Original Article

Limits of understanding: Psychological experience, German memory and the Holocaust Roger Frie Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract This article considers the relationship between traumatic history, narrative memory and the limits of understanding. It suggests that inherited traumatic memory is transmitted in family narratives that remain unconsciously organized and are guided by affective and dissociative processes. The author draws on autobiographical experience, particularly his German family’s own narrative of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. He suggests that what we remember or forget, what we know or do not know, is inherently connected to the narratives we inherit and rely on to make sense of the world. Using a hermeneutic perspective, he demonstrates the role of silence and of emotional processes, such as shame, which lead to the unconscious reproduction of family narratives. Until narratives and their affective processes are consciously organized, their meanings remain inherently ambiguous. The article shows how this ambiguity is powerfully at work in the German response to the perpetration and the traumas of the Holocaust. The author concludes by suggesting that a meaningful moral response to the Nazi past must account for both an articulated history and the feelings bound up in inherited memories, thus opening up a space for dialogue, acceptance and the creation of new narratives. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2014) 19, 255–271. doi:10.1057/pcs.2014.21; published online 26 June 2014 Keywords: German memory; Holocaust; narrative; hermeneutics; shame; silence

A German Family Narrative I recognized his face, but the image was unfamiliar. The photograph of my grandfather lay on a table with a host of letters. I was visiting Germany recently on the occasion of a wedding and family members were using the opportunity to sort through old documents, choosing which to keep and which to discard. Looking at the photograph I felt an immediate sense of unease. My grandfather

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was wearing a uniform that I did not recognize. Although I associated his face with the kindness he had shown me when I was a child, the uniform gave him a military bearing, making him appear somehow alien. Was he uncomfortable in the uniform? Or was the disjunction I perceived in the photograph a reflection of my own dissonance at seeing the image? I was familiar with a photograph of my grandfather in his German army uniform, but this was different. He looked younger, proud, and I imagined altogether more impressionable. What does it mean to be caught in a web of history, to be part of a traumatic past over which we have no control? We are born into history and culture and it is through our family that we are connected to these larger dimensions of experience. Our families provide us with narratives, stories that enable us to make sense of what we see and that implicitly shape what we know and remember at any moment in time. These narratives are an integral part of who we are, yet are not consciously organized. They remain largely unconscious, a compass by which our lives are prereflectively organized. At some stage, or at some point in life, we may be able to reflect on certain aspects of the narratives we inherit, and begin to question them, thus revealing new ways of seeing the world around us. I say “may,” because a reflective, conscious understanding of our situation is never a given. At other moments we may be confronted with alternative narratives that demonstrate the limits of our understanding and challenge our accepted view of the world. Initially at least, our place is made for us, unconsciously structured by the language we speak, the history we inherit, and the culture and traditions that constitute who we are. The history of war became evident to me early on through a gap in my family. While one grandfather was present, the other was absent. I learned at a young age that my paternal grandfather died fighting as a soldier on the Russian front, but his loss was rarely talked about. It belonged to the painful history of my parents’ childhood in Germany, which spanned the years of National Socialism and the Second World War. My history, and the history of my family, was intertwined with the reality of war and Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust. As the son of German post-war immigrants to Canada, I was born in North America, yet grew up in two cultures, spoke German before I spoke English, and was keenly aware of both belonging to and being separate from Germany and its traumatic past. The absence of one grandfather added meaning to my relationship with the other. The geographical distance between us generated a longing for connection that was satisfied only by occasional, but extended, visits, telephone calls and letters throughout the course of my childhood. My experience of my grandfather was directly related to his work as an artisan. He created beautiful objects made of wrought iron, brass and copper. As a child I marveled at the way he could take a mass of metal and fashion it into a piece of art, much as a sculptor molds clay or chisels marble. His skills were recognized and in the years of hardship that followed the war he was able to find work to provide for the family. As I grew older, my grandfather showed me his craft and 256

