The Holocaust in Three Generations

Front matter

Gabriele Ro enthal (ed.)‘

The Holocaust in) Th er Ors Familie y > h | Regime

Barbara Budrich Publishers

Contents

Prefäce. net Ber een mehreren 3 Part 1: The Dialogue about the Holocaust in Families of Survivors 1..- :QuestionsändMethod:..u.2:sa 22.0880 deci ce NEA 7 Gabriele Rosenthal Gabriele Rosenthal 3. Similarities and differences in public discourse about the Shoah in Israel and West and East Germany... 21 Bettina Völter and Michal Dasberg Gabriele Rosenthal 5. Surviving together and living apart in Israel and West Germany: Gabriele Rosenthal, Petra Jordans and Bettina Völter Gabriele Rosenthal, Michal Dasberg and Yael Moore Noga Gilad, Gabriele Rosenthal and Yael Moore Waltraud Schade, Sabrina Böhmer and Gabriele Rosenthal 9. The Kubiak/Grünwald family dialogue: blocking out the theme of Maria Nooke in cooperation with Christine Miiller Gabriele Rosenthal, Bettina Volter and Noga Gilad Gabriele Rosenthal, Bettina Volter and Noga Gilad 12. The intergenerational process of mourning: The families of Fred,

Gabriele Rosenthal, Bettina Völter, Noga Gilad and Yael Moore

Bettina Völter

Preface

After working together for a number of years, Prof. Dan Bar-On and the editor came up with the idea of conducting a study in which we wanted to dare, despite all reservations, to make a comparison between Jewish families and non-Jewish German families. Apart from the content-based problems arising from a comparison of this kind, such a project also raised the question of whether a team of Israelis and Germans would be able to work together successfully over a number of years. Would we even arrive at comparable analyses? In Germany, Prof. Fritz Schütze (University of Magdeburg) and, in the second stage of the project, Prof. Regine Gildemeister (University of Kassel) agreed to get involved with this project, to apply for funding to the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and to take responsibility for it. The funding we received for the project covered the period from December 1992 to August 1996. The editor, Prof. Gabriele Rosenthal (Kassel University), headed the academic research that went into this book.

The team of researchers - the authors of this volume - was an interdisciplinary one, comprised of sociologists, psychologists and political scientists from Israel, West and East Germany; Jewish Israelis and non-Jewish Germans. This constellation led to very different perspectives in the analyses of our interviews; something that proved to be an incalculable advantage. As members of the second and third generation of survivors of the Shoah and of forced emigrants, as well as of Nazi accomplices and Nazi perpetrators, we found again and again that we were trapped in our own perspectives and in some cases had to deal with very different feelings that came up during the course of our work. The critical dialogue within our team, one that spanned a number of years and was not always free from conflict, helped us to grow beyond these limitations. A number of colleagues were helpful to us in this process. Fritz Schütze and Regine Gildemeister acted as our link to the DFG. More than anything else, they put their trust in our work and offered us a great deal of support. We owe special thanks to them, and to our reviewers and the DFG. The study in Israel would not have been possible without Dan Bar-On's support. He assisted us in countless ways, helping us get over some of our interactive low points, giving us many important impulses regarding the content of our work and simply being there to offer advice. We would like to take this opportunity to thank him. We also wish to thank our colleagues Tamar Zilberman and Revital Ludewig-Kedmi, who worked on the project for the first two years. We are grateful to Angelika Heider for the historical research she undertook: the archive inquiries she made required a great deal of effort and persistence.

Catherine Johnson translated most of this book and carefully revised some of the translations we already had. Many thanks to her, and to the other translators, Michael Zuntz, Simon Srebrny, Promita Sengupta, and Libby Shapiro. Johanna Kröber has been transcribing our interviews very carefully for many years now: many thanks to her for her commitment and willingness to help.

Our special thanks go to all the families who agreed to take part in our interviews, who gave us their trust and shared their paths through life with us. All the families who are not directly mentioned in this book were very important to the research process nonetheless, but the scope of this work only allows us to present selected case studies that must serve as examples.

