Mourning, Meaning, and Not Repeating: Themes of Dialogue Between Descendents of Holocaust Survivors and Descendents of Nazis

“Itell my story everyday, but still it is painful,” recounted a survivor of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, her voice quivering, with a mix of quiet determination and tears. Thus began a five-day dialogue process between descendents of Holocaust survivors, descendents of Nazis, and others deeply connected to the Holocaust, which occurred in Berlin this spring (2002). I participated as a psychologist, and as a child of a Jewish father who served in the American Air Force during WWII. The 15 participants, who included children of high-ranking Nazis, children of survivors, children of bystanders, and one survivor herself, came to the dialogue with a variety of motivations, including a desire to lighten the burden most report feeling they have inherited as a result of their own or their families’ wartime experience. I came with my own mixture of personal and professional motivations. The latter included a desire to better understand the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and to see whether a dialogue of this sort could help participants diminish the likelihood of repeating traumatic patterns. Despite the importance of attempting to study the psychological dimensions of the Holocaust, a well-documented “conspiracy of silence” has been noted over time, in both the families of Jewish and German descendents (Bar-On, “Attempting”; Barocas and Barocas; Speier). Children on both sides have been left to grapple with the silence and emptiness left by their parents’ inability to discuss their wartime experience. Barocas and Barocas, in their psychiatric work with numerous families of Holocaust survivors in the United States, concluded that “Individual and collective ritualized mourning were not experienced, and grief was not worked through” (333). Cultural historian Dominick LaCapra, describing a context in which mourning the Holocaust was often bypassed, states that in Israel “the aim was to go from victim to agent, without passing through survival and the process of working through the past” (158). Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-on, in studying both the descendents of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, coined the term “double wall” of silence to describe resistance to speaking about the Holocaust experience, observable not only between survivor/perpetrator parents and their children, but also between patients and their therapists (“Attempting” 167–168). A prominent example of this phenomenon was highlighted by German psychoanalyst Sammy Speier. Speier indicated that the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPV), at the time of his writing in 1993, had failed to deal with the effects of its own, no less its patients’, Nazi past, and thus had demonstrated an inability or, more likely, “a refusal to grieve” (64). On a larger societal level, cultural historian Elizabeth Bellamy suggests that the melancholic strain evident in postmodern philosophy itself reflects a failure adequately to mourn and work through the Holocaust. Bellamy, in her book Affective Geneologies writes “postmodernism can be summarized as, among other things, a kind of melancholic reaction to the loss of modernity’s narratives of coherence” (2). Bellamy uses the term “melancholia” in the Freudian sense, defining it as “a kind of perversion or distortion of memory–a refusal of salutary remembrance of loss, a refusal to mourn, that condemns the subject to a futile ‘acting out’ ” (2–3). In this context, Bellamy defines the Holocaust as “perhaps the major unresolved trauma lying at ‘the core of Western identity,’ ” and goes on to suggest that this trauma “haunts the divide between modernism and postmodernism” (4). Thus, if one accepts Bellamy’s thesis, the inability or refusal to mourn (rather than simply memorialize) the Holocaust, has implications on the individual and collective level, ren-