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taught me some of the skills of metal work. He died quite suddenly when I was only fifteen and I mourned the loss of opportunity to do more with him. Later I used my grandfather’s workshop to practice some of what I had learned from him. To this day, working with my hands can evoke cherished memories of the time we spent together. These memories are connected to a sense of belonging, of a place of family and culture that became an integral part of how I understand myself. Yet I was always cognizant of the differences between the cultures in which I lived. As a child I was particularly struck by the fact that each day my grandfather would get on his bicycle and ride to the market to buy groceries. He would fill his basket and his bags, hanging them precariously on the bicycle handlebars, and then carefully ride home. I would join him on this venture and carry what little I could. Growing up in North America, this image also filled me with curiosity. It seemed that my grandfather’s life would be so much easier if he could load up a car with groceries; he could carry more and go less often. I remember asking my mother a host of questions. Why was it that my grandfather did not drive? Why did he not have a car? Would it not be easier if he could simply load the groceries into a trunk and drive them home? She recalled that he had once ridden a motorcycle when she was a child and that he and his brother had belonged to a kind of “motorcycle club.” I found this image appealing: my grandfather on his motorcycle, clad in a black leather jacket. It seemed to lend him a daring side and that image stayed with me as I grew up and visited over the years. Over time the images and narrative of my childhood ran up again the complexities of history as I learned about the war, the Holocaust, the horrors perpetrated by Germans under National Socialism. I began to question the activities of my family members and in particular those of my grandfather. I learned that he was involved in the aerial armaments industry. He spent the majority of the war in Peenemünde where the V rockets were built, participating in the design process. Towards the end of the war my grandfather was given a brief family leave. He chose to stay home in hiding rather than return and a short time later the building in which his unit worked was destroyed. This, then, was my family’s narrative. My grandfather was caring and kind, artistically gifted, and maintained a sense of humor in the face of the destruction and hardship wrought by war. Although I knew early on that my grandfather belonged to the side of the perpetrators, I was always relieved that his history, and by extension my own, was not one of perpetration. After all, my grandfather was not a Nazi. Or was he? There is a different photograph of my grandfather that I enjoy. It shows a confident young man, hands on his hips, a smile across his face and was taken some time in the late 1920s. My grandfather had spent that decade living and working in Berlin. He loved to tell stories about the city, and it was obvious that he considered these years a high point in his life. This was the vibrant and artistic Berlin, the city before the onset of the Nazi regime. He never returned there after the war. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

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Perhaps my disquiet was due to the contrast between this image of my grandfather from the 1920s and the unsettling photograph that I saw lying on the table before me. The paramilitary look of the uniform he wore in the photo had crystalized my sense of unease. My grandfather is wearing the uniform of the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK), a paramilitary organization concerned with the operation and maintenance of automobiles and motorcycles. The NSKK existed from 1931 through the war’s end, and its largely middle-class membership grew from seventy thousand in 1933 to roughly half a million by 1940. Both during and after the period of National Socialism, the NSKK was perceived as a largely apolitical organization, akin to the motoring associations of other countries. In post-war West Germany, this perception enabled many NSKK members to efface their past and achieve prominence in the highest sectors of society. Indeed, one of West Germany’s chancellors, Kurt Kiesinger, was an NSKK member.1 Recent historical research (see Hochstetter, 2005) has shown the long accepted view of the NSKK to be a convenient myth, generated and maintained by a culture that sought to distinguish so-called average Germans from Nazi perpetrators. In fact, the NSKK was an integral part of the Nazi regime, founded on a racist policy of exclusion and discrimination. Many of its members participated in crimes against Germany’s Jewish population. According to a statement made by the NSKK group leader in 1935, the year both of my parents were born, it was essential that “the NSKK man be one-hundred percent a Nazi and onehundred percent an anti-Semite” (Hochstetter, 2005, p. 415). This then, was my grandfather’s motorcycle club. The man whom I loved and whose memories I cherish was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party, a full-fledged supporter of the Nazi regime that orchestrated the Holocaust.

