The Collective Silence

German Identity and the Legacy of Shame

Barbara Heimannsberg, Christoph J Schmidt

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134897612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The silence surrounding the Holocaust continues to prevent healing - whether of the victims, Nazis, or the generations that followed them. The telling of the stories surrounding the Holocaust - all the stories - is essential if we are to understand what happened, recognize the part of human nature that allows such atrocities to occur, and realize the hope that we can prevent it from happening again.

Seeking to shed light on the collective silence surrounding the Holocaust in Germany, the contributors offer compelling accounts, histories, and experiences that illuminate the ways in which contemporary Germans continue to grapple with the consequences of the Holocaust. Denial in the older generations, as well as anger and confusion in the younger ones, comes vividly to the surface in these evocative stories of coping and healing. Told from the vantage points both of therapists and of patients, these stories encompass the psychological plight of all those facing the legacy of genocide - from the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official to the children of Jewish immigrants, from those raised in the Hitler Youth Movement to those born well after the war.

1

Psychotherapy
and the Nazi Past

A Search for Concrete Forms

Richard Picker

I would like to offer some preliminary remarks having to do with the terms in which the themes are cast: “psychotherapy” seems clear enough to be useful, but what about “Nazi past”? This term refers to people still living, particularly in the German-speaking states of Central Europe, who were the witnesses of the times (among them former Nazis, their victims, and others who were involved), as well as their children and grandchildren. In these families there is a palpable relationship between the present and the Nazi past. The Nazi time belongs to the recent past; there is no feeling of distance here, as there is with other historical pasts. If any sense of distance is felt, then it must be from some other cause. Very often, however, all subjective distance melts away.

How past is the Nazi past? This is a question which concerns many people in these times, myself included. For my contribution here, this means that I do not know how to come at my topic in such a way that it is not influenced, or even engulfed altogether, by the Nazi past itself. From what standpoint can I survey the phenomenon of Nazi past without being forced to discover that my standpoint itself is a part of that same phenomenon? Thus I am left with the possibility of a concretely subjective approach and a concrete report about how the Nazi past emerges into present experience, and how the process of that emergence and that encounter takes shape.

My approach begins with my awareness that I live in one of the cradles of Nazism, in Vienna, here in the city where Hitler indulged his youthful fantasies, where the cobblestones of the Linzerstrasse still exist, along which he passed in his Mercedes at the time of his triumphal entry into the city in 1938. Back then, after the hours-long entry march of German troops was over, there stood the “Bavarian Relief Train,” not far from my home. There, hungry Viennese received a free bowl of German army rations. Although my parents were not poor, we went along with many others to the field kitchen of this special train to take a “German meal,” the “brotherly offering from the Reich,” a sort of holy communion with “Greater Germany.”* We passed over this exact same cobblestone pavement, which was to outlast the war years ahead, the occupation after the war, the reconstruction period, the economic flowering of Vienna, the tourist invasion….

And perhaps these stones were here long before that, as was the famous view of St. Stephen’s Cathedral from the Graben, which Hitler sketched a dozen times, or the Heldenplatz, where he delivered his “Justification at the Bar of History” (Hitler’s speech defending the annexation of Austria, March 14, 1938). There are so many scenes and settings which are the scenes and settings of the Nazi past. To me they are the scenes of a Nazi present as well—the tourist buses and parking lots, the rush of visitors, all those things seem to me like a thin veneer over “German soil,” “eternal German earth,” which is to be defended “to the last drop of German blood.” And if I travel just a few streetcar stops into Vienna’s 21st District, I will come to the spot where a certain Major Biedermann was hanged. He did not want to see Vienna defended “to the last drop of blood.” In place of the lamppost of 1945 there now stands the tall, unwieldy column of a streetlight, but other than that everything is the same.

Everywhere the Nazi time arises before me. In the lovely southerly Vienna Woods stands the centuries-old Cistercian Monastery of the Holy Cross. The choral chant of the monks is a commentary, in its fashion, on the fact that one of their number, Lanz von Liebenfels,* left the monastery some hundred years ago and became “the man who gave Hitler his ideas.” Traveling on up the Danube, I follow the “Nibelungen Trail” and reach Linz, site of the former Hermann Goering Works (today the United Austrian Steelworks), and on into Germany (still following the Nibelungen), Land of Dreams, over the Valhalla* (by Regensburg) to Nuremberg, city of the Nazi Party Congresses. Everything I experience today is automatically infused with connotations from the Nazi period, and this occurs through the propagandistic misuse of words.

