party raters met in my flat, where they were offered food and drink and were free to ask me any questions. The underlying idea about independent third-party rating was not to determine inter-rater reliabilities or other comparative data, but rather to bring about a consensus between the three students. They were supposed to discuss matters, learn from each other, and in case of doubt, discuss and agree on category assignments. Some interviews were analyzed separately by the three students and discussed later. Some interviews were only rated by one student, and later, analyzed again by the three together, etc. Specifically, the analysis of interview transcripts by the third-party raters proceeded as follows. Initially, all third-party coders read the same transcripts from the investigation and comparison group (the third-party raters did not know how the groups were divided). Following the coding guidelines, they were asked to mark passages of the interview that were relevant to the four central questions in different colors. They then discussed the results. The aim of this discussion was to arrive at an agreement about the color coding of the passages. The third-party coders familiarized themselves with Mayring’s concept of a “summarising content analysis,”8 according to which the chosen passages are first paraphrased and presented in pre-designed tables. Then the statements are generalized. Finally, the generalizations are reduced and assigned to various numbered categories.

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The third-party raters then discussed their various paraphrases, generalizations, and reductions with the aim of arriving at consensually generated categories. The same procedure was followed with one further interview transcript. Then the students were presented with different transcripts, which they analyzed independently. Later, the third-party raters received another identical interview for analysis and then again different ones. We proceeded this way until all interviews were analyzed—i.e., some identical interviews were analyzed separately with a view to arriving at a consensus afterward, but most interviews were analyzed by only one third-party coder. In the end, the overall results of the third-party coding were summarized by the group. All extracted categories were listed in a table according to a central question. An attempt was made to assign each category to a superordinate category (e.g., entangled or not entangled attention or inattention; open or hidden pressure, etc.). The table contained the frequency with which the various categories appeared in the individual interviews. After that, the compilation of categories was to be compared with the deductive categories derived from the theory.9 This comparison was to be made by assigning inductively derived categories to the deductively obtained categories. The hypotheses were to be tested via quantitative analyses.

Conflict with the Third-Party Raters Conflict with the three students arose when the various extracted categories were to be assigned to certain superordinate categories, a prerequisite for group comparison. I will illustrate this via a specific example. The interview contained the following question: “Which experiences in the 30s and 40s had the most lasting impact on the life of your parents?” The answers were then discussed in detail. Once the interviews had been completed, the raters were presented with four “central questions for third-party rating,” designed to assist categorization. In “Central question 2” the term National Socialism was mentioned for the first time, an indication for the students that “dealing with” the time of National Socialism was to be the focus of the analysis. Verbatim, the second question read as follows: What did the interviewee say directly about how and to what extent his/her parents passed on information about their experiences during National Socialism? What did they pass on, how did they do that and what were their motivations for doing so? Parents may confront their descendants with their main, actual NS experiences, but they may also confront them with experiences that obscure events. They may also remain silent about their main experiences while being clear or they may hide their main experiences through silence.

They were next presented with an example for each superordinate category:

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Confrontation with main NS experiences “My mother always talked about her arrest and how she got separated from her family.” 1) Confrontation with covering experiences “My father frequently talked about the technological innovations in the company where he was employed as an engineer at the time, but he never mentioned the forced laborers that worked there.” 2) Silence while being clear about the main NS experiences “My father hardly ever talked about his experiences of that time. I always knew what it was that he experienced, but the memories seem to be too painful to talk about. Maybe he wanted to spare me that.” 3) Silence while hiding the main NS experiences “My mother never talked about her experiences of that time. She said that it was not that important. So, I don’t really know what she really experienced.” The third-party raters did fulfill their task up to a point: their categories and their assignment to superordinate categories for “Central question 2: Parents’ experiences of National Socialism” looked like this: 2.1. Confrontation with major experiences during National Socialism • Supporting Jews • Stories about parents’ sufferings under Nazi crimes • Reports about experiences during the war as soldiers and about the postwar period as prisoners of war10 2.2. Confrontation with hidden experiences (No assignments) 2.3. Silence while being clear about the main NS experiences • Hesitant and incomplete reports about experiences of persecution 2.4. Silence while hiding main NS experiences • Incomplete reports about experiences under National Socialism • Parents refuse to talk about experiences under National Socialism However, when it came to classifying another of their own categories, “Private experiences with family, job etc.” according to the above pattern, the thirdparty raters refused to continue their work. At this point, they suddenly and unexpectedly accused me of conducting my study “completely unscientifically.” They claimed that he results of the study had been predictable, and that the procedure forced them to make assumptions about the non-Jewish interviewees and their parents. They did not want to be used by me and be part of something that ought to be rejected as unscientific. The only aim of the study, so they claimed, was “to condemn Germans.” The fact that many people in Germany know little about what their parents had experienced or done during the time of National Socialism was "not something they could be reproached for just like that." The raters maintained that one ought not to conduct a sci-

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entific investigation in which the participants were deceived in this way. It was only supposed to seem as if they—the third-party raters—had really worked independently of me, the interviewer and author of the study. Initially, I was very surprised by the students’ sudden and vehement accusations after so many months of constructive efforts and collaboration. I tried to remain calm and asked them the reasons for their dissatisfaction. I explained that as independent third-party coders they did not have to adopt the specified superordinate categories. If they thought that certain categories did not fit the pattern, they were free to advance different suggestions. They did, however, have to assign their categories to certain superordinate categories in order to allow statistical analysis regarding group differences. Without that, it would be impossible to evaluate this important part of the study. Because I was beginning to lose my composure—my entire thesis was falling apart—I withdrew in order to seek advice from a friend and university lecturer who knew my work very well. His advice was to have another “sensible” conversation with the students. I was to explain that my method was not at all unscientific even if some of the results might perhaps have been expected. Perhaps, he thought, it would be better for all involved to meet at a later date rather than making any rash decisions. At our next meeting I once again tried to persuade the students to complete their third-party rating task—to no avail. I asked them whether they felt personally attacked, or whether they found themselves confronted with their own family histories. Perhaps we could come to an agreement that way. “That has nothing at all to do with it,” they said. The only problem was that the design of my study was “unscientific.” My request that the students complete their work for my sake, so that the project, which I had been working on for many years, would not fail, was also in vain. Neither did it make any difference that I threatened to not pay outstanding invoices if the third-party raters did not complete their work. The students discontinued their participation. They were not prepared to make any concessions. A little later, two of the students sent me a demand for payment via a solicitor, which I refused to pay. First, I explained, I had entered into a contract with the student assistants, which they did not fulfill. Second, I pointed out that I would have to train new assistants, which would involve further expenses. I still had a glimmer of hope that the three students might change their minds and complete their third-party rating task after all. As mentioned above, the legal proceedings ended with a settlement. After the hearing, the judge pointed out to me that jurisdiction does not necessarily go hand in hand with justice. A civil lawsuit is merely an attempt to bring about an agreement between two parties in order to settle a conflict. Out of court, however, the conflict was never settled. To this day, I have not even spoken to the two students who initiated proceedings. In summary, I was unable to reach an agreement on this far-reaching and, for the topic under investigation, very

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significant issue, either through my own efforts or with the help of any trusted third parties available to me. Did the third-party raters, in their own way and provoked both by me and my procedure, come into contact with Adorno’s “terror without end” after all?

Clarity Regarding Parents’ Main Experiences during National Socialism Another psychology student finally finished the “independent third-party rating.” With respect to the assignment of the category “Private experiences with family, job etc.,” she chose none of the existing superordinate categories and instead introduced a new category (2.5) without a title for this purpose. For statistical purposes, categories 2.1, Confrontation with main experiences during National Socialism, and 2.3, Silence while being clear about main experiences during National Socialism, of subsection 2 (Parents’ experiences of National Socialism) were combined. In this context, whether or not parents kept silent about their main experiences during National Socialism, was not regarded as a relevant differentiation. This occurred because the issue concerned whether daughters and sons, i.e., the interviewees, knew what their parents’ main experiences under National Socialism had been—irrespective of whether the parents spoke about them. As shown in Figure 5.1, the difference between the two groups in the Parents’ main experiences under National Socialism category was very pronounced. In the Jewish group, on average nine of ten statements in this area expressed clarity regarding parents’ experiences under National Socialism, while in the comparison group this was the case for an average of 17% of the categorized statements.

Researchers’ Entanglement with National Socialism Why did the third-party raters discontinue their work? Might the conflict have been avoided? A scientific investigation of the psychosocial consequences of the National Socialist extermination of Jews in Germany necessarily entails conflicts related to the relationship of Jews and non-Jews in Germany, especially when researchers from both groups collaborate. In the present case, the subject of investigation itself became the cause of an irresolvable conflict that can only be understood when both sides’ entanglement with the history of National Socialism is examined. When the students discontinued their work, my emotional entanglement consisted of my feeling abandoned and let down. Although I myself never experienced it, I imagined myself back in the time of National Socialism. I felt

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leading category 2: clear knowledge about parents' important Nazi experience

3%

Superordinate categories: Confrontation with experiences under Nazism Silence with clear knowledge Concealed silence

Jewish group

54 %

36 %

7%

Without designation

3% Control group

14 %

0%

36 %

20 %

40 %

47 %

60 %

80 %

100 %

Figure 5.1. Average percentage of superordinate categories of the sub-area Parents’ experiences under National Socialism in both groups (Diagram by K. Grünberg, Love after Auschwitz:The Second Generation in Germany. Jewish Children of Survivors of the Nazi Persecution in the Federal Republic of Germany and their Experience with Love Relationships [Bielefeld/New Brunswick/London 2006])

that my efforts to gain insight into the continuing effects of the extreme trauma caused by the National Socialist extermination of the Jews in Germany had failed. I felt as if I was experiencing something Jews had suffered during the early phase of National Socialism, when they lost their jobs, their friends, and their partners. In the end I felt I had to do what I had already gone through passively—namely, to leave Marburg and start over elsewhere. Although they explicitly denied it, I believed that the three students also saw themselves confronted with their own origins and with the history of their own families. They were probably afraid to accuse their own parents or, as a result of their own ignorance, to find that they were the accused themselves. They did not want to be reproached for “not having asked” their parents. Had they accepted the reproach, they might have found themselves on par with the unthinking silent supporters. They would no longer have been able to regard their own position as a good one. Awareness of such unease may either lead to feelings of hurt or shame, or it may lead to rejection of guilt. This is not, however, the rejection of guilt by Nazi perpetrators or silent supporters. Rather, this is what Ralph Giordano called the Germans’ “second guilt:”11 being part of the denial of the crimes of the Nazis and maintaining this—without the threat of Nazi persecution, contrary to people’s own experience, contrary to their knowledge and understanding. The third-party raters’ thoughts of my work and my person must also be taken into consideration. In this context I should mention that the argument occurred very soon after the dispute with Pohlen, head of the Marburg clinic, which is outlined below. The first letter from the two students’ solicitor was

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dated 27 March 1990, the same month during which the article “Eklat im Psychoanalyse-Seminar”12 (Scandal in the Psychoanalysis Seminar) appeared. The incident was much discussed in psychology circles, which suggests that the students were probably aware of it. This is significant because the students regarded me as someone who provoked conflict, who would not let go and who therefore needed to be reprimanded. But who likes to surround himself with victims? Are such situations not more likely to give rise to the need to break away, or even to “throw another punch”? Is it not possible that the third-party raters felt the need to punish, which they did by discontinuing their work? It is likely that they regarded me as provocative, as someone who must become a victim, as someone who must be prevented from making Germans feel guilty. They also took offense at the fact that I did not inform the non-Jewish interviewees at the outset about the objective of my study. They may have thought, or rather hoped, that if I had the research results would have been much more favorable for their group. The third-party raters probably saw me as a troublemaker—but how to silence a troublemaker? One significant aspect must be emphasized, as it does not require conjectures about hidden motivations and unconscious entanglements. The timing of the students’ “protest campaign,” which ultimately led to the discontinuation of their work, is of special significance. After all, the students did not voice their critical reservations when they initially encountered the methodology of the empirical investigation. Rather, they raised their objections when certain results of their analysis became apparent. The third-party raters discontinued their work when it became apparent that the Second-Generation Jews were confronted with their parents’ main experiences during National Socialism in a much clearer and more authentic way than the non-Jewish German comparison group. Obviously the third-party raters had problems with the results of the analysis, something they were not able to mention within the context of our collaboration. As long as they regarded the non-Jewish interviewees simply as a control group—which in all likelihood was the case until the results were collated—the study design did not appear problematic to them. The conflict arose once the comparison group was examined more closely and provocative results emerged from the comparison of the two groups. The students began looking for a different explanation for their feelings, finding fault with other aspects of the study, not with the results part. The way they harmed me was perhaps an unconscious continuation of a tradition, which would need to be investigated in detail in subsequent studies. It is a legacy that entangles non-Jewish Germans with their parents who went along with the National Socialist regime: the transmission of being a bystander in post–National Socialist Germany. The students knew that their actions caused me a great deal of distress but nonetheless thought them appropriate and just. When the practical aspect of research brings about a (partly unconscious) conflict such that the progress of the study is jeopardized, psychoanalytic in-

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terpretation seems appropriate. We obviously did not have any suitable means for settling the issue at the time. However, in retrospect I am inclined to reproach myself for the naïveté with which I assumed I would be able to carry out a study without taking into appropriate consideration the “loyalties”13 that prevail on all sides. A truly independent third-party rating was and probably is impossible, at least given the topic under investigation. Recognition of the entanglements and loyalties related to National Socialism may always remain highly difficult. However, such recognition constitutes a necessary condition for the resolution of conflicts that almost necessarily arise in the context of this complex and distressing topic, thus jeopardizing the scientific process of inquiry. I learned that Mr. Grünberg is Jewish; relatives of his were murdered by the Nazis. This has evidently obscured pure understanding and comprehension. (Solicitor Peter Becker, 22 February 1990).

Complicity between Perpetrators and Victims? Elsewhere I have described in greater detail the various strategies that exist for denying and rationalizing the Shoah.14 I also want to mention a few experiences, some very personal, that are related to my discussion of the psychosocial consequences of the Shoah in the context of my investigations, to the strategies of denial of Nazi persecution in the name of science, and last but not least, to my feelings of loneliness. The particular significance of these factors can only be understood in the context of the collision of the consequences Nazi persecution had for the descendants of survivors in Germany on the one hand, and the transmission of Nazi perpetration and silent support in the next generation of non-Jewish Germans on the other. As became apparent in the context of the so-called independent third-party rating described above, the perception and conceptualization of the entanglement with people’s family history under National Socialism and its effects on both sides regarding relationships, work contexts, and political and cultural relations is of great significance to the topic under discussion. For that reason, the personal experiences described here are not to be understood merely as private experiences. Rather, they should be regarded as having social significance and as being socially determined. My research targets the distributively organized social production of anti-Semitism,15 the dissociated fragments of the National Socialist heritage in “culture after Auschwitz” that must be expounded in people’s interpersonal relationships and within their culture. Scientific striving for “pure” understanding and comprehension, however, is almost certainly destined to miss these determining characteristics of the German-Jewish Lebenswelt after the Shoah. It is no coincidence that “academic psychology” uses the term confounding variable. It is precisely these “confounding” variables that grant a deeper understanding of the subject under investigation.

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In early 1990 I was involved in a serious conflict with a professor at the University of Marburg. The conflict was not limited to my research, but also affected my participation in a seminar and my dissertation. In short, my life at Marburg was seriously thrown into question. I will analyze this controversy by examining the unconscious entanglements of the people or groups involved with the history of National Socialism, which in turn will be invoked as a possible explanation for the disagreement. What happened? Pohlen, at that time head of the clinic for psychotherapy at the Centre for Neurology, conducted a seminar entitled “Psychoanalysis of Nazi Fascism.” In view of the often rather tedious process at the university, I thought it remarkable for someone to tackle this important and altogether difficult topic in such a setting. Furthermore, Professor Pohlen was regarded as unconventional and opinionated, rhetorically adept, and not readily conforming to the scientific mainstream. However, my initially positive assessment soon gave way to a more critical attitude when the ostensibly progressive but in reality authoritarian director of the clinic spoke about what seemed to be his real concern: Pohlen declared the persecuted Jews “unconscious accomplices.” He spoke of “parallel perpetrator-victim structures” and of “dizzying mirror effects.” The seminar’s central concept was “complicity.” Subsequent to my criticism of him,16 the head of the clinic announced that he would initiate legal action against me. He threatened me with large damages and with his intention to prevent me from completing my dissertation. In a move that reversed the actual events, Pohlen declared me, his critic, a perpetrator, precisely the role he wanted me to fit. And so Pohlen—quite consistent with and confirming his “complicity” thesis—accused me of “perfidious denunciation,”17 and of employing “Nazi methods,” “Gestapo-style slander,” and “Stürmer style.”18 He sought to hide his own responsibility and—if applicable here—his complicity with the Nazis by creating terminological confusion. His use of language suggested that ultimately there was a degree of arbitrariness and interchangeability with respect to the terms perpetrator and victim. Such de-differentiation of concepts must have been confusing for many, if not most, of the students. Furthermore, it must have had a liberating effect and generated relief from guilt, since presumably most members of the seminar were not members of persecuted families or families of resistance fighters. If the victims were unconscious accomplices, was it not also the case that the perpetrators were victims? At the time I was certain that I had personally experienced, recognized, and reasonably clearly labeled one of the defense strategies and rationalizations of the Shoah, namely the construction of “complicity” between perpetrators and victims. I also felt extremely threatened. In the presence of about forty seminar participants, the university professor presented a detailed charge against “the informant,” who, he claimed, wanted to bring about Pohlen’s “social death, social destruction.”19 Shortly prior to the end of the seminar, he ban-

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ished me from the room. None of the students present made even the slightest attempt to interrupt him during his one and a half–hour indictment, let alone challenge him. Only one person, a good friend of mine, timidly asked the professor at the end of the seminar whether it was possible that he, Pohlen himself, might be misguided rather than just recognizing this in others. Later, after the Pohlen showdown,20 there were reactions: the medical department reprinted an article by a journalist who had sneaked into Pohlen’s seminar (Richard Laufner of the magazine Express in Marburg) and, in conjunction with the Marburg “history workshop,” organized a public event in the summer of 1990. I received telephone calls of support and expressions of solidarity. People were worried about me, they said. Perhaps they were right. After all, at the very beginning of the seminar meeting, Pohlen, referring to me, spoke of a “psychopathological incident” “of what I want to finish off in the abstract.”21 His charge included what he had learned from Carlo Schmidt during SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) times: “Beat them up, boys. What could kill you, you must kill first.”22 Pohlen should “beat me like he would a fascist. You should know that. I know no mercy in this regard. Even if you confirm in writing before a court that you are a second generation Jew, this makes you in my eyes, a Fascist whom I persecute like I would persecute Fascists. I say it again, Carlo Schmidt was completely right.”23 I probably was frightened at the time. Since I did not comply with Pohlen’s demand for a “thorough and detailed apology” despite his solicitor repeatedly threatening that I would be subjected to serious fines and prevented from completing my dissertation at Marburg University, I did not feel safe. I was initially pleased about a telephone call I received at my home from the university’s president, reassuring me that no attempts were being made to prevent me from completing my doctoral studies at the Philipps University—indeed, he stated that he was very sorry that controversies were being forcibly conducted in that way at our university. I later questioned the value of this private telephone call. After all, it left no tangible trace that I could have referred to at a later date. I had nothing definitive to resort to. My subsequent application to Frankfurt am Main was accompanied by some degree of worry. Was it possible that the conflict with a psychoanalyst was going to hinder my application at a psychoanalytic research institute? The above mentioned publication in Express24 and a radio interview aired on the Hessischer Rundfunk radio station had generated a certain amount of publicity. It was increasingly important to me to conclude the “Marburg chapter.” In contrast to the conflict with the third-party raters, the lawsuit “Pohlen vs. Grünberg” never occurred. My solicitor in Marburg closed her offices a few months later, and I never heard from Pohlen’s solicitor again either. I remember my Marburg experiences to this day, even though I have written and talked about them numerous times in order to put the matter behind me. Only

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much later did I realize why it was so important for Pohlen to push me into this supposed role of persecutor. His aim was to validate—for everybody to see—his thesis of the “dizzying mirror effects” between perpetrator and victim. Pohlen was fascinated by himself and by the possibility of being able to oscillate between Nazi perpetrators and the victims of Nazi persecution. Such equalization of perpetrators and victims is a central element not only in the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ debate): to this day, it is also a frequently employed defense strategy to deny or rationalize the Shoah. It is often the case that German intellectuals claiming to act on the basis of a sociocritical approach are in fact embedded in the intellectual mainstream. In his Minima Moralia Theodor W. Adorno addressed in depth the question of the particular significance of the National Socialist extermination of Jews with respect to historical comparison. He pointed out that an examination of history can only result in valuable insight if the researcher, based on his current experience, deals with his own emotions regarding the topic under investigation. Such emotions may so disturb the researcher’s peace of mind that a purely detached analysis is not possible.25 In the case of the Shoah, the “observer” is drawn into an extreme state of emotional tension—Adorno speaks of “terror without end”—that must, at the same time, be understood as an indication of the uniqueness of the National Socialist extermination of the Jews. In its content, the thus emerging terror without end is connected to the Nazis’ crimes against humanity. Any attempts to loosen this connection or to dissolve it constitute a serious relapse, a disregard of what Adorno so strikingly explored. He states: Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of mind. Certainly, the unprecedented torture and humiliation of those abducted in cattle-trucks does shed a deathly-livid light on the most distant past, in whose mindless, planless violence the scientifically confected was already teleologically latent. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what, not having yet come to pass, denounces what has. The statement that things are always the same is false in its immediateness, and true only when introduced into the dynamics of totality. He who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without end.26

According to Adorno, after Auschwitz people had to recognize “together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole.”27 This is precisely what Pohlen obscured by deliberately refraining from making important distinctions. Similarly, he was critical of Habermas’s position regarding the Historikerstreit: “Just think of Habermas and the Historikerstreit. They [Habermas and others—K.G.] have settled the indescribable simply by declaring it a singular occurrence—and nothing has been explained.”28 Interestingly, here, too, Pohlen turns the attacked into the

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perpetrator. In the aftermath of Pohlen’s actions, a dissociated fragment that had previously been separate became evident in the seminar: the “terror without end,” which Adorno referred to in the passage cited above. During the trial situation staged by Pohlen, the accused—but perhaps also “the people”—felt some of this terror, pointing toward the “dark traces of the past,”29 toward what Pohlen had to dilute because it is so difficult to bear. Because I was not prepared to submit to this interpretation of the past, Pohlen wanted to punish me: “There must be atonement for guilt,” he said.30

Notes * Article first published in Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber et al., eds., Psychoanalyse als Profession und Wissenschaft (Stuttgart, Berlin, and Cologne 2004). 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative dialectics. Transl. From the German by E.B. Ashton (New York 1973) (reprinted 2005), 366f. 2. Kurt Grünberg, Love after Auschwitz: The Second Generation in Germany. Jewish Children of Survivors of the Nazi Persecution in the Federal Republic of Germany and Their Experience with Love Relationships (Bielefeld, New Brunswick, and London 2006). 3. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 359. 4. See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951) (Frankfurt/ M. 1984), 316. 5. Kurt Grünberg, Folgen nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung bei Kindern von Überlebenden / Juden in der BRD, diploma thesis, University of Marburg 1983. 6. See Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitlers willige Vollstrecker: Ganz gewöhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (Berlin 1996). 7. See Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, “Die Einzelfallstudie als psychoanalytisches Forschungsinstrument,” Psyche 49 (1995): 434–480. 8. See Philipp Mayring, Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken (Weinheim 1988) and Mayring, “Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse,” in U. Flick, E. v. Kardorff, H. Keupp, L. v. Rosenstiel, and S. Wolff, eds., Handbuch Qualitative Sozialforschung (Munich 1991). 9. See Norbert Groeben, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Kognitionskritik durch Inhaltsanalyse von Texten,” in P. Vorderer and N. Groeben, eds., Textanalyse als Kognitionskritik? Möglichkeiten und Grenzen ideologiekritischer Inhaltsanalyse (Tübingen 1987); Norbert Groeben and Ruth Rustemeyer, “Inhaltsanalyse,” in E. König and P. Zedler, eds., Bilanz qualitativer Forschung, vol. 2: Methoden (Weinheim 1995), 523–554. 10. With regard to superordinate category Confrontation with main experiences during National Socialism, the students cited Jewish people’s experiences of suffering side by side with war and prisoner of war experiences. I found this remarkable, since it demonstrates that the students were free to combine the categories extracted by them as they deemed appropriate. As far as my statistical calculations are concerned, this means that parents’ reports about their experiences as soldiers or as prisoners of war counted as much as parental reports about Nazi persecution regarding the clarity of the major experiences of parents’ experiences under National Socialism. 11. Ralf Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last Deutscher zu sein (Hamburg and Zürich 1987). 12. These were the words used on the cover page of the Marburg magazine Express (vol. 8, no. 6, 1990) to refer to the article. 13. Jürgen Müller-Hohagen, “Seelische Weiterwirkungen aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus zum Widerstreit der Loyalitäten,” in Kurt Grünberg and J. Straub, eds., Unverlierbare Zeit:

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Psychosoziale Spätfolgen des Nationalsozialismus bei Nachkommen von Opfern und Tätern (Tübingen 2001), 83–118. 14. Kurt Grünberg, “Vom Banalisieren des Traumas in Deutschland: Ein Bericht über die Tradierung des Traumas der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung und über Strategien der Verleugnung und Rationalisierung der Shoah im Land der Täter,” in Grünberg and Straub, Unverlierbare Zeit, (Tübingen 2001) 181–221. 15. Kurt Grünberg, “Zur ‘Rehabilitierung’ des Antisemitismus in Deutschland durch Walser, Möllemann u.a. oder Ich weiß wohl, was es bedeutet. Über das allmähliche Verfertigen des Ressentiments beim Reden: Eine psychoanalytische Betrachtung des Antisemitismus,” in M. Naumann, ed., “Es muß doch in diesem Lande wieder möglich sein…” Der neue Antisemitismus-Streit (Munich 2002), 224–229. 16. Kurt Grünberg, “‘Psychoanalyse des Nazi-Faschismus’: Stellungnahme eines Ungebildeten,” unpublished manuscript (1990). 17. Manfred Pohlen, Theorieseminar Psychoanalyse des Nazifaschismus vom 19.2.1990, unpublished manuscript (1990), 21. 18. Ibid., 25, 20, 25. A structurally similar controversy has concerned the National Socialist past of the late founding member, reigning analyst, former head and honorary member of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (German Psychoanalytic Association) Gerhart Scheunert in Frankfurt am Main. See Grünberg “Zur ‘Rehabilitierung’ des Antisemitismus in Deutschland durch Walser, Möllemann u.a.,” 84–86. 19. Pohlen, Theorieseminar Psychoanalyse des Nazifaschismus, 28. 20. R. Laufner, “Die ausweglose Spiegelung: Eklat im Seminar ‘Psychoanalyse des NaziFaschismus,’” Marburger Magazin Express 8, no. 6 (1990): 8–9; reprinted in Fachschaft Medizin, ed., Curare 17 (June 1990): 16–17. 21. Pohlen, Theorieseminar Psychoanalyse des Nazifaschismus, 4; my emphasis. 22. Ibid., 28 23. Ibid. 24. Laufner, “Die ausweglose Spiegelung.” 25. Similarly Jean Améry, in his preface to his 1977 book Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Beyond Guilt and Atonement) states: “Soon, the method forced itself upon me. While during the first few lines of the Auschwitz essay I thought that I would be able to remain cautious and detached and face the reader with distinguished objectivity, I soon realised that this was simply not possible. Where the ‘I’ should have been avoided, was the only viable starting point.” Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten (1966), here 2nd ed. of the reprint from 1977, Stuttgart 1980), 15f. 26. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, transl. E. F. N. Jephcott (London 1999), 234f. 27. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 316. 28. Pohlen, Theorieseminar Psychoanalyse des Nazifaschismus, 29. 29. Jörn Rüsen and Jürgen Straub, Die dunkle Spur der Vergangenheit: Psychoanalytische Zugänge zum Geschichtsbewußtsein (Frankfurt/ M. 1998). 30. Pohlen, Theorieseminar Psychoanalyse des Nazifaschismus, 26.

CHAPTER

6

Understanding Transgenerational Transmission The Burden of History in Families of Jewish Victims and their National Socialist Victimizers* JÜRGEN STRAUB

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say “hunger,” we say “tiredness,” “fear,” “pain,” we say “winter” and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer. —Primo Levi, If This Is a Man 1

The Presence of the Past It seems certain today that the term “present” encompasses far more than a merely present identity of the self. Assuming that present time equals pure presence, and stating thereby that it be nothing more than itself, means to underestimate—or neglect—Edmund Husserl’s2 differentiation of present (time) and now.3 Psychological presence is more than some point in time (“now”), and

Notes for this section begin on page 127.

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it proves more than William James’4 present time of consciousness, which he analyzed in Principles of Psychology. As psychoanalysis has impressively demonstrated, a vivid presence cannot be conceived of without those inherent traces of the past. Such incidents are part of the psychological present past, which is inscribed into one’s body and into one’s behavior, no matter how much time has passed since they occurred. In their psychological reality and effectiveness, they are not necessarily tied to conscious verbal representations, which add to well-known objections to the “presentistic premises.” Burkhard Liebsch, for instance, criticizes the latter as being “bias clotted to prejudice.”5 The premise basically states that “the existing present world alone [decides] about the future of the past, i.e. the so-called ‘present-bound interest’ negotiates independent of the ‘life’ of the past, which some scholars praise.”6 Psychoanalysis amongst disciplines regards this alleged liberty an illusion. Nor has depth hermeneutics investigated the experience of obliterative violence, so characteristic of the twentieth century, in a way that leaves retraceable marks in psychoanalytical language. This language turns toward life, so it seems hardly surprising that it still is unclear whether intensive and extensive destruction in the camps can at all find its way into theoretical terminology. Experiences of destruction and extermination, however, receive more psychoanalytical attention than ever. Psychoanalysis does not protect itself—to use the phenomenological phrasing—from the claims of these experiences, namely, to be heard and responded to. In other words, psychoanalysts have realized that such claims cannot simply be conceptualized outside the academic scope of psychoanalysis. This can also be seen from the increased and intensified efforts to analyze the role of traumata and experiences of violence as integral parts of collective and individual memory.7 I will not discuss in detail here whether such undertakings might also be part of a phenomenological ethos and—particularly—an ethics which does not indifferently accept the (violently inflicted) death of others. According to such approaches, the “resistance of the past” is rooted in our “basic attitude toward the lethality of others, which makes us understand history as history of lethal beings.”8 In recent times, an increasing number of psychoanalytic authors point out that traces of the past should not be regarded as mere relics of an inner “life of drives.” More than ever, psychoanalysts have been reconsidering the longterm impact of external incidents (like familial and non-familial traumatic experiences) on an individual, particularly the role such incidents play in the genesis of severe psychic disorders. Such incidents or traumas “are no longer restricted to their impact on an individual’s life of drives; they are analyzed in the light of their destructively altering function”9—which keeps psychoanalysts from neglecting the “reality of trauma.” Of course, this compensation does not render analysis of inner-psychic conflicts and processes dispensable. Quite the contrary: proceeding in modo psychoanalytico means to take on precisely this

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task. Such scholars or therapists will, however, avoid judging the experiences of survivors and their descendants without regard to experiences that are connected to the Shoah. This was how psychoanalysis dealt with the Shoah until the 1980s: as with any other “external” phenomenon, it was reduced to its role in and impact on the individual’s life of drives. It was considered a “term” of as little use for psychoanalytic language and professional analytic processes as any other historical event.10 Many scholars and analysts might still share this purist view. Others, however, acknowledge the fact that psychoanalysis, too, even as a therapeutic institution, locks itself away from “facing the extreme”11 and its psychosocial consequences (which can in some cases be quite useful—for instance, in a therapy setting such conduct helps to protect children. However, such a logjam is unsuitable for academic purposes). Kestenberg questioned this dubious liaison of fear and therapeutic methods at quite an early stage: “Both patients and therapists evaded such questions, repressing, negating and forgetting it, as if Holocaust had no impact on those who survived. The patients’ fear of undergoing these traumatic experiences once more equaled some analysts’ fear to listen to their patients’ reports.”12 Such fear-induced ignorance is remarkable, particularly since the concepts of so-called “real traumata” and cumulative traumatizing had already found their way into psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic thought—though it seems as if application of such knowledge to the psychosocial consequences of National Socialism, especially Jewicide, has long been avoided. In a recent essay on a young skinhead, Annette StreeckFischer states that “questions in connection with war experiences, Holocaust and National Socialism were simply bracketed out. The youth’s fascination for right-winged extremism is seen as a result of his cumulative trauma; especially the ‘re-staging’ of violence and destructivity [were considered] a direct consequence of traumatic experiences in a violent milieu, and as an ambiguous and convenient cliché to legitimate a threatened/threatening state.”13 Some of this has indeed changed over the last few years, particularly with regard to the transgenerational transfer of traumata, a form of transfer that is entrenched in utterances, actions, enactments, and bodily interactive stagings based on the traumatic experiences of the “First Generation.”14 It is commonly agreed that such enactments, actions, and utterances form a familial (and nonfamilial) field of action that holds various psychosocial strains for the descendants of Jews who have been exposed to persecution and extinction. Naturally, these descendants have neither witnessed nor experienced the horrors that their parents and grandparents faced. However, empirical research has proven that children of victims of the Shoah have to live with—and certainly suffer from—their parents’ “bodily-presentative” or linguistic-symbolic representations (whether these are enacted, “embodied,” or interactively staged) from the very moment they are born, and throughout their lives. Regardless of the very details of what has happened and still happens in such families, the passed-on

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trauma of the parents (or grandparents and other relatives) is a severely challenging heritage sui generis. The ability to bear this burden might vary; some might be able to cope with it while others break down. A burden it remains to them all from birth, long before they acquire the ability to understand words and sentences and respond in their mother tongue. For some years, academic research has also postulated distress-inducing conditions of upbringing regarding the children and grandchildren of National Socialist perpetrators (and, in less drastic shapes, the children of so-called spectators and followers, i.e., parents who are still pervaded with the reprehensible toleration of crimes and their constant failure to render assistance). These descendants of the perpetrator generation do indeed suffer more—and more heavily—from their parents’ past than has long been acknowledged. Their mental or psychosomatic suffering has its own logic. Perpetrators’ children have to live with their parents’ deeds, the fact that they had been actively involved in crimes against humanity. As Gertrude Hardtmann15 points out, such truths have rarely come out through direct confessions. External incidences and public pressure were needed in order to reveal what had happened. But be this as it may, those children suffer from knowing that their own parents have aided and abetted persecution and mass murder. Children who are conscious of being the progeny of perpetrators (i.e., parents who were deeply involved in the creation of what Jean Améry calls the “dehumanized human”)16 cannot simply change their way of thinking: they are constantly exposed to unsettling emotions. Once the mother’s face has turned into that of a merciless guard in her child’s imagination, or once the father’s hand has been envisioned as the deadly appendage of an SS killer, soldier, or member of a reservist corps, severe threats to mental health are inevitable—at least to those descendants who assume an inimical stance toward National Socialism and it’s a posteriori “justifications.” I will come back to this point in order to further investigate the questionable psychological comparisons many researchers and therapists draw, including the obvious differences as well as some of the alleged similarities—of at least “external circumstances”—between the progeny of victim and perpetrator. To summarize, the variety of concluded research and enlightening publications generated in the last two or three decades does not allow for self-congratulatory satisfaction. This applies even more to psychotherapy and psychology than psychoanalysis as such. Despite the considerable number of innovative and differentiative research projects, it still remains correct to state that “active reflection and analysis of heritages of the Holocaust regarding survivors, as well as investigations of the victims’ further courses of life and deformations of personalities resulting from acts of perpetration and warfare are still restricted to selective points in the course of research.”17 Where such reflections become manifest, diagnoses most often entail traumatic experiences that have been “deeply engraved in the bodies, minds, and souls of the victims leading to changes of character, and ‘blind spots of the soul,’ which persist like erratic

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blocks transferred from generation to generation.”18 In this respect, too, psychological research has made a rather reluctant start, and it is far from having reached its peak. It is this form of transgenerational transfer that I seek to analyze in the following section, thoroughly focusing on the most crucial aspect. This analysis is closely intertwined with the above-mentioned tendency to investigate the progeny and descendants of both the victims and perpetrators using a comparative perspective, though admittedly, the interest in perpetrator progeny has meanwhile become the center of attention in various psychotherapy studies and other fields of research. This predominant outlook is thus far linked to increasing levels of active investigative journalism plus an increased focus on these “children” from those who still treat them. Interestingly, the same could be observed previously regarding the attention focused solely on victims’ children.19 Their shared generational status gives them at least one thing in common: all these children of 1945 are now in their sixties.20

Victims, Perpetrators, and Their Progeny: Discussing Unstable Categorizations As is well known, differentiations between Jewish survivors and German perpetrators operate on the basis of problematic categories, with the “pooling” of perpetrators, mere followers, spectators, and victims having been thoroughly discussed. In the context of the Shoah, such groupings become even more problematic; no term or concept, be it of homogenizing of differentiative nature, deserves to remain unquestioned. As Raul Hilberg states, he hesitates to “systematically differentiate specific groups”21 of not only perpetrators and spectators, but even the victims, whom one almost exclusively thinks of “in the light of what happened to all of them.”22 To such categories might be added “refugees,” “persons who decided to stay in Germany after 1945,” etc. In most cases suitable subcategories need to be defined: i.e., mixed marriage Jews, Jewish children, Christians of Jewish descent, the privileged ones, the fierce, the disappropriated, the unadjusted, and finally, those who survived and were freed from the camps. Each of these terms carries certain narratorial foundations and at the same time suppresses discovery of inter-individual differences. Grossmann23 elaborates this by analyzing pictures of survivors, about whom psychology makes various assertions and conclusions.24 Hilberg has good reasons for employing such categories, since the “catastrophe did not affect every person at the same time, let alone in the same way,”25 and as a scholar he makes it very clear how he is forced to form theoretical groups, which inevitably leads to typifications, leveling, and a reflexive homogenization of phenomena that might otherwise reveal considerable differences, once the way was clear for a more detailed, individualized analysis.