Introduction Do we belong to history or does history belong to us? What do we inherit by way of history, culture and family, and what do we contribute to the course of our lives? I began with the autobiographical account of my grandfather because I want to consider the relationship between traumatic history, memory and the limits of understanding. Historical and cultural factors shape our understanding in ways that are beyond our conscious awareness. As Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960, 1996) has noted, “The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of history” (p. 276). Narratives connect our experience of family with the larger dimensions of history and culture (Bruner, 1990). Together, the contexts of history, culture and family form an ever-present yet unarticulated background – a horizon of understanding – that enables us to navigate our way in the world. 258

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Focusing on the question of German memory and the Holocaust, this article will consider the way in which inherited experience is unconsciously transmitted in narratives and maintained by affective processes that remain outside of awareness. From a psychoanalytic perspective memory and understanding are never strictly cognitive and always include diverse emotional states. Indeed, it is precisely the intersection of thought and affect that makes the work of remembering meaningful. As Barbara Heimannsberg (1993) states in relation to German memory of the Nazi past: [R]emembering is an integrative process in which senses, thoughts, and feelings work together. The perception of various perspectives, feeling one’s way into the attitudes of victims and of wartime enemies – all these belong to perceiving the facts and their consequences. Integrative work of remembering embraces the perceptions of events and the perception of their emotional meanings; further, it embraces empathy with the perceptions, meanings and feelings of the Other. One must stick with the tension of opposites that arises out of this process. (p. 169) I will suggest that our situated existence in historical and cultural narratives is largely unconscious and only enters into the realm of conscious awareness once it is reflectively understood and articulated. I use the term “unconscious” not in the sense of being private and repressed, but as indicating our situated psychological experience (Frie, in press a, b). Unless it is explicitly formulated, our situated experience will continue to exist outside of conscious awareness, guided by affective and dissociative processes that can work against its articulation (Sullivan, 1953; Stern, 1997). The process of dissociation takes place at both an individual and a collective level and is inherently connected to narrative. What we remember or forget, what we know or do not know, is not an individual achievement or product of the internal mind. Rather, remembering and forgetting, like the processes of understanding and dissociation, occur in the interplay between historical and cultural narratives, intersubjective systems and our personal responses. My analysis will draw on the hermeneutic perspective in narrative (Brockmeier, 2002; Freeman, 2002, 2010) and psychoanalysis (Cushman, 1995; Frie, 2011a, in press a, b; Orange, 2009) and seek to illuminate those meanings that prereflectively organize our lived worlds. Because this prereflective dimension of experience is relationally and socioculturally generated and maintained, any attempt to grasp our scripted positions is only possible with an acknowledgement of our historical and cultural formation. I maintain that the process of hermeneutic disclosure is not a linear, teleological movement from inner to outer, from a lack of awareness to articulated knowledge, but a shifting between more or less conscious awareness and different narrative possibilities. Psychoanalysis can help to disclose not only our embeddedness in specific narratives but also the © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

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affective processes that lead us to reproduce the narratives that we unconsciously live out. The point I wish to emphasize is that narrative both shapes and limits what we can know at any point in time. Until narratives and their affective processes are consciously organized, their meanings remain inherently ambiguous. This ambiguity and uncertainty is at work in the German response to the traumas of the Holocaust. I conclude by suggesting that a meaningful moral response to the Nazi past must acknowledge both an articulated history and the feelings bound up in our memories of the past.

History and Trauma across Generations and Contexts The determinative impact of history and culture on psychological experience cannot be underestimated. Indeed, the traumatic effects of the Holocaust reach across the historical and moral divide between victims and perpetrators, survivors and bystanders. In her study, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, Eva Hoffman (2004) sheds light on the power of traumatic history to shape future generations. Hoffman seeks to transform potent family narratives, which are neither fully understood nor grasped, into an informed understanding of the forbidding history of the Holocaust. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman elaborates the degree to which the lives of “the second generation” are circumscribed by the traumas that preceded them. A consciousness of war, in its most extreme and cruel manifestations, seemed to come with the first stirrings of consciousness itself. And yet I had no direct experience of extremity or collective violence … The paradoxes of indirect knowledge haunt many of us who came after. The formative events of the twentieth century have crucially informed our biographies and psyches, threatening sometimes to overshadow and overwhelm our own lives. But we did not see them, suffer through them, experience their impact directly. Our relationship to them has been defined by our very “post-ness,” and by the powerful but mediated forms of knowledge that have followed from it. It is perhaps simply this that defines us as “the second generation.” (Hoffman, 2004, pp. 25–26) The second generation became bearers of the traumas of the Holocaust, even though they had no direct experience of it themselves. As Hoffman (2010) observes, she was unable to keep history at bay: It is for these literal descendants that the legacy of the Holocaust is felt in its most intimate form; and it is here that the delicate issues of transferred 260