Berlin, January 1997 Gabriele Rosenthal

Part 1: The Dialogue about the Holocaust in Families of Survivors and Families of Perpetrators

1. Questions and Method

Gabriele Rosenthal

What form does the dialogue' about the family past during the Nazi period take in families of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and in families of Nazi perpetrators and accomplices? What impact does the past of the first generation and their way of dealing with it have on the lives of their descendants? What are the structural differences between the dialogue about the family past and the Holocaust in families of perpetrators and in families of victims of Nazi persecution? These are the general empirical questions that our research puts forward. The specific focus of our study lies in comparing different family constellations based on whether the first generation can be categorized as having been victims’, perpetrators, or Nazi accomplices during the Nazi period. Primarily from a sociological perspective, we examine how family histories that differ biographically after 1945 - in Israel, in West Germany and in former East Germany - affect the process of transmitting the family past from one generation to the next. We look at the process in which family history is passed down through the generations in three generations of Jewish and non-Jewish German and Israeli families. Our aim is to reconstruct constellations in life stories which may facilitate the psychological and social integration of people burdened with a collective and family past that they find threatening. In general, we do this by pursuing an interactive-intergenerational concept which does not view the second and third generations as passive recipients of the past, but rather as active agents in the way they deal with their parents and grandparents and their pasts. Our experience has shown accordingly that the way the first generation interacts with the second and third generation can change their own perspective on the past (cf. Moore 1994).

The method

We do not wish to burden the reader with the methodology and fairly laborious methods involved in our study (Rosenthal 1993b). The few remarks made here serve to facilitate a better understanding of the empirical findings we have reached using our instruments. Findings acquired through an open interview style and hermeneutical case reconstructions can not be compared to

1 In our considerations of family dynamics, we are primarily orienting ourselves on the Helm/Stierlin dialogue model (1981/1987). 2 Cf., too, Dan Bar-On's 1995 study on three-generation families of survivors.

quantitative analyses or results based on structured interviews or questionnaires. Statements made by interviewees in response to direct questions about their past and the impact of that past on their lives have a completely different significance than our analyses of latent biographical structures and the family dialogue. In some cases, the insights gained here contrast blatantly with the manifest statements of our interview partners.

In this study, we have conducted narrative-biographical interviews’ with at least one member of each generation in every family studied. After conducting individual interviews with the various family members, we conducted family interviews in order to examine the dynamics within the family dialogue. Our work for this study involved completed interviews of members of twenty families in Israel and eighteen families in Germany. We got in touch with our interviewees through personal contacts - the snowball effect - and through putting advertisements in Israeli and German newspapers.

Before proceeding any further, a brief statement about our interviewing method. At the beginning of every individual interview, we* made the following request to the biographer’: "Please tell me/us your family story and your personal life story, I/we am/are interested in your whole life. Anything that occurs to you. You have as much time as you like to tell it. We/I won't ask you any questions for now. We/I will just make some notes on the things that we would like to ask you more about later, if we haven't got enough time today, perhaps in a second interview." By posing this narrative initial question, we are not specifying any particular theme in the first part of the biographicalnarrative interview. Generally, this request to hear the interviewee's family history and life story is followed by a long biographical narration, (i.e. biographical self-presentation) often lasting for hours, not interrupted by questions from the interviewers at any time. The interviewers use nonverbal and paralinguistic expressions of interest and attention to encourage this narrative, which is known as the main narration. This leaves it up to the biographer to determine which themes are addressed, and in how much detail, as well as how they present them and in what sequence. It is only in the second part of the interview, the questioning part of the interview, that the interviewers ask questions about topics referred to in the main narration. In this "questioning period", the interviewer uses narrative questions to initiate more detailed stories or narrations of themes and biographical events touched on in the main

3 This interview technique (Schütze, 1976, Rosenthal, 1995a) works with an initial opening question aimed at eliciting and maintaining a lengthy narrative by the interviewee. The method is based on the assumption that narration of an experience comes closest to the experience itself. The narration of biographical events gives social scientists a chance to get a sense of some ofthe motives and interpretations guiding their subject's actions.

