Contaminated Generativity: Holocaust Survivors and Their Children in Germany
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CONTAMINATED GENERATIVITY: HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS AND THEIR CHILDREN IN GERMANY Kurt Grünberg Translation by Nadja Rosental Did nobody wonder where so many children’s shoes came from? Primo Levi
This paper addresses the trauma transfer from survivors of the Shoah to the Second Generation in Germany. What does it mean for both generations to beget children after Auschwitz? This necessarily entails perceiving non-Jewish Germans and their way of dealing with history. Survivors cannot live without their memory, nor is it possible for them to conceive of a life unencumbered by this constant “contaminant”. It is not possible to integrate the persecution experiences. On the contrary, decades after liberation, dissociated elements of traumatic memories penetrate everyday experiences, thought, affect and imagination as contaminants. Occasionally, these fragments of persecution experiences, like “encapsulated memories” hidden in crypts suddenly break open and frighten the survivors themselves and even more so the people around them.
KEY WORDS: trauma; transmission of trauma; Holocaust; second generation; memory. DOI:10.1057/palgrave.ajp.3350005
After his liberation from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Primo Levi agonized over how those Germans who were not directly involved dealt with their knowledge about the persecution of the Jews. Is it really possible, as so many maintained and often still do to this day, that they did “not know” anything about “all that”? In one of his “Briefe an Deutsche” (letters to Germans), he wrote, “that I myself after liberation, in Katowice, found parcels and parcels of forms that were used to authorize German family men to pick up adults’ and children’s clothes and shoes from the storage Kurt Grünberg, Ph.D., psychoanalyst (IPA), licensed psychologist, staff research member at Sigmund-Freud-Institut and research director of Jewish Psychotherapeutic Counseling Center in Frankfurt/Main (Germany). Address correspondence to Kurt Grünberg, Ph.D., Sigmund-Freud-Institut, Myliusstr. 20, D-60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany; e-mail: [email protected]
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rooms in Auschwitz for free. Did nobody wonder where so many children’s shoes came from?” (Levi, 1988, p. 184; transl. by N.R.). This seemingly straightforward question not only touches upon a central aspect of Nazi crimes, but Levi’s question also draws our attention to a point that is of fundamental significance with regard to the trans-generational transfer of the traumatic experiences of survivors to their descendents, because the systematic and large-scale murder of children impacts the people most profoundly. The murder of more than one and a half million Jewish children reveals that the Germans intended to annihilate the Jewish people in Europe. The genocide committed on the Jewish people using a hydrogen cyanide compound for pest control (sic!) was not intended to eliminate people who were persecuted because of unpopular views they may have held or because of their actions; rather, they were killed, gassed
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