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trauma and deferred mourning are felt most poignantly. In a sense, the elusive, deeply subjective experience of the Shoah’s heirs is also an acute example of a broader phenomenon: the bequest of historical experience from one generation to the next. (p. 406) Hoffman thus illustrates the way in which traumatic histories are transmitted across generations, their meanings implicitly communicated in family narratives and codes of silence, or more directly through the brute emotional experience of one’s elders. Despite their radically different histories, the aftermath of the Holocaust suggests a way in which German and Jewish lives have become paradoxically intertwined. Both are challenged by the traumatic effects of a past that is not of their making: post-war generations of Germans are confronted by tainted family histories of perpetration and support for the crimes of National Socialism and by the lingering effects of wartime experience; descendants of Holocaust survivors are haunted by legacies of enormous loss and by memories of unimaginable horror, cruelty and suffering that were endured before they were born. Because dialogue between the actual perpetrators and the victims of the Holocaust was unthinkable, possibilities for mutual understanding of the past began only with the second generation. From her perspective as a second-generation Holocaust survivor Hoffman is able to reflect on the experience of second-generation Germans. Taking a courageously empathic stance, she states: The Germans born after the war, I began gradually to realize, are my true historical counterpoint. We have had to struggle, from our antithetical positions, with the very same past … While the conflict for children of victims is between the imperative of compassion and the need for freedom … How can you ever come to terms with the knowledge that your parents, your relatives, the very people for whom you have felt a natural, a necessary affection, are actually worthy of moral disgust? That the relative who was fond of you, or a neighbor who treated you nicely, or indeed your mother or father, may have performed ghastly deeds? Or that the whole previous generation, which has served as your first model of adulthood, is tainted by complicity with such deeds? (Hoffman, 2004, pp. 118–119) Contemporary generations of Germans and Holocaust survivors are both confronted with traumatic histories, so that the silences of which Hoffmann speaks are similarly present in the lives of many post-war Germans. Yet the parallels are necessarily limited and cannot be universalized. Each is forced to address the legacy of the Holocaust from radically different, historically grounded perspectives. These differences work against any attempt © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

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at creating moral equivalency in the post-war German and Jewish experience. It was support of average Germans for the policies of National Socialism (Goldhagen, 1996; Bartov, 2003) that enabled the Holocaust to occur. Crimes against humanity were not limited to fanatical supporters of Hitler but were willingly carried out by ordinary German soldiers (Browning, 1992). There was no substantive German opposition to the Nazi regime and it was ultimately defeated only from without. Even the terrible firestorms that resulted from Allied bombings and engulfed cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, and about which so much has been written in the last decades (Sebald, 1999; Friedrich, 2006), followed on the heels of Nazi acts of aggression. Discussion of traumatic histories among Germans during and after World War II must thus be premised on responsibility for the Holocaust and the war. Anything less neglects the issue of moral accountability. When I saw the photograph of my grandfather I found myself suddenly upended. My understanding of the narratives and memories by which I came to see the past had inalterably shifted. Knowledge of my grandfather’s identity as a Nazi meant that I was the inheritor of an indelibly tainted history, connected however directly or indirectly with the perpetration of unimaginably heinous crimes. The fact that my grandfather appeared to be a “minor Nazi” was hardly consoling. It was the support lent by the rank and file that enabled the perpetration of mass murder to unfold. No matter how much I might want to disown this history, it is a part of my past, a part of who I am. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960, 1996) insists, historical consciousness “always includes more than it admits of itself” (p. 287). Because my parents were children during the war and my grandparents were participants in the war, I am defined by what it means to be someone who is “third-generation” (Cohen-Pfister and Vees-Gulani, 2010). I am chronologically more distant than my parents from my grandparents’ generation – the perpetrators, bystanders and witnesses to the Holocaust – yet their memories have become my own. These memories are not my recollections. They are not known in a conscious rational sense but are mediated through narratives and the imagination. Marianne Hirsch (1997, 2012) uses the term “postmemory” to account for the indirect and inherited nature of traumatic memory across generations. Postmemory describes “the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth … traumatic events that can be neither understood nor re-created” (Hirsch, 1997, p. 22). While Hirsch is speaking to the experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors, her perspective bears wider application. The notion of postmemory suggests that the meaning of inherited traumatic memory is hidden from view, not in the sense of being repressed but in the sense of remaining unformulated. The transformation of these memories into meaningful narratives is challenged by powerful emotional reactions that seek to dissociate and distance them from conscious articulation. 262