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This does not merely apply to the aforementioned category of the survivors, but mutatis mutandis to perpetrators, followers, and spectators as well as the progenies of all them. It seems obvious that children of all these groups have even less in common than did their parents: the former show remarkable differences in their personal zones of experience as well as their horizons of expectation. This can be illustrated by looking at one (exemplary) category—the descendants of the victimized population, i.e., persons whose parents can be classified as individuals who faced National Socialism as children, adolescents, or adults (as Kestenberg states in another specific classificatory approach).26 The most obvious differences can be identified under commonly agreed-upon labels, such as “Second,” “Third” and “Fourth Generation” (which seems far too superficial to me).27 Following this classification one will subsequently identify various differences within these categories too. As Grünberg28 (amongst many others) makes clear, U.S., Israeli, and Canadian studies on the consequences of the Shoah can only be partly transferred to findings from within the German research environment. In addition to this, members of the Second, Third, and Fourth Generation show differences even in the “external circumstances” of their lives: as far as those of the Second Generation are concerned, I believe their specific dates of birth play a crucial role in this. Furthermore, it remains an important aspect for survivors, as well as for their children, that from camp to camp (depending on their specific type) as well as other circumstances, there were wide variations involved regarding personal experiences—the only common factor we can be sure of is that they did survive. In addition, those Jewish children who were raised in postwar Germany form a highly distinct, unique subpopulation. Although this may sound obvious, it has been my experience that this particular fact is often overlooked as an historical afterthought, a vestigial curiosity. As is known, however, such typifications form a vitally necessary part of the human thought process. Unfortunately, the creation of another category of “Second-Generation Jews” including all children of Jewish survivors would inevitably entail the risk of this grouping strategy paving the way for social labeling and stigmatizing, a fact Elisabeth Brainin, Vera Ligeti, and Samy Teicher have repeatedly pointed to as it concerns this phenomenon.29 Public imagery usually employs only the most extreme examples, so that members of this generational subgroup might encounter severe difficulties identifying with the common image presented of mental illness or depression. We cannot deny, though, the fact that such characteristics loom large over this generation. The numbers tattooed on their parents’ arms already link these individuals together, as Helen Epstein wrote in the late 1970s, as a “silent community” known as “children of the Holocaust,” trailing a mute relationship.30 Progenies of perpetrators too share certain characteristics and “features,” even though their individual life histories could not be more different.

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It seems self-evident that the research yet to be done on the Second Generation must be conducted appropriately and designed for identifying further differentiation within the subgroups. Yet, as I will illustrate in the following, current research still finds itself in need of wider descriptive protocols. Indeed, comparative analyses seeking to evaluate the progenies of victimizers and victims often claim remarkable similarities between the two groups. In the following, I will ask whether such findings prove these claimed similarities, or whether the “determined” commonalities result from a lack of sensitivity toward differentiation and terminology (as should be clear by now, it is my belief that it is the latter that applies here). Before turning to this delicate issue, however, I would like to avoid a common misunderstanding: by criticizing the findings of comparative analyses, I neither seek to discredit systematic psychological comparisons of victims and perpetrators in general nor intend to reject any research on perpetrators and their progenies. Both approaches may enrich scientific research and help us to extend our knowledge and understanding of academic practices in general, and on this I will elaborate in the following paragraphs.

Perpetrators and Their Descendants: A Delicate Topic for Psychological Research? The increased volume of research investigating the phenomenon of National Socialist perpetrators and their progenies is a well-received and highly necessary trend. As long as the role of the perpetrators receives no more attention than do the victims—a development that would once again marginalize the latter—I see no need to object or to cast doubt on this endeavor. If the field of psychology is interested in contributing its insight toward the creation of more reason-oriented life forms, analysis of the various interwoven strands National Socialism has insinuated into the minds and lives of the offspring of perpetrators, followers, and spectators—from which they still suffer—must be acknowledged and strengthened. Being raised in a post-1945 German family often meant that these children lived under the same roof with former perpetrators, who brought them up and “shaped” them to some extent. The question of suffering inflicted by such circumstances, on the side of both perpetrators and their families and the victims (who lived next door to Germans, or at least interacted with the latter) deserves attention from various disciplines. The burdens and challenges are obvious—be it confrontation with one’s own legacy, with questions arising toward the members of one’s own family and friends until one reaches a point of self-questioning31 and doubt, or that research requires interaction with those “children” whose parents or other relatives (might) have persecuted and killed one’s own loved ones. Dan Bar-On,

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an Israeli psychologist whose parents fled Hamburg in 1933, illustrates what it takes to note down and analyze “conversations with children of Nazi perpetrators.”32 He found it particularly challenging to explain this step to Jewish friends and the Israeli public.33 Regardless of the controversy such undertakings generate, with debates often descending into heated arguments, it can be said that any intention to investigate this issue can only be a positive one. There is no doubt that perpetrators may suffer from their deeds, and that this suffering does not necessarily appear in the form of self-pity (which would only multiply the indignation of the victims). Such suffering is no psychological automatism. In many cases, a perpetrator’s feelings of guilt and shame are due rather to social sanctions (in an altered societal environment) and having to endure the interrogations of others. It seems evident that without the constant demand to face one’s own past actions—or rather, the demand not to deny, marginalize, or relativize them—many who committed their no longer officially sanctioned acts of violence would not have shown such post-deed regret, empathy, and guilt regarding others and themselves. If perpetrators truly empathize with their former victims in an authentic way, one could—as often happens—state that these erstwhile perpetrators have realized themselves as having been victimized. However, some obvious facts remind us of our need to use this term with extreme caution: if one says that individuals who committed crimes under the National Socialist flag might be considered “victims”—even victims of their own deeds—we find ourselves at risk of losing the distinctive representational function of the very term “victim.” As the saying goes, if everyone is a victim, then no one is. Relativizing political apologetics maintain that there will always be perspectives from which every individual appears as a tool, a dupe, the “product” of heteronymous external circumstances and incidents, and is bound to experience existential anxieties and suffering as a result. Such perspectives are often employed in questionable struggles for validity, consciously leading public attention away from those who indeed deserve support as the true victims of specific deeds. This of course enlarges the wounds of these victims. On the other hand, academic research has the right—some might call it a duty—to pay attention to the sufferings experienced by all groups, whether culprits or survivors. Violent behavior does not keep perpetrators from physical or psychological distress and harm, which can, as we know, lead to severe identity crisis. Hans Joas’s34 observations on Vietnam veterans should then be applied to all those who consciously dedicated themselves to defending their “Third Reich,” fighting battles all over Europe and in some cases even committing “crimes against humanity.”35 The reproachful slogan “sprayed and betrayed” finds itself mirrored in Germany, too—perpetrators are at risk of being harmed both physically and psychologically because they participated in, or committed, crimes for which they are (at least partly) responsible.36

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Certainly, any possible self-damage sustained by perpetrators37 will never change the fact that it was not them who were persecuted, tortured, and killed. Belated regrets and insights might alter a perpetrator’s nature, but as we all know, there is no way of undoing the past—which points to the fact that such changes as are wrought in a perpetrator’s psyche can shed no new light on the aforementioned questions of guilt and responsibility. The differentiation between victimizers and victims—both psychologically and morally—must be kept separated even if some of the former group might have come to rue and regret their actions. Those who actively “contributed” to the Jewicide should not be reduced to their deeds only: they can, as we have seen, undergo processes of change during the course of life and according to collective memory and sociocultural practice. They might learn to see their past deeds, their victims, and themselves in a new light—however, this is not the end of the story. Psychological fields of interest are not the same as moral or political concerns, even though there is inevitably some intertwining. There is a legitimate scientific interest in the self-damaged perpetrator, even if this interest appears as an unbearable burden to the genuine victims of the Shoah—and let us not forget that in some cases, researchers might seek to find some truth about the effects acts of victimization have on the perpetrators of which the interrogated are unaware. On the other hand, it is commonly agreed on that many progenies of German perpetrators do in fact suffer from their parents’ “legacy.” In sum, all of the observations and issues raised in this chapter are meant to indicate the need for further investigation. Apart from political necessities and the demands of academic research, it is our status as psychologists—and therapists in particular—that sets us a moral duty to gather relevant information and develop suitable therapeutical measures for this particular under-investigated group. Scientific research is always based on comparisons. It would thus be epistemologically naïve to condemn comparative thinking as such, or denounce any form of “historification” as an illegitimate procedure. As a crucial operation of scientific analysis, as well as of human thought in general, comparison proves an irreplaceable intellectual tool. Even the specifics that explain the oft-cited singularity of Auschwitz become manifest only by means of the comparative function. “Incommensurable” means that a certain phenomenon holds no similarity to other phenomena—yet it is not “incomparable.” Praising the uniqueness of certain phenomena is thus of little use in scientific research. From this perspective it seems obvious that comparisons of the lives and experiences of descendants of Jewish victims and their German victimizers might enrich the scope of scientific knowledge. In spite of all this, some methodological approaches lead to questionable leveling and homogenization of experience structures, expectation, self, and identity;38 and in some cases such proceedings do not even deserve a place amongst other comparative studies. Such “camouflaged” operations pretend to

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prove identicalness or strong resemblances; however, taking a closer look at the issue, one will find in them nothing but repeated—or perpetuated—active and conscious equalizations, by which differences are once again denied or marginalized. It should be apparent, however, that such a methodological approach serves the pursuit of—amongst other goals—political interests and aims, rather than the scientific construction of knowledge. Comparative explorations in the aforementioned context do not seek to define hierarchies of pain, since “objective” measurement of pain and suffering faces challenges of its own: the specifics of the Shoah and phenomena related to it do not provide the slightest reason or basis for such quantitative differentiation. It is the diverse character of these experiences that needs to be investigated; without a doubt, any scientific terminology or everyday language needs to take these wide diversities into account if the (transgenerational) psychosocial consequences of state-sponsored or other communal acts of violence are to be addressed.

Identical Pain and Other Similarities? Some Questionable Results of Empirical Research Looking at “comparative” results, one might get the impression that psychosocial consequences are more than just “equally painful for both sides” but are similar and somehow related—and yes, even considering the “diversity of backgrounds,”39 consequences are more or less the same. And in the course of further research into the topic, the word has spread that identical, parallel, analogous, symmetric, or basically similar psychological effects, as well as difficulties regarding social relationships, keep those concerned from pursuing fulfilled and happy lives. Those who stick to such diagnoses often find that familial practices on both sides are related through any unexpected number of similarities, and in many cases the similarities described make it almost impossible to distinguish or theoretically separate the phenomena for which they are considered characteristic. This is exactly what Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy state in their introduction to a “classic” of scientific research in the given context: even though there are differences between the two groups, comparative research has revealed far more “astonishing—and often entirely unexpected—similarities.”40 Tilmann Moser writes that “the horrors of the Third Reich have unsettled and harmed children of perpetrators so extensively that in some cases they were as close to mental-psychological death as were the victims.”41 This statement implies as much vagueness as do Ilany Kogan’s observations of two patients of his who appeared to be so similar regarding various characteristics that he found it difficult to view them as separate individuals: “Their courses of life are imbued by conscious and unconscious fantasies of horror, violence and death, of guilt and regret, identification and liberation.”42 What does this mean? Are

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these experiences the same? Is there any kinship of the soul between equally suffering offspring of perpetrators and victims? Moser’s report on his “psychotherapy with a daughter of a member of SS” is worth a thorough examination, since the book’s intent is to demonstrate what courage it takes to deal with the topic in this rather unconventional way. Moser’s openness deserves respect, too—although his work raises several doubts as well. The following can thus be read as a kind of excursus, in which I will temporarily switch genres. My analysis reveals how an author—to whom Moser affirmatively links his arguments—fails to develop reflective comparisons,43 only to more or less indifferently equalize variations, heteronomies, and incommensurable phenomena. Such a procedure is, as has been shown, scientifically deficient, yet it proves to serve as a remarkably efficient sociocultural and political provocation. Moser’s reportage is in fact a semi fictional narrative in which important roles are played not only by the therapist and his narrating I, but also by his 68-year-old patient, whom Moser gives a voice by installing a kind of “inner dialogue” with her “doctor.” This rhetorical device feeds the assumption that Moser is instrumentalizing his patient; what he describes gives proof of a “massive violation of limits, a process of ‘creeping-into’ her personality in order to appropriate it.”44 Even if we chose less dramatic terms than Moser himself does, we can state with some certainty that this author/psychoanalyst identifies intensively with his “protagonist.” In fact, Moser seems fascinated by his patient, and he feels tied to her life story in a “silent admiration.” He calls her “an exemplary German for whom I wish she could become visible.”45 He repeatedly states he is “proud of her.”46 However, Moser interweaves his patient’s fate and experiences uno actu with his own professional practices as a therapist as well as certain aspects of his own personal identity (to which he alludes, or “points”), which in effect adds some anomalous tones to his “report.” As poetics and rhetoric teach us, narrators give any incident to be described a specific narrative shape, or plot structure.47 What Moser describes is a love story—indeed, with an ever-present tragedy in the background—the story of a romance with a happy ending and several heroes. Moser’s protagonist is, of course, his patient, who lost her father in 1945 due to some “undisclosed circumstances during which he was shot by members of the allied forces.”48 In attempting to handle the loss, which in itself is connected to the father’s personality, life story, and the peculiar characteristics of National Socialism, the patient “spent five decades feeling guilty and ashamed,” a time during which she expiated and atoned for the deeds of National Socialism. There is no doubt that she has indeed suffered heavily from her father’s “legacy.” It is a legacy she has never been able to come to grips with, though, and thus she is compelled—at the age of sixty-eight—to seek out the empathy and therapy she needs by entering into a professional relationship with a psychoanalyst.

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This relationship, in the end, has enabled both of them to find an appropriate, politically correct, and—most importantly—healthy way to deal with the aftereffects or fallout from National Socialism and their individual relations to it. Moser assumes here several roles: a member of the second generation—he is son to a “father and Nazi follower”; a therapist and a doctor; an investigative scholar who touches “the dormant secrets of my family, and so many others”;49 and, lest it be forgotten, a talented writer whose works are published in Germany and elsewhere. Moser’s protagonists symbolize the paradigmatic “rightfully suffering second-generation German, a sensitive personality who took over the duty to regret and atone,”50 thereby following the traces of those “underground tradition[s] of revealing symptoms, deformed periods of life and disastrous consequences on the second generation.”51 Such persons did indeed deserve to be freed from ever-present anxieties, feelings of guilt and regret, and the compulsion to atone in the name of others, and to go on to lead fulfilled, self-determined lives. Moser’s patient and the patient’s father become a kind of holistic symbol of Germany. His patient augments the rehabilitation process of an entire nation and offers some kind of relief to all who were deeply entangled in the life stories of perpetrators, followers, and spectators: “It takes both of them to build this picture of Germany. The fanatic’s ideology of his father, the blindness and ignorance, and in addition the daughter’s life-long feeling of guilt taken together form this picture,”52 as the therapist tells his patient. Still, the narrative structure is far more complex than has been described, as in some exemplary cases the author uses some kind of “third-party comments” that stimulate and support his thoughts and opinions. For this reason such associative insertions make it difficult to tell the report from the narrative part of Moser’s book, which is what makes his work so questionable. Regarded as a matter of interest, two points might be of particular importance: the descriptions of discussions with Bert Hellinger and certain “smithereens” of Moser’s oeuvre, which together build a curious story climax.53 Despite his suspicion regarding Hellinger’s utterances, which the latter emits with “prophetic certitude,”54 Moser defends Hellinger’s insights, expresses “due respect to his works,” and intends not to withdraw from Hellinger’s “ingenious intuition.”55 Moser’s argument, however, is at this point bereft of all ingeniousness: certainly, the fact that social judgment and public condemnation, critique, indignation, and outrage, in addition to the well-known practice of publicly “holding someone to account,” may in many cases fulfill and serve questionable psychosocial “necessities” while adding little or nothing positive to a person’s mental health (which is equally applicable to communities, societies, and cultures)—yet, this is a psychological commonplace. Psychologically and therapeutically speaking, such a tribunalization of reality is often enough in debt to the needs of an insecure self-seeking salvation through the persecution of others. Meanwhile, it seems obvious that such conduct leads rather to superficial feelings of superiority and polemogenous exaggerations. We should not forget,

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though, that criticism, disputes, arguments, and the fight for acknowledgement are still necessary, especially to those who would have to be naïve or even blind not to see that their opponents never hesitate to fashion their world according to their needs alone, and that once they get the chance they will not refrain from (ab)using their compliant victims. Such disputes are open to rational arguments, too. Moser, however, goes further by quoting Hellinger: “Some former victims haunted the perpetrators with similar determination and eagerness they had faced themselves … , indignation is an impulse to destroy others … As soon as someone uses his pain to appoint himself to the right to harm others, his suffering has indeed been in vain … To me, successful handling of the past means to stand in line with the victims, and cry with them instead of attacking the perpetrators. … To me such accusations are unjustifiable. And, first of all: They are of no use”56 (italicizations by J.S.; they highlight inadequate wording and other traces of thoughtlessness). One does not have to be Hellinger’s “angry citizen,” who favors cheap and hateful feelings of superiority and revenge rather than seeking “salvation of the soul,”57 to deny some of the author’s further comments, especially when he points out an “odd sameness” of victims and the perpetrators whom the former try to condemn. They have, as Hellinger states, “in fact done the same. They found themselves superior and thus assumed a position of righteousness when persecuting and seeking to destroy others”58 (all italicizations by J.S., serving the same purpose as mentioned above). The author strikes a similar note when citing Hellinger’s comments on children who interrogate their parents’ National Socialist past and thus “[become] just as bad as their parents,”59 or by quoting that “a child must neither understand nor forgive the parents’ deeds. What insolence!”60 Further on, Hellinger prescribes us some kind of “spiritual oblivion,” which illustrates the simple but blatant contradiction that Hellinger and Moser too seem to accept all too easily by stating that “there is no doubt that a murderer has forfeited his right of membership regarding his family.”61 Moser rightly rejects the oft-cited criticism of his work Dämonische Figuren, insisting on the fact that his “comparison of children of perpetrators and victims” was not intended to “level” German crimes, or the lives and deaths connected to them, “to an unethical degree.” “While analyzing my patient’s biography, feeling both amazement and horror, it is not guilt that is leveled, but the pain of the second generation. My work is amongst others designed to measure and acknowledge the harm done to children of perpetrators and followers who seek our advice as therapists.”62 The protocols used have indeed been developed from the analytical research on victims and their children; yet today, as Moser states, we know about analogous disorders on both sides. Such analogies, parallels, symmetries, similarities, and relations, which in the end lead to some deceptive uniformity of symptoms, syndromes, and behavioral patterns, have long found their way into the diagnostic conclusions of several

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authors. This has naturally led to increased attention from the media and other collective bodies; with the process having reached a point where a victim’s offspring might state that her therapist has informed her how children of perpetrators have to live with the same inherited fate and thus face similar psychological hardships.63 Some of these individuals might even believe it. Yet even if we agree with Moser that there is no intention to level or relativize, acknowledging that the texts in question do not reveal any such intention (while speculations regarding unconscious motives are of little value here), what I described and quoted above is still questionable. If one seeks to pay attention to both groups and the comparative scope of research, there can be no space for superficial investigations and hastily drawn conclusions. Numerous works show us how easily one discovers similarities regarding phenomena that in truth are of remarkably different kinds. Such homogenizations then undermine both epistemic-cognitive and ethical-moral demands. The same can be said about the psychosocial consequences of National Socialism. Alleged universality of terms and concepts might then blur and obscure differences, thereby consciously and unconsciously denying that justified and appropriate differentiations are the tenets of scientific research. The results of such methodical steps remind us of slogans and set phrases that are meant to unite active perpetrators, followers, onlookers, and the victims of the Shoah in their commemorative function. Everyday experiences hold manifold examples of such precarious indifference, and as is usual, such examples are hardly based on lengthy and thorough investigations. The fundamental principle is simple and proves how little caution and sensitivity is given to the topic: heterogeneous and incommensurable phenomena are simply “equated,” whereby at least vague and diffuse similarities are pointed out. I will now illustrate this point by examining some examples taken from German media statements and publications. It is important to note that the following are items that I selected from a long list of possible examples. I believe these are particularly suitable to approach the Shoah as a psychological “factor”: persecution, silence, and extinction. Forever Haunted The first example is taken from the German mass media. It was in the autumn of the year 2000 that an advertisement in Die Zeit (a renowned German weekly) caught my interest. Designed and placed by the German TV station ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), it was meant to promote ZDF’s latest documentary. As the advertisement read, the mentioned series was dedicated to perpetrators and victims of the Holokaust as perennially haunted individuals.64 It was at second glance that I realized the unconventional spelling of “Holokaust”—which, being a technical term taken from Greek holokáuston (fire victim), is normally spelt with a c. Such irregularity seemed to me an odd “Germanization” of a term that in Anglophone countries and elsewhere refers

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to Jewicide only.65 In the German language, too, the term had always been reserved for persons and groups who had factually been persecuted within the National Socialist system. The same applied to such terms and sayings enabling a person to point to psychosocial consequences of persecution, including transgenerationally transferred consequences. Such use made it clear of whom one intended to speak: victims, or their offspring. In the advertisement just mentioned, however, this principle was unaccountably altered. Simple as it was, this advertisement broke with this practice—in other words, the shared frame of reference and interpretation was all of a sudden expanded. The problems connected to such alteration are obvious: a term that once was rightfully reserved to refer to victims only, is unexpectedly appropriated and “upgraded” to a level of reference that does not differentiate victims from perpetrators. “Persecution” thus describes psychosocial consequences in general. There are, as should be clear, no “all-purpose” incidents, experiences, or expectations that could justify such homogenization. Thus, there is no basis for the leveling of heteronymous and incommensurable phenomena, or any acts of equalization, not even if they operate indirectly, for example by using an abstract yet confusing term. One may argue that the above-mentioned homogenization does not deny the possibility that such differences exist, yet in the long run, we might have to deal with a conception of being haunted for life that no longer refers to perpetrators and criminal acts only, but past times (or history) in general. The past then becomes an underdetermined amalgamation of experiences of death and extermination as well as that of active persecution and mass murder. It seems obvious that such glib media conduct might easily be turned into a political issue and furthermore could even prove an obstacle to future academic research and its findings. Such a blunted term is hardly suitable to convey new insights, and it even perpetuates the deep divide that separates Germans from German Jews. As history records, there are numerous cases of Nazi war criminals who have neither been prosecuted nor morally condemned, and if such terminological homogenization becomes the norm, these people will be “relieved” once again. Furthermore, it seems to make little difference whether the described matter was meant to be applied to the progenies of perpetrators, too—those differentiations being obscured in just the same way as all that is previously mentioned. What exactly it is that some seek to insinuate by using such an obscuring terminology in the guise of an advertisement, might become clear through analysis of the specific meaning of the phrase mentioned above: National Socialist persecution. I will not elaborate this point in detail, yet some of the issues already discussed will come up again in the following dialogue, particularly in my analysis of the term “extermination.” As is obvious, the very terms persecution and extermination are interrelated, and partly interdefinable: with no regard to extermination—i.e., the declared Final Solution—National Socialist

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persecution can hardly be “understood”; similarly, extermination was already implicated in Nazi persecution. But, before elaborating on these thoughts, let us turn to the secondary aspect that I have just touched upon. Silence The above-mentioned homogenization of dissimilarities is by no means the original creation of mass media marketing but can be found on various levels of scientific research as well: comparisons as such form a crucial part of all methodically controlled research. Yet the term has often been used to label—and hide—the normalization and equalization of totally incommensurable phenomena. Thus, identicality has been “proven” with regard to phenomena that had little—if anything—in common.66 Let me give you an example, namely an empirically grounded diagnosis presented by Gabriele Rosenthal,67 whose diagnoses I find by and large appropriate. In her book, Rosenthal discusses “similarities and differences in family discourses on the Holocaust” based on a research project carried out in (East and West) Germany and Israel between 1992 and 1996. The scope of the project entails interviews with both families of victims (in Germany and Israel) and perpetrators (in Germany).68 I will not discuss the findings of the research in detail here but rather draw attention to how the author describes the ongoing controversy. Rosenthal starts with some common arguments whose validity she doubts, as a matter of course: While the grandparents’ ways to handle the past vary greatly in accordance to the specific groups (i.e. whether they are victims, perpetrators, or followers) … , the following generations show manifold similarities in terms of psychological manifestations: The denial of information regarding the familial past, extermination anxiety, separation anxieties, feelings of guilt, the lack of autonomizing processes, re-staging of the past and psychosomatic effects, all these mechanisms were found with members of each group. Silence has been instrumentalized not only in families of former perpetrators, but in victims’ families, too … We furthermore observe enormous effects rooted in kept-up “family secrets” and mutual reluctance—if not incapability—to speak about the past; a persistent inability to speak and discuss due to the practice of endless reproaching; restricted options of change of perspectives; family myths institutionalized in order to cease conflicts, and entire family systems immobilized by the burdens of the past.69

What might look like a concession directing the apologetics of commonalities (or similarities) soon turns into rigid criticism when Rosenthal continues, “Under these manifest surface phenomena, however, we find latent deep-structures which show fundamental differences due to the differences of experiences within the family, and members of the family.”70 I believe that we need to hold fast to Rosenthal’s criticism—in fact we should pay more attention to her arguments than she herself does. Rosenthal states that “the investigated phenomena seem similar, yet their functions within the family system and, even more so, their specific psychological impact on each of the family members differ according to the specific experiences which formed them.”71

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It is at this point that Rosenthal qualifies her arguments; however, as this essay has illustrated, differences between the experiences of perpetrators and victims (and their respective families) cannot be restricted to functions and consequences. Rosenthal’s diagnosis seems valid only if one abandons the sense and meaning-structure of the psychosocial phenomena being investigated.72 Such structuring is shaped by, among other things, personal experiences or transgenerationally transferred experiences and expectations; in any case palpable experiences, which means that it is precisely these experiences that need to be taken into consideration. We know for certain that anxieties and the means of selfprotection can be found in almost any given familial context, especially when past experiences and matters of shared lives are concerned. This seems so obvious that we might ask ourselves what any comparison with such basic characteristics of human interaction could add to the scope of social sciences, if any. Let me return to an example that has already been discussed, though in a different context: the role of silence. Some have postulated that silence has had a powerful impact on families of both victims and perpetrators, since silence decreases an individual’s potential for action and might intensify the dreadful fantasies of what might have happened, regardless of any possible categorization. However, the crucial question is whether such silence can be considered identical in the cases of both families of victims and perpetrators. Is it the selfsame phenomenon, which we then need to learn more about to arrive at unforeseen conclusions? One might argue from a physical perspective and find that silence means absence of sounds regardless of specific contexts. Such a perspective leads to a “technical-electronic” approach through which one might gather electroacoustic data to explain and understand transgenerational processes within families—the irony of such imaginings is almost graspable here. Silence is not just an absence of something—it is an action. Any action can be seen as a meaning-structured phenomenon, to couch it in psychological terminology.73 Consequently, different meanings define the quality of such actions. What exactly one does when remaining silent for a certain period of time, i.e., what it means to an individual (or group) to create or endure silence, can only be investigated via interpretation.74 Such interpretations entail the entire range of spaces of experience, expectational horizons, and the complex practice of transgenerational transfer that influence a particular period of silence. This range of influences is the specific context in which silence is, like any other psychologically relevant phenomena, embedded. Its impact stems from its structures of sense and meaning. In this respect, radical differences between the two “types” of families can hardly be denied, and in addition, such perspective allows us to ask whether functions and consequences of such heterogeneous silences can be equalized at all. Thus, differentiating specific meanings of “silence” might allow us to take an appropriate perspective here: “keeping silent,” “concealing,” and “silencing (oneself)” describe entirely different activities, motives, and intentions.75 Even

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if such silence (of victims) may enable parents and grandparents to exclude their experiences of persecution and extermination from familial discourses— as unrealistic as this attempt might be in the end—knowledge about the Holocaust is easily available from other sources. Children and grandchildren in these families usually acquire such knowledge even if parents and grandparents spare the details. The numbers tattooed on the parents’ or grandparents’ arms remain visible, and what they stand for is obvious. No silence can ever really suppress their meaning; no lack of words will ever render them meaningless. Those mute numbers stand for the “present past” of the suffering of millions of European Jews who were persecuted, tortured, and murdered, and in the same way they symbolize the parents’ or grandparents’ individual agony. The kind of silence I describe here might be motivated by the will to avoid pain and fear, to shield one’s children and grandchildren from those nightmares and doubts to which oneself is so accustomed. Consequently, the world of the children and grandchildren, which has been so carefully protected from pain and fear, turns into a somewhat unfamiliar, inhospitable place. One might find an unlimited number of reasons for the victims’ preference to remain silent, each of which helps us to understand the essence of this silence. It is important to note that the terms I introduced earlier, namely “concealing” and “silencing (oneself )” prove inappropriate here; they have nothing in common with the familial practices I have just described. It might be true that children of survivors must also (temporarily) imagine or fantasize about their parents’ or grandparents’ deeds and/or suffering, when these elders, for reasons of their own, have decided to keep silent. This does not erase important differences between the groups of interest here. The children of the victims of the Shoah are in no way able to imagine anything more awful than what their parents had gone through. What could that be? They did know, not only because they could with ease acquire factual knowledge but also because they were forced to, whether or not their families had decided to embark on a course of silence. “Engraved” prisoner’s registration numbers “speak” for themselves; they can be “read” as narrative abbreviations and fragments of familial, social, and communal memories. These numbers might even be considered a component of the universal memory of humankind. They were violently inscribed, thus becoming signs “within” the physical appearance of individuals—which locates them outside of the “inner” memory that is usually ascribed to the brain, as well as beyond the “outward dimensions” of memory that Assmann describes.76 Silence is just one example of what I have described in the above; I will now address a final one. Extermination Apart from silence, various kinds of anxieties form another highly popular topic in the scientific debate encompassing the Shoah. Detachment disorders

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and separation anxiety are often discussed as common characteristics of both victimizers and their victims (including families on both sides), yet hardly ever is this diagnosis linked to further specifications of individual background and experience. However, it is only in connection with such backgrounds that anxieties are shaped. The same can be said about the “extermination anxieties” Rosenthal mentions. The term seems to point to certain commonalities, or similarities in the psychic lives of members of different groups (i.e., families), which upon a closer look prove nonexistent. This supports the conclusion that the meaning of the Shoah as present past should be reconsidered. Like persecution, extermination is part of a word field and a hermeneutical instrument that has been employed in order to understand the realities of the camps and other places. If now the horizon of meaning implicit in the compound term “extermination anxiety” as a common feature of both groups is essentialized to the threat of physical extermination, some crucial aspects will never come to light.77 Transgenerational transfer of experiences and their meanings does not necessarily imply spoken or written language; thus we may conclude that the complex experiences involved in extermination (of others) are always present. Survivors will impart what they have witnessed even if they refrain from verbalizing such experiences within their families and elsewhere. Extermination goes beyond its commonly anticipated meaning (i.e., physical destruction of humans)—there are forms of extermination that are not even “lethal.” There was, and is, more to it than the fate of those who did not survive. Nazi extermination aimed at much more than the physical existence of the Jews. “Auschwitz” has ultimately and irreversibly changed the meaning of “extermination.” The term now refers to more than the deaths of those “liquidated,” “gassed like vermin,” as it was described in the language of the “master race” (Herrenmenschen). Furthermore, the term (which we might almost consider a terminus technicus) will forever remind us of the fact that even those who were saved were actually meant to die. First and foremost, “extermination” expressed the will to exterminate one’s affiliation with the human race, one’s personhood. This perfidious strategy and its tragic “successes” are portrayed in those books in which the persecuted themselves speak from their “internal” perspective, and works that utilize this perspective to make these voices heard. I think of the works of Robert Antelme, Primo Levi, or Jean Améry, who from the beginning attempted to “think Auschwitz,”78 and whose works belong to the most insightful ever written on the Shoah. This perspective is also a characteristic of the numerous interviews with children and grandchildren of survivors led by journalists, psychotherapists, and experts in the fields of the social sciences and cultural studies, to name just a few. It is too simple (and thus wrong) to reduce the anxieties of the interviewed to mere physical extinction, and claim that such anxiety is a common characteristic of both groups of descendants. In the case of the survivors, their children, and grandchildren, extermination anxieties entail memories of me-

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ticulously designed, planned and administered destruction of individual souls that most of the victims experienced successively. This annihilation of the self as Other79 becomes embedded in memory and is thus perpetuated. Mika I., who was interviewed by Kurt Grünberg,80 is able to summarize all that had happened to her parents and friends in just one phrase, or image, an image that stands for more than physical extermination. She quotes her mother’s account of what a fellow inmate had stated during their internment at Auschwitz,81 thereby giving us a slight insight into the “unthinkable” meaning of extermination. Both “lived” close to the Auschwitz crematorium. Mika quotes the female inmate who “knew it would be her turn the next day” in the Yiddish language, “You know, Rivkale, if you see some smoke tomorrow, that is me (Weißt de, Rivkale, wann Du werst sehen morgen a Roiech, dus bin iach).” This quote points not only to physical extermination, but tells us what (not just who) was meant to be killed in which way, and in what kind of context. It stands “for the entire pain of this camp,” as Mika puts it—or one could say it sums up the knowledge that Mika cannot reject. The horizon of meaning in the above is not entailed in this fear of death from which children and grandchildren of perpetrators might suffer. Another aspect supports this conclusion; it informs us less about something specific than about the specific language that is used: it is important that Mika puts precisely this quotation in Yiddish. The meaning implied in such a change of language can be seen in some other comments of hers: But, well, my life is determined through my people’s pain, through just one phrase. The humiliation, but I have learned to withdraw from humiliation bit by bit too. … I do not accept it ceaselessly.