4 Some interviews were carried out by two interviewers.

5 We prefer to use the term "biographer" instead of "autobiographer" in this context. It is our opinion that the latter term does not place adequate emphasis on the social construction of life stories.

narration. In the third part of the interview, the interviewer asks questions about themes that the biographer has not addressed. These questions are also asked with a view to generating narration; we refrain from asking questions like "why?", "what for?", as this would tend to provoke argumentation rather than narration. Our requests to hear more about a certain theme are formulated along these lines: "Perhaps you could tell us something more about your school years." Where our interviewees have trouble remembering certain events, we work with the technique of "scenic memory", to help them put themselves back into scenes in the past. Working from fragments of sensebased or body memories, we help them to gradually reconstruct these scenes by asking them questions about specific details. Provided our interviewees want help remembering, we ask them to put themselves back into the situation in the past and then begin to reconstruct the scene, formulating our questions in the historical present. We move forward from one detail to the next: "What do you see?"; "Who are you standing next to?"; "What do you hear?"; "Is it dark?"; "Is it cold?". This technique allows biographers to extricate the scene that has been blocked out of their memory; by naming individual details, it begins to take shape. Eventually, our detailed questions are less and less needed, and the biographers can gradually remember the chain of events and begin to translate them into a story. Another type of questioning targets fantasies and dreams that we reconstruct in the same way used in the scenic memory technique.

After the interview, we ask our interviewees to make a family sculpture, associate to it and explore what it means to them, much like the technique used in family therapy (Jefferson, 1978, Papp et. al., 1973, Simon, 1972). We give them adhesive circles in four different colours and ask them from their own perspective to group themselves and the members of their family by their emotional closeness or distance (putting them into positions that symbolize their relationships). When the sculpture is finished, we ask them to make a one-sentence statement to each member of their family and then to have each family member say a sentence back to them. The interviews are done in a research setting, rather than in a clinical environment. None of our first generation interviewees have ever been hospitalized for mental health reasons®. It should be noted, however, that we see our interviews as social-therapeutic intervention that facilitates communication. In the course of telling their stories, a number of our interviewees have become more aware of the extent to which their feelings, behaviour and fears are related to their family past. After a general analysis of the individual interviews, we decide which family members we wish to invite to take part in a family interview. The consideration of how we can best help the family to open up the family dialogue is a key criterion here. Like Ivan Boszormeny Nagy und Geraldine Spark

6 We have since discovered that two of our third-generation interviewees have required psychiatric treatment at certain times and have spent time in a clinic.

(1973) or advocates of the Stierlin School (Stierlin et al. 1987), we are thinking here in terms of helping to uncover family secrets and making family members aware of strong invisible bonds of loyalty as well as encouraging them to deal with family myths in a more reality-oriented way. In this process, it is important to ensure that the combination of family members chosen for the family interview does not lead to a discussion of too many or too different conflicts in one interview. This is why we conducted two family interviews in a number of families with different constellations each time. Our experiences illustrate the effect of these interviews in terms of opening the family dialogue, an impact that can be considered the start of family restructuring. We open the family interview either with the question: "What is it like for you to be taking part in a joint interview?" or with the request that they tell us what has happened in the family in the meantime since our last visit. From here, our interviewing method concentrates primarily on asking one interviewee to take on the perspective of another (i.e. "Can you imagine how your mother feels about this") or asking one family member what impact another member's statements has on them (i.e. "How do you feel after what you've just heard from your father?"). A further intervention is undertaken using the following question: "Are there any questions that you would like to ask your relatives?" The method used here to analyse narrated family and life stories is one of hermeneutical case reconstruction’ developed by the author over many years in combination with various other methods. In analysing the interviews, particular attention is paid to the structural differences between what is experienced and what is narrated: between experienced life and narrated life, i.e. life history and life story”. On the one hand, we tried to reconstruct what the biographer actually experienced during this sequence of their life and, on the other hand, how they present their life in a present-day interview. In analysing their biographical self-presentation, or life story, what we are aiming to achieve is an analysis of the biographer's present perspective. We interpret in what form, i.e. at what sequence of the text, they speak about certain parts of their lives, and we reconstruct the mechanisms behind the themes they choose to talk about and the experiences they choose to tell. We assume that it is by no means coincidental and insignificant when biographers argue about one phase of their lives, but narrate another at great length and then only give a brief report of yet another part of their lives or describe the circumstances of their lives in detail. As the analysis proceeds, it becomes clear how the indi-