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Silence and Narrative A central feature of German postwar discourse is the transgenerational silence about the involvement of family members in the Third Reich. It may seem strange to speak of silence in connection to Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust. After all, there are few nations that have so thoroughly engaged in a process of national and critical self-reflection in an attempt to confront the crimes of their past. And yet the silence to which I refer is not the culture of collective remembrance, but the emotional realm of family history, to the interpersonally and intergenerationally maintained silence about the participation of family members – of loved ones – in the actions the Nazi regime. As Volkan et al (2002, p. 145) suggest, “the collective effect of these individual ‘silences’ tends to keep intellectual understanding segregated from affective responses to the Holocaust as trauma.” Silence is a potent theme in any discussion of Nazism and the Holocaust. The fact that silence is connected to historical and emotional trauma is well established. The term “silence” is typically understood to mean the absence of sound, but this does not carry the feel of the German term, Schweigen, which is the silencing of voice, whether of speaking or telling (Heimannsberg, 1993). When silence is defined as something that is not said, it constitutes a form of signification. The notion of silence exists alongside spoken words and to the degree that it fills and defines a gap between articulated narratives it constitutes a narrative strategy on its own. The silence about my grandfather’s membership in the Nazi regime existed amidst several well-established narratives. One of these narratives was of the experiences and adventures of a young man in bohemian Berlin of the 1920s. This was the Germany of the Weimar Republic, before the Nazis and the war and indeed my grandfather could spend hours talking about this period of his life. The other narrative was of the hardship, hunger and impoverishment of the final years of the war and the immediate post-war years. The few memories I know of my grandfather’s participation in the war were of narrow escapes in which he was able to survive bombings and hostilities, despite the odds. But of the time between these two narratives, encompassing his support for and membership in the Nazi Party, there was chiefly silence. There can be many reasons for silence. A silence may be ideologically motivated, it may be a means of avoidance, or it may refer to that which is not expressible and remains unsayable (Blum, 1995). Because a silent narrative remains unspoken, it requires a kind of understanding that does not depend upon the spoken word. The listener intuits what a silence might communicate by attending to its embodied expression and what is articulated before and after the absence of words. In my family, as in countless other German families, the absence of a narrative about my grandfather’s participation in the Third Reich became a kind of dissociated and cordoned-off space in which no questions were © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