The pain, the misery of her people, the humiliation of all Jews—the shattering experiences that have damaged and destroyed bodies and souls—the best way to verbalize all this is metaphorically in the symbolically dense Yiddish language. Mika’s words entail some crucial aspects of what survivors of the Shoah have conveyed to their children, something that has then been transferred from one generation to another. Those who were—or still are—able to convey such experiences might have “survived,” yet it would be far too easy to reduce their painful experiences to just one term, namely, extermination (as the successive, excessive practice is commonly referred to). I believe, however, in consideration of the fact that our understanding is always limited, that further analysis of the term might help us understand as much as possible, or at least more, of the hideous experiences of the Shoah. Extermination is part of the inner core of that “captive time” that rendered some persons “victims,” and to which their progeny are still tied as if to a presence, thereby forming their relations of self and world. No survivor has ever been able to free him- or herself from the harrowing witnessing of extermination. It struck them all, even though their experiences and reactions differ.

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“Auschwitz” has in the meantime turned into a secular symbol of the hopeless encounters with individuals who held themselves ready for some formerly unthinkable ways of being obliterated. Such encounters can be seen as incidents in which others, particularly persons with whom one had always managed to somehow get on with, suddenly appeared as radical enemies whose actions aimed at disdain, damage, and destruction.82 A closer look at such experiences of extermination reveals the latter’s relevance regarding the already mentioned acts of intergenerational transfer; it furthermore adds to our understanding of the commensurability of the consequences of National Socialism for various groups of people. The Shoah has taught us a lesson, since what happened to the Jews in Europe tells us that in principle, human beings keep peace only because they are potentially capable of exterminating others.83 What National Socialism inflicted upon the Jews of Europe has turned this anthropological threat into reality. Extermination has hence become an irrevocable experience, which, and this is crucial in the given context, had until then been unknown, unthinkable, and unimaginable. As Liebsch84 argues, the collective experience of the European Jews has forever altered and transformed the meaning of extermination in every language in which this experience has been inscribed. The National Socialist Jewicide goes beyond those genocides of which world history informs us. It is the singularity of its purpose that I would like to point to here, despite the fact that National Socialist method, i.e., the industrialization of mass murder, forms a singularity of its own kind too. No less has the goal of this machine-like killing, the “whatagainst” of the National Socialist program, proven a singularity in history.85 The rationale behind the National Socialist scheme implied far more than mass murder, i.e., extensive “eradication” or “extinction” of a people. The extermination machine aimed at ‘more,” as can be seen from literary works from the lager, mostly eye-witness reports noted down by survivors. The distinguished books by Primo Levi and Jean Améry, who leave behind them the autobiographical genre by using their reflections, applying them to each of us, and finally, deriving conclusions for humanity as such, prove excellent examples. The extermination built up to an industrial scale, which consisted of and was “maintained” by humans, was more radical, to the point of abstraction, than murder as a single deed that has served its purpose once it has been carried out. Before they were to lose their lives, the victims were meant to lose something else: they were to be robbed off their personhood, their status as human beings—by which acts individuals became distorted into Others. Thus, National Socialist policy of extermination aimed at dehumanizing (Entmenschlichung) the Jews, or, as Jean Améry puts it, it was designed for the Entmenschung von Menschen. To the National Socialist ideologues of racism, however, the discovery made through this act of force was nothing but a necessary “revelation.”86 To them, as is known, Jews did not figure in the new world order, and so were not counted as “human.” In the “inventive” and relentless process of dehumaniza-

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tion that was supposed to lead to the gas chambers (the “Final Solution”), such social labeling was a first step.87 Levi has described this with the utmost clarity, and we need to bear his words in mind if we try to discuss transgenerational transfer of pain and suffering—particularly when some postulated commensurability regarding the progeny of perpetrators is under consideration. However, dehumanization as a crucial component of transferred experiences is often neglected or “forgotten,” as can be seen in numerous comparative research studies and analyses. This neglect thus puts severe limitations on the quality of possible findings. Se questo è un uomo? (If This Is a Man?), was Levi’s main concern in 1945—when he was still “facing the extreme”—and remained so later on. The objectifying “questo” or “this” is revealing, since it indicates how Jews were conceptualized—one might think of the so-called “Muselman,” a term used to describe the last stage of existence before one was sent to the gas chambers. Any negative answer to this question—however reluctant or “cautious” it may be—reveals the implication of the metamorphosis toward which the National Socialists worked. Sooner or later, those “former” humans were turned into something else, or as Levi88 says, this metamorphosis was actively created, planned, and arranged. It was the result of the long-term, far-reaching, multifaceted violence that was literally poured out over the Jews (and other groups) as part of the “unlimited existence permit within the borders of German living space.”89 Eradication turned out to be a challenging endeavor: To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, or quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.90

It was all designed to lead to a state beyond life and death, beings already absent in the minds of others, former humans who were then even deprived of their right to die in a humane way. This was the ultimate goal of all the violence with which the inmates were steadily confronted. To point it out once again, this form of violence did not come to an end with the forced change of outer appearances of humans who sooner or later embodied some kind of “dead beings walking,” something one might call a “paradox of existence.” It rather aimed at the very personhood of each individual. “This” was meant to be eradicated, or more precisely, it was meant to be brought to people’s minds that in the case of the Jews the very term “personhood” was not applicable anyway. Another common strategy was the relentless flood of “special treatments.” As Levi repeatedly indicates, this perfidious, experimental demonstration has indeed served its purpose—even with those who survived. In terms of the survivors Levi states, “us too, we are broken and beaten.”91 Reflecting the guiding question of his book If This Is a Man? Levi clearly answers “no”; in an attempt to justify this opinion, he also tries to prove

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any other possible answers wrong. Indeed, Levi’s thoughtful choice of words leaves little space for alternative interpretations. It thus seems as if Nazi Germany actually succeeded in excluding Jews from the community of humans. They described them as “pieces”92 (“vermin,” etc.), and in the end they treated them as such. A short time after arriving in Auschwitz, “[o]n the bottom,” Levi realizes: “This is hell. … What can one think about? One cannot think anymore, it is like being already dead,”93 but at least, it is like being “all about to die,”94 as far as the perishing of already “dead men”95 can be called a dying in the familiar meaning. Soon after their arrival, the inmates were drilled with methodical brutality to surrender in radical isolation. Names, thoughts, feelings (even fear), willpower, judgment, dignity, physical strength, personal habits, even one’s beloved objects, actions, and persons as well as any kind of appreciation by others that might enable trustful coexistence, one’s home(land) and mother tongue—even language as such—all these fade away in the hell of the camps. Questions and answers simply lose their relevance, or as Levi (amongst others) puts it, “there is no Why in this place.”96 Nothing is left there, in the scope of memories and imaginations, “and nothing is ours.”97 Levi’s remarks on the loss of his own name are revealing (and, we might add, they indicate the limits of a critique that considers names as limitations to personal freedom, or even as some kind of “gaol” in which an immobile identity is kept). In the camps, even Levi’s companion (“harnessed with me under the same load”) became nothing but a registration number—he turned into an object even for his friend: He is Null Achtzehn [Zero Eighteen]. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn [Zero Eighteen] is no longer a man. I think that even he has forgotten his name; certainly he acts as if this was so. When he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty inside, nothing more than an involucre.98

As he learned during his first few hours in Auschwitz, there was no doubt “that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life.”99 Radical objectification as means to deprive the Other of his or her status as a human being was key to the Nazis’ scheming. No one who has learned what it means to become nothing but an object in the eyes of others will ever return to his prior condition. Such metamorphosis seems one of the most inapprehensible experiences of human life: “Because the look,” writes Levi about the objectifying perspective of the Other (with whom he means fellow inmates as well as German camp personnel), was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.100

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Levi then attempts to guess the thoughts behind such behavior: “This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.”101 There are numerous examples of “self-evident” objectifications in the camps, like the case of a German who “naturally” used Levi’s shoulder to wipe sticky lubrication grease off his hands—a movement the German probably found functional and appropriate: “Without hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it.”102 Underestimating and defining down the situation, Levi sees in this incident an “act of animalization”103 that goes hand in hand with the consequent objectification of humans, i.e., the process of turning them—as Others—into anonymous objects and thus excommunicating them from humankind. “Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human.”104 What remains are numbers and cropped heads, physical punishment, thirst and chronic hunger, physical pain and diseases, “suffering and needs,”105 anguish, aspiration, and homesickness, as well as absolute indifference, lack of understanding, and the painful realization that one will never be capable of grasping what happened—sole emptiness, and nothingness. Much of this, however, is largely unknown to those “normal people”106 who have luckily never been forced to endure such a state. Those “marches and popular songs dear to every German” are the voices of the camp, “the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.”107 There is no doubt that determination grew in the camps to resist the power of dehumanization. Inmates aimed at dissembling the image German “beasts” (Menschenvernichter) sought to create, or, if there was too little willpower left for this endeavor, they attempted to not let it become part of their self-concepts, or the concepts of one another. Levi’s writings thus operate between two opposing poles: the author remembers that “we were nothing but tired animals,” yet at the same time he writes against this diagnosis. One gets the impression that Levi tries to make it clear that the judgment pronounced on them as Jews should at least not be considered absolute truth. It must have been overwhelmingly difficult to differentiate psychologically between one’s physical perception of the inmates and their hardly perceptible state as humans, since humans they still were and desired to be. A tightrope walk, one might say—the condition one’s fellow inmates were in seemed to force most of them into self-abandonment. This is exactly what the architects of dehumanization were aiming at. The most prominent example of the notorious practices one might think of would be the Nazi’s perfidious system of hierarchies amongst the inmates. To install this system, selected persons were privileged in exchange for total cooperation with the camp guards, and thus

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turned into collaborators. The so-called Kapo is a prototypic example of how blurry the boundaries separating victims from their merciless victimizers had really been.108 Levi sees in those “Jewish celebrities,” who in fact had to struggle by means of intrigue and treachery to keep their privileged status, “monsters of asociality and insensitivity.” These “chosen” inmates sold their cooperation to relieve their own suffering, and even took on the camp guards’ tasks. “They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager,”109 Levi writes, turning the tables in that he lumps the most widely diverse groups of people together: the “evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans.”110 This almost random collective is held together by a “uniform internal desolation”: “The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offence received or inflicted on someone else.”111 Only genuine intercourse with someone who had retained his personhood helped Levi to not forget that “he himself was a human being, too.”112 Dehumanization, as it has also been vividly described and analyzed by scholars such as Tzvetan Todorov, was meant to diminish millionfold acts of what was in fact murder into mere liquidation of object-like beings. The acts themselves are thus wiped of all ethical connotations and transformed into some sort of necessary disposal, which as such was “located’ beyond good and evil. To sum it up, with its strategy of extermination National Socialism pursued the eradication or extinction of the defenseless, who were set to be transformed into some human-like (yet in no way “human”) beings long before they were to be killed. Dehumanization was thus a crucial preliminary step, for with dehumanized beings, no limits are set to vileness and cruelty. Any malicious act seemed perfectly normal since nothing could in fact invade the perpetrator’s sense of justice and legality. These memories of the practices of extermination must suffice here. The elitist demagogues of National Socialism celebrated their ideological approach as an “evolutionary invention,” i.e., something completely new. What followed from it indeed forced millions of people to suffer from a new dimension of pain. What they had to withstand and endure is certainly unheard-of in the history of humankind. It is these kinds of experiences (amongst other dreadful memories indeed) that overshadow their entire lives. Dehumanization has inevitably found its way into the survivors’ concepts of self and world, as well as the horizons of the expectations of survivors’ children and grandchildren. It still affects survivors’ families even if the topic has never been brought up expressis verbis. Strictly speaking, there is no explicit need for words in this process, and as we know, any individual experiences with some kind of pain and traumatization can be found among various individuals, whatever their age, ethnic and geographic origin, etc. However, the dreadful experiences described in this essay do not belong in the wide range of “some sort of ‘bad’

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things” which “just happen to most people at some stage in their lives”—what I have set out here forms a specific kind of experience with which the victims and their families have (or had) to live. The above-mentioned has an impact on the victim’s social relations, particularly the more intimate ones. I believe that any psychology interested in intergenerational interaction and communication needs to consider and investigate this aspect. As we know, the uniqueness in which all the above is embedded makes “Auschwitz” a singularity in world history, a tragedy that forbids us to see National Socialist Jewicide as just one genocide amongst others (or even, as some do, to mention the Jewish tragedy and all sorts of traumatic experiences in the same breath). There are numerous arguments supporting the singular status of “Auschwitz” and the experiences and expectations of those concerned; one of the former is the meaning of extermination to those who found themselves directly confronted with this threat. The inferno of destruction remains the fragile ground on which the lives of Holocaust survivors rest, without ever being able to find peace. This aspect of the past remains present even in familiar environments such as a victim’s home. There is no doubt that the descendants of these individuals “sense” this presence—up to a level of awareness that in many cases would enable them to articulate their intuitive “knowledge”—as can also be seen from a large number of texts in which members of the second or third generation broach the issue of their own selfhood. Some of them express their perceptions with remarkable clarity, thus giving us an impression of the unique character of this form of extermination anxiety. Unlike those who have never encountered or internalized the Shoah directly (or in the form of a parental “legacy”), the progeny of survivors lack the security that (personal) distance brings. Secondary traumas cannot be identical with their origins. The impact the Shoah has on the fate of those who stayed alive apparently differs from what it means to the descendants and their and families. However, being in such close contact with their parents’ (or grandparents’) suffering, the offspring carry a unique burden of their own. Even though experiences and meanings might be transformed through the creativity inherent in every act of appropriation and perception, the Shoah remains ever-present yet incomprehensible and unthinkable—if it was not for the fact that it was, and is, real for millions of victims. As far as survivors and their children are concerned, it only takes their bodily existence to represent their role in history, and they are all part of a very specific and in many ways exceptional life-form. The latter, however, differs noticeably from someone whose parents (or grandparents) committed, enabled, watched, or tolerated these crimes. If we overlook this crucial insight, we put ourselves at risk of marginalizing differences, denying heterogeneity, and negating incommensurability. In other words, we reproduce and widen a debate that goes beyond contradicting academic standpoints. There is a social and explicitly practical side to it, and

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as a multi-party debate it occurs in great variety; however, all variations result from the mentioned negation of differences. If we do not acknowledge these differences in scholarly interpretations, we will maintain this practical debate for good. We should be aware that in the given context, any scholarly piece will inevitably touch the lives of those concerned. Such proceeding may also complicate the fragile relationship between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, especially in Germany. It has always been problematic to make others understand why differences and incommensurabilities deserve as much attention and acceptance as we grant to those similarities that seem to support claims for universal validity.

Notes * The original German version of this article was published in Kurt Grünberg and Jürgen Straub, eds., Unverlierbare Zeit: Psychosoziale Spätfolgen des Nationalsozialismus bei Nachkommen von Opfern und Tätern (Tübingen 2001), 223–280. 1. Published in London in 1960. The original book Se questo è un uomo was first published in 1947 before Einaudi launched a second edition in 1958. However, the book received little attention until 1963, when Levi—having become a successful scientist and head of a varnish factory—published La tregua, an account of his ten-month return journey to Turin after his rescue from Auschwitz. 2. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917), Husserliana, 10, (Den Haag 1950). 3. Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of consciousness of time remind us of a relatively complex concept of “present” in which one might consider, following Paul Ricœur’s Time and Narrative (Chicago 1984), fn. 12 remarks, an effort to specify the Augustinian concept of threefold present, of which the concept regarding “the presence of the past” is most relevant in the given context. For an approach to Husserl’s analyses, see the mentioned interpretation by Ricœur and the latter’s reference to Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston 1973). 4. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York 1890). 5. Burkhard Liebsch, Geschichte als Antwort und Versprechen (Freiburg and Munich 1999), 11. 6. Ibid. 7. Werner Bohleber, ed., Trauma, Gewalt und kollektives Gedächtnis, Psyche 54, no. 9/10 (2000) (special issue). 8. Burkhard Liebsch, Geschichte als Antwort und Versprechen, 16. As Liebsch’s questions regarding Jan Patocˇ ka’s Ketzerische Essays zur Philosophie der Geschichte und ergänzende Schriften (Stuttgart 1988), 322 understanding of history as “subject of a passionate relationship” illustrate, determining the fundamentals of such ethics can be quite an intricate issue. Patocˇ ka believes in an utterly shaken, yet “restorable” European rationality and its painful state of being-attached. This belief sides with the “interests of the suppressed, hurt, humiliated, and killed ones” (ibid.). Apart from the fact that Liebsch objects to Patocˇ ka’s concept of a “rationality of non-indifference toward the victims” (Liebsch, Geschichte als Antwort und Versprechen, 90ff. and 109–110), it seems clear that from a psychological perspective, such side-taking is all but inevitable—it even seems unlikely. Taking over the responsibility to retain the individuality of the dead as irreplaceable beings is in no way “natural.” This “inescapable indifference,” which breaks with the “normality” of mobilization, is as much a desire as it is a common experience. A mimesis toward the victims’ common fate as well as the claimed moral duty to bear in mind the lethality of others can, as it

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seems, never be fulfilled. (However, as we know, Patocˇ ka is fully aware that there is an unbridgeable divide between responsibility and justice). In his critical continuation of Emanuel Lévinas’ theory, Liebsch regards history as an answer and a promise. His ethics too ties in with pathos. Liebsch too grounds his theory on our relation to the past, “a historical affectability which puts ourselves in question and demands that we respond” (ibid., 18). In his works, the author replaces Patocˇ ka’s decisiveness with some more caution and reserve before he embarks on a thorough discussion of the assumption that historical beings are incapable of simply denying or neglecting the claim of bygone times since the latter form the “unreachable ‘what-to’ of the demanded response(s)” (ibid., 19). According to him, individuals are inspired by the past and the question it leaves with us, which makes us promise to “fulfil” the past through adequate (yet in their essence insufficient) answers. The question arises, is this phenomenological concept of “history as answer and promise” built only on analyses of historically relevant experiences? Should we not consider hopes and wishes as well a particular form of belief that is deeply rooted in the “religious dimension” of our historical relation to death? (These questions are all but identical with common objections against Lévinas’s well-known thesis, according to which the “irreplaceable,” or “absolutely different Other” was the transcendental instance to which only a “religious” relation is possible; see also Burkhard Liebsch, Moralische Spielräume: Menschheit und Anderheit, Zugehörigkeit und Identität (Göttingen 1999), 48. Most phenomenologists believe that philosophical ethics need to take “non-discursive” or “pre-discursive” constituents of ethical actions into account, too. Psychological insights support this finding, at least when moral psychology is concerned. Some scholars in this field have recently acknowledged (yet not “approved”) the strong cognitivist and rationalist biases of the mentioned approach, which used to be most influential and has not yet lost its relevance. Out of many possible objections, I would like to point out that Lawrence Kohlberg in particular marginalizes pre-reflective affectability, even though the latter is of the same importance for the ontogenetic-biographical development of morally correct behavior as are his explorations of the structure-theoretically determined field of practical reasoning. However, Liebsch’s phenomenological ethics employ claims of experiences of bygone times that—almost independently—appeal to subjects, and this, amongst other aspects, has never been proven by any breach of moral psychology. It seems as if the author sees directly relevant structures and moral implications in what he calls “experience”—an act of overemphasizing that can be found in the works of other scholars, too. Why is it that some subjects are “caught by” the past, while others are not? This question clearly is a desideration of moral psychology. Scholars of this field can hardly agree with Liebsch’s optimistic assumption of an irreversible “inner mobility of human beings, whose roots reach deeper” (Liebsch, Geschichte als Antwort und Versprechen, 112) than any event or incident might suggest. In the same way, moral psychology might need to suspend Lévinas’s radical “Otherness of the Other” with its assumed characteristics, for in Lévinas’s eyes, such radical Otherness is inescapable and has an immediate impact on every individual. (The German language allows this radical Otherness, “Anderheit,” to be distinguished from a relative or gradual Otherness called “Andersheit.”) Indeed, the radical Other as an ungraspable and entirely withdrawn being has hardly any clear (or easily identifiable) influence on our actions. In spite of all this, I doubt that analyses of our experience (as a whole) necessarily lead to the specific Other that Lévinas describes. This other is so defenseless, vulnerable, and relinquished (Liebsch, Moralische Spielräume, 44) that any “encounter” with him or her leads us to a categorical commandment of non-indifference, responsibility, and non-violence that even a cold-blooded murderer cannot deny, writes Lévinas. Unfortunately, in the empirical world of real human beings this metaphysical insight is not true in any case. 9. Mathias Hirsch, “Transgenerationelle Weitergabe von Schuld und Schuldgefühl,” in L. Opher-Cohn, J. Pfäfflin, B. Sonntag, B. Klose, and P. Pogany-Wnendt, eds., Das Ende der Sprachlosigkeit? Auswirkungen traumatischer Holocaust-Erfahrungen über mehrere Generationen (Gießen 2000), 141–158, here 141. 10. See Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy’s introduction to their edition (with Judith Kestenberg) of 1982: Bergmann and Jucovy, “Einleitung,” in M. S. Bergmann, M. E. Jucovy, and J. S. Kestenberg, eds., Kinder der Opfer, Kinder der Täter: Psychoanalyse und Holocaust

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(Frankfurt/ M. 1995), 23–55. The German translation entails some minor changes. However, the author’s findings regarding the United States equally apply to Germany and other countries, especially their statements on the psychological economy of perpetrators, followers, spectators, and all progenies. 11. Tzvetan Todorov, Angesichts des Äußersten (Munich 1993). 12. Judith Kestenberg, “Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe,” in M.S. Bergmann, M.E. Jucovy, and J.S. Kestenberg, Kinder der Opfer, Kinder der Täter, 9. 13. Annette Streeck-Fischer, “Vergangene und gegenwärtige Traumatisierung—jugendliche Skinheads in Deutschland,” in L. Opher-Cohn et al., Das Ende der Sprachlosigkeit? 51–70, here 52. 14. On the term “transgenerational transfer,” see Jürgen Straub, “Unverlierbare Zeit, verkennendes Wort. Sekundäre Traumatisierung und Gewalterfahrungen der ‘zweiten Generation’ in Deutschland lebender Juden,” in M. Dabag and K. Platt, eds., Das Reden von Gewalt (Munich 2001), 272–302, which provides an extensive introduction to important studies on psychosocial consequences of the Holocaust; thus I will introduce only a few in this essay. Ulrich Streeck, Erinnern, Agieren und Inszenieren: Enactments und szenische Darstellungen im therapeutischen Prozeß (Göttingen 2000) has elaborated and discussed the terms “enactment” and “staging” with great accuracy in a collection of essays he edited. See also his instructive essay “Szenische Darstellungen, nichtsprachliche Interaktion und Enactments im therapeutischen Prozeß,” in the same edition. Memories do not necessarily appear in the form of (verbal) utterances, as Streeck points out with regard to psychoanalysis in therapy settings. This insight is of utmost relevance for the concerns of my essay, even though I do not primarily refer to psychotherapeutical purposes. The claims of the past become manifest in the actions and interactions of everyday practices, too. More than other individuals, traumatized persons communicate their pain and suffering through “interaction, impartment by means of gestures” (U. Streeck, “Vorwort,” in Streeck, Erinnern, 7–12) and other forms of physical (“leiblicher”) communication. Such interactive messages are usually indirect and subtle and hard to decipher, as video documents of such interactions show. Despite all this, the “partners” in such interactions often feel what is meant (i.e., that there is more than what has been said directly); in many cases, they react to this anticipated meaning, sometimes without being aware of it. It seems important here to consider that memory-based enactments and staging cannot simply be reduced to the well-known Freudian concept of “reenactment,” since the term is restricted to psychological defense. Sigmund Freud also gave alternative interpretations for the term, as Streeck (Streeck, “Szenische Darstellungen”) shows. 15. Gertrude Hardtmann, “Lebensgeschichte und Identität,” in Kurt Grünberg and Jürgen Straub, eds., Unverlierbare Zeit: Psychosoziale Spätfolgen des Natinoalsozialismus bei Nachkommen von Opfern und Tätern (Tübingen 2001), 39–56. 16. Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten (1966) (Stuttgart 1997), 44 (in English, At the Mind´s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, transl. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld [New York 1986]). 17. Streeck-Fischer, “Vergangene und gegenwärtige Traumatisierung—jugendliche Skinheads in Deutschland,” 52–53. 18. Ibid. 19. For an overview see Straub, “Unverlierbare Zeit, verkennendes Wort.” 20. Soon after the war, namely in the 1950s, Anna Maria Jokl started investigating the suffering of children of perpetrators, too. Her works long remained unpublished (Anna Maria Jokl, “Zwei Fälle zum Thema (Bewältigung der Vergangenheit),” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 81 [1988]: 81–102), so that Tilman Moser (Tilman Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind: Eine Psychotherapie mit der Tochter eines SS-Mannes [Munich 1997], 161ff.) praises Jokl’s “formerly lost” piece of writing as the unique testimony of a “seer of destruction” (p. 179). He sees in it the depiction of the psychological disaster that “the National Socialist era has left with the children of victims as well as perpetrator’s progenies” (p. 179). Later publications on “perpetrator’s children” include investigative journalism (P. Sichrovsky, Schuldig geboren: Kinder aus Nazifamilien [Cologne 1987]) and reports from an “inside point of view” written by progenies (N. Frank, Der Vater:

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Eine Abrechnung, [Munich 1997]; D. v. Westernhagen, Die Kinder der Täter [Munich 1987]), as well as scholarly pieces and psychoanalytical essays (D. Bar-On, Die Last des Schweigens: Gespräche mit Kindern von Nazi-Tätern [1989] [Frankfurt and New York 1993]; A. Eckstaedt, Nationalsozialismus in der “zweiten Generation:” Psychoanalyse von Hörigkeitsverhältnissen [Frankfurt/ M. 1989]; B. Heimannsberg and C. J. Schmidt, eds., Das kollektive Schweigen: Nazivergangenheit und gebrochene Identität in der Psychotherapie [Heidelberg 1988] [extended reprint: Cologne 1992]; T. Moser, Dämonische Figuren: Die Wiederkehr des Dritten Reichs in der Psychotherapie [Frankfurt/ M. 1996]; Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind; J. Müller-Hohagen, Verleugnet, verdrängt, verschwiegen: Die seelischen Auswirkungen der Nazizeit [Munich 1988]; see also the contributions by Hardtmann, Eckstaedt, Müller-Hohagen, and Bar-On in Grünberg and Straub, Unverlierbare Zeit). 21. Raul Hilberg, Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer: Die Vernichtung der Juden 1933–1945 (1992) (Frankfurt/ M 1996), 10. 22. Ibid. 23. Klaus E. Grossmann, “Verstrickung, Vermeidung, Desorganisation. Psychische Inkohärenzen als Folge von Trennung und Verlust,” in L. Opher-Cohn et al., Das Ende der Sprachlosigkeit? 85–111. 24. The author makes it clear that findings on the “extent and intensity of long-term consequences with regard to the Holocaust” (ibid., 104) are in fact ambiguous. He describes a “certain discrepancy between prospective studies, and clinical research” (ibid.) as follows: “Reintegration of survivors of the Holocaust seems to be successful in many cases, and many of the survivors show no signs of severe psychological problems. On the other hand, a high percentage of survivors show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as has been documented” (ibid., 105). Apparently, prospective studies seem more optimistic, i.e., it seems that some individuals do cope with—or appear to be able to cope with—experiences that make others suffer or break (of course, we need to acknowledge inter-individual differences regarding these experiences, and how they were perceived). Now, if there are any individuals of the first type—psychologists refer to them as “invulnerables”— amongst the survivors of the Shoah, then we lack sufficient knowledge on them. A current research study from Israel that Grossmann mentions might help us here since it entails three generations of survivors and is centered on circumstances under which “even severest traumatic experiences can be coped with, so that many survivors as well as their children could remain unscathed” (ibid., 105). Naturally, we need to bear in mind that certain methods and contexts may serve to achieve certain results, whereas for other findings they are not suitable. It is not just this particular study that shows us how we need to ask ourselves again and again if what has been labeled “assimilate able” has resulted less from rational, methodically adequate research than from doubtful motives and insufficient methodical processes. Since the wish for “total copeability” should not be father to the thought here, we must enquire how “assimilation” can be measured. What if an individual who leads an entirely inconspicuous life, who “functions” and appears to be perfectly “normal” in terms of objective measurements and subjective impressions, still has never forgotten what it means to be a mere “thing,” or “vermin” in the eyes of others, that was meant to be exterminated, or to “eradicate himself ” in the camps? What does it mean not to forget? What does it mean to cope with all this? It seems almost needless to say that psychological diagnostics should be aware that the future life of an individual is always open, i.e., it can never be determined through any form of prognostic methods, and thus remains a “blind spot.” 25. Hilberg, Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer, 10. 26. Kestenberg, “Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe.” 27. The very term “generation” implies far more than an age cohort. On this matter, see Straub, “Unverlierbare Zeit, verkennendes Wort,” where I have, alongside Grünberg, pointed out the difficulties resulting from an all too careless use of “second generation” as a reference to children of both victims and perpetrators. The same applies to the so-called third and fourth generations. These terms imply meanings that are tied to specific collective spaces of experience and horizons of expectations as well as individual experiences and biographies, which all together make it impossible to reduce “generation” to its temporal-chronological function. Some authors—Grünberg, for instance—solve this problem temporarily by spelling the numerals with

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a capital letter, whereby these terms must then be reserved for children of survivors only. Perpetrators’ children, however, are not categorized in terms of these generations whose line started anew after the Shoah. From my point of view, and however trivial it may sound, there are no arguments for such treatment. I thus suggest that the capital spelling be used to refer to victims’ children while small letters indicate progenies of committers and any other “generational line,” or in cases where a general statement on progenies of different “first generations” comes into play. The former describes my proceeding in this essay. 28. K. Grünberg, “Zur Tradierung des Traumas der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung,” Psyche 54 (2000): 1002–1037, here 1003–1004. 29. See, among others E. Brainin, V. Ligeti and S. Teicher, “Pathologie mehrerer Generationen oder Pathologie der Wirklichkeit?” in Grünberg and Straub, Unverlierbare Zeit, 151–179. 30. See H. Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1979) (London 1988), 14; on this, see also Straub, “Unverlierbare Zeit, verkennendes Wort.” 31. Jürgen Müller-Hohagen, is one of many authors who have investigated the processes of questioning and experiencing one’s self. For related publications, see Müller-Hohagen’s essay in Grünberg and Straub, Unverlierbare Zeit, as well as the editors’ introductory remarks in the same volume. 32. Bar-On, Die Last des Schweigens, 17ff.. 33. Bar-On describes his life in Israel as life “in a culture of victims,” in which the Holocaust “still remains an open wound to many of my fellow men. More than one fourth of the population have been directly or indirectly affected. Some of them I come across every day … In this culture, the culprits of Holocaust are still equal to the absolute evil. Some believe they should not be treated like humans after ‘what they have done to us’. As most children of my generation, I have inherited this black-and-white way of thinking: The barbarianism toward the victim” (ibid., 20). 34. Hans Joas, “Sprayed and Betrayed: Gewalterfahrung im Vietnamkrieg und ihre Folgen,” in H. Joas, Kriege und Werte: Studien zur Gewaltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Weilerswist 2000), 165–180. 35. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York 1963). 36. We know from scientific investigations like the ones undertaken by Christopher Browning that there were countless volunteers who helped to make the extermination of European Jews (and other victims) “work.” 37. On a side note, it seems far more difficult to explain not only how perpetrators might potentially and indirectly harm themselves but also that this form of self-punishment is inevitable. It seems almost impossible to prove that those who harm, persecute, and exterminate others inevitably inflict damage on themselves. Supporting such claims brings one to an edge that some larmoyant perpetrators themselves find quite convenient, and it takes quite a lot of idealism, which, however, is seldom backed by empirical-reconstructive analyses of the internal perspective of perpetrators. 38. Jürgen Straub, Verstehen, Kritik, Anerkennung: Das Eigene und das Fremde in den interpretativen Wissenschaften (Göttingen 1999). 39. Kestenberg, “Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe.” 40. Bergman and Jucovy, “Einleitung,” 54. 41. Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 162. He refers to the works of Anna Maria Jokl, and even where he does not, his thoughts go in Jokl‘s direction. 42. Ibid., 57. 43. On this term, which is a continuation of Immanuel Kant’s differentiation of determinating and reflective judgment, see Jürgen Straub, Handlung, Interpretation, Kritik: Grundzüge einer textwissenschaftlichen Handlungs- und Kulturpsychologie (Berlin and New York 1999), 211ff.; Straub, Verstehen, Kritik, Anerkennung. 44. Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 14. 45. Ibid., 61.