What are my own words? What language could be my mother tongue, when my own mother sought so ardently to speak the language of the Nazis—the so-called “German word”? The dubious Viennese dialect was hardly the “proper medium” for the expression of hopes for a “glorious future”—a “world dominion of the good, the pure, the noble, of Nordic devotion to duty, peopled with heroic mothers and fathers who give their lives in the front lines of battle for Führer, Volk, und Vaterland.”

“Short and sweet” was the German word, “crisp and clear” as well; Schiller and Goethe wrote it, Bach and Beethoven set it to music, and the Führer spoke this German word. And when it was transmitted on the radio, then I for my part was to sit there, attentive and still, and to rise for the closing German anthem.

In what language, what German language, can I capture the Nazi past in words without repeating the old words of domination, which for the most part were stolen from our tradition? For me, the Nazi past is a phenomenon of usurpation. Its very essence is infectious; every attempt at a concrete approach is threatened by a complete loss of distance. Perhaps it is for that reason that in the realm of psychotherapy, the Nazi past comes up only as a private issue.

Between 1967 and 1975 I was undergoing my psychotherapeutic training, in the course of which I studied three different schools of therapy: group dynamics, psychoanalysis, and finally Gestalt therapy (which was to become “my” method). In all alike, the place of the Nazi past remained “private.” In the beginning I did not appreciate this fact. It seemed to me that psychotherapy was a domain that offered security against the threat of an encounter with the Nazi time. The vocabulary of psychoanalysis was not “pure German,” and its psychic dimensions were not those of the “German soul.” Sigmund Freud, Kurt Lewin, Wilhelm Reich, Jakob Levy Moreno, and Fritz Salomon Perls had all fled to England, America, or Africa after the occupation of Central Europe by the Nazis. In no way did they transmit a Nazi ideology, a Nazi language, or a Nazi point of view when their scientific work was passed on to us. The world of psychotherapy was a different world from that of the Nazis. And that felt good. It gave me and my colleagues a certain security—even in the face of the Nazi past itself.

Could we not capture many threatening pasts in words? Had we not learned to deal with psychic dynamics, to grasp and even influence their processes? As therapists just setting out, were we not grounded in social criticism and relativism to a degree that placed us out of reach of the Nazi world? Thus the Nazi past was transformed into just one problem among many to be approached technically and classified diagnostically. And so it happened that whenever the Nazi past threatened to show up in therapy, we met it as therapists, under the cover of a correct methodology, determined to hold to therapeutic boundaries. The clients behaved accordingly. There arose a sort of collusion: we were all of us more interested in “positive” things—the human potential for future development, the resolution of neurosis, emergency intervention in cases of psychosis, further development of therapeutic methodology, and many other such matters.

The Nazi past, by contrast, came up quite differently. It had always seemed to me to be unfathomable, and thus it was probably just as well that it should remain private, buried, even though eminently present.

Typical of this state of affairs, it seemed to me, was a training seminar that took place in 1973 in a nature preserve in the middle of the alpine foothills of southern Germany. Some twenty candidates of a psychoanalytic society who wanted to learn group therapy plunged for some days into the experience of inner realms. The world of dreams, the relational configurations that were manifest in the group itself, the discovery of our own potential—all this had touched us, changed us, brought us into a shared process. One evening a second group arrived at the conference center and sat down in the main hall, right in the middle of our accustomed places. I was surveying the new faces curiously, when suddenly I was addressed by the somewhat older woman who was the group leader: “I hear you are from Vienna. We will be sharing space here for a few days. I must tell you something: In 1938 I had to flee the city. I am a Jew. This is the closest I have come to returning to Vienna since that time; I have never made it any closer. Can you somehow understand that? It would mean something to me, to feel that you do.”

I was thunderstruck. Everything that had transpired in our group was suddenly inconsequential—all the dreams, the relational issues, the agonizing and marvelous common processes of our group’s development. The shrill, sharp-edged words “Nazi past” hung in the midst of the room, among us and between us. All at once there was no detached point of view, no place of “suspended awareness” to be found, from which some explanation could be offered. Here no interpretation, no intervention was possible. I came from the same city from which my colleague had had to flee because she was Jewish. And while I could drive around through southern Germany without thinking about it, the same terrain was a land of painful return for her. My colleague left me alone while she plunged into the dancing that was starting up, into movement, contact, wine, and fruit. I remained for some time sitting at the edge of the commotion, stirred up and distressed. The real world, the political, historical world had broken into the world of psychotherapy with a vengeance.