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asked and no answers were given. Instead, talk of the past was rehearsed in well-established narratives. These narratives constituted a framework for what was said and what was not said, what was known and what remained unformulated. The silence in my family was also part of the broader cultural narratives that frame what is articulated and what remains hidden. The official culture of remembrance in Germany has long focused on collective rather than individual responsibility. As a result many second and third generation Germans grew up without an oral narrative tradition about the involvement of their family members in the Third Reich. Even in the face of more open and honest public and private discourse about Nazi participation, dissociation remains a powerful force when individuals are not ready to grasp the meaning of traumatic histories within their own families (Maier-Katkin, 2007, p. 82). The introduction of mandatory Holocaust education in Germany that followed from the secondgeneration’s confrontation with the country’s Nazi past in the upheavals of 1968 created an important shift in the culture of collective remembrance. Yet the impact of this shift on private and family memory discourses was uneven and limited at best. Psychoanalysis seeks not only to understand the reasons for silences, but the affective conditions that enable it to continue through time, so-called transgenerationally inherited silences (Volkan et al, 2002). Silence may be a form of withholding and concealment, thus avoiding an acknowledgement of complicity. It can also be a way of signifying denial, self-deception and rationalization. Indeed, silence may seek to support the fantasy of the innocent bystander. I know that as long as the silence about my grandfather was not filled with words, I was able to maintain a sobering but relatively benign image of my grandfather as the reluctant soldier, obliged to fight in a war that was not of his making, a supporter of neither the Nazi regime nor its policies. This imagined grandfather belonged to the multitude of Germans, powerless in the face of tyranny. It seems clear to me now that I had been dissociating historical facts as a way of maintaining intact memories of my grandfather and avoiding uncomfortable, even forbidden family discussions. I may also have been protecting my mother and her siblings by not speaking more directly to the possibility of my grandfather’s involvement. Indeed, from a psychoanalytic perspective (Friedrich, 1995, p. 277), acknowledgement of shameful, dangerous or horrible histories of parents or grandparents can pose a threat to a child’s (or grandchild’s) love and identification. The strength of our emotional bonds and loyalty to our parents and grandparents cannot be underestimated. These bonds help to explain continued silences about the Nazi past within German families and the impact of dissociative processes that sustain rather than challenge family narratives. The transgenerational study Grandfather Wasn’t a Nazi (Weltzer, Moller and Tshuggnall, 2002; Welzer, 2005) demonstrates how those grandchildren of the first generation, like myself, may actively dissociate the historical realities of their 264

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grandparents’ lives to avoid knowing about their involvement in the Third Reich. The large majority of third-generation Germans who were questioned by the authors sought to maintain idealized images of their grandparents despite their knowledge about the horrors of the Holocaust and the support it received from everyday Germans. Many grandchildren sought to create idealized, even heroic, images of grandparents who were believed to have stood up against the Nazis. In some instance these images were maintained despite being directly challenged by historical facts that contradicted their beliefs. My own family narrative certainly lends credence to the results of Welzer’s (2005) transgenerational study. Silence about family involvement in the Nazi past creates a dissociated emotional space in which idealized images of parents and grandparents are fostered, thereby hindering the process of consciously acknowledging and working through the historical trauma. But there are also other emotions at work in the process of dissociation that need to be understood before traumatic memories can be articulated.

Shame and Dissociation My recognition of my grandfather’s image in the photograph was unbidden. Once I began to grasp the meaning of the image, it formed what Mark Freeman (2002, p. 194) describes as a “disruptive counternarrative” that challenged the memories I held dear. A host of questions followed from my sense of alarm and unease. How might silence about my grandfather’s participation in the Nazi regime be understood? How could I not have known or recognized the facts? Was my family silence motivated by a fear and dread of what might be known if my grandfather spoke more openly? What else lay hidden or might be discovered? Will I be able to tolerate the ambivalence that memories of my grandfather now evoke in me? How do I manage the revulsion I feel about his participation in the Nazi party? And most fearfully, could my grandfather have been a perpetrator? Many of these questions remain unanswerable, but the process of asking them breaks the silence. It also forces me to confront the shame I feel. To this day it is hard for me to imagine that my grandfather could have taken part in the evil acts of the Third Reich. But as studies of Nazi perpetrators have shown, these men were able to participate in heinous crimes and remain loving fathers, creating the unbearable emotional conflicts in their children that Hoffmann describes (Bar-On, 1989; Senfft, 2007). The very thought that my grandfather may have participated in crimes, let alone the knowledge that he openly supported the regime that orchestrated the Holocaust, fills me with a deep sadness and shame – an affective response that makes me want to hide this chapter of my past. Many Germans break affective bridges to the past to avoid intolerable emotions such as horror and shame. Shame is a powerful relational dynamic that © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

