History, Trauma and Shame

Engaging the Past through Second Generation Dialogue

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367563585
• eBook ISBN: 9781351391177
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

History, Trauma and Shame provides an in-depth examination of the sustained dialogue about the past between children of Holocaust survivors and descendants of families whose parents were either directly or indirectly involved in Nazi crimes.

Taking an autobiographical narrative perspective, the chapters in the book explore the intersection of history, trauma and shame, and how change and transformation unfolds over time. The analyses of the encounters described in the book provides a close examination of the process of dialogue among members of The Study Group on Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust (PAKH), exploring how Holocaust trauma lives in the 'everyday' lives of descendants of survivors. It goes to the heart of the issues at the forefront of contemporary transnational debates about building relationships of trust and reconciliation in societies with a history of genocide and mass political violence.

This book will be great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of social psychology, Holocaust or genocide studies, cultural studies, reconciliation studies, historical trauma and peacebuilding. It will also appeal to clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, as well as upper-level undergraduate students interested in the above areas.

Chapter 1

Empathic repair in the aftermath of mass violence and trauma

Is it possible to repair the past?

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

In the history of genocide and other forms of mass violence, the problem of transgenerational transmission of trauma has been the paradigm most studied in recent years. Shifting the lens to focus on research that explores strategies aimed at interrupting the cycles of intergenerational transmission of trauma is an area that calls for investigation, and this is what we seek to address in this book. The book is an in-depth examination of the question of what happens when children of Holocaust survivors engage in sustained dialogue about the past with descendants of families where parents were either directly involved in Nazi crimes, or indirectly involved as bystanders and, wittingly or unwittingly, as “fellow travellers”. The book seeks to contribute insights on what the transformation of relationship between children of Holocaust survivors, and children born into German families of Nazi perpetrators and/or families “implicated” (see Rothberg, 2019) by their very identity of having been brought up in Hitler’s Germany means.

There was a time when developing understanding between survivors of the Holocaust and children of Nazi perpetrators was taboo, and when these discussions only happened in isolated dialogue contexts (see for example Bar-On, 2000). Examples of this work of dialogue between children of Holocaust survivors and descendants of Nazi perpetrators include the Nazareth Conference series organised as part of Tavistock Group Relations, which brought together German and Israeli psychoanalysts (see Erlich et al., 2009). The recent establishment of the Dan Bar-On International Dialogue Centre is a sign of the present when debates about the need for dialogue about the past and its transgenerational repercussions are becoming commonplace. The opera Lost Childhood (by Janice Hamer and Mary Azrael), based on Nir’s (2002) book, is indicative of this trend. In his article reflecting on the significance of this opera, Pogany-Wnendt (2012), a child of Holocaust survivors, concludes that these dialogue processes are an urgent responsibility for children of perpetrators and survivors. The dialogue is necessary, he argues, if the cycle of destructiveness associated with the “burden” inherited by the second generation is to be broken and stopped from being handed down to their children. On the “other side” of the historical divide, Gottfried Wagner, whose family roots originate from Nazi sympathisers, most notably his great-grandfather the composer Richard Wagner, echoes this call for dialogue between non-Jewish Germans and children of survivors of the Holocaust. This book therefore, offers a unique platform for reflecting on the complex dynamics of the process of dialogue between children of Holocaust survivors and second-generation Germans who were either young children during, or were born in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

“Dialogue” has provided a framework for engaging with the past in the pursuit of a peaceful and democratic political order in the wake of post-conflict democratisation in many countries that have emerged from mass violence as a strategy for addressing its traumatic impact on individuals and communities. Experience has shown that, although the descendants of a generation that lived through a period of mass violence and genocide did not experience the past directly, the deeper issues of the past are reawakened repeatedly in their lives as inheritors of this past. The close analysis of the dialogic encounters that are described in the chapters that follow after this chapter offers rich and profound insights into the dynamics of a process that has become ubiquitous in debates about “dealing with the past”. Often in these debates the focus is on language and on the aesthetics of the process of dialogue with little or no reflection on the deeply unconscious dynamics that are evoked in the internal world of participants in these dialogue processes.

The Jewish-German dialogue encounters analysed by the authors in this book are not on the scale of a vision of “national healing” usually pursued in countries such as South Africa, which seek to transcend the systematic violence and oppression of earlier governments (although there is reflection on the group dynamics embedded within the interpersonal contexts as well as in the context of the PAKH group as a whole [see Chapter 6]). The careful psychoanalytically informed reflection in the chapters offers rich and profound insights into the dynamics that play out inter- and multi-subjectively in Jewish-German dialogue encounters. The discussion illuminates what we mean when we talk about being “haunted” by the past, and what it takes to face these ghosts of the past and to transcend them in order to forge links of solidarity with the living descendants of history’s violent past. An important insight in this regard is that the acknowledgement, recognition, and empathy that unfold in these dialogue processes at the interpersonal and trans-subjective level introduce a new narrative that offers an expanded vision of the future and create an imaginative space where national healing becomes first conceivable, then ultimately possible. The authors’ reflections and their self-reflexive approach draws our attention to the critical role of “witnessing” and shows how reciprocal mutual witnessing makes it possible to respond empathically to others.