7 For details of the hermeneutical case reconstruction procedure, cf. Rosenthal, 1993, 1995a. Reconstruction and sequentiality are the key principles in this method. The texts are not subsumed under specific categories, but rather are analysed for meaning in the context of the entire text (= interview). The sequential compilation of the text of the life story and the chronology of biographical experiences in the life history play an essential role.

8 By life story we mean narrated personal life as related to another in conversation or as written down in the present-day; by life history we mean the experiences that a person has lived through.

vidual sequences of the main narration are thematically linked. In this context, we speak of thematic fields, referring to Aron Gurwitsch (1964). The underlying assumption is that the narrated life story does not consist of a haphazard series of disconnected events, but that the narrator's autonomous selection of stories is based on a context of meaning, namely, the biographer's overall interpretation. The narrated life story thus represents a sequence of mutually interrelated themes, which between them form a tight network of interconnected cross-references (Fischer 1982, p. 168). In Aron Gurwitsch's terminology, the individual themes are elements of a thematic field. The construction of a genogram of the family under analysis is of considerable help in this process. This schematic diagram of the relationships within the family system based on the family tree is helpful for recognizing complicated family structures as well as historical developments and the complexes of problems linked to them within the family. Only now do we begin to formulate initial readings or questions about the family system that offer orientation in analysing the life stories. It is at this point that we start to undertake historical research and archive inquiries. However, for reasons of personal data protection, we are not always able to give an exact account of our findings or of the information that we turned up in the archives. To this end, we have also changed not just names, but in some cases places and other personal data as well. Slight historical discrepancies or inaccuracies may crop up as a result. The general questions behind our analysis can be formulated as follows: how is the collective and family past integrated into the presentation of the individual's life story? What significance is assigned to this past in the biographical construction of the biographer? What form does the interplay between the individual life stories and the interactively generated family story take?” What biographical repair strategies are used to heal the effects of a threatening past? As biography researchers, we are working on the assumption "that a deviation from the normal represents an active life achievement, which in itself entails the solution to a problem and which has a certain function in the life history in question" (Fischer-Rosenthal 1992, p. 20). Thus, we make a concerted effort not to subsume the development of symptoms into psychopathological concepts, but rather to reconstruct their function in the individual's biography and family system. In doing so, we refrain from evaluating them, for example, by dividing symptoms up into conscious coping mechanisms and unconscious defence mechanisms. Accordingly, we tend to initially develop our concepts in a descriptive manner, in the sense of the question: how is the past dealt with in the individual's biographical construction and in the family dialogue?