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46. Ibid. 47. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore 1973); Jürgen Straub, “Zeit, Erzählung, Interpretation: Zur Konstruktion und Analyse von Erzähltexten in der narrativen Biographieforschung,” in H. Röckelein, ed., Biographie als Geschichte (Tübingen 1993), 143–183; Jürgen Straub, “Über das Bilden von Vergangenheit: Erzähltheoretische Überlegungen und eine exemplarische Analyse eines Gruppengesprächs über die ‘NS-Vergangenheit,’” in Jörn Rüsen, ed., Geschichtsbewusstsein: Psychologische Grundlagen, Entwicklungskonzepte, empirische Befunde (Cologne 2001), 45–113. 48. Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 13. 49. Ibid., 57. 50. Ibid., 61. 51. Ibid., 56. 52. Ibid., 104. 53. Ibid., 120ff. 54. Ibid., 121. 55. Ibid. 56. B. Hellinger and G. ten Hövel, Anerkennen, was ist: Gespräche über Verstrickung und Lösung (Munich 1996), 158; quoted in Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 122. 57. Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 122. 58. Hellinger and Hövel, Anerkennen, was ist, 160; taken from Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 122–123. 59. Taken from an interview with Hellinger; Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 123. 60. Ibid.. 61. Ibid., 122. 62. Moser, Dabei war ich doch sein liebstes Kind, 58. 63. These statements are taken from an interview with Mika I. I would like to thank Kurt Grünberg, who led the interview, for allowing me to read parts of the transcript. 64. The original was printed in blue and white letters on a black background (blue letters are indicated by italicizations in this essay), and it read, “Holokaust:Victims and perpetrators—haunted for good. Documentary in six parts. Tuesday 8:15 p.m. … ZDF” (Holokaust: Opfer und Täter – für immer verfolgt. Sechsteilige Dokumentation, dienstags 20.15 Uhr. Mit dem Zweiten sieht man besser. ZDF). Needless to say that my remarks on this advertisement in no way refer to the quality of the documentation. 65. James E. Young, Beschreiben des Holocaust. Darstellung und Folgen der Interpretation (Frankfurt / M 1992). 66. One might interpret the deficits I criticize here as being inspired by unconscious motives, thereby considering them results of rationalization strategies, as Grünberg does (Grünberg and Straub, Unverlierbare Zeit). What follows from this is that the psychological process of finding these parallels, symmetries, and analogies regarding certain aspects of the pain-charged lives of progenies of both victims and perpetrators are seen as “defensive” attempts at exculpation undertaken by Germans who identify more strongly with the “side of committers” than any analyst or scholar would appreciate. Apart from this psychoanalytical perspective, one might add that epistemological theories, methodology, and methodics of comparative studies teach us that the criticized parallelizations are rooted in cognitive operations that can hardly be considered scientific “comparisons.” 67. Gabriele Rosenthal, “Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede im familialen Dialog über den Holocaust,” in Gabriele Rosenthal, ed., Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen: Familien von Überlebenden der Shoah und von Nazi-Tätern (Gießen 1997), 18–32. 68. The author enumerates the following guiding questions and goals of the project, “How are family dialogues on the family’s past constituted in families of victims of the Nazi regime? How are they constituted in families of perpetrators and followers? What impact does the grandparents’ past have on their children and grandchildren? What are the structural differences between those ‘victims’ dialogues’ and those of families of perpetrators, and families of victims? …

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In addition we compared family discourses and public dialogues in the Federal Republic of Germany, the former GDR, and Israel. We seek to know to what extent different family-biographical courses of life after 1945—in the FRG, the GD, or Israel—influenced such ‘living with the past’ constitutively. We thereby attempt to find out, amongst other goals, which constellations might facilitate the psychological and social integration of individuals bearing the burden of a threatening collective and family-related past.” Rosenthal, “Fragestellungen und Methode,” in Rosenthal, Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen, 11–17, here 11. 69. Rosenthal, “Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede im familialen Dialog über den Holocaust,” 18f. 70. Ibid., 19. 71. Ibid. 72. One might also observe that Rosenthal investigates differences and similarities in how the past is handled, which, however, might be a little too superficial: One lives with one’s past long before questions arise how to cope with it—it is an integral element of the self. One embodies and stages one’s past as bodily actor, one is past even before one can act in relation to it. These variations of personal being and personalized habitus, which might as well be transgenerationally transferred, are of the utmost importance. 73. E. E. Boesch, Symbolic Action Theory and Cultural Psychology (Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York 1991); Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1990); J. Straub, Handlung, Interpretation, Kritik. 74. J. Straub, “Understanding Cultural Differences: Relational Hermeneutics and Comparative Analysis in Cultural Psychology,” in J. Straub, D. Weidemann, C. Kölbl, and B. Zielke, eds., Pursuit of Meaning: Theoretical and Methodological Advances in Cultural and Cross-Cultural Psychology (Bielefeld 2006), 163–213. 75. Kurt Grünberg, “Schweigen und Ver-Schweigen: NS-Vergangenheit in Familien von Opfern und von Tätern oder Mitläufern,” Psychosozial 20, no. 68 (1997): 9–22; Kurt Grünberg, “Zur Tradierung des Traumas”; for comments on the related German terms of “verhüllen” and “verleugnen” see Rosenthal, ed., Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen, 415ff. On this basis, one might still debate whether this conscious silence might at times fulfill a rightful purpose in collective and individual lives.This argument finds the support of philosophers like Hermann Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein,” Historische Zeitschrift 236 (1983): 579–599, from whose functionalist perspective intended silence appears to serve the reconstruction of postwar Germany. He adds that without the old functional elites, the reconstructive tasks would not have been fulfilled; hence the silence toward the latter’s participation in the National Socialist project. We might easily think this argumentation further and apply it to individual lives. Lübbe, however, fails to take into account the unconscious motives and latent meanings behind what actors believe to be intentional and rational in accordance with transparent reasons and purposes. 76. J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich 1992). When survivors die, the memories of those who saw the tattooed numbers, as well as paintings, photos, and videos (or other means of data saving of the visual “outer memory”) remain. Once those memories as parts of the collective memory begin to fade, manifestations of cultural memory, as located in Yad Vashem and many other places, come into play. 77. I share Müller-Hohagen’s view when he suggests that children of perpetrators might suffer from death anxiety rather than extermination anxiety. See J. Müller-Hohagen, “Seelische Weiterwirkungen aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus—zum Widerstreit der Loyalitäten,” in Grünberg and Straub, Unverlierbare Zeit, 83–118. 78. Enzo Traverso, Auschwitz denken: Die Intellektuellen und die Shoah (1997) (Hamburg 2000). 79. I adopt the common spelling of the Other with a capital “O” whenever the term indicates the concept of radical alterity (see above). The other as Other implies some ethical meaning that obviously goes beyond mere distinction of “one” person and “another.”

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80. See Grünberg, “Vom Banalisieren des Traumas in Deutschland,” in Grünberg and Straub, Unverlierbare Zeit, 181–221. 81. We do not know whether the quote is a literal reproduction of what was said, or whether it is part of a rhetorical strategy to add authenticity to the account. Regardless of the outcome, such discussion would add nothing to my argumentation. 82. The enmity of “Jews” and “Germans” was a continuation of “traditional” anti-Semitism and was further created, promoted, and instrumentalized by the Nazis. This peculiar separation still influences German language practices: Ignaz Bubis (former chair of the Central Consistory of Jews in Germany), amongst others, referred to himself as ‘German of Jewish believe’. He thereby attempted to protest against this extraordinarily resistant differentiation. One must consider, of course, that many German Jews found it impossible to see in this discrimination anything but absurd idiocy. Even today, many of them speak of themselves (or Jews in general) and “the Germans,” thus articulating a chasm that no documented nationality can bridge. Let us not forget that Jean Améry, too, although born and raised in Austria, felt he was “turned into a Jew” by the Nazis—this feeling would determine his broken relation with Judaism for the rest of his life. Simple decisions and categories had long gone, as the freed and rescued Jew impressively illustrates: when he was rescued from Auschwitz, he changed his surname of his given name, Hans Mayer, to an anagram: Jean Améry. Primo Levi is another example of an individual who, as Enzo Traverso (Traverso, Auschwitz denken, 246, 248ff.) aptly puts it, turned into “a Jew against his own will.” It seems understandable that the assimilated Jew felt a certain distance toward Yiddishdom. The divide between the Italian Jew and the Germans was as mysterious as were “the Germans” themselves. The chasm between Jews and Germans might persist for an unforeseeable period of time, particularly for those Jews who still live in Germany 83. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalität und Unendlichkeit (1961) (Freiburg and Munich 1987), 322 (in English: Totality and Infinity, transl. A. Lingis [Pittsburgh 1969]), and, in response, B. Liebsch, Geschichte als Antwort und Versprechen, 115. 84. Burkhard Liebsch, Geschichte als Antwort und Versprechen, 135ff. 85. Speaking of a program, I do not seek here to conceptualize those actions aimed at extermination as mere realization of prior intentions and plans. Beyond intentionalism and functionalism, some historians have now begun to search for a “third way” of explanation that might be more appropriate to comprehend the practical logic behind National Socialist crimes against humanity. 86. It seems of little relevance to mention here that however ambitiously racist arguments had been assembled, they were never based on genuine biological findings. Of course, they appear even more ridiculous in the light of current biological insights. There is no biological race. 87. The denial of their status as humans affected Jews in a particular way. They were the lowest beings even in the camps, where there was not even a trace left from the humans they had once been: “We know that there are three categories of camp inhabitants: the criminals, the political inmates, and the Jews” (Primo Levi, Ist das ein Mensch? (1947) (Munich 1994), 35 (in English: If This Is a Man [London 1960]); see also Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 25. This special status inside and outside of the camps does not at all reduce the pain that non-Jewish inmates had to endure. Eugen Kogon (Der SS-Staat [Stockholm 1947]), a former Buchenwald inmate, described the practice of internal differentiation as early as 1946, when he published the first extensive study on the camps. He enumerates Jews, political opponents, criminals, celebrities, prisoners of war, homosexuals, etc. Kogon’s heroic stories of the courageous resistance led by certain individuals and groups disappear in later descriptions, to be replaced through other plot structures. Eli Wiesel’s accounts, for instance, follow a certain martyrological type; see Y. M. Bodemann, “Gedächtnisnegativ: Genealogie und Strategien deutscher Erinnerung an Auschwitz,” in T. v. Trotha, ed., Soziologie der Gewalt, Special Issue of Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 37 (Opladen 1997), 357–379, which can be seen as a paradigmatic way to tell these “stories.” 88. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, 21.

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89. Ibid., 99. Here Levi’s choice of words shows how much he turns against the idea that concentration camps used to be some kind of punishment, i.e., a measure that was clearly no part of normality in Nazi Germany. As far as social order is concerned, inmates of extermination camps, too, were used to rigid hierarchies: Who does not manage to become an organizer, a Kombinator or a celebrity (what cruel eloquence of expressions!) will soon end up as a “Muselman” (Levi, Ist das ein Mensch? 107). It was particularly hard for the inmates to escape from “selection,” which was designed to be their “fate.” There were no clear selection criteria, which granted a lot of power to those having it at their disposal to define who was forced to die in the gas chambers. 90. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, 177. As has been said before, those who reached the last stage were then called “Muselman.” On page 105, Levi reserves his only footnote for these individuals: “This word ‘Muselmann,’ I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.” Three pages further, it states that “they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand. They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.” Améry tells us that “the so-called muselman, for this is the name in the language of the lager for those who were giving up themselves, and were given up by their fellow inmates, had no conscious space anymore, no space in which good and evil, virtuous and malicious, spiritual and unspiritual could face each other. The muselman was nothing but a stumbling dead body, a bunch of physical functions breathing his last” (Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 28f.). When it comes to his own experiences as an intellectual in Auschwitz, Améry excludes the “muselman” from his thoughts: “I can only report from the perspective of my own position” ( Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 28f.). 91. Levi, Ist das ein Mensch? 179. Those who survived were indeed broken and beaten, but they were allowed a new start—however tied to what had happened this start would be. Considering this fact, Levi later asks whether these individuals were genuine witnesses of the “final cruelty” of Auschwitz and other camps since even these poor souls did not fall into the deepest chasm of all. Those who were forced to do so never returned. They could not give their account of the final step that the National Socialists intended to erase from collective memory anyway. 92. In Levi’s account of a typical deportation appeal, the Oberscharführer asks, “How many pieces?” The Rottenführer replies “with the bizarre precision to which we got so used after a while: ‘Six hundred and fifty pieces,’ and everything was fine.” Levi, Ist das ein Mensch? 15. 93. Ibid., 15f. 94. Ibid., 38. 95. Ibid., 59. 96. Ibid., 31. 97. Ibid., 28. 98. Levi, If This Is a Man, 42. 99. Ibid., 57. 100. Ibid., 123. 101. Ibid., 123. 102. Ibid., 125. 103. Ibid., 206. 104. Ibid., 205. 105. Ibid., 21. 106. As we know, the world of gods has no space for humans. However, there is another limitation to the concept of lethality, which certainly has nothing to do with heaven. As Levi

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makes clear, “in the deep,” there is no normal way to die. Heidegger’s notorious elitist dictum, according to which some humans will never die (because they miss the ability to “die” in Heidegger’s philosophical sense), sounds even more peculiar in the light if the fact that humans may also find it impossible to die. 107. Ibid., 52. 108. In his novel Kapo, Alksandar Tišma (1987) (Munich 1997) describes the life of a persecuted Jew who turns into a collaborator, becoming a merciless committer and excessive murderer. The author also tries to explore the “inner misery” to which the life-saving endeavor of total cooperation leads. The broken bond of solidarity leaves his Self scattered and restless. Regardless of all possible justifications, the formerly persecuted has to live with the mark of having been a persecutor. 109. Levi, If This Is a Man, 104. 110. Ibid., 142. 111. Ibid., 142. 112. Levi, If This Is a Man.

Part III

CASE STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICS

CHAPTER

7

On Social and Psychological Foundations of Anti-Semitism* KAROLA BREDE

Hitler’s Willing Executioners, authored by Daniel J. Goldhagen and published in 1996, was not least a vehement criticism of conventional research. The German edition was released in the same year that the original English edition came out in the United States. In his book, Goldhagen posits that during the period of National Socialism, the Germans had held an active anti-Semitic attitude featuring eliminatory characteristics toward the Jews. This thesis, which provoked fierce reactions from both the German public and within specialist circles, notably among historians, was eventually rejected as untenable. Essentially, Goldhagen’s mistake was held to have been classifying the “cognitive model of Jews”1 as belonging to the “general canon of values”2 toward which the Germans oriented themselves, which thus fulfilled the function of supplying German society with cohesion. Goldhagen overlooked the fact that a destructive attitude cannot create enduring social ties. A strict distinction must be made between the basis of societal cohesion and the social foundation of anti-Semitism.3 A solid line of argument underscoring such a thesis would have to combine a theory of social integration with psychological assumptions concerning the aggression that is an active element within anti-Semitism. Here the theoretical goal to be pursued would have to be guided by the question concerning the conditions under which destruction may coincide with social cohesion. The following considerations are based upon this very question. It is of course inevitable that Goldhagen’s thesis will, in accordance with the results of these considerations, have to be subjected to modification. Social cohesion, I shall argue, is sustained by cultural precepts and bans as well as special social and psychodynamic mechanisms. Under closer examination it is evident that these contain conditions of derailment, such that societal Notes for this section begin on page 154.

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development is able to take a socially destructive course. The persecution and extermination of the Jews under the territorial influence of the National Socialist regime accordingly represents the lethal case of a society’s limited integrational capacity, in which the conditions of failing normativity are inherent. This thesis is ambitious, and my reasoning will not be sufficient to sustain it to the reader’s content. It is, however, a promising approach in throwing light upon the question of why German society exhibited such a high level of integration in terms of material provision and formal social order, while persecution of the Jews was intensified. In contributing to the clarification of this absurdity, it will be necessary to expose those aspects of the process of social integration that are, so to speak, open to attack. First I will discuss the ambiguous contribution of cultural prescriptions and the ban on killing toward the individual’s motivational obligation to norms and values. Following this the assailability of alter ego as a social object within intersubjective interaction will be addressed. Finally, I will consider structuring aspects of the social system that contribute to a subpopulation viewing itself as the social entirety and in doing so, partially or completely denying a further subpopulation its co-affiliation and right to participation in the social process. Georg Simmel’s model, created in view of the group in relation to the stranger, can be considered suitable for uncovering conditions that facilitate the social annihilation of selected circles. These conditions are inherent to cultural precepts and bans, as well as to social interaction, as far as it is guided by values and norms. First, however, it must be shown how social integration within modern societies is supported by the internalization of cultural values and social norms. The example of the sick role can demonstrate that internalization processes reach deeply into the personality and may hamper self-secluded aggressive impulses. The pattern of the sick role shows how the problem of social integration is solved in general—at least from the position of the social theoretician Talcott Parsons.

The Depth Structure of Social Control Subtilization of aggression characterizes the level of social integration in modern societies more precisely than the libidinal attention that ties the members of a society together. Within the social sciences, however, it has become a fixed view that the question of social cohesion must be explored from the perspective of social control of individual behavior and its motivational outcome. Acts of violence, extremism, fanatism, etc.—i.e., ostentatious ways of utterance aggression can take on—indicate, according to this position, a more or less temporary breakdown of this control. Social cohesion, then, results from successfully hampering irritating, annoying affects and impulses—hatred, aversion, rivalry, envy—or from punishing the violation of social norms.4 Correspond-

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ing to this one-sidedness, on empirical grounds, is that aggression tends to be socially undecipherable. Sigmund Freud’s approach differs from this view in that it integrates aggression into his theory of culture.5 He is also attracted by the problem of social integration in large societies, and lets sexuality and aggression act together as dual drives. A state of society wherein aggression is under control forever is inconceivable for Freud. In order to be able to explain massively destructive social phenomena,6 Freud’s approach calls upon seeking a way to incorporate aggression as an explanatory element into the theory of society, even if this intention is easier to express than to translate into a solution. Social control covers the structure of normative expectations, the mutual referral of actors to each other, and the motivational obligation not only to act, but also to think in specific ways. This deep influence may be illustrated by Parsons’s famous concept of the sick role, if it is amplified by its psychological dimension. To Parsons, illness means the inability to fulfill role obligations within the social system on all levels of the role pattern: the institutional, that of acting within expectations, and that of task fulfillment. The sick person is allowed to remain in a state of exemption. In return for the acceptance of this exceptional state the sick person takes on the obligation to actively participate in the recovery of his or her health.7 The intensity of social control and the far reach of precepts and bans down to the oldest layers of acquired psychic dispositions achieving this control can be seen, if one puts aside for a while the sociological perspective on social integration. The pattern of the sick role to which the sick person belongs with respect to his or her nurse may serve as an example illustrating the way the participating persons build up their actions. Even when sick people think their situation is bad, they will demonstrate their will to recover from their illness and fight against their feelings of desperation, helplessness, and hopelessness. It is a matter of course for them, that they do all they can to contribute to their recovery. The caring person has, as we may imagine, hostile impulses, which he or she will hide or even repress, if they come up. To have and to feel aggressive emotions toward the sick person infringes the precept of unlimited, unselfish caring that is expected of us, especially if the person is emotionally close. When aggression within the caring person arises with more or less clarity, it invokes anxiety that the sick person might uncover the intent of unwillingness that accompanies the nursing activity. We therefore wish that such emotions would not impair our behavior or the complementarity in our relation to the sick person. Still, undeniably we have such impulses and vigorously undertake to keep such unsanctioned emotions under control. Their control, from the point of view of the perceiving I, is not limited to willfully driving them back. Control includes repression in the psychological sense of the term. This can be illustrated by an example Freud gives in his essay “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.”8 It deals with a man who has taken on the role of caregiver for his dying father.

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A man who had once nursed his father during a long and painful mortal illness, told me that in the months following his father’s death he had repeatedly dreamt that his father was alive once more and that he was talking to him in his usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had really died, only without knowing it. The only way of understanding this apparently non-sensical dream is by adding “as the dreamer wished” or “in consequence of his wish” after the words “that his father had already died”, and by further adding “that he [the dreamer] wished it” to the last words. The dream-thought then runs: it was a painful memory for him that he had been obliged to wish for his father’s death (as a release) while he was still alive, and how terrible it would have been if his father had had any suspicion of it! What we have here is thus the familiar case of self-reproaches after the loss of someone loved, and in this instance the self-reproach went back to the infantile significance of death-wishes against the father.9

The completion of the sentences by the formulations “as the dreamer wished” and “in consequence of his wish” lets us know that the man, remembering the former situation during his dreams, had thought his father should die while he nursed him. At that time, the thought had the meaning that his father was to be released from his pain. Though it expresses compassion for the father, the man condemned himself for having the thought. The dream does not contain the positive meaning of the father’s release from his suffering, i.e., the man’s thought while nursing his father. Only the aggressive meaning is preserved, but it would be unrecognizable if Freud had not laid it open by completing sentences that belong to the reported dream, that is, by adding that the father had died “in consequence of his wish” and that the dreamer had “wished (it).”10 The example demonstrates how the death wish and highly esteemed attitudes meet in our culture. The abyss of annihilating wishes against a beloved person—patricide—opens on one side, while on the other, self-reproaches arising from a deed never carried out are recognized as responsible for the sense of deficiency the son experienced during the time he nursed his father. The annihilating deed exists only in the man’s fantasy, but from it arises the culturally exceptional attitude of the son, namely, that his inner responses tended to generalization toward everyone.11 Without hesitation one can say that guilt feelings nourished in this way would stimulate all the more unselfish integrative turns toward others; their motive is, so to say, imagined murder. Even if one subtracts the neurotic exaggeration from what is going on, one becomes aware how the killing taboo sets free social forces connected to the care for others and, in general, the cultural precept of brotherly love (charity).

Charity, the Killing Taboo, and the Collective Ban on Killing With its deep anchorage, the killing taboo has cohesive effects on the relationships among individuals. But it is accompanied by a lack of clarity und uncertainty regarding the meaning aggressive expressions acquire on the level

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of social interaction. The dreamer who could have modeled for Freud’s essay about “Civilization and Its Discontents”12 (1930) wins his highly civilized level at the—complicating—cost that value internalization does not erase the forbidden wish, in spite of deep internalization of cultural demands. Instead, the wish comes under the influence of psychological repression and is preserved as a deeply internalized layer of the psyche Insofar as Freud developed a model of social integration through his theory of culture, he lays bare the fact that cohesion is built on unstable psychological grounds, and that it is therefore susceptible to disturbances from which it must be re-secured over and over again. The killing taboo forms the centerpiece of the precept of brotherly love. The taboo against killing preserves the wish to kill in a decentered manner. It implies that the ban on killing, while not extinguishing the wish to kill altogether, displaces its goal and in this way keeps it virulent. The resulting ambivalence remains active: it is impossible to fulfill the expectation included in the precept of charity, for brotherly love concerns not only the needy stranger as in the biblical narration of the Samaritan,13 but also one’s enemy. The precept demands that even an enemy be included in the community of those upon whom we turn our love—despite the knowledge of our being endangered by him. This high expectation led Freud to speak of a “greater imposition” by which culture constantly demands too much of the individual.14 The precept of charity increases our obligation to love our neighbor to a point where its fulfillment is unrealizable. One’s own survival and that of the enemy stand in each other’s way and eventually exclude each other. Each refusal to pay more respect to the life of the enemy than the interest in one’s own survival recommends, violates the precept of charity. Because we can fulfill the precept only through repression of all that would remind us of the other person’s humanity—if we deal with him as enemy—we burden ourselves with guilt. This guilt draws us into subsequent acts that do damage to us, as in the case of the man tormented by the dream about his father. The rigor of the precept becomes apparent in relation to the social object in interaction. The normative precept of charity is violated if I “overlook” or “forget” something and evade my obligation to provide active help. The killing taboo is violated if I think the wish to kill unconsciously, but the consequence of this unconscious meaning in interaction is undetermined and, as a rule, remains unelucidated— except in that its repeated occurrence is analyzed internally. Something different is meant by the ban on killing, by which the community prohibits—under given circumstances, in a given situation—deadly violence and reserves the punishment of the offenders to itself. The collective ban on killing is independent of the moral obligation that arises from guilt and is experienced individually. It is looked upon as being complied with if an invisible, inner intention to kill goes along with observable obedience, and more so if an unconscious death wish diffuses in guilt—but the wish is of no importance compared to maintaining obedience toward the ban on killing. From the per-

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spective of the ban on killing, an act need not be a violation. While, from the point of view of charity and the killing taboo, it is a more ore less heavy—factual or supposed—violation of normative expectations, as when one “overlooks,” “forgets,” “evades,” etc., the ban may function, though the social relationship at which it is aimed is damaged or seriously disturbed. From this also follows that the outer, observable obedience does not reveal to us whether it was merely inappropriate to deal with a situation in this or that way, or whether the deed is held to be detestable, that is, rejected because of an internalized moral orientation. Because of this intransparency, the ban on killing should be specified by its subsuming function in a collectivity. It serves the social control of large social groups. It is unimportant to its successful functioning whether or not the members detest a murderous deed, as long as they do not commit any, react to the threat of punishment with obedience, and do not refuse to obey. This is what Georg Simmel probably had in mind when he maintained at the beginning of the twentieth century that in modern mass societies, directives handed out ex negativo become most obligatory in setting behavioral expectations in advance. In Simmel’s opinion, “the more prohibitive and restrictive … kinds of conduct”15 have a higher chance of being accepted by large groups of people and achieving more general social recognition than norms that are conceptualized positively and deduced from the precept of charity. The socially integrative aptitude of the ban on killing arises, according to Simmel, from the “particular circumstance” “[t]hat the opposite of prohibition is by no means always a command, but often only permission.”16 This means that for the individual’s orientation it becomes more important to find a more socially accepted expression concerning the idea or deed of killing than what the ban is aimed at, namely, the killing itself. The integrational superiority of the ban on killing as compared to the killing taboo arises from the negatory norm, because under it different social categories of people can be subsumed—those whom only sanctions prohibit from violating the ban, and those who could do without the ban because it is replaced by an inner taboo that performs the prohibiting function. Regarding its acceptance, the ban on killing includes those who have never built up an inhibition against killing as well as those who have internalized the ban and submitted murderous wishes to “thought … obeying these elementary norms,” as Simmel says,17 or who committed them to repression, as Freud might have said.18 The variants of social control—both the modification of the death wish according to internalization and repression in the frame of neuroses-generating mechanisms, and the check on annihilating aggressive behavior in the framework of the subsumptive ban on killing that follows the principle of reward and punishment—have in common that they start out with the position of the other as social object but may detract from the foundation of social integration in intersubjectivity. In the first case, the revocation of the position as social

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object attacks the individual through psychological conflictuality and social entanglement,19 while in the second case, the revocation leads to a situation where the object is intentionally made the victim of all kinds of annihilating variants, including the physical. The ban on killing thus becomes a gateway for the spread of cynicism and, where the differentiation is only between what is permitted and what is forbidden, hypocrisy as well as opportunism—each time induced through ruining the other as social object.

The Social Object of Aggression The precept of charity and the ban on killing, of course, address the other as social object. Beyond differentiations that will be introduced as elaborated in the work of George H. Mead, the other is a social object because expectations are directed toward him (or her); he is called upon to react by meaningful gestures that discriminate between friend and enemy, neighbor and stranger, as close or distant to oneself. To kill somebody it must be assumed that that person has been deprived of his or her status as a social object: in the murderer’s perception, the other no longer functions as part of a world shared on common grounds of intersubjectivity. Therefore, contact with the other is constricted by a selective perception that falls below the threshold that demarcates the other as social object.20 What, then, is going on inside the actor who perceives the other in such a way that the object changes its position and becomes assigned to a negative state, resulting in meanings that are aggressive and, as a consequence, annihilating? Following Mead, action includes at least two actors: ego and alter ego. They are present to each other as social objects, which leads to the ability to experience the other. This experience is accessible as the sum of mental representations: ego develops about alter, and can be recalled by alter. Ego recalls the experience from past interactions in which alter took part. The perception of objects depends fundamentally on the distinction between physical and social objects, but it relies on the unity of the other as material and social object. Mead presupposes this unity. It enters the representation of alter ego in ego’s mind. According to Mead, this unity results from the fact that the object belongs to the same genus as ego. Neither visually nor tactilely could alter ego be experienced in the same way as ego, if it did not share with ego the physical gestures starting the interaction;21 the social object thus has a material meaning.22 When the unity of social and material object is canceled, then communication with and about that object fall apart; communication about the other will no longer include communication with the other. It is then that the other becomes available as object of an aggression that can be experienced without guilt. Because the other has been denied as a social object, ego may exempt him from shared

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cultural knowledge—to which alter actually contributes—that is, from the social and normative expectation alter correctly directs toward ego. Historically shared cultural meanings seemingly cease to exist when ego does not choose to relate to these shared achievements. But perception “organized” in this way runs the risk of reality breaking into ego’s position, and the other as accurately perceived social object becoming undeniable. Ego, therefore, has to take lavish cognitive and emotionally intense measures to maintain its constricted perception. Ego must never elucidate the problems in social agreements and matters of course that cover up the precarious relationship between imagination and reality, nor must it transform the messages actually received from alter ego into a revised attitude toward alter ego. The consequence of the distinctions made between the other’s social and material objectivity may be shown with the help of four steps. They are taken from Parsons, a social theorist mentioned earlier, who has analyzed the importance of the social object in learning processes.23 For our purposes, these steps are only referred to when unaccomplished or violating any rules by which aggression might win some influence over the action: (1) Regarding the other who has been deprived the status of social object, the answer to the question of what the object is already exists. The object acquires no meaning that could revise the way it is perceived. Concerning the other, claims are set up that depend on ideas that are cut off from the experience of what the object is. (2) Concerning the question of what the object means in an emotional sense, Parsons’s categories allow for only one answer: “aversion.”24 This aversion cannot have been produced by an other-as–social object who behaves as a motivated actor, because significance is denied to all of this other’s statements that reach any further than what has been predetermined for the other as an object. Hence, only aversion can be produced by the other’s attitude toward the alter as object. “Aversion” may be replaced by other variants of the aggressive impulse, but these variants are never introduced by the object and his or her way of being. (3) The evaluation of the object, which takes into account what the object is as well as what it means in an emotional sense, sets the seal on the situation of the other who has been deprived of social objectivity. The other as social object with continuity in time is replaced by fixation of a type to whom “aversion” or other negative meanings are attached. Intersubjectivity is not presupposed, nor may it be installed in the relation to this type. Communication with the other is replaced by communication about the other. Notification is managed through nonproblematic matters of course and includes the pretension of social exchange with the other. The exchange may proceed without any major affect, as in

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the one Robert Musil presents in the conversation between the protagonist of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich, and Count Leinsdorf. They consider the advantages of oriental dressing for the Viennese Jews, and a Jewish state.25 The exchange can also be continued as intervention in the social status of the stereotyped other, as is the case with ghettos, internment, or deportation. A closer look at the social object makes visible—alongside the regulating function of exquisite cultural precepts and the anomie-prone ban on killing— another gateway for aggression in the process of social integration. Once the threshold of civilization is lowered by the ban on killing, the object of perception can be reduced to a material instead of a social object. Non-revisability of once-ascribed meanings—meanings that cannot be cathected—and negative stereotyping of the object build the basis for variants of isolated or totally annihilating interventions in the lives of others. Somebody may “overlook” and “forget” the other; the other also may be “avoided” or the contact with the other “refrained from”; he or she is “excluded,” “removed,” “eliminated,” and “exterminated” independent of the psychological point from which the antiSemitic individual departs. Regarding the question of the social and psychological foundations especially of aggressive selves (who isolate or annihilate the other), the way a social group relates the stereotyped other to itself is decisive. I will assume that the stereotyped other is imbedded in a special structural relationship between him or her and the social group that has undertaken the stereotyping. The model for this relationship is the stranger, as described by Georg Simmel in his famous essay of 1908.26

The Model: Group and Stranger Complementarities within the setting of the sick role advance the chance to recover. The question of unintentional side effects like the symptom of repeated dreaming in the case of the man who nursed his father does not, as it seems, come up seriously. The complementarity that Simmel uncovers in the relation between group and stranger is of an entirely different nature. In this case social cohesion is realized by the reverse, by exclusion of the stranger through the group. In his essay on the stranger Simmel presents to us the group as a community that creates its situated opposite. The opposite position is held by the stranger. Although alter is a stranger only from the perspective of the group—he (or she) is a part of the life world, and the structures of meaning to which the group refers apply to him as well; he is “a member of the group itself ”27—the essay opens with the position of the stranger. Different from the wanderer who travels around, the stranger is one who does not yet move on. He is “the man who comes today and stays tomor-

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row.”28 The man who comes today and announces about the uncertain future of tomorrow that he will stay, combines the independence of one who decides when to move on with the indeterminate freedom of one who retains in himself the intention to pass over from a single actual local fixation to an enduring tie to this locality. The restrained attitude implied in this position is displayed as social distance, an element that is constitutive to the role of the stranger. Simmel connects it with culturally high-standing qualifications—with distinctive objectivity, with messages of the unknown existing in faraway regions, and with appreciated general goals of cognition. These qualifications are presented by Simmel as something positive that the stranger adds to the group. He contributes his specified mobility to the group that is characterized “through established ties of kinship, locality, or occupation.”29 He recognizes that “no native was free from entanglement in family interests and factionalism”30 through his committed objectivity. He helps the commonality that is “general within the relation, [but—K.B.] specific and incomparable with respect to all those on the outside”31 and changes it to a “more abstract nature.”32 Through him, all qualifications that he and the group, with its particularistic interests and ties, nevertheless share are established on generally valid grounds. Still, the relation between group and stranger turns out to be unfavorable for the latter: The stranger is close to us insofar as we feel between him and ourselves similarities of nationality or social position, of occupation or of general human nature. He is far from us insofar as these similarities extend beyond him and us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people.33

It becomes clear to a certain extent that the relation between group and stranger is built on a dichotomy. It arises from the perception of what a lone stranger and group—“a great many”—have in common. In the limiting case they only share what is unspecific to each of them, namely, the belonging to the human species or—should the stranger have a social position as a businessman from a foreign country—to the economic background and global cultural meanings. Both—belonging to the human species and global cultural background—may become a precondition and gateway through which social destruction enters the relation between group and stranger. The group consolidates its superiority by loosening its commitment to the relationship with the stranger. Its particularity that is emphasized as extraordinary is, from the group’s perspective, the wholeness of the society, which it believes to form and from where it faces the stranger. Between these two factors of nearness and distance, however, a peculiar tension arises, since the consciousness of having only the absolutely general in common has exactly the effect of putting a special emphasis on that which is not common.34

Insofar as the stranger brings together traces of the modern individual, the principle of social integration grasps him through his isolation. His isolated

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individuality confirms to him that he will not come up in the group because of his newness But it hides indefiniteness and one-sidedness. Initially brought about by the group, these qualities now invite the group to take hold of the stranger. How does this taking-hold-of turn the social reality of group and stranger into structuring by an enduring dichotomy? The following aspects of an answer result from the considerations above and are summarized on a model level of argumentation. (1) The ubiquity of what group and stranger have in common without joining their forces, namely, belonging to the human genus, may have enormous consequences. The questioning of the nature of the human genus is open to different ways of answering it, depending on whether the answer concerns the relation to the stranger or to the identity of the group. The communication among its members might be influenced to a high degree by their perception of the stranger as material object. The outline of action is not tied to turning one’s attention to the stranger as an alter ego. In the perspective of the group, his humanity might be reduced to, for example, him as specimen of the genus. Thinking in the dimension of species—be it human or subhuman— exposes the stranger to a discourse that excludes the especially humane qualities of interaction in the relation to him. (2) After the group has de-individualized its perception of the other, its evaluative attitude determines how it will instill equality between the stranger and itself. The group communicates about the stranger in a way that stereotypes him (on the level of different species, for example) either negatively or positively. What the group, from its perspective, regards as his type influences the way its members-as-actors react to the stranger, and may lead to his annihilation. (3) The stranger is, in fact, neither the sole specimen of a genus nor a deindividualized type. Because of his social distance he disposes of qualifications that others desire also: objectivity, bringing novelty, advancing the general. The group acquires what it desires from the stranger “rapaciously.”35 The decentered perception of the stranger within the group induces loss of cultural and normative inhibitions. The group becomes able to take away from him what he owns. But, as a matter of fact, the stranger does not own exclusively what others desire from him. At least to a certain extent, what he owns belongs to the stock of common culture and is accessible to all. Insofar as the group accepts this third premise—that of culture as the property of all—as not being accessible to all, it has subjugated the modernity of the stranger to its pre-contemporaneous particularism. (4) The object that is meaningful psychologically regarding its members does not coincide with the object that has become agreed on within

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the collectivity. The latter has to be suited to satisfy heterogeneous needs. This function is fulfilled by the social exchange within the group. The exchange establishes the object in a desocialized state through an unproblematized, phraseological arrangement of matters of course. The group members, in contrast, “legitimate” their eliminatory habits with the “false” need to protect themselves against attacks by the stranger. The members ensure themselves of the correctness of their attack on the stranger by means of the threat felt through the stranger. Supposedly, they forestall the danger arising from the stranger and in this way impose their own superiority over him. On this breeding ground psychological mechanisms prosper, with the effect that one’s own aggression is perceived as located within the stranger. This concerns especially psychological mechanisms that are described as defense in psychoanalysis: projection, splitting, and narcissistic self-esteem. (5) It goes further than Simmel’s approach allows for, to underline the part aggression plays in the dichotomization of group and stranger. Aggression contributes the urgency and affective quality of aversion, antipathy, and—under certain circumstances—hateful rejection to the dichotomous relation between group and stranger. This—in the end physically—violent repulsion of the stranger arises not from the power somebody has at hand because of his dominant position, but from the psychological potential of structuring aggression within social relations, by which the group submits the stranger to itself and comes to confront him. Projection36 is regarded as the center-piece of the process of dichotomization between group and stranger. But at first it creates nothing more than an individual, unconscious object representation equipped with negative meanings of the object. In a further step, the object is shifted from the interior to the outside, i.e., its negative meaning becomes attached to an “external object.”37 The external object must not be confused with the real other, the stranger. Communication within the group relates to the former. It proceeds under specific conditions, namely, that ideas about the stranger that are not subjected to testing reality, contain—in the case of projection—delusional elements. Communication under these conditions serves to reassure the members that within the group they share the opinion, according to which aggression is initiated by the excluded group. What Parsons calls the evaluation of the (social) object is reduced to the imagined equipment of the other with supposedly dangerous features; confirmation by the factual behavior of alter cannot be expected. Further aspects would have to be considered, however, so that a whole group of people can receive the makeup of the stranger and acquire the position of attacker and persecutor. Only the following will be named:38

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(1) While its particularism is hidden to it, the group stabilizes its universalized superiority by withholding fundamental rights from the excluded circles. (2) Because it sees its limited cultural basis of interaction as universally valid, the group must spend an enormous amount of energy and produce the right mood to shield its normative standards against factually valid and culturally founded precepts and bans;39 their violation must become as unrecognizable as possible. From this it follows that the discriminated circle does not obtain any influence that would enable it to correct the scotomized perception within the group. It therefore may seem to the group that the system of cultural values created by it is reinforcing universal values. (3) The history of the relation between the group and the excluded segment will be written and rewritten depending on the background of the social problems that are dealt with by structural dichotomization. I assume that the history of the portrayals, especially of anti-Semitism, is discontinuous depending on the self-interpretation a group reinforces by presenting its relation to the excluded group. (4) If the group is able to make its particularism look as though it is the general culture, and if it has annihilated the other as social object, even the other’s physical existence may be extinguished. Nothing preserves the excluded circle under certain conditions from becoming socially inexistent for the perceiving group, or to be swamped by ideas that elude the influence of experiential facts and the corrective effect that arises from the meaningful resistance these facts produce in front of the projective character all perception depends on.40 The general validity of cultural values is not able to keep precepts and bans from slackening affectivity regarding inner orientation, and regarding the sanctioning of violations. Multilayered aggression concentrates on groups of people with negative “characteristics.” This aggression is socially destructive and is connected “intimately” with processes of “successful” integration of a society.