The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa, which demonstrated the power of witnessing trauma in a public way, is an important backdrop to the exploratory conversations that gave birth to the idea of this book project. Thus, the issues that are addressed in this chapter resonate with themes discussed in the rest of the book. The chapter will focus specifically on the South African context, on where things stand concerning the reconciliation that was envisioned through the work of the TRC. The first part of the chapter critically reflects on the meaning of the concept “intergenerational transmission” of historical trauma in the South African context. It considers whether the concepts that have been used in the literature on the transmission of the traumatic past adequately capture the essence of what it means for the younger generation to grow up in the shadow of apartheid. The second part of the chapter reflects on some of the tenets of the TRC process and shows how principles of empathic dialogue were established to facilitate victim-perpetrator dialogue. The third section draws from the Kleinian perspective to consider the dynamics of victim-perpetrator dialogue and its limitations. The section ends with a reflection that suggests a more critical examination of the question of dialogue in the face of structural problems that limit the extent to which the young generation can enjoy the freedom that being born after apartheid promised. Almost 25 years since the TRC completed its work, and with the post-apartheid generation reaching adulthood, the haunting weight of the past and its entanglement with the present continue to reveal itself in the lives of the generation born after apartheid.

Intergenerational transmission of trauma

The term “intergenerational trauma” has come to represent the enduring legacies of historical trauma and how it has been passed on to the descendants of survivors and victims. In a book of essays that deal with this issue of the transmission of trauma, Auerhahn and Laub (1998) capture this notion of the passage of the impact of trauma through time from one generation to another:

We have found that massive trauma has an amorphous presence not defined by place or time and lacking a beginning, middle, or end, and that it shapes the internal representation of reality of several generations, becoming an organizing principle passed on by parents and internalized by their children.

(p. 22)

A thread that runs through this scholarship on trauma’s generational transmission is the idea of the lack of a continuous temporal narrative and the centrality of the relationship between traumatic “returns” and memory. In his notion of “multi-directional memory”, Rothberg (2009) suggests that the complex layers of violent histories may create a situation of shared memory from all sides—we are all affected by this violent history—as opposed to competing memories. Hirsch (2008) has elaborated on this problem of inter/transgenerational transmission of the past. She describes the phenomenon of “postmemory” which she says involves “acts of the postgeneration” (pp. 106, 115). These acts, Hirsch informs us, are imbued with the narratives and memories of the previous generation so deeply and affectively that it seems that they constitute the full-fledged original memories. She puts it thus:

Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.

(Hirsch, 2008, pp. 106–107)

For Hirsch (2008), these “memories” from the past of an earlier generation come to inhabit and dominate the lives of subsequent generations, affecting them overwhelmingly and displacing their own generation’s narratives. This scholarship on the transgenerational traumatic impact of violent histories has enabled a productive engagement with one of the most urgent topics of the twenty-first century. What has remained underdeveloped, however, is the role that countries in the African continent and other countries with recent histories of mass violence and genocide can play in broadening the scope of the theory of trauma after mass atrocity. Expanding the domain of inquiry on trauma to include new terrains of investigation opened up by narratives of trauma from individual testimonies and from communal stories of trauma from countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Namibia and others may open up possibilities for renewed critical reflection on the question of how individuals and groups live with the memory—and “memories”—of violence. At this political time with post-apartheid and post-genocide generations that have now come of age in South Africa and Rwanda, for instance, with some of the victims of past violence still living on the very sites of the trauma, we should be interested in exploring these questions and placing them in the unique contexts that these countries offer. Rwanda, for instance, has defied history in ways that I cannot go into here (see Benda [2018]). The country presents us with challenging questions that concern how we think we know what it means to live with trauma and what the “best” way for victims living together with perpetrators and their descendants might mean in order for them to heal from the shackles of the past. In South Africa, after the eruption of the 2015 and 2016 nationwide student revolts, which was—the second generation’s protest against the slow pace of change,—we cannot but pause to ask again: are we dealing with “ghosts” from the past, the death of hope in the present, or a combination of both?