9 By family story we mean the shared construction of a single family history in the family dialogue.

General findings

An empirical comparison of families from West Germany, East Germany and Israel demonstrates clearly that the structural differences inherent in the family dialogue with regard to National Socialism result less from differing socialization processes after 1945 and more from pre-1945 differences. That is, these pasts have a far greater impact on the biographer's deep structure than the family history after 1945, be it in Israel, in West Germany or under socialism in former East Germany. It is of crucial importance for the life stories of subsequent generations, as well as for the dialogue within the individual family, whether and, if so, how the great-grandparents, grandparents or parents were persecuted in Europe, and how they survived this persecution. Or, on the other hand, to what extent and how the grandparents were implicated in Nazi crimes. Our analyses indicate that the Jewish families we interviewed differ considerably depending on whether the generation of the grandparents'” survived ghettos or concentration camps and death camps or whether they were able to leave Eastern Europe or Germany before 1939. A contrastive comparison showed that the families of these two groups demonstrate both different family dynamics and different family and life history constructions in all three generations. Both the family dialogue and the individual biographical constructions are defined by different themes in each case. In families of survivors (cf. Part 2), the operative themes are "death" and "fear of extermination", whereas the family and life histories of families of forced emigrants - regardless of whether they now live in Israel, West or East Germany - revolve around the themes of "emigration" and "life in the new society". However, it becomes apparent that in Israel, but not in Germany, the children of young forced emigrants tend to block out the theme of "emigration", because, unlike the second generation of Holocaust survivors, they wish to present themselves as Sabres, as Israelis with no European roots (cf. Part 3). Families from former East Germany, on the other hand, have been able to embed the theme of "emigration" into their socialist self-conception in all three generations, for by emigrating, their grandparents were either setting out on their "anti-fascist" path through life or were continuing along it (cf. Part 4). We have structured the book into the following parts in accordance with these empirical findings, distinguishing between families of survivors (Part 2), of forced emigrants in Israel (Part 3), of forced emigrants in East Germany (Part 4) and families of Nazi perpetrators and accomplices (Part 5).

10 Many of the grandparents living in Israel who took part in this study were interviewed as early as 1989/1990 by Gabriele Rosenthal within the scope of a study on survivors of the Shoah.

2. Similarities and differences in family dialogue

Gabriele Rosenthal

Do descendants of Nazi perpetrators and descendants of survivors of the Shoah have similar problems? This question is one being raised more and more frequently in academic discourse and in everyday life. So far, responses to it have had a tendency either to equate the two, a position expressed in an article by Mona Weissmark et al (1993), or to vehemently reject any possible similarities. A growing number of self-help groups, set up to provide a forum for descendants from different types of families to talk about their family past and the suffering it causes them, struggle between an open and sometimes aggressive dialogue about the differences and dealing with them in a harmonizing way (Dan Bar-On 1995b).

At first glance, similarities do emerge in a comparison of how Jewish families, in which the grandparents either survived the Shoah, or managed to flee Germany in time, deal with their traumatic past under National Socialism and how families, in which the grandparents were either Nazi perpetrators or active National Socialists, deal with their past. Whereas the way the first generation deals with the past differs significantly depending on whether they were among the victims, perpetrators or accomplices (cf. Section 2.1.1), descendants of both families of victims and families of perpetrators exhibit the following symptoms: blocking out information about the family past, fear of extermination, separation anxiety, guilt feelings, impeded separation-individuation process, and acting out the past in fantasies and psychosomatic symptoms. In addition, similar mechanisms can be observed in the inner-family dynamics within families of those who were persecuted and within families of persecutors. The silence surrounding the past, that has institutionalized itself within perpetrator families, also extends to families of those who were persecuted (Danieli, 1982). Moreover, in both kinds of families, one may observe the tremendous impact of family secrets (Karpel, 1980), as well as family members obstructing each other in any attempt to address themes relating to the past, accusations that render family dialogue impossible, an institutionalization of family myths (Ferreira, 1963) to circumvent conflict within the family, and a bound family system (Stierlin, 1981) resulting from a problematic past.

Behind these manifest similarities on a superficial level, however, lies the level of the latent deep structure, which is different in each case depending on the experiences in the family past. In other words, no matter how strong the superficial similarities, their function within the family system, and, more specifically, their psychological impact on individual family members differ based on the differences in the family pasts.