Eliminatory Anti-Semitism: Goldhagen Revisited Simmel’s distinction between group and stranger hides a division between premodern and modern components of society as a whole. The stranger is sort of a pulse generator moving kinship relations and local and occupational ties to the secondary rank of socially important achievements. If one deals with the Germans during the period of National Socialism as being in the position of the group that advanced the persecution of the Jews, then the following aspects

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have to be considered at present: first, that fighting against the Jews meant rejecting modernity, and second, that the clash with the Jews took on the multilayered active and annihilatory character of German eliminative anti-Semitism, which Goldhagen intended to elaborate. On the one hand, Goldhagen’s approach is comparable to investigations by Helmuth Plessner,41 Robert Jay Lifton,42 Zygmunt Bauman,43 Giorgio Agamben,44 and others who underline the continuity between National Socialism and the preceding historical period with its preparatory conditions. On the other hand, Goldhagen was, when he wrote his book, resolved to present the Germans as actors, that is, motivated perpetrators. This intention is revealed in the chapter on “Explaining the Perpetrators’ Actions: Assessing the Competing Explanations.”45 In his preface to the German edition Goldhagen opposes a view in which the Germans would have been passive personnel holding the will of a criminal regime. “I would like to explicitly oppose the frequently taken position, that the Germans had acted automatically, like willingless little wheels in a machinery, so to speak.”46 Goldhagen rejects this view as incompatible with the historical facts and as implausible in relation to the extensive character of the Holocaust, which is unexplainable without the assumption that assistance came from all parts of society. This far, the objection of the author is comprehensible, and Karp and I affirmed his view. However, Goldhagen neglects factors like the social constitution of the relation between Germans and Jews during the given historical situation, where there arose a mass society on the basis of industrial capitalism and on a specific history of religion and ideas.47 Only if one takes into consideration this frame of reference does it become apparent how the Germans participated in the genocidal crime of the Holocaust. Goldhagen does not accept the distinction between perpetrator, supporter, and victim. The supporters are subsumed under the perpetrators as well as the non-Jewish German victims, as soon as the question of their participation comes up. By not following this common distinction, the author frees himself, on the one hand, of difficulties that are the consequence of the distinction, because it opens the chance for exculpation. On the other hand, it then would have been necessary to differentiate among the perpetrators. Goldhagen does not do this. He introduces a view of social action that ties the Germans down to explicit and willing readiness to eliminate the Jews, as well as to a meaning of guilt that applies to the justiciability of crime only.48 “Genau so wesentlich [wie die politische Führung – K.B.] war […] die große Bereitschaft der meisten gewöhnlichen Deutschen, die rabiate Verfolgung der Juden […] zunächst zu tolerieren, zu unterstützen, oft sogar tätig daran mitzuwirken und sich schließlich […] auch an der Ermordung der Juden zu beteiligen.”49 Guilt that does not result from a concrete act, then, would not become a considerable element of action. In this way, Goldhagen restricts the thesis of

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the German who actively participates in the persecution of Jews by reducing him to an actor who exclusively participates through his will. “In Deutschland wie in den USA werden Menschen nicht dafür schuldig gesprochen und entsprechend gesetzlich belangt, daß sie andere Menschen hassen oder Verbrechen gutheißen, die andere verübt haben – sofern sie das, zumindest in der Bundesrepublik, nicht öffentlich äußern. Auch der bloße Vorsatz oder die Bereitschaft, bei passender Gelegenheit ein Verbrechen zu verüben, reichen zu einer Verurteilung nicht aus”50 It is easy to comprehend that Goldhagen wanted to show that anti-Semitism during the period of National Socialism united the German people and led to aggressively affirmative activity ending in the persecution and elimination of the Jews. But he narrowed the basis of argumentation within the theory of action so far that it could be turned down by his opponents as untenable. The problem of interpreting his sources that came up in this way becomes evident even in the first pages of his introduction. Captain Wolfgang Hoffmann, who had the command of three companies of Police Battalion 101, refused, according to a letter he wrote that the author cites, to obey an order to persecute Jews and let the men in his company sign a statement that would have obligated them to carry such orders out.51 Goldhagen interprets this refusal as “moral autonomy,”52 in the name of which the captain would stand up for their resolve. Moral autonomy becomes a central argument in supporting the thesis that each German had enough room to maneuver, but would only use it in favor of willing participation in the extermination of the Jews. His voluntaristic approach prevents Goldhagen from taking into account further meanings that also would be compatible with his intention. Had the captain really refused to obey a command? Could he not count on his superiors to reward his decision as an especially firm one, to honor and upgrade him in his group, while the murder of thousands of Jews that this same man had undertaken fell outside the frame of reference within which his refusal was situated? Such a—more coherent, I think—interpretation is supported by the model developed here. It departs from the position that the Jews had been radically excluded from the community of those who claimed sole membership in the human species by removing all others from the culture they had believed was theirs exclusively. This lethal attitude or annihilating perception is the condition of active and energetically taking part in murder. Emphasizing one’s own resolve assures the individual of belonging to a superior group; the puffed-up gesture serves to remind the individual that it was necessary to reassure oneself of belonging to the group. In contrast to Goldhagen’s views, the active nature of participation in National Socialist society is not to be derived solely from willingly using maneuvering room to move in order to commit murderous crimes. The attitudes must have belonged to a spectrum, reaching from the will to exterminate the Jews to looking aside and forgetting. In principle, attitudes that were less visibly elimi-

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native cannot be regarded as less active. The extreme case of the police captain who murdered Jews demonstrates the decreasing influence that repression of the death wish (precept of charity and killing taboo) has on social integration as compared to the formal inhibition by the collective ban on killing. Behind a front of decency, etc., mutually assured within the group, a scenario of murder that is concealed in many ways seemingly leads a life of its own.53 Factually, this scenario is dissociated, and social integration is tied to heterogeneous motives—murderous ones among them—and corrupted by them. Farsighted Simmel supposed that in mass societies the ban on killing was superior to functionally comparative positive precepts because it simplifies their complex demands and reduces them by playing off what is permitted against what is forbidden. The community sets the limits of what is allowed farther in relation to the Jews. What is allowed within the framework of the ban on killing becomes variable, extending from the death wish, which may pass the border of repression relatively unchanged, to the murderous deed. The deed vanishes in a superstructure of socially ventilated matters of course to the point when it is almost invisible. The ban to kill may be violated by somebody who differs from the dreamer who nursed his dying father only in that he is no longer frightened by his murderous thought and no longer condemns himself because of it. It may also be violated by a murderer who never had erected an inner inhibition against killing. It probably was in this context that Freud denied that conscience was an “inflexible judge.” When the community no longer raises objections, there is an end, too, to the suppression of evil passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that one would have thought them impossible.54

Under conditions of loosened precepts concerning the coexistence of the other, murderous thinking and acting may, therefore, be enacted independently from the individual who is able to mobilize moral scruples.55 The destruction of the other as social and his reduction to a material object make dissociation possible. It opens, to the repressed but not inexistent murderous wish, a perspective on the murderous act, which may be his own or somebody else’s. Yet one need not have associated with the murderous deed any meaning in which he who was killed would have been conveyed as a social object. One need not have known anything about him and will not miss anything about him that might cause mourning.

Notes * This paper is the translated version of my essay “Über soziale und psychische Grundlagen des Antisemitismus: Daniel J. Goldhagen ‘Hitlers willige Vollstrecker’ revisted,” Handlung Kultur Interpretation 14, no. 1 (2005): 296–318.

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1. Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York 1996), 170. 2. Ibid., 103. 3. When in an earlier essay Alexander Karp and I presented our view about Daniel Goldhagen’s book (Karola Brede and Alexander C. Karp, “Eliminatorischer Antisemitismus: Wie ist die These zu halten?” Psyche 50 (1996): 606–628), we distinguished between linguistic structures that facilitate smooth communication and negative attitudes that actors bring into the horizon of social interaction by virtue of their communicative abilities. I would not maintain this distinction any more. It situates the psychological dimension of aggression contained in the destructiveness of National Socialist society merely on the level of negative matters of course. We could not make it seem convincing that the negative of aggression enters the social system only on the level of unproblematized matters of course and not also on the level of the processes within which communication takes place in general. In that case, though, communication does not function smoothly, in principle. 4. In Parsons’s structural-functionalist theory of society the problem mentioned remains beneath the surface of social order, which is preexistent to its irritations. According to him, libidinal cathexis causes common convictions to result in cohesion, but he presupposes for these cathected relations that they can turn away aggression successfully and definitely; the love principle takes over instead. For an account of Parsons’s position see Alexander C. Karp, Aggression in der Lebenswelt: Die Erweiterung des Parsonsschen Konzepts der Aggression durch die Beschreibung des Zusammenhangs von Jargon, Aggression und Kultur, doctoral thesis, Frankfurt/ M. 2002. 5. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London 1961), vol. 21, 59–145. 6. See in present times Dori Laub, “Der Genozid in Ruanda: Das Kaleidoskop der Diskurse aus psychoanalytischer Perspektive,” Psyche 59 (2005): 106–124. 7. Talcott Parsons, “Definitions of Health and Illness in the Light of American Values and Social Structure” (1958), in Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality (London 1964), 257-291, here 271ff. 8. Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, 213–226. 9. Ibid., 225f. 10. Freud’s proceeding by completing sentences will probably evoke doubts. However, the capacity for psychoanalytic truth cannot be judged on this level. 11. The high moral level of the caregiver son’s personality is in itself a result of denying the difference between thought and deed. This lack of distinction is the condition under which the aggressive wish cannot be disproved by the assurance that it had not been executed. 12. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents.” 13. The Samaritan, a member of a different tribe and thus free of obligations arising from his membership within the group he belongs to, takes pity on a man who has been robbed and beaten half to death, cares for his wounds, takes him to a sheltered place, and pays for his care. He who is a stranger to the tribe of the sick man practices charity under special conditions that include the sick other as a distant stranger (see Luke 10:11) From this perspective, the sick role takes up high expectations of the integrative power of love. 14. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 110. 15. Georg Simmel, “The Negative Character of Collective Behavior” (1908), in Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, transl., ed. Kurt Wolff (New York 1964), 396–401, here 397f. 16. Ibid., 398f. 17. Ibid., 400. 18. Freud, like Simmel, was concerned with the problem of how to encounter the evil through cultural enforcement. Under the impression of World War I he affirms the subsumtive effect of integration arising from the ban on killing. From his psychological perspective, he argues that egoism and aggression were not always ennobled as we would suppose. “Only a particular concatenation of circumstances will reveal that one man always acts in a good way because his instinctual inclinations compel him to, and the other is good only in so far and for so long as such

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cultural behavior is advantageous for his own selfish purposes. But superficial acquaintance with an individual will not enable us to distinguish between the two cases, and we are certainly misled by our optimism in grossly exaggerating the number of human beings who have been transformed in a cultural sense,” he wrote in 1915. See Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 273–300, here 284. 19. Emma Moersch, “Analyse eines Arbeiters mit Tötungsimpulsen,” Psyche 48 (1994): 191–247. 20. See for example Nikolaas Treurniet, “Mörderisches Schuldgefühl,” Psyche 48 (1994): 248–270. 21. George H. Mead, “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol,” Journal of Philosophy 19 (1922): 157–163, reprinted in George H. Mead, Selected Writings (Chicago 1964), 240–247; Peter Nick, “Das objektivierte Subjekt. Mead und Freud: Anthropologische Modelle des Psychischen im Vergleich,” in Herbert Barether, ed., Plädoyers für die Trieblehre: Gegen die Verarmung sozialwissenschaftlichen Denkens (Tübingen 1999), 47–83, here 54. 22. Wittgenstein’s remark is short and to the point: “A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (1945), 2nd ed. (Oxford 1958); in English, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., transl. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA, 1998), here p. 583. 23. The four steps Parsons mentions derive from the fact “that two interacting persons must be conceived to be objects to each other … These are (1) cognitive perception and conceptualization, the answer to the question of what the object is, and (2) cathexis—attachment or aversion—the answer to the question of what the object means in an emotional sense. The third mode by which a person orients himself to an object is by evaluation—the integration of cognitive and cathectic meanings of the object to form a system, including the stability of such a system over time.” Talcott Parsons, “The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems” (1952), in Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality (London 1965), 17–33, here 20. 24. Ibid. 25. “At this point Ulrich could not do otherwise than express his admiration for His Grace’s acumen, which had now also enabled him to uncover the ‘real Jew.’” Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (1930–33), vol. 2 (New York 1996), 917. 26. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger” (1908), in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago 1971), 143–149, here 148. 27. Ibid., 148. 28. Ibid., 143. 29. Ibid., 145. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 146. 32. Ibid., 146. 33. Ibid., 147. 34. Ibid., 148. 35. “But the men’s hunting and fighting are both of the same general character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior and the hunter alike reap where they have not strewn.” Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York 1899), 14. I refer to the recent study of Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt/ M. 2005). 36. Projection is an “operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes or even ‘objects’which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing.” J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Projection,” in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Language of Psycho-analysis (London 1988), 349–355, here 349. From the point of view of getting what one desires into one’s possession, devouring the other may become a mechanism that is as important as projection; see Ernst Simmel, “Antisemitismus und Massen-Psychopathologie” (1946), in Ernst Simmel, ed., Antisemitismus (Frankfurt/ M. 1993), 58–100, here 84. 37. An “external object” is different from other object representations, because it is accessible to perception and has, to a certain extent, the same psychological meaning for all members;

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they communicate about the object, but on the basis of delusion. The collectivity turns into a mass. “A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 65–143, here 116. In order to explain the persecution by the object it sometimes is maintained that the exteriorized object must fulfill the condition of being evil. But it is also possible that the shift to the outside of the object in itself induces the idea of being persecuted, i.e., without the object being qualified in a specific way. For an account of different aspects concerning the clarity of the category of projection in Freud’s theory see Laplanche and Pontalis, “Projection.” 38. The following compilation is limited to the approach I am presenting. Robert Castel, for example, chooses a different solution. He questions the integrational capacity of work within a society. He rejects terms like exclusion or elimination because of the heterogeneity of those who are subsumed under these labels. Castel prefers the term “Entkoppelung.” This term applies to all those who are not linked in temporary or long-lasting periods. Entkoppelung results from lack of social integration through work and leads to the social conditions of vagabonds, paupers, and at present, neo-paupers. Robert Castel, Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage: Eine Chronik der Lohnarbeit (Konstanz 2000). It does not include the assumption of internalized precepts and bans. 39. See the chapter “Die reine Philosophie und der Zeitgeist” in Pierre Bourdieu, Die politische Ontologie Martin Heideggers (Frankfurt/ M. 1976). 40. See the differentiation by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno between projection and pathical or false projection: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1944) (Amsterdam 1955), 22f. 41. Helmuth Plessner, Die verspätete Nation: Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes (1935/1959) (Frankfurt/ M. 1988). 42. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York 1986). 43. Zygmunt Bauman, Moderne und Ambivalenz: Das Ende der Eindeutigkeit. (Hamburg 1992). 44. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Die souveräne Macht und das nackte Leben (Frankfurt/ M. 2002). 45. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 375ff. 46. Goldhagen, “Vorwort der deutschen Ausgabe” (Foreword to the German edition), in Goldhagen, Hitlers willige Vollstrecker (Berlin 1996), 12. 47. Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German- Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933 (New York 2002); Peter G. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York 1964). 48. Goldhagen, “Vorwort der deutschen Ausgabe,” 12. 49. Ibid., 9ff, “Just as fundamental [as the political leadership – K.B.] was the […] ample willingness of most ordinary Germans […] at first place to tolerate, to support and often participate actively in the virulent persecution of the Jews … and finally even to engage in the killing of the Jews” (own translation from the German foreword) 50. Ibid., 11, “In Germany as well as in the US, people won’t be found guilty or won’t be prosecuted for hating other people or for approving crimes which were committed by others – as long as (at least in the Federal Republic of Germany) they don’t express this publicly. Even the simple intend or readiness to commit a crime at an appropriate opportunity won’t suffice to a conviction” (own translation from the German foreword) 51. Ibid., 15. 52. Ibid., 15f. 53. The success of the movie Der Untergang (directed by Oliver Hirschberg, 2004) about Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker at the end of April and the first days of May 1945 exploits this constellation. It conceptualizes Hitler’s secretary Traudl Jung, the architect Albert Speer, and the personal physician Ernst Günther Schenck as decent, correct, and loyal figures who, unlike the remaining personnel, are introduced as having more distance from the dramatic events and

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evoke the impression of not being involved. This is an attitude that still seems to be appropriate to ease the conscience of the—German?—public. About the NS-career of Schenck see Christoph Kopke “Das KZ als Experimentierfeld: Ernst Günther Schenck und die Plantage in Dachau,” in Ralph Gabriel et al. (eds.) Lagersystem und Repräsentation. Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager (Tübingen 2004), 13-28; on Speer compare the ongoing discussion initiated by Heinrich Breloer’s film Speer und Er (May 2005). 54. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” 280. 55. Thinking and acting while the effectiveness of general inhibitions is reduced probably belongs to the conditions that allow comprehension of the professionally specified actions of groups of actors who transgress the purpose of the institutions they are related to. But it does not follow from this that the social totalization of anti-Semitism during the period of National Socialism that Goldhagen examined makes it unnecessary to question the integration of the society with whose totality a group associates itself. Giorgio Agamben did not merely generalize the derailments of institutionalized medicine toward the biopolitics of National Socialism altogether. He also did not distinguish between conditions of valid, as compared to given up, inhibition of the annihilating deed through the precept of charity and the ban on killing. Because of this the “sovereign power” that National Socialism represents for Agamben applies directly to the bodies. From this perspective, the National Socialist euthanasia program would play the role of leading the way to “the practice of decision about naked life by the sovereign power” (Agamben, Homo sacer, 151; my translation.—K.B.), which belongs to modernity. Agamben overlooks that in this case biopolitics could then not be inhibited to start the extermination of all by one, the sovereign—and finally by all.

CHAPTER

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From Religious Fantasies of Omnipotence to Scientific Myths of Emancipation Freud and the Dialectics of Psychohistory* JOSÉ BRUNNER

Introduction: Freud’s Political Touch Undoubtedly, the relevance of a psychoanalytic dimension in historical understanding correlates with the importance that is attributed to anxiety and fantasy in history. In circumstances in which historical agents—both groups and individuals—conduct themselves in what seems to observers and commentators to be a rational manner, the contribution of anxiety and fantasy to their conduct is usually taken to be negligible. Only when rational explanations are no longer considered sufficient will affects such as anxiety or unconscious fantasies play a major role in an historical analysis. For instance, those concerned with historical processes of domination and submission question neither the deeper motives that make people want to dominate others—that is, exercise power “over” them—nor the reasons of people who are ready to submit to the power of others. In conventional historical analysis, social relations and power structures tend to be the ultimate units of explanation, while for psychoanalysts they are seen as in need of interpretation and explanation.1 In contrast to historians, psychoanalysts seek to excavate the unconscious anxieties and desires that may compel some people to dominate others, as well as the unconscious anxieties and desires that may make these others not only yield to domination but sometimes even actively yearn for it, and last but not least, the fantasies that both sides attach to mechanisms Notes for this section begin on page 182.

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of domination.2 As we see, the trajectories of these two approaches, the historical and the psychoanalytic, are opposed to one another. While conventional historians and political analysts reject inquiries into unconscious motivations of historical and social actors as unjustifiable and unproductive for their purposes, psychoanalysts delving into psychohistory often tend to reduce historical events and developments to the personal and psychological level. These contradictory trajectories have often led to criticism, denigration, and condemnation of psychohistory and psychopolitics on the one hand, and to protracted attempts to justify psychohistorical and psychopolitical inquiries on the other.3 This essay seeks to elucidate the logic of Freud’s inquiry into history and the processes of domination and emancipation by scrutinizing his writings on religion in general and his progressive three-stage theory of the development of humanity from animism through religion to science in particular. Of course, when one judges Freud’s writings from our own contemporary vantage point, the shortcomings of his approach to animism, religion, science, domination, and historical developments are glaringly apparent, and there is no lack of dismissive titles under which one can place them, such as sexism, scientism, elitism, reductionism, ethnocentrism, etc., which will be mentioned below. But despite the biases, blind spots, and deficiencies that are characteristic of Freud’s analysis of religion in particular and his historical perspective in general, this essay is not designed to join the chorus of Freud’s critics in relegating his analysis of religion to an archival history of ideas. Although this essay will address some of the serious problems that vitiate a Freudian psychohistory/psychopolitics, these do not form the core of its argument. Rather, this essay aims to recover the dialectical complexity of Freud’s work in order to reveal that, while the surface trajectory of Freud’s historical analysis leads from manifest, economic, and political layers of social relations to hidden, emotional, and unconscious strata of human existence, it always also carries an inverse logic in its depth, in which it continuously politicizes its subject matter by tracing desires, anxieties, and fantasies to multiple dynamics of domination, embedding the former in the latter. Thus, this essay shows that when Freud aimed to reveal religion as an Oedipal fantasy, he did not only seek to excavate its underlying unconscious desires and anxieties: by reading his analysis closely, one discovers that Freud’s psychoanalysis of religion also provides a dialectical and power-oriented political theory of history. As will be shown, Freud’s analysis is dialectical, both in the psychological insights it provides and in that it continually transcends itself, transgressing the boundaries of what is commonly taken to be psychology into the domain of politics. The notion of dialectics that informs this reading of Freud derives from the work of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who used it to denote processes in which phenomena and forces are subjected at once to a threefold transformation: they are not only abolished in their original form, but also transposed to a higher plane, where they are preserved. Thus, to call a process dialecti-

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cal denotes that a transition takes place whereby something is simultaneously done away with, elevated, and maintained, where an affirmative moment is simultaneously preserved and transcended in its negation. Hegel used the German notion “Aufhebung” to describe the result of dialectical processes, since its range of meanings includes abolition, elevation, and preservation, which can hardly be said for the English notion “sublation” that tends to be used in translations of Hegel.4 In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel uses the term “understanding” (Verstand) to designate a non-dialectical approach satisfied by fixed notions, firm distinctions, and entities that are enduring and exist in themselves.5 Understanding, in the Hegelian sense of the term, is dominated by the category of identity, which refers to everything as identical to itself and determined in its specific nature. In these terms, then, one would say that psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis and thus not historical and political analysis, while history and political analysis, since they are history and political analysis, cannot be psychoanalysis. According to Hegel, this view of things is true, but only partially so. Though entities are identical, to come to grips with the totality of being, thinking must go beyond the stage of “understanding” (Verstand) and become “reason” (Vernunft), which captures the continuous and complex dialectical self-transformation, interdependence, and interrelation of things, events, and forms of thought. This perspective guides the reading of Freud presented in this essay, suggesting that by psychoanalyzing religion, which is a social, political, and historical force, Freud not only introduced references to unconscious psychological processes into the understanding of faith but also, due to the interpenetration of the subject and the object of an analysis, unwittingly but inevitably transformed psychoanalysis into a type of social, political, and historical analysis. What, then, was the vantage point from which Freud intended to analyze religion? In a letter to Oskar Pfister, the Swiss pastor and lay analyst with whom he corresponded on psychoanalysis and faith, Freud described himself as “a completely godless Jew.”6 This much-quoted expression—which also provided the title for one of Peter Gay’s books on Freud—provides an accurate and succinct description of the perspective from which Freud formulated his bellicose critique of religion.7 This critique can be found above all in five texts that he published in the course of three and a half decades, starting in 1912–13 with “Totem and Taboo,” through “The Future of an Illusion” of 1927, “Civilization and Its Discontents” of 1930 and his lecture on “The Question of a Weltanschauung” of 1933, to “Moses and Monotheism” of 1939, the last of Freud’s writings to be published in his lifetime.8 In response, a number of religious thinkers have seen it as their duty to come to the defense of religion. As a rule these authors have chosen one of two approaches: outraged by Freud’s polemics, they have tried to protect humanity from what they regarded as a threat to society and morals, or, in a more conciliatory mood—typical of religious psychoanalysts, for instance—they

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tried to integrate Freud’s stance into an “enlightened” form of faith.9 However, there also are a substantial number of commentators who have inquired into Freud’s approach to religion from what I consider to be a more scholarly, that is, a social, historical, political, and/or philosophical outlook. These authors examined Freud’s classification of religion as an obsessional neurosis on a world-historical scale. They stressed that Freud’s outlook was androcentric and Eurocentric, since it regarded only men as historical actors and neglected other religious forms, such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. They pointed to Freud’s atheist presuppositions as well as to his identification with Moses and his preference for Judaism over Christianity. They aimed to discover the intellectual ancestors of Freud’s critique of religion by tracing it to Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer. They placed his approach to religion within the psychoanalytic theory of culture in general and depicted his view of religion as part of an ethics of renunciation. Finally, they discussed Freud’s view of science as the antagonist of religion.10 In contrast, this essay is devoted to the postulate that Freud’s analysis of religion, as well as his portrayal of the historical transition from animism through religion to science, and hence his conception of historical progress in general, are imbued with power-centered categories that endow his reading of history with a pervasively political touch that can be pictured, perhaps, as akin to the touch of King Midas of Pessinus, which turned everything that he laid his hands on into gold. However, in contrast to the mythical Greek king, who had asked Dionysus for this special gift, Freud probably was neither aware of his political touch nor would he have wanted it. Moreover, while the legend tells us that Midas’s golden touch stemmed from greed and turned out to be a curse, Freud’s political touch will be dealt with as an insightful and enriching dimension, adding a dialectical twist to his thinking.

Animism and the Dialectic of Total Control When Freud dealt with taboos, animism, and magic in “Totem and Taboo” in 1912–13, he described them primarily as expressions of collective fantasies of human omnipotence designed to counter an unbearable fear provoked by the real powerlessness of what he considered to be primitive human beings. He introduced this approach by comparing taboos to the private laws of obsessional neurotics, since both were without manifest reason and, in his words, “forcibly maintained by an irresistible fear.”11 But even though he considered taboos to be similar to obsessional neurosis in their dynamics and form, Freud warned against going too far in “carrying the comparison to the point of identity in every detail.”12 He emphasized a crucial difference between the two in their scope: while he described neuroses as “asocial structures,” he stressed that the

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“parallel sociological phenomenon” belonged to the public realm and was a “social institution” and a “cultural creation.”13 Concomitantly Freud distinguished two types of desire underlying the two parallel structures: the desire driving neuroses aimed at sexual satisfaction, while that of taboos aimed at command or control. Similarly, he juxtaposed the private neurotic prohibitions on touching a desired object with the political taboo on “dangerous contacts” with rulers, which was designed to prevent forbidden acts of hostility or domination against them, explaining that whereas “in the case of the neurosis the prohibition invariably relates to touching of a sexual kind … In the case of taboo the prohibited touching is obviously not to be understood in an exclusively sexual sense but in the more general sense of attacking (Angreifens), of getting control, (Bemächtigung) and of asserting oneself (Geltendmachens der eigenen Person).”14 In other words, Freud implied that in the public sphere desire aimed at power, and that the wish for complete hegemony was controlled by the establishment of taboos—which constituted the public counterpart to obsessive symptoms. Moreover, the notion of “omnipotence (Allmacht) of thoughts”—a term coined by Freud’s patient the Rat Man during his analysis—appears prominently in “Totem and Taboo.” Like his own “civilized” patients, Freud argued, “primitive” people believed in their magic power to determine events by means of wishes, thoughts, and words. He portrayed animism as a theory of the universe that derived from the refusal to recognize the finitude and mortality of human beings, and from what he described as the “unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world (Weltbeherrschung).”15 That Freud considered animism a worldview based on a fantasy of control and domination is also evident from the way in which he referred to its applied form: magic. Freud explained that “the principle governing magic … is the principle of the ‘omnipotence (Allmacht) of thoughts.’”16 People in early tribal societies, Freud argued, believed in the magical power of their thoughts, which “has to serve the most varied purposes—it must subject (unterwerfen) natural phenomena to the will of man, it must protect the individual from his enemies and from dangers and it must give him the power (Macht) to injure his enemies.”17 For Freud, animism was thus first and foremost a fantasy of human omnipotence. It was also the first and most childish stage in Freud’s grand scheme of the intellectual evolution of the species. According to Freud, fantasies of limitless power were a reaction to the early condition of humankind, in which it was exposed to nature without any means of understanding or defense against its forces. They could thus be seen as necessary illusions that made life bearable. They were attempts—albeit illusionary ones—to cope with anxiety and thus to overcome a traumatic situation. However, at this early stage of the cognitive, scientific, and technological development of humanity, no other means were available to reduce anxiety.

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Religion and the Dialectic of Absolute Domination Freud regarded religion as characteristic of the second stage in the cognitive growth of humanity, describing it “not as a permanent acquisition but … a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity.”18 In other words, for Freud religion formed a transitional level in a developmental sequence that contained what he called the “three great pictures of the universe: animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific.”19 In “The Future of an Illusion” Freud characterized religion, like animism, as an attempt to relieve anxiety in the face of nature by attributing human features to natural forces and endowing them with human passions. In this fashion, Freud claimed, humans, who in actual fact were helpless, no longer felt completely exposed to the inexorable power of nature: “We can apply the same methods against those violent supermen ( gewalttätigen Übermenschen) outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of part of their power (Macht).”20 Freud emphasized that the humanization of the natural elements derived from an attempt to gain command—albeit illusionary—over them. As he put it: “it is in fact natural to man to personify everything that [man] wants to understand in order later to control it (psychical mastering as a preparation for physical mastering).” Of course, Freud strongly opposed such an anthropomorphic vision of nature. In his view, humanity had to learn that “[o]bscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men’s fate; the system of rewards and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe (Weltherrschaft) seems not to exist.” In opposition to the religious outlook, Freud advocated the objectification of nature. In this respect Freud was a typical representative of Enlightenment thought, aiming at the disenchantment of the world and the substitution of cozy illusions by instrumental knowledge. Science demanded the renunciation of feelings of closeness and belonging to nature, replacing them with the severe acknowledgement of an unbridgeable distance between humans and nature. However, Freud’s claim was not simply and generally that the religious frame of mind tended to humanize nature in an illusory fashion. His point was much more specific and focused on the way in which religious man attributed paternal features to natural forces: When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers ( fremde Übermächte), he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness. The defense against childish helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) is what lends its characteristic features to the adult’s reaction to the helplessness (Hilflosig-

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keit) which he has to acknowledge – a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.21

This process came most clearly to the fore in monotheist religions, for, as Freud stressed, “[n]ow that God was a single person, man’s relation to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father.”22 Already in “Totem and Taboo” Freud had placed the father-son relationship in the center of his genealogy of totemic religions, declaring the totem animal to be a father substitute.23 In fact, in “Totem and Taboo” Freud had not only set religion for the first time in the middle of his three-stage developmental sequence of humanity’s attempt to master nature; he had also provided a more explicitly political explanation for the emergence of religion with his famous tale of the primal horde, which he was to recapitulate and develop to its full extent toward the end of his life in “Moses and Monotheism.” Freud’s famous story of the primal horde told of a revolt of a band of brothers who had lived under the sexually oppressive rule of an absolutist father/tyrant, rose up against him in order to commit incest, and killed and cannibalized him. However, as soon as they had committed parricide for the sake of incest, they imposed restrictive rules on themselves that denied all of them the authority of the father and the pleasures of incest. According to Freud’s interpretation of totemic religion, out of remorse the sons symbolically reinstated the dead father in his position of authority as the superhuman totem animal, making him posthumously more powerful than he had ever been during his lifetime. At the same time they also continued to reenact their crime in the form of rituals, such as totem meals, in which they symbolically continued to cannibalize their father. Rather than the continuous revolt against the father, however, Freud emphasized the “deferred obedience (nachträglichen Gehorsam)” expressed in the father’s symbolic resurrection as totem animal.24 In Freud’s view it “embodied the unlimited power (Machtfülle und Unbeschränktheit) of the primal father against whom they had once fought as well as their readiness to submit to him.”25 By submitting themselves to the totem animal the brothers not only concluded a “covenant with their father” after his death,26 by exaggerating the power of the dead father into imaginary dimensions, they also posthumously extended the scope of paternal authority beyond human limits: “The dead father became stronger than the living one had been.”27 As a whole, then, Freud’s discourse provides two genealogies of religion, both of which explain religions as fantasies of absolute power, modeled on the figure of the father as he appeared to the child—according to Freud, of course. In “The Future of an Illusion” Freud accounted for the need for such fantasies primarily by humans’ traumatic lack of power in the face of nature’s superior forces, driving them to fantasize an invisible father who could both control these forces and be accessible to the pleas of humans. In “Totem and Taboo” and “Moses and Monotheism” he depicted these fantasies above all as

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a response to the, in his eyes, no less traumatic loss of archaic political/paternal authority. In “Totem and Taboo” he described totemic religions as replaying the political drama in which the power of an individual was overcome by a group, which, however, could not maintain a stable social order without subjecting itself to paternal authority. Then, in “Moses and Monotheism,” he presented later religious forms as reconstructions of past political regimes, that is, as Kingdoms in Heaven. At this final stage of his theorizing Freud not only depicted the totem as a representation of the dead father but also explained that mother-goddesses later appeared in the wake of a short interlude of matriarchy, which he postulated as following the primal parricide. In “Totem and Taboo” Freud did not yet explain the emergence of mother-deities, but in “Moses and Monotheism” he argued that they emerged to compensate women for their loss of the real political power they had held temporarily after the murder of the primal father.28 In his view, polytheism, with its “numerous, mutually restrictive” male gods, symbolically recreated in turn the communal rule of the brothers that he thought had existed after a short matriarchal period.29 Finally, in “Moses and Monotheism” Freud also portrayed “the world-empire of the Pharaohs as the determining cause of the emergence of the monotheist idea.”30 As he explained: “In Egypt … monotheism grew up as a by-product of imperialism: God was a reflection of the Pharaoh who was the absolute ruler of a great world-empire.”31 Thus, while in “Totem and Taboo” Freud characterized the origins of the totem paradigmatically as the sons’ compensation for the loss of their protective father/ruler, that is, as stemming from anxiety and remorse, in “Moses and Monotheism” he described deities as a compensation for the loss of a political authority and as an eternalized reflection of an authoritarian political structure that no longer existed in reality. In all these instances Freud deciphered the meaning of religious rituals and credos both as expressions of an unconscious desire for authority and domination—for the sake of order and protection—and as disguised collective memories of past patterns of domination. These desires and memories of power structures that had disappeared from the real world led them to be “aufgehoben,” in the Hegelian triple meaning of the term, that is, abolished in their original earthly form, but at the same time also elevated to a higher, metaphysical level and eternalized in Heaven. Although Freud did not elaborate on the mechanisms of transposition involved in the patterning of religious forms, in all these instances he clearly presented religion as container of a desire for political and familial authority structures that were lost, of a many-faceted collective historical memory as well as a fantasy. When speaking of Freud’s approach to religion, one has to be aware that he never referred to it either as being the disguised expression of a historical truth or a wish-fulfilling figment of imagination; rather, he inevitably bridged the gap between memory and fantasy by regarding religion as driven by the attempt to compensate for the memory of a traumatic loss through the