A second training experience belongs to this same period. This time the Nazi past erupted in the middle of a Gestalt training group. Here the process was confrontive, direct, more personal from the start—at least the therapist was more available. There was an elderly Jewish woman in the group who beseeched us for help. We didn’t know how to help her. For three hours we listened to her depiction of horrendous concentration camp experiences. It was three hours too many, and at the same time far too few to work through all that we heard. At last we could not bear any more. Nor did we want to. But no one had the courage to admit this openly. And the “safe framework” of therapeutic encounter? What form could that have taken here? We had no idea. Was it that we were too young, in years and perhaps in training? What was to be done? An abyss yawned between the habitual approach of group therapy and the Nazi past.

Finally, the woman left the group room, leaving us with her image: a face shadowed with clouds of horror. With this face, the Nazi past stepped into our present. We had come up against the limits of psychotherapy as a craft which can be taught. The Nazi past forced us to encounter this boundary. I have often reflected uneasily on the feeling of being at a loss in this situation. My thoughts turn to my teachers. I ask myself, what about their Nazi past? But I can give only a very fragmentary answer to this question. This is because they themselves presented only a bare minimum of personal material—despite a great deal of supportive patience on those occasions when we did stumble onto the Nazi past in the course of working through our own biographical material. This material seemed to me always to be individualized, in myself and in others, as a purely “private” problem. Never was it—I think I can say this—a shared encounter with our shared Nazi past—unavoidable, affecting everyone, filling us with shock and horror, and leaving us all at a loss together. It was always “I have something to work on,” but apparently never something that would challenge us all to a common therapeutic task (or any other task), to a shared questioning, to discoveries in common. And there might have been much to discover there, though at the price of being confronted with our own shared, immediate, historical roots.

This is how I see the constricting effect of our contact with the Nazi past. In order not to have to face it, we have developed into clever methodologists, avoiding it together. When I think of the loneliness that is tied up with this constriction, many scenes come to mind in which I, with my Nazi childhood, met with no interest, no resonance when I began to speak, for example, of my own school days. Certainly I am not alone in this. Over and over clients report that their fathers and mothers speak only reluctantly of the war years; to the question of whether they themselves wanted to listen to their fathers and mothers on the subject, the answer is in the negative. “The world has changed. Nobody would understand, after all,” to which is added, “Let’s talk about the present!” But in my opinion the Nazi past is not really past. There are the sites, there the perpetrators, there the victims, there the accomplices and witnesses, there their children and their children’s children. Where, then, are all these horrors supposed to have gone? Who has exposed all this immeasurable weight to an open accounting?

And so by its lack of closure, the Nazi past occupies the present. In this way, it is still with us and poisons the present like a living corpse. I am thinking of an old man who had served as a police functionary after his army service and who came to the clinic because of “bad dreams, anxiety, and sleep disturbance.” He needed help, but he also presented his helpers with the question of the Nazi past. His own Nazi past was coming back to him in the night—that much was clear to anyone who was willing to listen to him. And what became of this Nazi past, which was then awakened in his helpers? Everyone joined together in a soothing diagnosis: WHO-ICD #298.0: “reactive depressive psychosis.” Separated from his wife and the families of his children, he was enclosed in the isolation of clinic life. This example illustrates for me the poisoning of the present by the living corpse of the Nazi past.

And so I turn again to all of you, my teachers, and pose the question that we, your students in psychoanalysis, should have asked you long ago: I beg you to join us in confronting the Nazi past. What was it like for the one among you who survived as the child of a Jew in Prague, only to come then to Vienna and encounter someone who had been in a prominent position under the Nazis—this time not employed as a chief physician but rather as a court consultant? We students heard somewhere that he had unburdened his soul with an (unpublished) novel. Was that enough?

And I think of the one among you who served as engineer on a submarine, completely integrated into the Nazi war machine, now above water, now below, hunted and hunter of others. After the war he sat for decades as an analyst behind a couch, ever more rigidly, until finally he fell ill and died, much too young for us all. Was there some connection in all this to the Nazi past? Can it possibly be that there was no significant connection?

And the one of your number who, as a Jewish youth, likewise had to live under the Nazi terror. He was tortured and survived it. Human kindness was united in him with an acute concern for fitting in with established authority. Psychoanalysis in its driest and most orthodox form became his backbone. This was inviolable. Why could he not, why would he not share his memories of the Nazi time with us? I cannot believe that such openness would not have been healing.