It seems clear that in South Africa at least, we are dealing with continuities of the past rather than its return as such. There are other layers of distinction between the “postmemory” transgenerational impact of the Holocaust and the second generation’s experiences in South Africa and in other post-conflict regions on the African continent. The Holocaust is regarded as an impossible-to-comprehend event, during which an unimaginable number of Jewish people were murdered in Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Apartheid occurred over several generations. Its repercussions have been felt over several generations. At the same time, each generation has experienced these multigenerational impacts of the oppression, exclusion from economic and educational privileges, and marginalisation directly. This means that each generation both inherits and lives the events of the previous generation. The notion that experiences of the second generation are imbued with “imaginative […] projection and creation” as Hirsch (2008, p. 106) describes the way in which Holocaust remembrance plays out in the actions of the postmemory generation, does not capture this reality of a past that is simultaneously inherited and lived. For South Africa’s post-apartheid generation, the effects associated with the misery and suffering of previous generations belong to the current generation themselves; they are personally confronted directly with the consequences of a life of oppression and depravity that their forebears were faced with under apartheid. The intertwining of narratives and memories of pain and suffering across generations, the layers of transgenerational entanglements in the lives of the younger generation as they face their troubled present while at the same time living their parents’ “present past”, is the parents’ past re-wound. Far from living a present haunted by the parents’ past passed on uncannily to them, the ghosts of this impossible life of repetition belong to the younger generation. They are the “rewind” generation. To characterise their experiences as “postmemory” would be to deny a reality faced by the younger generation in countries with centuries of violent histories of colonial oppression.

I suggest that what this “rewind generation” is dealing with is the “lived memory” of trauma (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2001). They are living the experiences of their forebears rather than engaging with this past through the mediated expression of internalised narratives, images, and behaviours transmitted by the parents’ generation. This was clearly shown in findings from a recent study we conducted in the Cape Town area in three black (“black” here is inclusive of the apartheid-era designation of the “coloured” race) residential areas. Young people who participated in the study were born after the end of apartheid. They reported feeling a deep sense of betrayal because their circumstances are “worse” off than their parents’ generation (Gobodo-Madikizela et al., 2019). This should not be taken to mean that life under apartheid was better. Rather, this suggests that while a life of depravity under apartheid was expected under the oppressive whites-only government, a more caring and socially responsive approach was expected from a black government. For these young people who are growing up after apartheid, the past is lived not as remembrances expressed through an imaginary shaped by stories and projections. Some of the second-generation South Africans who were young children at the end of apartheid have first-hand experience of this past, because the violence of apartheid was lived, shared, and witnessed within families and communities, a repetition that they continue to experience in the present, however, not at the hands of the apartheid government and its violent police.

Dialogue and the afterlives of victims, perpetrators

Dealing with “the past” or “healing the divisions of the past” when the past is continuously lived in the present calls for innovative ways of facing history. In a country where victims and their descendants are faced with the continuities of the lived memory of suffering while perpetrators and implicated others enjoy the transgenerationally inherited benefits of a life of privilege under apartheid, dialogue about the past in the face of intransigent structural problems becomes challenging. In this context, there is a great possibility that feelings of anger and resentment may dominate and become the language of engagement with the past. What is required is a response to the past that demands accountability, while at the same time fostering solidarity in order to inspire a sense of care and responsibility for social justice. This would involve working with symbols, language, politics, media, and academic institutions to create conditions that will encourage alternatives to revenge. Such an approach imbues the process of dealing with the past with a relational ethics that places emphasis on the value of continuously working on the repair of the past rather than once-off “events” aimed at healing, which end up deepening the divisions of the past, because they leave the deep structural problems we are facing unaddressed.

There is a tendency among scholars of human rights and international legal institutions to rely too narrowly on retribution as the only legitimate form of addressing past injustices and state-orchestrated atrocities, an approach inherited from the post–Nazi Germany Nuremberg trial model. Aligned with the prosecutorial values of the Nuremberg trials, the United Nations tribunals have been an important judicial process and a global accountability framework for countries that have not dealt effectively with past human rights abuses. However, their tendency to focus only on perpetrators from one side of past political conflict may disrupt the fragile unity that might be forged by two sides that are emerging from war with each other if there is public acknowledgement of responsibility for victims of the conflict from all sides of the conflict. This could fuel the anger from people who may feel that the law is biased against one group in the conflict, the oppressor group, when in fact, for whatever reasons it came to pass, there is often a record of human rights crimes committed by the oppressed group as well. The issue is not a simple one, for in recognising that both sides produced victims, one stands on shaky ground by seemingly applying the same mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Facing the internal worlds of ghostly inheritance
• Chapter 1 Empathic repair in the aftermath of mass violence and trauma: Is it possible to repair the past?
• Chapter 2 The power of fear and shame: From hiding place to public space
• Chapter 3 Beyond inherited guilt: Reclaiming the self
• Chapter 4 Moving from broken human bonds to compassionate dialogue: Transgenerational restoration of interpersonal solidarity Ruined by the Holocaust
• Chapter 5 From broken identities to repair: A German-Jewish dialogue
• Chapter 6 Group phenomena in working through the past
• Epilogue: Daring to empathise
• Appendix A
• Index