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fantastic reconstruction of what had been lost. In this respect Freud’s discussion in “Totem and Taboo” and “Moses and Monotheism” parallels the account of “The Future of an Illusion,” where he emphasizes that the humanization of the forces of nature followed the pattern of infantile father-son relations, thus reviving the memory of a past hierarchical relationship as much as projecting a fantasy onto the natural world. For Freud the psychoanalytic debunking of God as an exalted father and of faith as deriving from infantile helplessness was the unique contribution that his science could make to the critique of religion, which had formed a current of European thought since the Enlightenment. As he explained, his aim was to show that religion, which humanity considered “the highest, most precious, and most sublime thing that the human spirit has produced,”32 was not based on divine revelation but had its roots in the wishful father-fantasies that stemmed from the helplessness of early childhood, both of the individual and of the species. With this supplement, Freud proclaimed, the modern, scientific critique of religion was finally complete; as he put it, his psychology of religion was to be “[t]he last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung.”33

A Dialectic of Emancipation As long as Freud dealt with religion as a transitional stage in a developmental sequence, he did not pronounce it pathological. As he stated in “The Future of an Illusion,” he did not expect “our wretched, ignorant, and downtrodden ancestors” to solve the “difficult riddles of the universe.”34 In his view, in its early developmental stages humanity had no other choice but to produce religious illusions in order to escape anxiety. However, the advent of modernity, that is, of the scientific age, turned religion for Freud into a phenomenon that had to be superseded, for the possibility of scientific thought and practice indicated that humanity had reached powers of cognition and action that allowed and necessitated the transcendence of the limits that religious belief systems imposed on humans. His concern was that while religious fantasies could provide relief and consolation, the effect was that of all neurotic escapes: it prevented humanity from attaining maturity by maintaining unnecessary and harmful prohibitions, and by thwarting skepticism and curiosity: Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner – which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing (gewaltsame Fixierung) them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.35

Again, in “The Future of an Illusion”: “When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him

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and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.”36 Freud also stated explicitly that he held religious education responsible for “the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult”;37 and like Marx, he compared religion to a narcotic.38 Freud’s problem with religion was, then, its continued presence in modern society. Religion was not only a fantasy of power for him, but also a powerful fantasy, perpetuating powerlessness by limiting human thought and action. Freud’s lecture on “The Question of a Weltanschauung” of 1933, in which he elaborated at great length on his scientific credo, also presented religion as a power that had to be fought by science. In his words, “The struggle of the scientific spirit against the religious Weltanschauung is, as you know, not at an end: it is still going on to-day under our eyes.”39 He argued that religion had no “right” to exclude itself from scientific scrutiny. “What is in question,” he claimed, “is not in the least an invasion (Übergriff ) of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion (Übergriff ) by religion of the sphere of scientific thought.”40 In demanding a privileged position outside the bounds of science, religion attempted to impose limits on the domain of critical thought. This, Freud declared, was “an invasion (Übergriff ) which must be repulsed in the most general interest.”41 The metaphoric mold of this passage is significant. It shows that Freud regarded the very attempt to define a realm of human thought and action as being located beyond the reach of science as an “Übergriff,” a violation or infringement upon the jurisdiction of science. Indeed, time and again Freud stressed as a particular merit of psychoanalysis the fact that it left no realm of mental activity outside its scope. As he pointed out, even in phenomena such as dreams, slips of tongue, hysterical symptoms, or jokes, “where hitherto nothing but the most freakish capriciousness has seemed to prevail, psycho-analytic research has introduced law, order and connection or has at least allowed us to suspect their presence where its work is still incomplete.”42 At last, in “The Future of an Illusion,” Freud admitted that science not only defended its own territory but actively sought to enter into the terrain of religion; in Freud’s words of 1927: The scientific spirit generates a certain posture towards matters of this world; before matters of religion it stops for a while, hesitates, at last there too crosses the threshold. In this process there is no stopping; the more the treasures of our knowledge become accessible to people, the more defection from religious belief will spread, at first only from its obsolete, offensive vestments, but then from its fundamental presuppositions as well.43

Common to all these passages is their juxtaposition of science and religion in terms of a power struggle and their presentation of the rule of science as inherently and necessarily absolutist, which cannot allow any room for religious claims. In Freud’s eyes science could suffer no other realms of cognition, unless they were powerless and harmless, such as philosophy or art. As he stated un-

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equivocally: “It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromise or limitations, that research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and that it must be relentlessly critical if any other power (Macht) tries to take over part of it.” From this political perspective, Freud considered religion to be important as a “mass delusion (Massenwahn),” hence he dealt only with what he called the religion of “the common man (der gemeine Mann),” which he proclaimed as “the only religion which ought to bear that name.”44 As he pointed out, he had no business with the gods of the philosophers, who had been robbed of their strength and were turned into “vague abstractions which they [the philosophers] have created for themselves,” so that what remained was “nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.” In this context Freud compared religion to art and philosophy, since he considered the latter two also as attempts to cope with feelings of powerlessness and thus motivated by wishes for power and authority that in turn led to illusionary constructions. He claimed that philosophy had retained animistic features, such as “the belief that the real events in the world take the course which our thinking seeks to impose on them,” and he characterized philosophy as “animism without magical actions.”45 Similarly, art constituted for him “a region half-way between a reality which frustrates wishes and the wish-fulfilling world of the imagination – a region in which, as it were, primitive man’s strivings for omnipotence are still in full force.”46 Thus, Freud’s politicizing discourse presented the aim of the artist in creating an imaginary world as an attempt to transcend the limits of his social power and authority, in order to become “the hero, the king, the creator, or the favorite he desired to be, without following the long roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world.”47 However, Freud held neither philosophy nor art to be worthy of a “declaration of war,” as he named it in “The Future of an Illusion”: Of the three powers (Mächten) which may dispute the basic position of science, religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy. Art is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion … it makes no attempt at invading the realm of reality. Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works in part by means of the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent … But philosophy has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind … religion is an immense power (Macht) which has the strongest emotions of human beings at its service.48

We see how Freud’s discourse turns not only religion, but also art, philosophy, and science into conflicting powers that establish their jurisdiction over certain realms of human experience and cognition. It is not difficult to discover, in this conflictual vision of the relationship among realms of human thought and action, Freud’s image of humans as power-seekers who make up in their fantasies for the power that they lack in reality. Of course, Freud’s own

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analysis of religion epitomized the power-oriented approach, which he attributed to all human endeavors: it was to support science in its struggle for victory over religion, a victory that in turn was to increase the power of humanity over nature.

The Dialectic of the Scientific Worldview Somewhat paradoxically—or, perhaps, also dialectically—Freud argued that in order to increase the power of humankind, science had to engender a more sobering knowledge about the finitude and limits of power of humanity. In his words, science “no longer affords any room for human omnipotence, men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities of nature.” Echoing Bacon’s natura parendo vincitur (nature is conquered by obedience), Freud wrote of the discovery of scientific truth as a “submission to the truth” emphasizing that scientific maturity—like the completion of an analysis—brought not only a more active mode of life, but also amor fati and the recognition of one’s limitations. “Critics persist in describing as ‘deeply religious’ anyone who admits to a sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction that seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further but humbly acquiesces in the small part that human beings play in the great world—such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.”49 Such passages stand in stark contrast to the demand for absolute jurisdiction, which, as we have seen, characterized Freud’s project of scientific emancipation. Paradoxically, what was to be made absolute with the rule of science was the renunciation of fantasies of omnipotence. One may, possibly, put it as follows: for Freud, the absolute rule of science entailed an absolute elimination of fantasies of absolute power. Since Freud took the essence of the religious attitude to be the persistence of the wish for a remedy against life’s ills, rather than the renunciation of such a wish as childlike,50 his message was: “Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life’. We may call this ‘education to reality.’”51 In a much-quoted passage from his “Introductory Lectures” of 1916–17, Freud portrayed psychoanalysis as part of the great subversive movement of modern science, designed to destroy the illusion that humanity forms the apex of the universe. According to Freud, this decentering endeavor had three heroes, starting with Copernicus, who taught that the earth was not the center of the cosmos, and continuing with Darwin, who displaced humans from the pinnacle of creation and turned them into descendants of animals. “But,” Freud added, “human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove

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to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”52 In an article that he wrote at about the same time as he completed his “Introductory Lectures,” Freud elaborated in more detail on these three blows to human narcissism. He explained that the assumption that the earth was the center of the universe “fit in well with [man’s] inclination to regard himself as the lord of the world.”53 As always, Freud related the construction of an illusionary cosmology to conditions of command and domination. Similarly, he associated the attempt of humans to separate themselves from animals with the “dominating position over his fellow creatures in the animal kingdom,” which mankind thought itself to have acquired “in the course of the development of civilization.”54 Lastly, he accounted for the assumption that man was “supreme within his own mind” by the ego’s feeling that consciousness provides it with “news of all the important occurrences in the mind’s working, and [that] the will, directed by these reports, carries out what the ego orders.”55 Thus, in Freud’s view science undermined not only illusions about the centrality and importance of humanity in the plan of the universe, but subverted the overvaluations of human agency that led into the errors concerning the position of our species in the universe. Moreover, Freud’s discourse created an inextricable link between the renunciation of illusions of power and a real increase in power: on the one hand, control over reality could be achieved only by abandoning wishful fantasies; on the other hand, such fantasies could be abandoned only when humanity had enough power and knowledge at its disposal to be able to do without them. According to Freud, modernity could lead to emancipation from the dependence on theistic fantasies because modern thought provides in reality something of the magical power that humans had dreamed of since primeval times. As he put it: propped on technological contraptions, the modern individual could finally become “a prosthetic God (Prothesengott).”56 Furthermore: At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities of nature. None the less some of the primitive belief in omnipotence still survives in men’s faith in the power of the human mind, which grapples with the laws of reality.57

This, then, is the contradictory relationship to power that Freud took to be characteristic of science: science was more than an instrument for the manipulation of nature; it also signified a new self-consciousness of humanity, representing a third, final, and mature stage of dealing with powerlessness in Freud’s evolutionary sequence. Since, in his view, science really could provide a way out of the terrors of human powerlessness and thus could offer real relief, it

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no longer needed to promise absolute power. Science could remain incomplete and take “account of our dependence on the real external world.” For this very reason, however, it drove people to act: “By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone.”58 Freud’s project of scientific emancipation, too, followed a dialectical logic. On the one hand science could abolish the power of religion as a dominant social force. On the other hand it preserved elements from both religion and animism, but elevated them from the realm of the illusionary into reality. Thus in Freud’s scheme of history, science constituted an Aufhebung of the two pictures of the universe that preceded it, by both abolishing and preserving fantasies of domination and power, turning them into reality—albeit only partially—precisely because and when they were abandoned. In other words, religion as a pathology of power could be cured by science—and only by science—because science could bring about both an increase in real power vis-à-vis nature and a renunciation of illusions of power.59

A Dialectic of Blindness and Vision How did Freud assess the likeliness of humanity actually reaching the endpoint of this dialectical development by growing into a mature, scientific self-consciousness?60 In “The Future of an Illusion” of 1927 Freud was optimistic that ultimately science would carry the day, overcome the infantile disorder of religion, and usher in an age of reason in which the human race would free itself from subjection to divine father images.61 In the age of science the decay of religion could not be stopped, he thought.62 Thus, all that psychoanalysis had to do at this stage was to fulfill the function of a historical midwife and facilitate the transition of humanity into a post-religious age, which would be based on the “primacy of the intellect.”63 As Freud suggested: “Our behaviour should … be modeled on that of a sensible teacher who does not oppose an impending new development but seeks to ease its path and mitigate the violence of its irruption.”64 Even in 1933, the year in which Hitler came to power in Germany, Freud still declared in his lecture on “The Question of a Weltanschauung”: Our best hope for the future is that intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—may in process of time establish a dictatorship (Diktatur) in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give man’s emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance (Herrschaft) of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions.65

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This passage reveals both Freud’s political obtuseness and the limitations inherent in his emancipatory vision, which derived from his analogy of collective, historical processes with those typical of individual neurosis. While Freud sought the emancipation of humanity from the power of religion, he believed that only a small minority of people was capable of actually freeing itself from its infantilism and the comfort that illusionary father-deities could provide. For instance, in “Civilization and Its Discontents” he admitted that “to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this [religious] view of life.”66 Undoubtedly, Freud held a truly universal emancipation to be neither possible nor necessary. Rather, in his eyes humanity had achieved scientific self-consciousness when the forces of the past were disarmed and a rational elite—the ego of humanity, so to speak—had gained dominance in the collective mind of humankind. For Freud, emancipation meant the rule of rational leaders, but never an egalitarian society without authority. While he hoped that scientists would remove priests from their position of social authority, he feared the perils that he associated with popular revolutions against all authority. Even in the optimistic “Future of an Illusion,” he warned of the dangers that he considered immanent in the decline of religion. Aware of the sociological role of religion as an efficient instrument of social control over the masses, he pointed out that its authority kept communities together, restrained aggression, and thus made human life in common possible. Therefore he was afraid that its demise could lead to a revolt of what he called “the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed”: If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbor is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life – then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbor without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.67

Despite such Dostoevsky-like expressions of fear and loathing, Freud never suggested abstaining from the battle against religion. On the contrary, he held suggestions to save and maintain religion because of its political function to be both dishonest and futile in an age of science. Only toward the end of the 1930s did Freud finally notice that humanity was on the verge of an abyss rather than ascending to a higher unity based on the rule of reason. In the prefatory note to “Moses and Monotheism” he noted with bewilderment “that progress has allied itself with barbarism.” In his eyes the Soviet Union was one example of such an alliance. Its regime attempted to improve living conditions, withdrew the opium of religion from the people, and granted them a reasonable amount of sexual liberty, but at the same time the Soviet regime also “submitted them

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to the most cruel coercion and robbed them of any possibility of freedom of thought.” Fascist Italy was Freud’s other example of an alliance of progress and barbarism. There he deplored the violent means used to instill in people such positive qualities as “orderliness and a sense of duty.” Nazi Germany was different for Freud. In his view it proved that “a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism can occur as well without being attached to any progressive ideas.” On the whole, he admitted, things have so turned out that to-day the conservative democracies have become the guardians of cultural advance and that … it is precisely the institution of the Catholic Church which puts up a powerful defense against the spread of this danger [of barbarism] to civilization—the Church which has hitherto been the relentless foe to freedom of thought and to advances toward the discovery of the truth!68

Without being able to theorize his historical experiences adequately, Freud abandoned the dialectical vision of the interrelationship of powerlessness and power, religion, science, and modernity that he had constructed on the basis of analogical reasoning and readings in classics of anthropology. The political events unfolding at the end of his life forced him to recognize that in constructing his grand vision he had neglected the crucial role of socioeconomic factors in the generation of collective anxieties and the destructive effects of political fantasies of omnipotence, which, alas, did not remain restricted to the realm of thought. This, then, is another instance of a dialectic in Freud’s thinking: while he wrote on the origins and effects of powerlessness in history and on the way megalomaniac fantasies could emerge as compensation for fears and anxieties, he remained blind to the sources, impact, and intensity of those very fantasies in his own society and to the catastrophic collective pathology that developed as a result of it. While his discourse continuously politicized the development of humanity and moved the dialectics of reality and fantasy, as well as of power and powerlessness, into the center of his historical vision, he had turned away from the real political issues of the age, that is, from real social and political conditions in which religion and science are embedded and with which they inevitably interact. Thus, in one sense Freud’s analysis was pervasively political; in another sense, however, Freud’s approach was never political enough.

A Dialectic of Science and Myth A few years after Freud had expressed his consternation at the political developments in Europe, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment with the aim to explain “why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”69 They followed Freud in some of their factual assumptions, though not in the critical evaluation of their consequences, and they, too, regarded the process of civilization as built on increasing renunciation. As they put it: “The history of civiliza-

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tion is the history of the introversion of sacrifice. In other words: the history of renunciation. Everyone who practices renunciation gives away more of his life than is given back to him: and more than the life he vindicates.” Horkheimer and Adorno agreed with the canonical thinkers of the Enlightenment that only modern thinking could lead to a free society, but they were also concerned that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”70 Thus, although they did not reject the Enlightenment project as a whole, Dialectic of Enlightenment was severely critical of the principles of modern scientific thought. First, Horkheimer and Adorno rejected any strict separation between myth and science. They stressed, rather, that “myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”71 They argued that Odysseus could be seen as an Enlightenment figure, resisting temptation and practicing renunciation. Second, they claimed that “the only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.”72 While myths such as that of Odysseus already realized aims that usually were attributed to modern thinking; in its attempt to overcome mythical thought, science inevitably turned into mythology. Third, Horkheimer and Adorno criticized modern scientific thought as engendering domination. In their view, when mythical thought is displaced by science, “[m]en pay for the increase of the power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them insofar as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things insofar as he can make them.”73 A theory that objectified nature, Horkheimer and Adorno maintained, also objectified humans; hence the scientific domination of nature inevitably produced the social domination of humans. Fourth and last, they explained the totalitarian tendency of science to appropriate all realms of life by an underlying anxiety: [M]an imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything unknown. That determines the course of demythologization, of enlightenment, which compounds the animate with the inanimate just as myth compounds the inanimate with the animate. Enlightenment is mythic fear (Angst) turned radical … Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear (Angst).

Freud’s scientific Weltanschauung displayed most of the problematic features that Horkheimer and Adorno postulated in their critical reflections on the self-destructive nature of the victory of modern science over myth. His understanding of scientific emancipation was built on a series of simplistic oppositions; it was tied to an elitist and authoritarian view of society; and while it aimed to reveal the anxieties that drove animism and religion, it remained blind to the anxieties that underlay its own scientific impulse. Moreover, it was precisely in his struggle against religion, that is, in the instance in which Freud presented himself as a knight in an armor shining with the sparkling light of rationalism and science, that his own thinking lapsed into myth.

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This is not an attempt to repeat the already well-rehearsed claim that Freud’s faith in science was quasi-religious, as can be seen in passages where he praised “our god Logos” who, even though “not a very almighty one,” was described as the only one who could “increase our power (Macht).”74 Nor is this an occasion for taking up the often-voiced criticism that Freud’s science, too, turned into a Church with its own orthodoxies, priesthood, sects, and heretics. This is undoubtedly true and has been widely documented, but it is not at issue here. Instead, the claim made here, following in the footsteps of Horkheimer and Adorno, is that Freud’s attempt to provide an emancipatory scientific explanation of the origins and function of religion brought him to develop mythical categories of explanation. Moreover, in reflecting upon this dialectic, I intend to examine a premise in Freud’s thinking on religion that Horkheimer and Adorno—as well as other members of the Frankfurt School—shared with Enlightenment thought, rather than one on which they differed. As an emancipatory project in the Enlightenment tradition, Freud’s analysis of religion aims to base its politics on truth. That is to say, it seeks to facilitate the recollection of what lay “forgotten” in religious discourse in order to decipher the unconscious meaning of religious doctrines and rituals. Emancipatory projects of this kind—including that of the Frankfurt School—are built on the assumption that they reveal a hitherto hidden truth and that their ability to expose this truth through means of interpretation and explanation constitutes part of their emancipatory power. Without this claim to truth and its liberating potential, movements aimed at social emancipation cannot assert that they lead to freedom rather than the substitution of one form of social oppression for another.75 True to this premise of Enlightenment thinking, Freud declared his endeavor to be directed at revealing “what is true in religion (Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion)”—of course, in order to subvert its power.76 Linking power to truth, Freud assumed that since religion had power over humans, it had to contain at least a kernel of truth and was effective for precisely this reason. Freud’s strong belief in the power of truth led him to argue, for instance, that just as a psychoanalytic interpretation could be effective only “because it recovers a fragment of lost experience, so the delusion owes its convincing power to the element of historical truth which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality.”77 Indeed, Freud often described the interpretive task performed in analysis as one where a grain of truth was freed from the layers and wrappings of misconceptions and deceptions that were characteristic of delusions, divesting them thereby of their power. Assuming that phylogeny was analogous to ontogeny, Freud applied this method to humanity as a whole, stating in “Moses and Monotheism”: I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us—as the return of long since forgotten, important events in the primaeval history of the human family—

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and that they have to thank precisely this origin for their compulsive character and that, accordingly, they are effective on human beings by force of the historical truth of their content.

Of course, this methodology raised a host of problems concerning the mechanism by which historical truth, or rather memory, could be assumed to be transmitted unconsciously across generations. Freud invoked the concept of a “phylogenetic inheritance” or “archaic heritage” that he said had preserved the memory of the primal murder and transmitted it by heredity across generations since the dawn of history. This highly problematic assumption relied on the doctrine of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which had been discredited for many years by the time Freud adopted it.78 Starting with “Totem and Taboo,” Freud also attributed to the human race “a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual.”79 According to Freud, this collective mind was universal and contained a number of “primal fantasies” that formed part of a “store of unconscious phantasies of all neurotics and probably all human beings.”80 Primal fantasies were supposed to be residues from the time of the primal horde and the primal murder. They originated “from the prehistory of the primal family, when the jealous father actually robbed his son of his genitals if the latter became troublesome to him as a rival with a woman.”81 Therefore Freud claimed unequivocally in “Moses and Monotheism” “that men have always known (in this special way) that they once possessed a primal father and killed him.” In the attempt to trace the historical truth underlying the power of religion as a collective delusion, Freud’s science became increasingly entangled in a series of mythological claims and categories, such as (a) the assumption of transhistorical and transcultural inheritance of acquired characteristics; (b) the postulate of an original castrating father, who turned into the prototype of all fathers; (c) the conjecture that there actually occurred a momentous parricide committed for the sake of incest, which fulfilled the role of an Original Sin in Freud’s theory of history; (d) the supposition of a collective unconscious where the memory of the primal crime and a universal feeling of guilt are preserved. Rather than tracing the hidden truth underlying religion, the construction of such hypotheses generated a political myth that is itself in need of interpretation.82 Thus, the very categories by means of which Freud’s discourse sought to demote religion to the status of science’s inferior Other undermined the postulated primacy of science over religion. While aiming to unmask religion, Freud’s frame of reference constantly revealed as fallacious the hierarchical opposition that placed the scientific as enlightening and emancipating over and against religious superstitions and delusions. Possibly, Freud may have sensed some of the problems immanent in his approach. He adopted a rather ambivalent attitude toward the scientific status

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of his reconstruction of primeval events in “Totem and Taboo,” admitting that his hypotheses may seem fantastic and that the earliest state of society that he portrayed in his essay “has never been an object of observation.”83 In a footnote he even conceded that “[t]he determination of the original state of things … invariably remains a matter of construction.”84 Almost a decade later, in “Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego” he described as “not unkind” a critic who called “Totem and Taboo” a Kiplingesque “Just-So Story.”85 A few pages later Freud referred to his own depiction of the primal horde as a “myth.”86 Nevertheless, when he summarized the essential themes of “Totem and Taboo” in “Moses and Monotheism,” he asserted: “There is nothing wholly fabricated in our construction, nothing which could not be supported on solid foundations.”87

Conclusion: A Framework for a Dialogue To recap: the first three sections of this essay demonstrated the political character of Freud’s interpretation of religion by showing that it was embedded in a political discourse from its very inception, for already the historical antecedents of religious rituals, practices, and belief systems, such as taboos, magic, and animism, appear in his writings as embodying fantasies of—and restrictions on—absolute power. The second section, turning to Freud’s analysis of religion proper, argued that he not only traced religion to an exalted father fantasy, but that he thereby also referred to it as a fantasy of absolute power that served as compensation and consolation for real powerlessness, as well as an encoded memory of past political deeds and structures of authority. In other words, Freud placed the genesis and social function of religion within an interplay of past and present power relations, describing humanity in his writings on religion as an eternal son, as it were, with all the gendered implications that such a vision carries. Humankind is depicted as a male, hegemonic, all-pervasive political entity, whose obsession with domination constitutes an illusionary remedy for anxieties stemming from insidious feelings of powerlessness. The third section examined the way in which Freud referred to religion as a social force with the power to structure social relations and to impose constraints on thought and action. While he regarded recourse to religious fantasies in earlier times as an inevitable consequence of the actual powerlessness of humans vis-à-vis natural forces, Freud declared the continuing existence of religion into the modern, scientific era to be pathological, since it prevented humankind from achieving the real power over nature that could be provided by science. In line with the political or politicizing thrust of his discourse, Freud construed science, too, as a social force. Seeing his own work as a contribution to the struggle of science against the power of religion, he advocated the exclusive jurisdiction of science over the whole spectrum of human cognition, including religion.

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Sections four to six considered a different dialectic inherent in the way in which Freud introduced science into this discourse as the only power that could overcome religion and emancipate humankind: The fourth section elaborated on Freud’s advocacy of the absolute rule of science in the name of progress and enlightenment, juxtaposing it to his claim that science, progress, and enlightenment ought to bring about the renunciation of fantasies of absolute power. The fifth section questioned the tendency of Freud’s scientific analysis of religion to politicize apparently nonpolitical phenomena, such as animism, religion, and science, against the background of his evidently undiscerning attitude toward the actual political context in which he conducted his scientific analysis of religion. The sixth section maintained that Freud’s endeavor to provide a scientific etiology of religion by revealing the historical truth underlying its phenomena impelled him to postulate a series of substituted mythical hypotheses of his own. However, as was stated in the beginning, the aim of this essay is not simply to lead to the conclusion that Freud’s thought should be archived as a failed endeavor in interpreting history. Instead, this concluding section of the essay suggests that despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Freud’s analysis of religion can still provide food for thought for those who wish to contribute to contemporary discourses on history, precisely because it continuously interweaves (at least) two trajectories: one leading from power structures in the outside world into the inner world of unconscious desires, anxieties, and fantasies, and the other embedding them in an interplay of power and powerlessness. Thus the conclusion of this chapter suggests—admittedly somewhat apodictically—that Freud’s framework of analysis is not only of interest from the point of view of an intellectual historian, but may constitute a fruitful starting point for a dialogue between more traditional historians and psychoanalytically inclined or trained interpreters of history on how one is to approach the multiple and complex dynamics of power in history, their underlying psychological motivations, and their fantasies and pathologies. Although historians are right to approach psychoanalytic interpretations of history with much caution, when these are read for dialectical and sometimes perhaps even unintended politics, as has been done here with Freud, they may find in them fruitful insights. Perhaps such insights can be developed in a dialogue between psychoanalysts and historians, in which the latter should take seriously these four theses that can be derived from Freud’s work on religion as it has been sketched, albeit roughly, in this essay: (a) There are social phenomena that can plausibly be described as collective pathologies. These phenomena can be defined in relation to their origins, purposes, and effects; that is to say, collective pathologies originate in collective anxieties and constitute responses to overwhelming emotions, which are evoked by perceptions of powerlessness. Such

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phenomena can be termed pathological when they are used to reduce anxiety by illusionary wish-fulfillment while imposing restrictions on the field of thought and action of the social actors involved and thereby preventing them from acquiring real social power. (b) Collective anxieties have to do with collective historical experiences and perceptions of powerlessness, whose role in the emergence of collective pathologies can be investigated by careful historical research. Peter Loewenberg has drawn attention to this field of research, which has had to endure sad neglect in the Anglo-Saxon world of scholarship ever since Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom, which was written during the Second World War.88 (c) Memories of past hierarchies of power and authority have an effect on present attitudes toward power. Memories and fantasies of this kind not only have power as their object; they are themselves powerful social forces, since they contribute to the legitimacy and entrenchment of patterns of domination and subjection, not the least self-inflicted subjection. (d) Emancipatory projects must have as their goal both the empowerment of the powerless and the subversion of illusions of power. The two endeavors are interdependent: illusions of power, and especially of unlimited power, prevent the appropriation of real power, and only the presence of real power can allow social actors to give up on their illusions and provide the security that enables them to come to terms with their limits. Hence, any attempt to achieve one aim without the other is bound to fail. A dialogue between conventional historians, psychoanalysts, and psychohistorians is only possible if the latter, too, draw their lessons from Freud’s writings on religion with a focus on their particular problems. Rather than spinning wild interpretations over hundreds of pages, providing comprehensive and self-contained (though reductionist and severely flawed) monologues, they would be well advised to adopt a more modest, but also more critical and dialogical mode of interpretation, one that comes much closer to the traditional role of the analyst in the clinical setting. The role that psychoanalysts and psychohistorians can legitimately adopt in historical inquiry is perhaps akin to the role of the kibitzer and critic: looking over the shoulders of traditional historians, asking questions, offering possibilities, pointing to blind spots and criticizing unquestioned assumptions whenever the desires, anxieties, and fantasies of historical actors are ignored. In order to be credible and productive in such a dialogue, psychoanalytic kibitzers have to abandon hubris that all too often characterizes their stance, a stance that derives from their claim to the exclusive possession of the key to the

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hidden, unconscious inner world of historical actors whom they will certainly never meet, and whose lives they can know about only through the writings of historians. Without direct access to the person or collective whose unconscious anxieties and fantasies they discuss, there can be no opportunity to elicit associations and responses, to proceed step by step and to give carefully worded interpretations. While clinical analysts are in control of the analytic setting, and therefore are able to make more or less reasonable distinctions between what derives from unconscious fantasy and anxiety, and what is more or less an appropriate response to a given situation, those dealing with historical events and processes lack a comparable power over the context of the actors they wish to understand. Hence, psychoanalytic discourse becomes problematic when it goes too far in trying to turn large-scale historical processes into epiphenomena of psychology; that is, when they take too seriously Freud’s preposterous claim that sociology is but applied psychology. This perspective transforms society into an empire of passion and portrays it almost exclusively as a realm where desires and fantasies, anxieties and hate are evoked, exchanged, transformed, and consumed; while processes in which material goods are produced and distributed are relegated to a secondary or negligible position. No believable contribution to historical enquiry can fail to take cognizance of the fact that large-scale social and cultural formations, such as class, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc., structure the way in which individuals satisfy their psychological needs and express their anxieties and desires. Therefore psychoanalytic interpretations involving manifestations of unconscious anxieties and fantasies must be made with an awareness of these sociological influences. Thus, those who would be psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed kibitzers of history should acknowledge that they cannot provide a self-contained method for historical analysis, and hence the first virtue of psychoanalysts—or any who wish to make a convincing contribution to a dialogue with historians—should be modesty. However, rather than limiting itself to providing a psychological supplement to other, nonpsychological approaches to domination (such as the Marxist one), a psychoanalytic perspective can also shed light on the origins and functions of the limitations and blind spots of the theory or method that it is supposed to extend. In other words, a psychoanalytic viewpoint can be most productive when it is also used reflexively in order to question and subvert the framework within which it is deployed. In addition, a psychoanalytic approach to history gains both soundness and fruitfulness by the multiplicity—though not obscurity—of its application: i.e., its synthesis of a number of levels, languages, or dimensions of analysis. As this essay has tried to show, Freud—and perhaps other analysts as well—always spoke more than one language and always looked at phenomena from more than one angle.

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Notes * Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the international conference on “Psychoanalysis and Historical Consciousness” at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, Bielefeld, February 1995, and at the international workshop on “Politics and Ethics: Dilemmas of Modernity,” in Prague, May 1995. I am grateful to the participants of these two events for their comments and suggestions. In addition, this essay relies on arguments and material presented in pp. 156–180 of José Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (Oxford 1995; New Brunswick 2001), as well as in two previously published German essays: José Brunner, “Die Macht der Phantasie – die Phantasie der Macht: Freud und die Politik der Religion,” Psyche 50 (Special issue 9/10) (1996): 786–816; José Brunner, “Die Macht der Vergangenheit: Freud und die Religion,” in Jörn Rüsen and Jürgen Straub, eds., Die dunkle Spur der Vergangenheit: Psychoanalytische Zugänge zum Geschichtsbewusstsein (Frankfurt/ M. 1998), 82–100. 1. For a classic definition of domination, see Max Weber, “Domination by Economic Power and by Authority,” in G. Roth and C. Wittich, eds., Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1978), vol. 2, 941–948. For a comprehensive survey of theories of domination and concepts of power, see J. C. Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View (Ithaca 1987). 2. For a sophisticated feminist psychoanalytic approach to domination, see J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York 1988). 3. The literature on this topic is vast and highly controversial, with at least one historiographic book or major article appearing every year for the last four decades. See H. Meyerhoff, “On Psychoanalysis as History,” Psychoanalytic Review 49 (1962): 3–20; Kurt Eissler, “Freud and the Psychoanalysis of History,” Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association 11 (1963): 675–703; S. Kakar, “The Logic of Psychohistory,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1970): 187–194; B. B. Wolman, ed., The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History (New York 1971); J. Barzun, “History: The Muse and Her Doctors,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 36–64; P. L. Pomper, “Problems of a Naturalistic Psychohistory,” History and Theory 12 (1973): 367–388; J. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History and History (Chicago 1974); G. Izenberg, “Psychohistory and Intellectual History,” History and Theory 14 (1975): 139–155; J.W. Anderson, “The Methodology of Psychological Biography,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1981): 455–475; L. DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory (New York 1982); P. Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford 1985); P. L. Pomper, The Structure of the Mind in History: Five Major Figures in Psychohistory (New York 1985); T. A. Kohut, “Psychohistory as History,” American Historical Review 91, no. 2 (1986): 336–354. G. Cocks and T. L. Cosby, eds., Psycho/History: Readings in the Method of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and History (New Haven 1987); H. Lawton, The Psychohistorian’s Handbook (New York 1988); P. Loewenberg, Fantasy and Reality in History (Oxford 1995); K. Figlio,” Historical Imagination/ Psychoanalytic Imagination,” History Workshop Journal 45 (1998): 199–221. 4. M. Forster, “Hegel’s Dialectical Method,” in F. C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge 1993), 130–170; S. Warren, The Emergence of Dialectical Theory: Philosophy and Political Inquiry (Chicago 1984). 5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller (Oxford 1977), paragraphs 50–52, 84–87. 6. Letter of 9 October 1918, in S. Freud and O. Pfister, Psycho-Analysis and Faith:The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, ed. E. L. Freud and H. Meng (New York 1963), 64. 7. Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven 1987); see J. Brunner, “The (Ir)relevance of Freud’s Jewish Identity to the Origins of Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 14 (1991): 655–684. 8. References to Freud’s writings are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London 1953–74). For a comprehensive survey of the development of Freud’s discourse on religion, see E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York 1967), 349–374. For a comprehensive bibliography of the psychoanalysis of religion, see B. Beit-Hallahmi, Psychoanalytic Studies of Religion: Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport 1996).

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9. For the latter approach, see H. Küng, Freud and the Problem of God (New Haven 1979); R. S. Lee, Freud and Christianity (s.l. 1948; Harmondsworth 1967); W. W. Meissner, Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience (New Haven 1984); J. Scharfenberg, Sigmund Freud und seine Religionskritik als Herausforderung für den christlichen Glauben (Göttingen 1968); P. Homans, Theology after Freud (Indianapolis 1970); P. C. Vitz, Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (New York/ London 1988); G. Zilboorg, Psychoanalysis and Religion (New York 1962). 10. See J. B. Abramson, Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud (New York 1984), 67–82; A. Grünbaum, “Psychoanalysis and Theism,” The Monist 70 (1987): 152–192; R. Lehrer, Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought (Albany 1995), 231–256; P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven 1970), 230–254; P. Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (London 1965), 257–299; P. Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York 1970), 125–191; J. J. Di Censo, The Other Freud: Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis (London and New York 1999); P. E. Stepansky, “Feuerbach and Jung as Religious Critics—With a Note on Freud’s Psychology of Religion,” in P. E. Stepansky, ed., Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals (Hillsdale, NJ, 1986); J. Van Henrik, Freud on Femininity and Faith (Berkeley 1982), 69–104, 143–200. 11. For more details of Freud’s comparison, see Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo” (1912– 13), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, 26–28. 12. Ibid., 31. 13. Ibid., 26, 71, 73. 14. Ibid., 73. 15. Ibid., 91, 89. 16. Ibid., 85. 17. Ibid., 78–79. In some instances Freud described magic as belonging to an even earlier stage of human development. In others he presented it simply as the technique of animism. Here I consider the two as related. For Freud’s distinction between magic and animism, see ibid., 91–92. 18. Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” (1933), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22, 168. 19. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 77. 20. Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, 17. 21. Ibid., 24. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 144. 24. Ibid., 145. 25. Ibid., 148. 26. Ibid., 144. 27. Ibid., 143. 28. Ibid., 149; Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism” (1939), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, 83. 29. Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” 83–84. 30. Ibid., 85. 31. Ibid., 65. 32. Sigmund Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” 170. 33. Ibid., 167. Already Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche had characterized religion as a “psychic pathology” or a “religious neurosis” from which humanity had to be freed; cf. M. W. Wartofsky, Feuerbach (Cambridge 1977), 253; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Harmondsworth 1976), 58. 34. Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” 33. 35. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, 84–85. 36. Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” 48. 37. Ibid., 47. 38. Ibid., 49.

