“Hooray, I am a Kriegsenkel!” - Transgenerational Transmission of World War II Experiences in Germany
Date
2015
Authors
Jakob, lina Birgit
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Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Abstract
For decades talking about the wartime suffering of the German
majority population was felt to be a moral taboo. Out of shame
about the inconceivable crimes Germans had committed in the name
of the ‘Third Reich’, suffering of Germans was largely
excluded from public discourses and psychotherapeutic practices.
Recently, however, the topic has moved into public focus, and
questions about the long-term psychological impact of WWII on the
eyewitness generation and their families are being raised.
My PhD focuses on the generation of the ‘Kriegsenkel’ - the
‘grandchildren of war’. Although born in the 1960 and ‘70s
people who identify as Kriegsenkel feel that through processes of
transgenerational transmission, war experiences were passed on to
them by their families and underlie many of their emotional
problems, from depression, anxiety and burnout to relationship
break-ups and career problems. Kriegsenkel now meet across the
country in self-help groups, workshops and Internet fora, sharing
personal stories and discussing ways to overcome their emotional
inheritance. Common psychological symptoms and consequences are
extracted from Kriegsenkel life histories collected in popular
books, contributed to special websites, and continuously
negotiated in closed Facebook-groups.
Drawing on more than 80 in-depth biographical interviews and on
participant observation undertaken in 2012/13 in Berlin, I argue
that through this process of ‘sharing and comparing’, driven
by therapy-experienced participants themselves, a cluster of
symptoms for a new psychological profile as sufferers of
transmitted war trauma is slowly being assembled and associated
by them with a Kriegsenkel identity.
I show that this new identity is constructed, explored and
performed within the framework of Western ‘therapy culture’
(Furedi 2004). Sociologists have critiqued therapy culture as
cultivating vulnerability and victimhood and as promoting
political disengagement and narcissistic self-concern. Looking
from the subjective experiences of ‘consumers’ of therapy and
self-help culture, I argue that that they also create meaning for
emotional problems and offer therapeutic interventions, often
seen as the only hope for a better and healthier future.
In the second part of my thesis, I delve more deeply into
individual life histories of the Kriegsenkel generation. I
explore how mainstreamed concepts of transgenerational
transmission form the backbone of my participants’
auto-biographical accounts, and what they often find to be a
convincing explanation of their emotional suffering. I examine
the strengths and weaknesses of common models of transmission in
helping individuals to make sense of and address their problems.
Lastly, I call for a broadening of these models in a number of
ways to better capture the subjective experiences of descendants
of families impacted by war and violence.
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transgenerational transmission of trauma, therapeutic culture, family conversations about WWII
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