I think of the one from your circle who outlasted the war as a psychologist in a small Viennese psychiatric hospital. Deeply cultured and politically engaged—how did he pull it off? Psychoanalysis itself has its own Nazi past. How was that trick accomplished? This studied world-weariness, this bemused resignation to the inevitable futility of things human (“Now see here, gentlemen, this touches on your own fascism! And analysis cannot cure that, I’m very much afraid…”)—can all that really be? All that, in answer to the question of how the Nazi past can even be possible?

I have an entirely different memory of my teachers in group dynamics. You called yourselves “trainers” and made up a “staff.” That communicated a vigorous, pragmatic atmosphere and a kind of hope: organizations can be humanized; power can be controlled; the group has more capacity for solutions than the individual. Your ideology was in one respect the exact opposite of the Nazis’: you had no use for führers. But what about the Nazi past? Two of you had visible wounds as a result of the war. Both of you could talk about that; but the Nazi past, which each of us carried within us, was not mentioned. The “here and now” of social psychology yielded a different emphasis. I remember in the last phase of our training, how the phrase “In cases of doubt, the group is always right,” seemed unacceptable to me. After all, I had often heard that in my own school days: “The Führer is always right,” or “The Party is always right.” How can anyone be always right? The Nazi past plainly lurked under the surface of the discussion, but it remained frozen at that level. More and more, hope was invested in the group, in the “whole.” But if at first these were small groups on which our hopes were pinned, they were large groups in the end. And I had the feeling of being in a world where the countless prisoners, the helpers, and the “quiet” resistance fighters of the Nazi time had been lost from view.

It seems to me all too cynical and unbearable to go along with pronouncements of that kind when I think of those who lived out the war and the Nazi years completely isolated and removed from the public consensus of the times. For example, a colleague who as a ten-year-old schoolboy at the beginning of the war was told privately by his mother how she saw Hitler and the war: “All Nazis are criminals! You’ll see, the war will be lost! Don’t believe a word of what your teachers say about all this. And don’t tell anyone what I’m telling you now. This is for you alone—because it’s the truth!”

How shall this colleague, lost and alone in the group consensus of a Nazi schoolroom (and yet supported by the contradictory reality of history)—how can this colleague ever put his faith in group consensus as a guide to discovering reality? Obviously this working hypothesis breaks down in the face of the Nazi past and its educational methods.

And how is such a consensus to be arrived at? Was the dynamic of the moment of the group process, which was the object of your research, so fascinating for you? Was the harmony of the emotional climate of the group so much more important than the discovery and articulation of the immediate past, in the conceptual landscape you presented to us in our training?

Of course, you knew all this well enough intellectually; you will refer me right away to some publication you can cite (and which I quite possibly am unaware of). But none of that helped us to come into contact with the Nazi past. That past remains exactly where it was: right under the surface of consciousness—close enough to be intellectually available, but emotionally out of touch.

I belie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments and Note
• Translator’s Introduction
• The Editors
• The Translators
• The Contributors
• Psychological Symptoms of the Nazi Heritage:Introduction to the German Edition
• 1. Psychotherapy and the Nazi Past: A Search for Concrete Forms
• 2. Farewell to My Father
• 3. I Too Took Part: Confrontations with One’s Own History in Family Therapy
• 4. The Psychoanalyst Without a Face: Psychoanalysis Without a History
• 5. Family Reconstruction in Germany: An Attempt to Confront the Past
• 6. Effects of Lingering Nazi Worldviews in Family Life
• 7. “How Can I Develop on a Mountain of Corpses?” Observations from a Theme-Centered Interaction Seminar with Isaac Zieman
• 8. Unwilling to Admit, Unable to See: Therapeutic Experiences with the National Socialist “Complex”
• 9. The Dialogue Between the Generations About the Nazi Era
• 10. The Work of Remembering: A Psychodynamic View of the Nazi Past as It Exists in Germany Today
• 11. The Difficulty of Speaking the Unspeakable: How an Article Entitled “The Nazi Past in Psychotherapy” Was Never Written
• 12. Holocaust Perpetrators and Their Children: A Paradoxical Morality
• 13. “Guilty!” Thoughts in Relation to My Own Past: Letters to My Son
• Translator’s Afterword
• Glossary
• References
• Index