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39. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” 169. 40. Ibid., 170. 41. Ibid., 171. 42. Sigmund Freud, “The Claims of Psycho-analysis to Scientific Interest” (1913), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, 174. 43. Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” 38. 44. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 81, 74. 45. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” 166. 46. Freud, “The Claims of Psycho-analysis to Scientific Interest,” 188. 47. Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, 224. 48. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” 160–161. 49. Freud, “The Future of an Illusion, “ 32–33. 50. Ibid., 32. 51. Ibid., 49. 52. Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” (1916–17), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 16, 285. 53. Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-analysis” (1917), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, 140. 54. Ibid., 140. 55. Ibid., 141. 56. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 91. 57. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 88 (original emphasis). 58. Ibid., 50. 59. Paul Ricoeur is thus both right and wrong to suggest that the “history of religion [is] to be regarded as the history of a dispossession or renunciation of omnipotence.” Freud and Philosophy, 238. 60. Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 164–165. 61. Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” 53. 62. Ibid., 44. 63. Ibid., 53. 64. Ibid., 43. 65. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” 171. 66. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 74. 67. Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” 39. 68. See Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 165. 69. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York 1988), xi. I am indebted to Anson Rabinbach for directing my attention to continuities and contradictions between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Freud’s writings on religion. 70. Ibid., 3. 71. Ibid., xvi. 72. Ibid., 4. 73. Ibid., 9. 74. Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” 54–55; see also Sigmund Freud, “The Future Prospects of Psycho-analytic Therapy” (1910), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11, 147–148. 75. See C. Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” Political Theory 12 (1984): 152–183. 76. Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” 122. 77. Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, 268–269. 78. For the political undercurrents in Freud’s Lamarckism, see the discussion in Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 161–163, on which the presentation here relies. 79. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 157.

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80. Sigmund Freud, “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-analytic Theory of the Disease” (1915), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 269. 81. Sigmund Freud, “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” (1940), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, 190, n. 1. 82. See Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 156–165; D. Caroll, “Freud and the Myth of Origin,” New Literary History 6 (1975): 513–528;Y. Gabriel, Freud and Society (London 1983), 41; Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 208; E. V. Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (London 1993), 36. 83. Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 141. 84. Ibid., 103, n. 1. 85. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 122. 86. Ibid., 140. 87. Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” 84. 88. Peter Loewenberg, “Anxiety in History,” Journal of Preventive Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 4 (1990); Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London 1960); E. Jacques, “Social Systems as a Defence Against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety,” in M. Klein, P. Heimann, and R. E. Money-Kyrle, eds., New Directions in Psycho-Analysis (London 1955); I. E. P. Menzies, The Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety (London 1977). More attention has been paid to the role of anxiety in history in French scholarship, albeit not from a psychoanalytic perspective. J. Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XIV–XVIII siècles): Une Cité assiègée (Paris 1978); P. Diel, “L’Origine et les formes de la peur,” Problèmes (April–May 1961); Lucien Fèbvre, “Pour l’histoire d’un sentiment: le besoin de sécurité,” Annales 11, no. 2 (1956): 244–248; C. Odier, L’Angoisse et la pensée magique (Neuchâtel-Paris 1974); M. Oraison, “Peur et religion,” Problèmes (April–May 1961); J. Palou, La peur dans l’histoire (Paris 1958). See also Peter Loewenberg, Fantasy and Reality in History.

CHAPTER

9

Working toward a Discourse of Shame A Psychoanalytical Perspective on Postwar German Literary Criticism IRMGARD WAGNER

Positionality has long been recognized as an important category in historical discourse. An author’s position is even more relevant to a psychoanalytical perspective on historical writing, and particularly so to the topic under investigation here. As a native German scholar living in the United States and working in the field of German language and literature (Germanistik), I am a priori placed in the dialectic of eigen (own, innate) and fremd (foreign)—that which pertains to the self versus that which pertains to the other. It is precisely the dialectic of self and other that is constitutive for the discourse of shame. Exploring this discourse as it emerged in postwar German literary criticism, obviously as a consequence of Third Reich historical experience, brings into play the positionality of this writer from the generational angle, too. To scholars of my generation, the critics who produced the discourse under discussion stood in a relation of fathers and mentors: they were our admired and revered teachers, the role models to be emulated and imitated. Strong resistance on the part of the acolyte—this writer—must be expected to the discovery of shame in the discourse of the masters; such resistance will surely have left its traces in the following discourse about the discourse of shame. Yet a third positional factor will have to be entered into the equation: gender. A female scholar confronting her male mentors in the historical frame of male-dominated German university hierarchy, will be far more of an outsider with a viewpoint of otherness than her male counterpart might be, who would view the professional masters from the potential insider’s position, from the perspective of self: mea res agitur. Notes for this section begin on page 199.

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Theoretical Baseline The relation of self and other is constitutive for the discourse of shame. Nowhere else except in love are self and other so closely linked. I experience shame when I look at myself from the position of the other, with the gaze of the other. Adam or Eve alone in Paradise, and without the prospect of having to face God, would not have felt ashamed. In the experience of shame, as in love, the power of the other over the self can be so strong, so overwhelming as to reach the point of self-loss, of self-annihilation: madness or suicide. There is endless talk; there is an entire literature about the dialectic of self and other in love. But hardly anyone talks or writes about shame. Suicide of unhappy lovers has been a favorite theme in literature for centuries; but how many stories do we tell of generals who kill themselves to avoid the shame of defeat? Here another fundamental aspect of shame discourse emerges: the command of silence. Shame needs to hide itself. Adam and Eve tried to hide their shame from each other under the symbolical fig leaf and their shamed selves from God. Therein lies, of course, the most paradoxical problem of this investigation: How can one identify and talk about a discourse of shame if shame forbids discourse? The difficulty of identifying such a discourse has indeed been part of my scholarly experience: the resistance to the recognition of shame as a textual element has been and is very strong indeed. The second difficulty, analyzing and making statements about the forbidden discourse of shame, derives from the lack of both theoretical and empirical studies of the issue. My own discipline of literary scholarship has developed a solid tradition of silencing this discourse. We have learned to displace and discount shame by attributing it to false pride, a false sense of honor, the damaging dictates of a repressive culture. Such are the typical views in literary histories of Lessing’s tragedy of classical Roman despair over shame in Emilia Galotti and of his comedy of the Prussian fear of shame in Minna von Barnhelm. Similarly, storm and stress (Sturm und Drang) dramas where shame is a major driving force, such as Lenz’s Hofmeister or Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, are explained in terms of the harm done by repressive social laws. The masters of psychoanalysis, Freud and his revisionist reader Lacan, likewise observe this vow of silence to an amazing degree. Since my own approach to psychoanalytical perspectives is based on Lacanian theory, Lacan’s position on shame needs to be examined in some detail. For Lacan, the relation to an other is absolutely basic for subject formation, which in turn must proceed through language. This is the main thrust of his 1953 manifesto, the Discours de Rome, which marked his break away from traditional Freudian psychoanalysis and the foundations of his own school. Speech, discourse, language is a priori intersubjective: “Every word is an appeal for a response,” he states with leitmotif insistence. But, like literature and literary historians, he articulates this nec-

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essary relation of the subject to an other through love, even drawing on poetry to supply an appropriate motto: “Between man and love, / There is woman. / Between man and woman, / There is a world. / Between man and the world, / There is a wall.”1 Love, libido, and sex have been central to the psychoanalytic enterprise certainly since Freud; Lacan in this respect follows in this tradition. It is nevertheless startling that in his seminar on Hamlet, which undertakes to revise Freud’s essay on “Mourning and Melancholia,”2 he does not once address the issue of shame, which, in Freud’s essay, figures as a major enigma. There is at least one instance where Lacan does touch on the issue of shame, but only to recoil at once, with almost physical force. His seminars on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis present “The Gaze” as the second of these four concepts, and in this context Lacan examines voyeurism. Amazingly, shame does not occur in the complex of reactions described in the subject who is being gazed at by the voyeur.3 Shame does occur, and with strong impact, in the voyeur who is caught. For his example, Lacan refers to “one of the most brilliant passages” in Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant, where another’s gaze “surprises me and reduces me to shame.” Lacan, in fact, retells this experience of being overwhelmed by shame twice on the same page, emphasizing the centrality of shame in Sartre’s text (“shame … is the feeling [Sartre] regards as dominant”). But just as forcefully he immediately erases the relation to an other in shame by shifting the focus back to the subject-voyeur, and by insisting that Sartre’s perspective on intersubjectivity here is wrong.4 When he is asked about this point in the question period following the seminar, Lacan refuses to engage, first by a series of vague evasions, then, on a follow-up question precisely about the role of the other in this (Sartrean shame) discourse, he interrupts the questioner almost rudely with a slang phrase. Wahl: “But I don’t understand how others will reappear in your discourse—” Lacan: “Look, the main thing is that I don’t come a cropper!’”5 Lacan’s retort shows why shame is to be avoided: the subject who feels shame “is reduced” to loss of desire, is paralyzed. Lacan returns once more to “Sartre’s analysis” concerning “the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other,” in the discussion of his third “fundamental concept”—transference and drive—but merely as a point of departure to explain his concept of perversion.6 The index, not surprisingly in view of the evasion of the issue performed by the text, does not list “shame.” “Sartre” is listed, of course, on precisely the three pages examined. While Sartre is acknowledged, the reason why he figures in Lacan’s text—the “dominant feeling” of shame—is not. Neither has Sartre scholarship picked up his shame discourse. My colleagues in French studies link this fact with the resistance within French postwar culture against facing the issue of Vichy France. They point out that this taboo was broken in a very tentative fashion only recently in one of the many fifty-year commemorations of the end of the Second World War, when a French president expressed his regrets over the French role during that war.

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The most likely place for a discourse of shame to be carried on is feminist theory. Woman as the object of the male gaze has become a major theme here, as has the entire genre of pornography. It is here that one would expect the debate on voyeurism, exhibitionism, and perversion to be expanded beyond the male subject of the gaze in the Lacanian view, in order to focus on the other, the female subject who is gazed upon. But nothing of the sort has happened. During the early phase of feminist criticism, if the topic of shame comes up at all, it is either, as in Lacan and Sartre, on the side of the voyeur and of the subject of the pornographic agency, where, however, shame is immediately converted into fear—of impotence, of woman, of the other—and subsumed under the heading of domination, power, violence; or shame is placed on the side of the object of the pornographic action—woman—and discussed as humiliation and degradation. It is again a question of power: woman is to be put down, lowered into submission, not shamed as such.7 Missing is an exploration of what François Wahl, Lacan’s questioner, called the discourse of the other in the shame complex, i.e., how shame articulates itself within the other subject: the gazed-at, humiliated, violated object of the pornographic perpetrator. The reason commonly given for this omission is that this other subject is no longer a subject at all, but has been objectified precisely by the voyeuristic or pornographic action. Reduced to object status, woman would not be able to articulate any discourse; feminist criticism sees her reduced to silence. This is the main point made in a 1989 overview from a postmodernist perspective by Geraldine Finn: “Nobodies Speaking: Subjectivity, Sex, and the Pornography Effect.”8 Silence has long been a major topos in feminist texts;9 it seems, then, that in this discourse shame reappears in one of its major effects—precisely in its silencing power. As American feminism became increasingly politicized, the topic of shame became a non-topic. Feminist views of pornography in the 1990s divided into two camps: opponents and defenders. Both pursued a quest of female empowerment; both therefore placed pornography in the context of power. One side followed the earlier line, opposing pornography for its degradation of women. The other side, on a distinct upswing in recent years, defended pornography as a right of free speech and vocally claimed this right for women, too. There now exists a considerable body of pornographic literature, heterosexual as well as lesbian, authored by women. And feminist theory has followed practice here: in a reversal of the traditional subject-object relation in voyeurism and pornography, feminists now see the male exposed to and objectified by the female gaze. Thus, while there now is one more victim of the silencing effect, in this constellation there is certainly no place for a discourse of shame. In fact, shame so thoroughly disappeared from public discourse in the United States that the higher-brow twin of Time magazine, Newsweek, felt the need to bring it back, literally, with the cover story of its 6 February 1995, issue: “The Return of Shame (the word “Shame,” an appellation conveying

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strong disapproval in US English, stands in huge black letters against the white background on the cover): How Do We Bring Back a Sense of Right and Wrong?”10 The lead article offers a number of speculations concerning the reason for the disappearance of the feeling of shame. One of the companion pieces, entitled “Imminent Victorians,” blames mostly the “shameless” TV media and with emphatic rhetoric prophesies the imminent demise of American civilization: “slip-sliding toward turpitude … society [as a whole] is shameless.” Yet the focus of Newsweek is not a call to reawaken the subjective feeling of shame, but a strategy of imposing shame on the other as “alternative punishment,” which would fight general cynicism toward the justice system by providing a “catharsis” through shaming the perpetrator: “expressive justice.” The second companion piece, on “original sin,” serves to demonstrate how hard it is to talk about shame, to engage in a shame discourse. Here shame is avoided by a detour on guilt, an avoidance that goes all the way to the level of vocabulary. Adam and Eve’s hiding from God in the Garden of Eden is mislabeled “flushed with guilt.” As Lacan knew, when talking about the “conflagration of shame” in Sartre’s text, and as the German word schamrot states, shame, not guilt, turns faces red. A recent text from the historical discipline, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man,11 does indeed give a central role to shame, even if shame is made to appear in double disguise. The first disguise is shame’s positive counter-image: dignity. The second disguise is dignity’s Greek name: thymos. In Fukuyama’s quest for the ideal state, he displaces economy by this Greeknamed dignity as the crucial constitutive principle of democracy. It is reasonable to surmise that the historical consciousness of the Japanese-American Fukuyama includes a portion of Japanese cultural heritage, where the concept of prestige and dignity is very important. The Newsweek article acknowledges this cultural difference in a provocative introductory reference to the absence of shame in America: “Shame—that’s something they have over in Japan, isn’t it? Our country is about shamelessness.”12 Freud, the founding father of the psychological twentieth century, set the course for hiding shame behind guilt when he displaced the biblical myth, which locates the origin of civilization in shame (Adam and Eve have to invent clothing), with guilt myths.13 One of these myths, the anthropological tale of primal parricide, begins, for Freud, the collective life of humankind. On the side of the individual, it is the Oedipus complex, the desire to kill the father, that installs the feeling of guilt, or—as the German double meaning of the word “guilt” (Schuld) indicates—the consciousness of indebtedness, of social obligation, which initiates the development of personhood. The other node within the Oedipus complex, the fear of castration and thus of humiliation, of shame, is precisely what has to be overcome in the resolution of the complex (Untergang in Freud’s terminology) required for psychic health.

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The reason for shame avoidance in the Freudian system might be sought, as Peter Gay suggests in Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture,14 in Freud’s position as an assimilated Jew, whose life goal was acceptance by and success in an anti-Semitic society. Perhaps the key to this Freudian puzzle is to be found in another founder of modernism, Freud’s contemporary, who shared his positionality to a high degree: Franz Kafka. The definitive variation of Kafka’s Abraham myth, whose first variation likens Abraham to an “Altkleiderhändler” (old-clothes dealer), the stereotypical occupation of the despised Eastern European Jew, is of one who has to hide for shame, who fears the ridicule of exposure, “that this ridiculousness will make him still older and more repulsive, his son dirtier, more unworthy. …”15 And Kafka’s famous novel about guilt, The Trial, has a strong if well hidden subtext of shame. The last sentence of the unfinished work is, to the persistent frustration of Kafka criticism: “It was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”16 There is, however, a Freudian text that deals explicitly with the shame phenomenon: the essay on “Mourning and Melancholia,” of 1917. Through the work of psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, this text has become highly significant for the historical context of the present investigation: postwar Germany. Reflecting on the pathological phenomenon of melancholy, there is one thing Freud finds especially hard to understand in the behavior of the melancholic: his open talk about his own shame. Such behavior, for Freud, is a breach of taboo, equivalent to exhibitionism; it is the distinguishing criterion that marks such behavior as sick: “For there can be no doubt that if anyone holds and expresses to others an opinion of himself . . . he is ill … Feelings of shame in front of other people, … are lacking.”17 Freud cannot even accept such exhibitionistic behavior as a symptom of illness that has to be cured; he needs to erase it from his text, from his own thought, by declaring the symptom itself a displacement hiding another, the real emotion that will be more acceptable than shaming oneself. The self-abasers, Freud decides, are really debasing someone else: “Their complaints are really ‘plaints’ in the old sense of the word. They are not ashamed and do not hide themselves, since everything derogatory that they say about themselves is at bottom said about someone else.”18 Thus, for Freud, there is no real self-abasement, no admission of one’s own shameful conduct: no discourse of shame. The most famous reading of this Freudian text, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 book The Inability to Mourn, does indeed talk about shame. This text, however, couples shame with guilt in a way that a priori subordinates shame to guilt. The most frequent occurrence of the word Scham is in the combination “Schuld und Scham.” Shame, in the Mitscherlichs’ telling, is a consequence of guilt, and the problem to be dealt with in the collective German psyche is guilt. Shame would then presumably take care of itself, although the authors do not address the issue as a separate topic. That shame is not seen as

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a topic here is confirmed by the index. There are a total of eighteen page references given for Schuld but only one for Scham,19 although the text speaks about shame far more frequently. The index, in fact, attempts to hide the “shame” of the text, suppressing the discourse of shame that the text at least initiated.20 The concept of shame, even though it does not rise to the level of discourse, plays an outstanding role in the historical frame of this investigation: postwar Germany. The most basic part of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) consists of a statement of human rights (Grundrechte). This section begins with the sentence “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar”: “The dignity of man is inviolable.” This statement, written in 1948–49, points to its origin in early postwar history. Here a crucial part of the experience of the immediate past history (the Nazi era) reverberates; it transforms itself into historical consciousness, into a regulative idea (in the Kantian sense) that is intended toward future conduct. The sentence “The dignity of man is inviolable” makes sense only on the presupposition that the dignity of man is vulnerable. The most basic command of the Grundgesetz, then, that the vulnerable human dignity has to be protected—“to respect and protect it is the obligation of all power of the state” 21—originates in recent German experience where that dignity had indeed been violated. At the time in question, shame can thus be identified as part of the German historical unconscious.22 It is interesting to compare the similarly basic sentence in the Preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, which served in many ways as a model for the German Basic Law. The US document lays claim to basic human rights: “certain unalienable Rights.” These two concepts continue to mark a difference between German and US public discourse. The German concept of “Menschenwürde” does simply not signify in US public or political discourse. The equivalent term there is “human rights,” as in that ubiquitous subtext of American foreign policy activism, “human rights abuses.”

The Discourse of Shame in Literary History In retrospect on my work in literary scholarship, my first encounter with shame discourse in a literary text reveals, first, the difficulty of identifying this discourse, and second, a reason for the difficulty. For a psychoanalytical reading, the works of GDR writer Franz Fühmann (1922–1984) contain an extraordinarily strong subtext of shame, a subtext that gets ever stronger in his later writing after Fühmann himself, in a deliberate challenge to GDR ideology, had taken up the study of Freud. Fühmann thematizes addiction, criminality, uncleanliness, dirt, degradation, obscenity, homosexuality, incest; he reflects on the power of shame and taboo; he is obviously engaged in transgressive writing, in breaking taboos. And yet, a study of this writer I undertook in the late 1980s failed to recognize his shame discourse for what it was.23

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A first reason for this blindness was, obviously, the command of silence embedded in the shame phenomenon. A second reason suggests yet another important aspect in the dialectic of shame: it is that another’s shame may impose an even stronger prohibition against speech than the shame experienced by the self. Because of the basic commandment that “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar,” we do not touch another’s shame. Or, if we see it in the other, from the position of another we recognize shame more distinctly and thus feel more inhibited by the law of silence. Academics know the disciplinary law that regulates such behavior by the term decorum. It says: a scholar does not write about certain things in certain ways and words. The experience of another’s shame as my own results from a complicated play between identity and difference. Language, both German and English, indicates that there are at least two different ways of experiencing the shame of another: (1) sich für jemanden schämen = to be ashamed for someone, and (2) sich jemandes schämen = to be ashamed of someone. The tiny grammatical difference translates into a substantive differential in signification, as examples of actual usage will demonstrate. “I’m ashamed for my country,” meaning, for what my country has done, is not as bad an experience as “I’m ashamed of my country.” The difference is even clearer in the following example. “I’m ashamed for my father”—bad enough, but far worse: “I’m ashamed of my father.” The latter example needs to be stated in German, too, in order to clarify what went on in the texts of the postwar German critics that constitute the focus of this investigation. “Ich schäme mich für meinen Vater” is altogether different from “Ich schäme mich meines Vaters.” The first statement concerns an issue of ethical judgment, implying difference between self and other—me and my father. The second is an issue of identity, involving the self with the other in an existential way, i.e., touching the survival of the self and of selfhood. Shame, even or precisely if it is the shame of another, is a very serious business. In a study of Goethe drama criticism since the 1840s, a project I took up after the work on Fühmann, reading the texts of Goethe‘s critics in their historical context was no problem until the criticism of Iphigenie auf Tauris in the years after the Second World War. Earlier Iphigenie criticism had been surprising sometimes, but not hard to explain. The nineteenth century built up Goethe’s heroine Iphigenie as the German-Ideal. Critics after the First World War trashed this ideal as a false and failed idol, and long before Fritz Fischer discovered the issue of German war guilt in historiography, Goethe scholars used the Tantalid family history in Goethe’s Iphigenie drama for a sometimes amazing argument of exculpation on principle.24 After the more painful than embarrassing interlude of critical tergiversations during the politicized 1930s, criticism of the early postwar years presented unexpected difficulties. Postwar I and postwar II criticism seemed to have nothing in common. It was impossible to use the historical context and the critical reactions of the years after the First World War as a model, grid, or matrix for

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reading the texts after the Second World War. Worst of all was a dilemma that threatened my very enterprise: I could not make sense of the first major postwar critic, Benno von Wiese. His great book on drama, Die deutsche Tragödie von Lessing bis Hebbel, published in 1948, had been written over the years between 1938 and 1947. Von Wiese’s readings of other Goethe dramas had presented no such difficulties. Even if I did not see things his way I could still understand his position; I could read him. But his text on Iphigenie was impossible to read. Here von Wiese stammers and stutters but cannot find his own voice; instead he reproduces Goethe’s text in the sort of paraphrase one might expect to find in a poor student paper. He moreover writes in an insufferable style, engaging in bombastic, overblown rhetoric that positively repels the reader in its seeming effort to make mountains out of molehills. I saw no way to deal with von Wiese’s view of Iphigenie, and in the first version of my own text decided to omit him from the chapter on postwar criticism. The next major critic, Karl Viëtor, who published a substantial Goethe monograph simultaneously in German and English in the poet’s anniversary year 1949, presented another kind of problem. Despite highest praise for Iphigenie, he does not show any real interest in the work itself. Inexplicably, he comes up with no ideas of his own and spends surprisingly little text on this drama; in fact the chapter that purports to treat Iphigenie is instead on a rather obscure poem that Goethe wrote at about the same time (Die Geheimnisse). Viëtor, then, was mystifyingly brief and empty. By contrast, Emil Staiger, the Swiss scholar whose three-volume Goethe monograph began appearing in 1952, made perfect sense. Josef Kunz, however, who wrote the commentary on Iphigenie in the new Hamburg Edition of Goethe’s works in the same year as Staiger, was yet another enigma. He seemed to aim for obscurantism by concocting a murky mix of philosophical and historical eclecticism. The critical historian here was met by an apparently insoluble dilemma: how to make historical sense of contradictory texts belonging to an identical historical context, i.e., the early postwar years up to 1952. A Lacanian reader confronted with such texts will conclude that avoidance is at issue, that it is a question of parole vide.25 But a further question needs to be asked, namely: what is avoided? What is it that is hiding behind the emptiness of these words? What is the subjective reality referent—a particular critic’s experience of his historical reality—that produces precisely these words and sentences, and does not produce (or more precisely, silences) other words that should be there. A critic, after all, has to account for specific textual data as well as for data that have become leitmotifs in the critical tradition. In the case of Goethe’s drama Iphigenie, such leitmotifs are, first of all: Wahrheit (truth) and Menschlichkeit (humanity), the crux of the challenge between the Barbarian king Thoas and his Greek captive Iphigenie.26 Only after many rereadings, after stubbornly working through von Wiese’s utter(ed) chaos, did the search finally succeed in finding the node around which

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avoidance was taking place, although that node literally sticks out like an aggravated symptom. It was the word Menschlichkeit. The text highlights the word in a number of ways, unmistakably marking it as “a symptom.” The German word itself, Menschlichkeit, which in the text of Goethe’s Iphigenie is the most discussed word in the critical tradition, never once occurs in von Wiese’s text. The word von Wiese uses instead is the foreign word “Humanität,” although he otherwise meticulously strives to avoid foreign words. The word Humanität itself is further highlighted typographically. With only one exception, Humanität always occurs in italics or within quotation marks: whenever it appears, it appears as “so-called” Humanität. If we trace the word Menschlichkeit through the historical timeline, we find where this word makes its presence felt when, for the first time in history, and under a new legal concept, Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit (crimes against humanity) came before a court of justice. This was the substance of the Nuremberg Trials. Menschlichkeit and Unmenschlichkeit (humanity and inhumanity) marked traumatic experiences in lived German history. It was during the Nuremberg Trials that these formerly abstract concepts took on the awesome power of reality: the power over life and death, freedom and captivity, fame and shame. Another topos in those days was the Wörterbuch des Unmenschen, published as a regular feature in the monthly journal Die Wandlung from November 1945 to December 1949.27 This Dictionary of the Unmensch enacted a taboo against the German language, which was considered to have been debased by its Nazi usage. But language, the German language, was the very element of life for a literary critic like von Wiese. Von Wiese had certainly not himself committed any crimes against humanity. But neither had he resisted Nazi ideology as did, for instance, Karl Jaspers, who lost his university chair at Heidelberg as a consequence (1937). Quite by accident I came across a review essay authored by von Wiese in one of the streamlined German language and literature studies journals of the Nazi era. Von Wiese’s evaluation of the books he reviews manifestly tows the line of the officially approved value structure. At this point, the enigmatic text of the other major critic, Karl Viëtor, author of the 1949 Goethe monograph, began to unfold its own shame discourse. Viëtor literally flags shame when he lavishes praise on Iphigenie, the drama of humanity, in order to repair the damaged self-esteem of the German living and teaching “the humanities” abroad. This work, he assures his American readers, “will always remain one of the purest manifestations of European morality and art.” Key words here are “purest” and “European.” Viëtor envelops the besmirched German in the spotless European mantle accessible through Goethe’s work—and he says so with amazing candor and complete clarity: “The German above all may point to this work as the noblest expression of his highest essence and success whenever his essence and his worth are questioned by himself and by the world.”28

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Viëtor could not help but be aware of shame-induced self-questioning. He had come to teach in the United States after the war, to Harvard in fact, the university with the strongest commitment to the study of German literature in the US at the time. The Mitscherlichs’ preface to The Inability to Mourn tells about a similar experience by which they became conscious of the shame attached to German identity while they were living and working abroad in the early 1960s. Shame is most inevitably experienced in the presence of an other, exposed to the gaze of the other as stranger, as outsider. Viëtor’s own past contains a well-known book, Der junge Goethe. Published in 1930, the book anticipated fascist values in explicit terms. It is not hard to imagine what it must have felt like for Viëtor in the postwar years: knowing that your Harvard colleagues had read those words that you would now like to be able to eat. An expurgated version of the 1930 book was published in 1951. The final turn in the dialectic of the shame discourse bears upon the experience of carrying another’s shame.29 This experience can be placed at the root of Iphigenie rejection by the generation of ’68, a rejection that heralded the war against the classics during the 1970s, the so-called Klassikstreit. In terms of real history the Klassikstreit coincided to an amazing degree with the turbulent decade that witnessed the student revolts and RAF (Red Army Faction) terrorism. The denomination “Hitler’s children” given to the terrorists at the time was subjected to heated controversy initially but has since become commonly accepted. The rebels turned terrorists were seen as sons and daughters raging against their fathers’ shameful past conduct. For graphic examples of this generational warfare, we may think of Gudrun Ensslin and the son of Will Vesper.30 The academic class of the rebellious generation made Goethe’s Iphigenie their whipping-girl: the scapegoat ordained to receive the punishment for the fathers’ sins. The beginning of Iphigenie rejection can be traced to a famous speech given by Martin Walser at the 1964 Germanistentag (German Studies Convention) in Essen. The position of Walser’s generation (born in 1927) within the structure of the shame discourse is complex, in terms of rejection and identification. Teenagers at the end of the war (seventeen years old), just old enough to be used as Flakhelfer (artillery aides) in the vain effort to defend the hometown against enemy bombers and the unstoppable advance of the Allied troops, Walser’s age group found themselves somewhere between the status of fathers on the one hand and sons or daughters on the other. There could certainly be no question of responsibility or guilt in their case. But there definitely was a large question of shame for, perhaps even of shame of, the fathers. There is ample evidence of the great psychological turbulence to which postwar German literature owes some of its major writers: both Martin Walser and Günter Grass were born in 1927; Christa Wolf in 1929. Walser’s polemic against Iphigenie comes to a head in two passages of his speech. The first is ostensibly directed against actualizing the classics on the

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stage. Theater directors, Regisseure, Walser complains, are staging Schiller’s Wallenstein as a parable of 20 July 1944. “And now, in ‘Iphigenie,’ the audience is supposed to learn how to cope with the burdensome reverberations of the Third Reich. The German is supposed to feel as a humanizable Tantalid.”31 The two sentences call for a nearly interminable psychoanalysis. Their content is obviously the postwar discourse of shame, of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with the past). The question is who is telling whom to feel ashamed for, or of, what: “soll sich … fühlen.” Two key words hold the answer: “the German” and “humanizable.” The first, the German, calls attention to a peculiar structure of identification. In a way that is typical of shame discourse, the line between insiders and outsiders, between self and others, is blurred (“The German is supposed,” not “We Germans are supposed”). Identification with “the German” overlaps with rejection of “the German.” What appears is the most outstanding mark of the experience of shame: the invasion and contamination of the self by an other.32 The other key word, “humanizable,” ups the ante of the Iphigenie tradition in a decisive way. In the one hundred and twenty years up to Walser’s moment of 1964, Iphigenie interpretations had discussed the concept of Menschlichkeit/ Humanität in various dimensions: human versus divine agency under the sign of secularization; sin versus crime or disease in the tradition of errare humanum est; grace and redemption versus cure and justice, following Goethe’s clue that “For all our human frailties/Pure humanity atones”33 Walser’s statement reaches far beyond that tradition. His “humanizable” places “the German” on the borderline between animal and human, between bestiality and atrocity, on the literal level of the Unmensch, who must undergo a metamorphosis first in order to become human. In the evasive way typical of the distortions within shame discourse, Walser, like Benno von Wiese sixteen years earlier, avoids the significant word Menschlichkeit by means of a foreign word: “humanizable.” The shame experience that struggles to be expressed in Walser’s attributing of Unmenschlichkeit (inhumanity) to the ancestors (the German as Tantalid) even as it struggles against being spoken, is one of the most difficult to bear: it is being ashamed of the father, “sich des Vaters schämen.” There is a passage in this same drama, Iphigenie auf Tauris, that speaks directly and with wrenching pathos of this shame of the father. As Iphigenie hesitates before continuing her horrible ancestor narrative, she reflects: Happy the man who can recall his fathers With joy, who with their deeds and greatness can Regale a hearer, and with quiet pleasure Beholds himself at the close of that fair Succession. For a house does not produce The monster or the demigod straight off; Only the evil or the good in series Will bring about the horror of the world Or the world’s joy.34

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We find that Goethe, too, handles shame discourse with extreme caution: a negativo. Iphigenie speaks directly of a self (“the man who … himself ” [“dem der … sich”]) proud of his or her fathers, but far more indirectly—in universalizing, abstract terms—of the shameful opposite, displacing the shamed self ’s experience by “the world’s” (“the horror … the world’s” [das Entsetzen … der Welt]). The passage itself is hardly ever discussed in interpretations of Iphigenie, yet it remains subtextually very much alive. My own experience confirms the critics’ tendency to “forget” this part of the drama. I kept associating the wellremembered beginning of Iphigenie’s speech (“Happy the man who can recall his fathers” [Wohl dem der seiner Väter gern gedenkt]) with Faust’s reminiscences about his father during the Osterspaziergang (Easter walk) with Wagner. Clearly, a “dark gentleman” (dunkler Ehrenmann) such as Faust’s father is not half as bad as the unspeakable Tantalids. There can be no doubt that this passage was part of the subtext of Walser’s protest against Iphigenie.35 The second outstanding passage of Walser’s attack has become one of the most winged words in German Iphigenie reception history. “Iphigenie’s leap into pure truthfulness, by which she after all puts at risk also the lives of two more, let’s just say, humans, this leap in every other space would be the worst kind of lieutenantesque carelessness. But Thoas is a Weimarian.”36 These words belong in another postwar German discourse, one featured in the narratives of Borchert and Böll: the anti-war, anti–hero-worship tales of reckless or stupid leaders sacrificing the lives of their soldiers. This is the cannon fodder argument of victimization. Like Walser here, it argues: “Soldiers, too, are human” (Auch Soldaten sind Menschen.) In the role of victim, fathers who were soldiers can claim the sympathy of the sons; the victim can even claim, by extension, innocence. The structure of identification has changed. Now the shame-inducing other (the father) is split into two functions. One, the potentially innocent victim, can be accepted as part of the son’s self. The other function, of perpetrator, Leutnant or Führer, can be rejected as Other. This Other can be (self-) righteously judged and condemned in the strongest terms. He is assigned the position of the worst: “schlimmster.” Twenty years after the Hitler era, i.e, one generation later, in the reemergence of shame discourse on the subject of Iphigenie, we are witnessing the return of the repressed. But as in all historical returns, the repressed does not come back as the same. The dialectic of self and other has changed with the passage of time from fathers to sons and daughters. The new generation could and did now, twenty years after the abhorrent historical reality, reject the “showpiece of humanity” (Paradestück der Humanität [Walser]), Goethe’s Iphigenie, in toto. Yet the postwar discourse of shame on Menschlichkeit (humanity) and Unmenschlichkeit (inhumanity), which was repressed in von Wiese and Viëtor, has returned with its own power of distortion. We see it in Walser’s recourse to the foreign word “humanizable.” And we see it in the second passage, on Iphigenie’s ir-

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responsible salto into pure truth, with its incredibly cautious, embarrassed approach to the counterclaim of Menschlichkeit, even for the (German) fathers as victims. Walser’s version of the argument, “Soldiers, too, are human” reads: “two more, let’s just say, humans” (zwei weitere, sagen wir einmal, Menschen).