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suggests the need to hide. But hiding in shame results only in silence, and perpetuates and maintains pre-existing narratives that are used to explain the past. Admitting one’s shame and speaking openly about the past can open up the possibility for understanding in a climate of emotional honesty, grounded in consciously organized narratives that more fully acknowledge and account for the events and deeds of the past. This suggests that how we remember the past, like the narratives we use to make sense of our lives, always takes place in the context of our affective relationship to family and history. Acknowledging this affective process within my own life helps me to understand how my family, who embrace liberal and progressive values, has remained silent for so long. What I have learned is that for my mother and her siblings the term “Nazi” is akin to perpetrator and that there is an emotional need for them to separate the notion of perpetrator from their memories of the loving father they knew. As a result, history was made grey and murky. By remaining out of focus it remained out of mind, a part of the broader cultural and historical narrative that separates knowing from feeling. I became aware of Germany’s history of perpetration and the Holocaust early on in life, but this intellectual knowledge of history remained somehow separate from my felt experience of my grandfather and the images I sought to maintain of him as the “reluctant” German soldier. I have come to understand the depth of my family’s shame, and by association my own, and the silence that ensued. By engaging with my family’s history and the meanings of my relationship with my grandfather, I feel the need to relate to my shame in a different way – to break the narrative of silence as it were. But this is also difficult because it disrupts the emotional investment I have in the loving memories of my grandfather; it creates a fundamental ambiguity, marked by a sense of loss. Yet, however ambivalent my (or our) response to the articulated memory of trauma might be, we cannot overlook the fact that the trauma itself remains fixed in the shifting lens of history. As Jürgen Habermas (1989, p. 239) reminds us, “the image of the unloading ramp at Auschwitz refuses to pass the way of a moral imperfect past tense.”

Moral Obligations of Memory When I initially reflected on the questions I posed, I found myself wavering about whether to fully engage the past. After all, my grandfather’s actions took place long ago, in an entirely differently time and place from my own. How was his political allegiance, his support of an immoral regime, possibly connected to me? In a purely chronological sense, I am one of those who “came after,” and as such bear no direct responsibility for what happened before me. But any attempt to erase, or relativize the meaning of history in this way, is surely motivated by a 266

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singular wish for an unburdened past, for memory of a grandfather that is free of conflict, a wish that must ultimately fail. As much as I might want to step out of my historically defined position as a third-generation German, I am unable to. This fact certainly limits my ability to speak to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Yet the historical juxtaposition of the German and Jewish experience is not only very familiar to me, but it has also played a fundamental role in my adult life. While my family background is German and the majority of my family resides in Germany, I married someone who is Jewish. I met my wife in the late 1980s, when we both attended university in England, at a time when my parents were living in Germany. My wife and I sought to come to terms with our different cultural backgrounds and what the weight of history meant for us in the evolving context of our relationship. The mutual process of negotiating history and identity made me appreciate how readily the past can appear in the present – that we are situated in dimensions of history that continually shape our lives in ways that are beyond our knowledge. To quote William Faulkner (1950): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The question of how to respond to a traumatic past that is not of one’s making or choosing is complex and not easy to answer. Indeed, the position of moral responsibility that has been outlined by Habermas and others on the German Left is often challenging for contemporary generations of Germans to bear. In a country that has long focused on its obligations for the crimes of the Nazi past, members of the third and fourth generations increasingly express a wish to focus on the future, rather than on a morally tainted history that is receding with time. The desire for a life unburdened by the past must be balanced with an appreciation of the complexity of history and the moral obligation of memory. I have always sought to responsibly deal with my position at the intersection of history and culture. Being of German descent, this meant being aware of what happened in my past, the extent to which my family was involved in the crimes of the Nazi period. My wife’s presence in my life has undeniably shaped my perception of the past, of German history and of life in present-day Germany. My first-hand experience of what it can mean to be Jewish has made me sensitive to the historical and psychological dynamics at work in the German and Jewish experience. These dynamics also came to play a central role in my clinical work with second- and third- generation Holocaust survivors, about which I have written (Frie, 2011b, 2012, 2013, in press a, b). To illustrate the ethical implications and the challenges involved in responding to the Nazi past and the Holocaust I will draw on another brief autobiographical example. My wife and I lived in Berlin for a time and often met with friends and family members. I remember how, over the course of a particular conversation with a relative, the issue of the Nazi past and the question of German identity came up, as it sometimes does when Germans and non-Germans converse. My relative © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