In survivor families, the silence of the grandparents about their experiences is connected to completely different problems and motives than the silence of grandparents who were implicated in Nazi crimes. A grandmother who survived the ghetto and the death camp is not denying the persecution in her past if she does not speak about it, whereas this certainly is the case when Nazi perpetrators or accomplices remain silent. If she does not articulate this part of her past, one of her reasons for choosing not to do so is an attempt to protect her children and grandchildren from the fantasies and nightmares that haunt her. Survivors very often remain silent to spare their children the burden that weighs so heavily on them and to avoid exposing others to their painful experiences (Danieli, 1982). In contrast, a grandfather and grandmother or parents who were implicated in Nazi crimes primarily keep silent and deny the past to protect themselves from accusation or loss of affection. Similarly, common reactions found in children or grandchildren of survivors are motivated by different causes than those found in descendants of perpetrators. Examples of such reactions include withdrawing from the horror depicted in survivors' narrations of persecution and killing, failing to grasp the full meaning of certain details of the experience, or even repeatedly forgetting the information that has been communicated to them. These self-protective responses are an attempt to ward off very different pressures than those that children or grandchildren in perpetrator families are trying to evade, even if they use similar methods of self-protection. Children and grandchildren of survivors do not want to imagine their parents and grandparents in situations where attempts were made to rob them of their human dignity and where they were helpless to prevent the humiliation and murder of other people, such as their parents, siblings or even their own children. Another reason that they resist knowing and realizing what their grandparents or parents suffered is because they feel guilty for not being able to relieve them of this suffering or for not having endured this suffering themselves. These guilt feelings "include the pressure to compensate parents with naches (happiness) for their suffering through accomplishment; a desire to protect and care for parents; a deep sadness and pain awakened by Holocaust memories; and feelings of powerlessness to undo the Holocaust for their parents" (Klein-Parker 1988, p. 208). In contrast, descendants of Nazi perpetrators are protecting themselves from having to realize the cruel deeds, lack of guilt feelings, emotional coldness and racism and anti-Semitism that continue unabated to this day in their closest reference individuals. And they are also trying to defend themselves against both guilt feelings and fear that their grandparents or parents will murder them or classify them as /ebensunwert (a Nazi term meaning "unworthy of life").

A fear of being murdered that in some cases intensifies into a genuine fear of extermination is something we find in children and grandchildren of both perpetrators and survivors. Fear of extermination in children and grandchildren of perpetrators tends to relate to an unconscious fantasy of being murdered by their own parents (cf. Kestenberg/Kestenberg 1987; Rosenthal/Bar-On 1992), while the potential threat that children of survivors feel tends to be a general anxiety towards the extra-familial and non-Jewish world''. In descendants of perpetrators, we also observe a fear of being considered "unworthy of life". Thus, for instance, the daughter of a Nazi euthanasia physician felt this fear as a child in connection with her father and concealed her shortsightedness from him for this reason (Rosenthal/Bar-On 1992). As a child, she had to witness her father throwing her younger brother, a mere baby at the time, into a swimming pool as a test aimed at dispelling his father's doubts of the child's "racial purity". Children and grandchildren of perpetrators also express fears of being murdered by their parents or grandparents if they attempt to expose the family past. A grandson of a Nazi perpetrator, who talked to his grandfather, trying to motivate him to admit his crimes with a certain amount of success, barricaded himself in his room the night of the conversation. He was tormented by the fantasy that his grandfather might shoot him because he was on to his past or was beginning to dissolve the bonds of loyalty he felt towards his grandfather. In another of the families we interviewed, a son of a perpetrator has had a recurring dream since childhood that he is being choked to death by unknown men who sneak up behind him soundlessly. Just a few years before our interview, his father told him that he “always keeps a length of wire with him to throttle the enemy silently from behind, like a sentry for example". His son also imagines taking part in a special duty operation with his father and being murdered by him because he has proven unsuitable for the task. He knows for a fact that rather than leave wounded comrades in enemy territory, his father and his unit murdered them instead. In contrast, descendants of survivors often become afraid in situations that they - often unconsciously - associate with the persecution in their relatives' past. For instance, one hears of them becoming mortally afraid of being gassed when they enter unknown or confined spaces. The grandson in the Goldstern family presented below suffers from a phobia of heights, of being pushed down from somewhere high. In the ghetto, his grandmother had to witness her girlfriend being thrown out of a window by a German.