Notes 1. “Entre l‘homme et l‘amour, / Il y a la femme. / Entre l‘homme et la femme, / Il y a un monde. / Entre l‘homme et le monde, / Il y a un mur.” Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, transl. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore and London 1968), 53. 2. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London 1957), vol. 14, 243–258. 3. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York and London 1978), 83. 4. Ibid., 84f. 5. Ibid., 89. 6. Ibid., 182f. 7. See for instance Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (New York 1981), 20–33. 8. Philosophy Today 33 (1989): 174–182. 9. An early example is Susan Sontag‘s The Pornographic Imagination: Styles of Radical Will (New York 1969), 35–73. 10. Newsweek, 6 February 1995, pp. 20–26. 11. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York 1992). 12. Newsweek, 6 February 1995, p. 21. 13. For this tendency, see James S. Hans, “Shame and Desire in the Myths of Origins,” Philosophy Today 33 (1989): 330–346. Hans contrasts the social forces since Socrates/Plato, which have placed shame under a taboo in Western culture, with Nietzsche’s “superman” morality, which sought to undo the taboo. 14. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York 1978), 29–92. 15. “…daß diese Lächerlichkeit ihn noch älter und widerlicher, seinen Sohn noch schmutziger machen wird, noch unwürdiger… .” Letter to Robert Klopstock, June 1921. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, transl. Richard and Carla Winston (New York 1977). 16. “Es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.” Franz Kafka, The Trial, transl. David Wyllie. (retrieved 08-09-2006). 17. “Denn es leidet keinen Zweifel, wer eine solche Selbsteinschätzung … vor anderen äußert … der ist krank. … Es fehlt das Schämen vor anderen.” Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246f. 18. “Ihre Klagen sind Anklagen, gemäß dem alten Sinne des Wortes; sie schämen und verbergen sich nicht, weil alles Herabsetzende, was sie von sich aussagen, im Grunde von einem anderen gesagt wird.” Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 248. 19. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich 1967); in English, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour, transl. Beverley R. Placzek (New York 1975). 20. Freud’s discourse on shame has likewise escaped notice in a close reading of “Mourning and Melancholia” by Marsha Lynne Abrams: “Coping with Loss in the Human Sciences: A Reading at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics,” Diacritics 23 (Spring 1993): 67–82. 21. “Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt.” Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 57th ed. (Munich 2005), Article 1.

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22. The allusion to Fredric Jameson’s concept of a political unconscious is intentional. For the historicist basis of Jameson’s approach see esp. the Preface and the first chapter in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca 1981). 23. Fühmann’s Hungarian journal (22 Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens) reflects explicitly and extensively on shame and taboo (“30.10.”), while signally marking and suppressing specific taboo areas, e.g., in the unwritten dream of deep shame of “29.10.” In his last major work, Fühmann’s autobiography of Georg Trakl, Der Sturz des Engels: Erfahrungen mit Dichtung, the angel of the title, emblem of the self, is the clearest signal of shame’s power. The truth about this self-angel throughout the text is not a crash of good into evil of Miltonic grandeur, but debasement in excrement and decay, characterized in phrases such as “Kotige Flügel, Würmer tropften von seinen Lidern, kotfleckig, Exkrement an der Schulter.” Cf. Irmgard Wagner, Franz Fühmann: Nachdenken über Literatur (Heidelberg 1989). 24. For details see Irmgard Wagner, Critical Approaches to Goethe’s Classical Dramas: Iphigenie, Tasso, Die natürliche Tochter (Columbia, SC, 1995), chapters I.1. and I.2. 25. See especially section “I” in Lacan‘s Speech and Language. 26. Other leitmotifs in the critical tradition are: peace, brotherhood of man, guilt versus innocence, human sacrifice, the relation of Gods and humans. 27. Published in book form in 1957. Dolf Sternberger, Gerhard Storz, Wilhelm Emmanuel Süskind, Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen (Hamburg 1957). Sternberger was the editor of Die Wandlung. 28. Karl Viëtor, Goethe the Poet (New York 1949). Quoted from the 1970 edition, 67. 29. I shall only mention briefly another configuration in the shame discourse: German scholars exiled in Britain or America who were in fact victims of the Nazi past, yet still experienced the shame attached to the name “German.” There is a complex structure of identity involved here, as adumbrated in Erich Heller‘s famous volume of essays on German literature and culture published in 1952 under the title The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge). 30. For an imaginative account of this problematic see the chapter “Kein Denkmal für Gudrun Ensslin: Rede gegen die Wände der Stammheimer Zelle,” in Christine Brückner‘s Wenn du geredet hättest, Desdemona: Ungehaltene Reden ungehaltener Frauen (Hamburg 1983). 31. “Und in der ‘Iphigenie’ soll der Zuschauer jetzt erleben, wie man mit dem lastenden Nachhall des Dritten Reiches fertig werden kann. Der Deutsche soll sich als humanisierbarer Tantalide fühlen.” Martin Walser, “Imitation oder Realismus,” first published in his Erfahrungen und Leseerfahrungen (Frankfurt 1965), 72. 32. Freud‘s view in Trauer und Melancholie, that the melancholic’s self-accusations are really accusations of another turned back onto the self, reverses the perspective in an effort to deny the experience of shame. What is real is the subject’s experience, his or her suffering from feelings of self-abasement, not what serves Freud as rational explanation of that experience, i.e., the origin of that feeling in the other’s perceived abasement. 33. Own translation of Goethe‘s phrase “alle menschlichen Gebrechen / Sühnet reine Menschlichkeit,” which can be found in: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Dem Schauspieler Krüger mit einem Exemplar der ‘Iphigenie,’” in Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, vol. 1 (Hamburg 1996), 353. 34. Iphigenie in Tauris: A Play in Five Acts, transl. Charles E. Passage (New York 1963). “Wohl dem der seiner Väter gern gedenkt, / Der froh von ihren Taten, ihrer Größe / Den Hörer unterhält, und, still sich freuend, / Am Ende dieser schönen Reihe sich / Geschlossen sieht! Denn es erzeugt nicht gleich / Ein Haus den Halbgott, noch das Ungeheuer; / Erst eine Reihe Böser oder Guter / Bringt endlich das Entsetzen, bringt die Freude / Der Welt hervor.” (V. 351ff.) 35. By identifying the subject of shame (Iphigenie’s inhumane ancestors, the Tantalids) with “the German” (der Deutsche), Walser also protests in the name of “the German” against the imposition of shame from the outside, from non-Germans. As a trained Germanist, Walser knows that Iphigenie interpretation since the war had been carried on primarily abroad, while German scholars had remained overwhelmingly silent. Walser acknowledges the heavy burden of Third Reich history—”der lastende Nachhall des Dritten Reiches, mit dem man irgendwie fertig wer-

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den muß”—yet his German self responds with resentment to the arrogance of the self-righteous outsider who presumes to reeducate the German sinner. The historical analogy that suggests itself here is the reeducation policy of the Allies in early postwar Germany. 36. “Iphigenies Salto ins pure Wahrhaftige, mit dem sie immerhin auch das Leben von zwei weiteren, sagen wir einmal, Menschen riskiert, dieser Salto wäre in jedem anderen Raum schlimmster leutnantshafter Leichtsinn. Aber Thoas ist Weimaraner.” Walser, “Imitation oder Realismus,” 77.

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Notes on the Contributors

Assmann, Aleida, Dr. phil., Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz (Germany). Main areas of interest: history and theory of writing, historical anthropology, intermediality, and cultural memory. Her publications include Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (1999) and Zeit und Tradition: Kulturelle Strategien der Dauer (1999). She is also the editor of several anthologies of comparative literature and cultural studies, including Weisheit (1991) and Texte und Lektüren (1996). Bohleber, Werner, Dr. phil., psychoanalyst in private practice in Frankfurt (Germany). Training and Supervising Analyst, former President of the German Psychoanalytical Association. Editor of the German psychoanalytical journal Psyche. Author of several books and numerous articles. His main research subjects are trauma, adolescence and identity, psychoanalytic theory, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, and terrorism. His most recent book as editor is Die Gegenwart der Psychoanalyse die Psychoanalyse der Gegenwart (2001). Bosse, Hans, Dr. phil., Dr. theol., Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Social Psychology at the J.W. Goethe-University, Frankfurt (Germany). Areas of interest are adolescents as agents of cultural, social, and identity change; formation of group cultures (connections between collective and individual identity); hermeneutic research methods, and political religions. His publications include Männlichkeitsentwürfe:Wandlungen und Widerstände im Geschlechterverhältnis (2000 with Vera King), Der fremde Mann: Jugend, Männlichkeit, Macht. Gruppengespräche mit jungen Sepiks in Papua Neuguinea. Eine Ethnoanalyse (1994) and Diebe, Lügner, Faulenzer (1979/1984). He is also a co-founder and teaching group analyst at the Institute of Group Analysis, Heidelberg. Brede, Karola, Dr., Dr. phil., Dipl.-Soz., Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany). Main

Notes on the Contributors

215

areas of interest: destructive consequences of social integration in the fields of economy, social relations, and culture, and methodology of the case study. Her publications include Der Fall, die Fallstudie und über den Fall hinaus (2007), Jargon als gewaltsame Rede: Fallstudie über Stellenabbau in einem Bankunternehmen (2006), Freud als Beobachter (2001), Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte: Aggression als Element öffentlicher Auseinandersetzung (2000). She is also the editor of several anthologies regarding the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture, including Nein,Verneinung, Konstruktion: Französisch-deutsche Verknüpfungen (2004) and Das Überich und die Macht seiner Objekte (1996). Brunner, José, Dr. phil., Professor of Philosophy of Science and History of Ideas at Tel Aviv University (Israel). His main areas of interest are history and politics of psychoanalysis and of the discourse on trauma; modern and contemporary political thought; time and law; psychological explanations of Nazism and genocide; practices of compensation for Holocaust survivors. His publications include Freud: The Politics of Psychoanalysis (1995 hardcover, 2001 paperback). Since 2006 he has been editor of the Tel Aviv Yearbook for German History. Emrich, Hinderk M., Dr. med., Dr. phil., Professor Emeritus at the Department of Psychiatry, Social Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Medical School Hannover (Germany). Main areas of interest: psychopharmacology, psychology of perception, systems-theory of psychosis, philosophy. His publications include Psychiatrische Anthropologie: Therapeutische Bedeutung von Phantasiesystemen (1990), Vom Nutzen des Vergessens (1996), Welche Farbe hat der Montag? – Synästhesie: Das Leben mit verknüpften Sinnen (2001), Psyche und Transzendenz (2002), On Time Experience in Depression: Dominance of the Past (2004), Emotional Time, Creativity and Consciousness: On Time Experience in Depression (2005). Grünberg, Kurt, Dr. phil., psychoanalyst (IPA), Staff Research Member at the Sigmund-Freud-Institut and Research Director of the Jewish Psychotherapeutic Counseling Center in Frankfurt am Main (Germany); private practice. Main areas of interest: intergenerational transmission of trauma; late psychosocial effects of the Nazi persecution on survivors and second-generation Jews in Germany. His recent publications include Erinnerung und Rekonstruktion:Tradierung des Traumas der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung und Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2004), Love after Auschwitz: The Second Generation in Germany. Jewish Children of Survivors of the Nazi Persecution in the Federal Republic of Germany and their Experience with Love Relationships (2006), and “Contaminated Generativity,” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (in press). Rüsen, Jörn, Dr., Professor, Senior Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), Essen; Professor

216

Notes on the Contributors

Emeritus at the University Witten/Herdecke (Germany). Fields of research: theory and methodology of history, history of historiography, modern intellectual history, historical consciousness, historical learning; processes of sensegeneration, strategies of intercultural comparison and communication, general issues of cultural orientation in modern societies. His many publications include Historische Vernunft (1983), Zeit und Sinn (1990), Geschichte im Kulturprozeß (2002), Kann Gestern besser werden? (2003), and History: Narration – Interpretation – Orientation (2005). Straub, Jürgen, Dr. phil., Professor of Social Theory and Social Psychology at the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany). He was Research Director and a member of the Management Committee at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Essen (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, KWI) from October 1999 to September 2001. In April 2004, he began leading the research group Graduate School (Graduiertenkolleg) Intercultural Communication – Intercultural Competence at the KWI and at the TUC. Straub’s general research topics are cultural psychology, intercultural communication and competence, methodology of qualitative research, identity theory, biography research, and historical consciousness. His recent book publications include Übersetzung als Medium des Kulturverstehens und der sozialen Integration (2002, co-edited with Joachim Renn and Shingo Shimada), Transitorische Identitä: Der Prozesscharakter des modernen Selbst (2002, co-edited with Joachim Renn), Lebensformen im Widerstreit (2003, co-edited with Burkhard Liebsch), and Pursuit of Meaning (2006, co-edited with Doris Weidemann, Carlos Koelbl, and Barbara Zielke). Wagner, Irmgard, Dr. phil., Professor Emerita of German at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (United States). Main areas of scholarship: German literature, literary theory, theory of history, cultural studies. Her books include Franz Fühmann: Nachdenken über Literatur (1989), Critical Approaches to Goethe’s Classical Dramas (1995), Goethe: Zugänge zum Werk (1999), and Kaiserreich und Republik in Tony Schumachers Jugendbüchern (2006). Since 2003 she has been President of the American Goethe Society of Washington, D.C.

Index

A abandonment, 39–40 Abraham, Nicolas, 73 Abraham myth, 191 actualizing deactualization, 63–64 Ad Herennium, 23 Adam and Eve, 187 addressing versus talking to, 46 adolescence, 34–43 ambivalence and, 36–37 case study, 38–40 historical awareness and, 35–36 ritual and, 37, 43 Adorno, Theodor, 83, 85, 98, 99, 174–175 affect, 22–25, 70, 128n8 versus cognition, 40 Agamben, Giorgio, 158n55 aggression, 42, 48, 142 , 150, 155n3, 155n18, 156n35 anti-Semitism and, 139 social control and, 140–142 social object of, 145–147 alien entity, 47, 55 alter ego, 145–147 ambivalence, 36–37, 38–40 ritual and, 38 American Handbook of Psychiatry, 20 Améry, Jean, 100n25, 104, 119, 121 analysts, 79, 103 anecdote, 30 anger, 70 animism, 162–163 Antelme, Robert, 119

anthropocentrism, 6, 164 Antin, Mary, 24–25 anti-Semitism, 139–158 eliminatory, 151–154 Jewish-German gap, 134n82 anxiety, 163, 167, 175 collective anxiety, 174, 180 art, 169 Assmann, Aleida, 19, 214 aufgehoben, 166 Aufhebung, 172 Auschwitz research and myth of objectivity, 83–99 symbolism of, 121 authenticity, 22, 24 authors versus victims, 11 autobiographical frame, 30 autobiography, 23, 24 autonomous subject, 46 aversion, 146 avoidance, 194–199 B Bacon, F., 170 ban on killing, 142–145, 154 Bar-On, Dan, 53, 61, 71, 107–108 basal therapy, 54 Beckett, Samuel, 19 belatedness, 13–14 Bergmann, Martin, 110 Bernstein, Basil, 40 Bettelheim, Bruno, 37–38

218 biography, 2, 23 biographical rupture, 34 narrative and, 12 Bohleber, Werner, 69, 214 bondage, 78 borderline personality, 61 Bosse, Hans, 33, 214 Brainin, Elisabeth, 106 Brede, Karola, 139, 215 Brothers Karamazov,The, 47 Brunner, José, 159, 215 Buber, Martin, 46 C case studies adolescence, 38–40 reconstruction, 33 second-generation Holocaust perpetrators, 73–81 Castel, Robert, 157n38 chain of emotions, 23 change, 55 ritual and, 38 charity, 142–145 chronology, 34 cognition theory, 57 cognition versus affect, 40 cognitive psychology, 21, 22 collaborators, 125, 136n108 collective, 3–4, 9 collective agent, 9 collective ban on killing, 142–145, 154 collective forgetting, 59 collective memory, 26, 42, 102, 133n76 collective mind, 177 collective pathology, 179–180 collective trauma, 29, 30, 69–81 Colonialism, 35 comparative perspective, 105–136 passim equalizations, 110 examples, 114–127 guiding questions, 132–133n68 homogenizations, 114, 115 incommensurable versus incomparable, 109 narrative shape, 111, 112 rationalization strategies, 132n66 reflective comparisons, 111 terminology, 115 comparator systems, 57–59 compensation, 166

Index

complicity, victims and perpetrators, 95–99 historians’ conflict, 98 concretism, 71 confession, compulsion of, 45–48, 51–54 conflict regulation, 38 consciousness formation, 56–59 Copernicus, 170–171 coping, 55, 61, 104, 130n24, 163 coping with past, 197 Cournut, Jean, 73 Cramer, Friedrich, 59–60 cross transference, 5 cultural imperialism, 6–7 cultural production, 35 D Darwin, C., 170–171 Das Geisterfest (Konrad), 19 death anxiety, 133n77 death instincts, 56 death wish, 142, 144 death-in-life, 29 debate, 38 defense mechanism, 35, 47, 60, 79 dehumanization, 121–125, 134n87 special treatment, 122 Deleuze, Gilles, 54 delusion, 62 querulatory delusion, 50 denial, 60, 61, 70, 93 Der Untergang (Hirschberg), 157–158n53 detachment, 47 disorders, 118–119 Devereux, George, 40 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 174–175 dialectics abolition, elevation, preservation, 161 of absolute domination, 164–167 of blindness and vision, 172–174 of emancipation, 167–170 process, 160–161 of science and myth, 174–178 of scientific worldview, 170–172 of total control, 162–163 dialogue, 178–181 Die Zeit, 114 dignity, 190, 192 disacknowledgement, 60, 61

Index

discontinuity, 34 domination, 159, 164–167 social domination of humans, 175 doppelgänger, 47 Dostoevsky, F., 47 Douglas, Mary, 40 dreams, 74, 142 drive, 188 Durkheim, Emile, 40 E ecclesiastic frame, 30 Eckstaedt, Anita, 78 Edelman, Gerald, 60 ego, 145–147 eigen, 186 Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (Fassbinder), 50 Eissler, Kurt, 56 emancipation, 167–170, 180 Emrich, Hindirk, 45, 215 End of History and the Last Man,The (Fukuyama), 190 endo-system, 52, 57 Enlightenment, 175, 176 Ensslin, Gudrun, 196 enticement, 52–53 Epstein, Helen, 106 Erdheim, Mario, 40 Erikson, Erik H., 3, 14n6 ethnic identity, 34, 38–40, 42 historicity and, 36–37 mythical origins, 35 ethno-analysis, 33, 40 ethnocentrism, 6 ethnohermeneutics, 33 eugenics, 80 euthanasia, 80 exhibitionist behavior, 191 experiential space, 14n12 extermination, 118–127 extermination anxiety, 119–120 terminology, 115–116 witnessing, 120 F Faimberg, H., 73 false memory debate, 20–22, 29 implanting false memories, 21 False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), 21

219 family, 10–11, 21 Jewish victims, 101–136 passim National Socialist perpetrators, 101–136 passim structure of, 47 fantasy, 159–185 father-son relationship, 165–167 omnipotence, 170 primal fantasies, 177 primal horde, 165 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 50 father-son relationship, 165–167 Federal Republic of Germany, 83–99 feminist theory, 189 Final Solution, 122 Finn, Geraldine, 189 Fischer, Fritz, 193 forgetting, 29, 54–56 active process, 60 aggressive, 56 balancing values and, 61–62 improper, 61 passive process, 60 representing, 62–64 system theory and, 59–60 theory of, 58 transformational, 63 forgiveness, 50 Frank, Niklas, 51 Frankfurt am Main, 97 Frankfurt School, 176 fremd, 186 French studies, 188 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 29, 40, 58, 60, 141, 143, 155n18 analysis of religion, 160–170 decentering endeavor, 170–171 exhibitionist behavior, 191 inquiry into history, 160–185 passim mythical categories of explanation, 176 Oedipal fantasy, 160 power politics and, 160–185 passim shame and, 191, 200n32 writings “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 161, 173 “Future of an Illusion, The,” 161, 164, 165, 167, 168, 172, 173

220 “Moses and Monotheism,” 165–166, 167, 173, 176–177 “Mourning and Melancholia,” 191 “Question of a Weltanschauung, The,” 161, 168, 172, 175 “Totem and Taboo,” 161, 162, 165–166, 167, 178 Fühmann, Franz, 192 Fukuyama, Francis, 190 future, 46, 60 G Gay, Peter, 14–15n16, 161, 191 gaze female, 189 male, 189 of other, 187 gender, 186 generational issues boundaries, 80 dialogue, 71 generation born 1927, 196 generation terminology, 130–131n27 intergenerational patterns, 10, 11 transgenerational transfer, 129n14 transgenerational transmission, 72– 73, 101–136 transgenerational trauma, 69–81 genocide, 121 “German, the,” 197, 200–201n35 German Basic Law, 192 German Lager, 125 German studies, 186–201 passim literary history, 192–199 German television, 114 Germany, Nazi, 174 Giordano, Ralph, 93 Goethe, J., 193–199 Goldhagen, Daniel J., 139, 151–154, 155n3 Gondek, Hans-Dieter, 54 Grass, Günter, 196 Graumann, Carl, 47 “great men of history,” 2 grief, 70 Grossmann, Klaus, 105 group, 147–151 Grünberg, Kurt, 83, 106, 120, 215 Guattari, Félix, 54 guilt, 72–73, 143, 152–153

Index

guilt myths, 190 responsibility and, 109 second guilt, 93 versus shame, 189–190 H Habermas, Jürgen, 40, 98 Halbwachs, Maurice, 26 Hamlet, 188 Hardtmann, Gertrude, 104 Hauer, Nadine, 71 “haunted forever,” 114–116 Hegel, G. W. F., 160 Phenomenology of Spirit, 161 Heisenberg, Martin, 57 Heller, Erich, 200n29 Hellinger, Bert, 112–113 hermeneutics, 2, 10, 119 depth, 102 ethnohermeneutics, 33 heroic memory, 28 Hilberg, Raul, 105 hippocampus, 58 historia vitae, 28 historical agent, 10 motivation, 9 subjectively intended meaning, 2 historical awareness, 33–43 adolescence and, 35–36 ethnic world and, 36–37 ritual and, 38, 40 historical frame, 30 historical psychoanalysis, 159–185 passim, 180–181 data collection methods, 5 individualization of historical situations, 4 memory and recall, 8 overview, 1–15 personalization of historical situations, 4 reductive nature of, 5 sociological infuence, 181 historical studies dialogue with psychoanalysis, 1–2 fantasy and, 159–185 memory and recall, 8, 25–26 oral history, 25–26 power and, 159–185 socialized subjects and, 11 socioeconomic factors, 174

221

Index

historiography, 25. See also historical studies history, 127–128n8 Hitchcock, Alfred, 61 Hitler, Adolph, 9, 50–51, 55, 172 Hitler Willing Executioners (Goldhagen), 139 Hitler Youth, 50 Hitler’s children, 196 “Hitler’s Problem,” 4 Hoffmann, Wolfgang, 153 Holocaust, 121 as historical event, 103 versus Holokaust, 114–115 second-generation identification, 69–81 selection, 135n89 transgenerational trauma, 69–81 Holocaust research, 8 myth of objectivity, 83–99 Holocaust victims, 10, 28, 29, 30 second-generation, 69–81. See also second-generation Holocaust victims Horkheimer, Max, 174–175 human nature subjective knowledge of, 2 Humanität, 195 “humanizable,” 197, 198 humiliation, 120 Hussein, Saddem, 51 Husserl, Edmund, 101, 127n3 hypochondria, 53 I identification, 197 endocryptic, 73 narcissistic, 80 Nazi, 72 oedipal, 80 processes, 72–73 second-generation identification, 69–81 unconscious, 73 identity, 161, 193 dynamic, 51–54 ethnic identity, 34, 38–40, 42 fragmentized, 73 loss of, 52 as process, 45, 54–64 imagination, 62

imperialism, 166 Inability to Mourn,The (Mitscherlich), 191–192, 196 incest recovery movement, 20–22 individuality, 3 individualization of historical situations, 4 individualization of life prospects, 36 institutional frames, 22 intergenerational patterns, 10 internalization of norms, 140 interpersonality, 45–48 Iphigenie drama (Goethe), 193–199 Italy, fascist, 174 J James, William, 102 Jaspers, Karl, 195 Joas, Hans, 108 Jokl, Anna Maria, 129n20 Jucovy, Milton, 110 K Kafka, Franz, 191 Kapo, 125, 136n108 Karp, Alexander, 152, 155n3 Kestenberg, Judith, 73, 103, 106 Kijak, Moises, 79 killing, ban on, 142–145, 154 killing taboo, 142–145 Klassikstreit, 196–197 Klein, Hillel, 73 Kleist, Heinrich von, 48–51 Knauss, Werner, 39 Kogan, Ilany, 73, 110 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 128n8 Kohut, Heinz, 53, 61 Konrad, György, 19, 28 Koplin, Albert, 26–28 Kunz, Josef, 194 Kurosawa, Akira, 45 L Lacon, J., 187–188 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 177 Langer, Lawrence, 29 Laufner, Richard, 97 legal frame, 22, 30 Lenz, Georg, 187 Lessing, Gotthold, 187 lethality, 102, 135–136n106

222 Levi, Primo, 101, 119, 121, 122–124, 135n89, 135n90, 135n91 Levinas, E., 45 liberation, 39–40, 63, 102 libido, 63–64 Liebsch, Burkhard, 102, 121, 127–128n8 Ligeti, Vera, 106 literary criticism, 186, 192–199 classic rejection, 196–197 litigation, 38 Loftus, Elizabeth, 21 Lorenzer, Alfred, 40 lottery of proposals, 57 Lyotard, Jean-François, 29 M Maaz, Hans-Joachim, 48 magic, 163 Marburg University, 86, 93, 95–99 Marx, Karl, 168 mass media, 114–116 material object, 145–147 matriarchy, 166 Mead, George H., 145–147 meaning historical, 42 ritual and, 38, 40–41 Mediations on Metaphysics (Adorno), 83 meditation, 62 megalomania, 48 memory. See also collective memory anchors, 19–31 affect, 22–25 symbol, 26–28 trauma, 28–30 co-fabulation, 21 cultural, 133n76 external stabilizers, 19 false memory debate, 20–22 heroic versus unheroic, 28 neurophysiological research, 19 past subliminal options, 63 power and, 180 Proustian method, 62–64 psychological mechanisms, 19 repressed memories, 21–22 screen memory, 75, 80 static versus dynamic models, 19–20 violence and, 102 memory interview, 25 menmo techniques, 19

Index

Menschlichkeit, 195, 197, 198 Michael Kohlhaas (Kleist), 48–51 mission, sense of, 51 second-generation children of Holocaust, 70 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, 191, 196 model of the world, 57 modernity, 167, 171 modernization, 34–43, 38–40, 42–43 ritual and, 37 school and, 37 moral autonomy, 153 moral psychology, 128n8 Moser, Tilmann, 110–114 mother/child dyad, 47 motivation, 5 causative motives, 9 cognitive reasons, 9 multiple personality disorder, 20 Muselman, 122, 135n90 Musil, Robert, 147 mythifying, 35 Abraham myth, 191 guilt myths, 190 historical events, 35 mythical categories of explanation, 176 mythical origins, 35 origins of work, 35 science and, 174–178 N narcissism, 53, 72, 76, 80, 171 narrative, 11–12, 30, 111, 112 abbreviations, 118 competence, 12 National Socialists, 4, 10. See also secondgeneration Holocaust perpetrators anti-Semitism and, 139 legacy of, 83–99 nature, 164, 170, 175 Nazi crimes, 74 analysts and, 79 Neuronal Darwinism (Edelman), 60 neurophysiological research, 19 Newsweek, 189–190 Niethammer, Lutz, 25 Nietzsche, F., 54, 55 Nirvana principle, 63 nomological paradigm, 3

Index

Nukuma ethnic group, 38 Nuremberg Trials, 195 O object, 145–147 evaluation, 146 external, 156–157n37 radical objectification, 123 objectification of nature, 164, 175 Oedipal fantasy, 160, 165–167, 190 omnipotence, 163, 170 ontology, phylogeny and, 176–177 ontology of the in-between, 46 oral history, 25–26 Original Sin, 177, 190 Other, the, 46, 52, 120, 121–125, 128n8, 133–134n79, 177, 186–187, 188, 193, 198 stereotyped, 147 overvaluation, 46, 48–54, 55 P Papua New Guinea, 34–43 paranoia, 48–54 paranoid delusion, 55 parents denial and, 70 internalized, 80 mortality and, 36 Nazi, 72–81 second-generation identification, 70, 80 Parsons, Talcott, 140, 141, 146, 150, 155n4 past, 60 pathology, 179–180 Patocka, Jan, 127–128n8 payback, 36 perpetrators, 198. See also secondgeneration Holocaust perpetrators persecution, 10 terminology, 115–116 personality, 3 personalization of historical situations, 4 personality splits, 61, 80 personhood, 121–125, 190 personification, 164 perversion, 188 Pfister, Oskar, 161 Philipps University, 97

223 philosophy, 169 phylogeny, 176–177 Pohlen, Professor, 96–99 political discourse, Freud and, 160–185 passim pornography, 189 positionality, 186 postcolonialism, 35 post-traumatic stress disorder, 20, 130n24 powerlessness, 51, 159–185 passim primal horde, 165 Principles of Psychology (James), 102 problem solving, 64 procrastination, 74 progeny of perpetrators, 104–136 passim. See also second-generation Holocaust perpetrators progeny of victims, 104. See also secondgeneration Holocaust victims progression, 39 projection, 150, 156n36 projective identification, 47, 70 promise contexts, 54–55 Proustian method, 62–64 psychic structures, 10, 13 psychoanalysis, 14–15n16. See also historical psychoanalysis biography and, 2 data collection methods, 5 diagnosis analysand’s agreement, 5 dialogue with historical studies, 1–2 expense, 7 memory and recall, 8 method of data collection conversational, 5 cross transference, 6 textual, 5–6 objections to, 4–7 resistance, 7 sociological infuence, 181 terminology of, 5, 15n17, 52 training protocol, 7 universality, 6 psychohistory. See historical psychoanalysis Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud), 58, 60 psychotherapy unconscious and, 53

224 Q querulatory delusion, 50 “Question of a Weltanschauung, The” (Freud), 161, 168, 172, 175 R race, concept of, 134n86 rape, 63 Rashomon, 45 regression, 39 Reik, Theodor, 59 religion compensation and, 166 control and, 162–163 domination and, 164–167 imperialism and, 166 monotheism, 165 polytheism, 166 remembering, act of, 45. See also memory renunciation, 175 replacement, child as, 70 repressed memories, 21–22 myth of, 21 repression, 60, 61, 141, 144, 198 conservation versus forgetting, 29 research academic questions, 7–14 categorization, 87–92, 93, 99n10, 105–107, 176 censorship and, 84 comparative perspective, 105–136 passim. See also comparative perspective control group, 86 criticism of, 139 data analysis, 87–92 methodological applications, 3 myth of objectivity, 83–99 qualitative, 3, 86, 87 quantitative, 3, 86, 87 sample, 86 study design, 85–87 third-party rating, 87–92 resistance, psychological, 7 ritual, 35 argumentative discourse, 40–41 conflict regulation and, 38 expressive discourse, 40–41 informal rituals, 37–38 initiation rituals, 37, 43 ritual integration, 38–40

Index

social drama and, 41–43 spontaneous rituals, 37–38, 43 theories of, 40–41 Rosenthal, Gabriele, 116–118 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23 Rüsen, Jörn, 215–216 S Sartre, J., 188 scapegoat, 43, 80 Schafer, Roy, 52 Scharfetter, Christian, 47 Schiller, Friedrich, 187 Schmidt, Carlo, 97 school, institution of, 37 science, 164, 167–185 decentering endeavor, 170–171 myth and, 174–178 power and, 168–169, 175 technology and, 171 screen memory, 75, 80 second-generation Holocaust perpetrators, 71–81, 84–99, 104, 129n20 autonomy and, 73 case study, 73–81 change and, 109 guilt and, 109 legacy and, 111 organizing factors, 70, 80 self-punishment, 131n37 transgenerational transmission, 101– 136 passim second-generation Holocaust victims, 69–81, 84–99 autonomy and, 73 bodily-presentative trauma, 103 linguistic-symbolic representations, 103 mission fantasies, 70 organizing factors, 70, 80 replacement fantasies, 70 stigmatizing, 106 transgenerational transmission, 101– 136 passim selective attention, 58 self, 186–187, 193 alien within, 47 destabilization, 56 interpersonal, 47 social devaluation of, 47

225

Index

structure of, 46 self-diffusion, 47 self-esteem, 53, 61 self-reflexivity, 13, 40 separation, 39–40, 47, 72 separation anxiety, 119 Sepik region, Papua New Guinea, 34–43 sexual behavior, 75–76 shame, 53, 186–201, 200n32 coping with past, 197 gaze of other and, 187 versus guilt, 189–190 literary criticism and, 192–199 shamelessness, 190 as taboo, 199n13 Shoah. See Holocaust sick role, 140, 141, 147 silence, 71, 74, 116–118, 133n75, 187 as action, 117 different meanings of, 117–118 family secrets, 116 interpretation of, 117 role of, 117 shame and, 187 Simenauer, Erich, 81 Simmel, Georg, 140, 144, 154 social anthropology, 40 social cohesion, 139–158 passim control and, 140–142 social control, 140–142, 144 social drama, 41–43 social integration, 139–140, 143 social object, 145–147 sociology, 40, 181 Soviet Union, 173–174 special treatment, 122 Spellbound (Hitchcock), 61 Staiger, Emil, 194 Starobinski, Jean, 24 stranger, 147–151 Straub, Jürgen, 1, 101, 216 Streeck-Fischer, Annette, 47, 103 Sturm und Drang drama, 187 subjective perspectivity, 47 subjectivity, 5, 7, 24–25 surprise, 46, 55, 56 survival, myth of, 73 survivors, 122, 135n91, 143 symbol, 26–28, 30 Auschwitz, 121 historical, 43

ritual and, 37, 38, 40, 43 symbolic communication, 38 system theory, 59–60 Szczypiorski, Andrej, 26–28 T taboos, 162–163, 191, 199n13 talking to versus addressing, 46 technology, 171 Teicher, Samy, 106 telescopage, 73 testimony, 30 therapeutic frame, 22, 30 Theunissen, Michael, 46, 60, 62 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 54 thymos, 190 time, 46, 127–128n8, 127n3 captive time, 120 differentiating, 11 future, 130n24 lifelines, 80 negative theology of time, 60 now, 101 presence of past, 101–105 present, 101 present past, 102, 118 present time of consciousness, 102 present-bound interest, 102 procrastination, 74 Proustian method, 63 psychological presence, 101 second-generation trauma and, 73, 74, 80 Tišma, Alksandar, 136n108 Todorov, Tzvetan, 125 Torok, Marie, 73 traditions retaliation and, 36 transference, 76, 79, 188 transposition, 73 trauma, 10, 28–30 adolescence, 34–43 bodily-presentative trauma, 103 conspiracy of silence, 63 influence of, 59–60 as organizing factor, 70, 80 secondary versus original, 126 social drama and, 41–43 transgenerational trauma, 69–81 trauma therapists, 22

226 Trial,The (Kafka), 191 Turner, Victor, 40 U unconsciousness, 53, 73 unheroic memory, 28 universality, 6 V values, balance of, 45–48, 53, 54–56, 61–62 vengeance, 50 Vernunft, 161 Verstand, 161 Vesper, Will, 196 Vichy France, 188 victims, 11, 20, 28, 198. See also secondgeneration Holocaust victims authors versus victims, 11 terminology, 108 Vietnam veterans, 108 Viëtor, Karl, 194, 195–196 violence, 48, 50, 72–73

Index

dehumanization and, 122 memory and, 102 obliterative, 102 von Wright, Georg H., 14n4 voyeur, 189 W Wagner, Irmgard, 186, 216 Wahl, François, 189 Walser, Martin, 196 war crimes, 53, 61 warfare, 38 Weber, Max, 34 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 2, 3, 4, 8 Westernization dominance and, 34 Wiese, Benno von, 194 Wolf, Christa, 196 writing, 19 Wulff, Erich, 60 Y Yiddish language, 120