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is a committed pacifist, progressive in his political outlook and personal beliefs. As a German he felt shame about the horrors perpetrated by Germans under the Nazis. But he also felt torn about the issue of responsibility and did not want to feel obligated to wear a badge of guilt. When I asked him to say more, he explained that he did not choose his past, that he did not participate in a war which occurred well before he was born. Nor did he understand how previous generations could possibly have supported the Nazis or condoned the horrors that were committed by everyday Germans. My wife listened carefully and was respectful of my relative’s views. After a pause she pointed out that while Germans born after the war might well feel frustrated at inheriting a terrible history of aggression and perpetration that was not of their making, the question of choice seemed misplaced. She did not choose to learn as a child that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust simply because they were Jewish. Although she is not a descendant of Holocaust survivors, the reality of the Holocaust has always cast a shadow over her sense of identity, a feeling shared by many Jews. As this exchange makes clear, our lives are thoroughly constituted by historical and cultural realities. How we respond to these realities at an individual level is never transparent. The generalized concepts and categories we use to identify experiences of the past (“perpetration” or “victimization”) can be inherently limiting and are themselves subject to debate (LaCapra, 1998; Novick, 1999). My point is to suggest that we cannot meaningfully detach ourselves from our contexts. Any distance we think we achieve is inevitably illusory. It is perhaps the very need to engage memories that are not one’s own that connects succeeding generations of post-war Germans and the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Once we acknowledge the situated nature of our experience, we can begin the process of recognizing our role in the moral construction and reconstruction of our cultural worlds. We cannot “choose” to stand outside of history or the past that we are bequeathed (Freeman, 2010). Not only is psychological experience embedded in historical, social, and cultural contexts that enable us to make sense of the world, but these contexts also provide us with a moral compass for orienting our actions. We live in a world constructed by moral traditions and need to recognize the historical and narrative contexts that influence our attitudes and values (Cushman, 1995; Richardson et al, 1999). This involves what Gadamer (1960, 1996) refers to as “effective history” – entering into dialogue with voices from the past which shape our interpretations of the present (see Freeman, 2002, 2010). I believe that recognition and engagement with these historical trajectories can allow for the possibility of understanding, change and healing over time. As the psychoanalytic process suggests, acknowledgement of complex emotional factors in memory and understanding may open up possibilities for meaningful engagement with our place in history and the narratives we rely on to make sense of the world. 268

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Conclusion I have learned over time that the German responses to the Holocaust include a range of affectives states, from avoidance and dissociation to shame and resentment, and ultimately – hopefully – acceptance and openness to the suffering of Others. By recognizing and responding to the complexity of our emotions, I think it becomes possible to achieve an ethical stance towards the Other, whether in the clinical situation or in social praxis. Rather than hide or remain silent, my hope is to create a new space, one of dialogue and reflection on the nature of German memory, trauma and perpetration. I hope that by speaking about my history and that of my grandfather I can establish a new narrative based on openness and acceptance of the past, one that I would like to impart to my children. The opportunity to begin a new narrative began after I returned from a trip to Berlin where I was researching this article. My children know about my work and I have sought to share with them and impart the importance of knowing and remembering. I spoke with my nine-year old son about my trip and he wanted to know more. He wanted to know whether my grandfather was a Nazi. “Papa, your Opa wasn’t a Nazi, was he?” I fully admit I hesitated. I did not want to answer him. In that instance I wanted to hide. I did not want my young son to think of my grandfather in this light. But not to answer would be to continue the code of silence with which I grew up. So I replied: “Yes, he was.”

About the Author Roger Frie is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia (both in Vancouver, Canada) and Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He has published six books on the intersection of psychoanalysis, philosophy and social theory and is completing a book on German memory and the Holocaust. He is Co-Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, Associate Editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Editorial Board Member of Psychoanalytic Psychology.

Note 1 Among their number were other future politicians such as the Bavarian prime minister, Franz Josef Strauss; the publishers Hubert Burda and Axel Springer; and well-known academics such as Theodor Eschenburg and Wolfram Fischer. The fact that these prominent West Germans had all been members of the NSKK may be viewed by some as proof of the organization’s apolitical nature. Historical research (see Hochstetter, 2005) suggests otherwise and illustrates the significant degree of overlap between the National Socialist regime and the newly founded West German state. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

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