Holocaust und Trauma

Postmodern Practices Conference Nov. 23rd – 25 rd 2001, Erlangen
I.2. Religion and Politics in the Postmodern
Holocaust and trauma. Telescoping of three generations in contemporary
drama
By Bernhard Chappuzeau, Universität Düsseldorf
Introduction: Auschwitz, the foreign body in memory
Helmut Dahmer complained in 1987 that the Germans repressed their past: “Since 1945 we
live in Germany on a carcass field. Politicians and ideologists who represent the majority
of those who derealize the past, build over the ruins and fill the cellars of the torturers.”
(1990: 137)1 I was shocked about this radical and unjust statement about the German discussion of the Holocaust, but I think he denounces, rightly, a compulsive behaviour towards the victims of the Holocaust and their children. His analysis of the German motivation to understand Auschwitz as a taboo – the fateful and incomprehensible – indicates a
form of traumatic experience in the descendants of the perpetrators, which is characterized
by a precept of reverence and forbidden thoughts of the functions of genocide for millions
of people who were involved (what in fact we can learn from the political debate about the
Holocaust memorial in Berlin and about economical compensation of forced labour, too).
Dahmer would describe the heir of the genocide as “mysterious as a giant shadow without
somebody casting it”. This is formed decisively by Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966)
which express the loss of positive reconciliation in an extensive trauma of speech after
Auschwitz, followed by the continual reproduction of guilt and the problem of continuation of National Socialism.
Now the third generation after the war starts participating in society and I would like, as a
member of them, to try (and this should be understood as a rejection of derealization or
normalization) a different point of view to the compulsive ritual of “crime and punishment” that has characterized German post-war-literature for more than three decades after
the creation of a putative zero position in 1945. I would like to emphasize in this context
the clear interpretation of Ruth Klüger about the German fantasy of compensation in lit-
1
Rough translation of the German text.
2
erature that precisely denies the frightening witness of atrocity by stigmatising the survivor
of the Holocaust to the edge of society. 2
Taking Adorno’s statement of Auschwitz seriously, that an alien element or foreign body
produces in our memory feelings of guilt about the continuation of National Socialism, I
would like to clarify the concept of trauma due to the results of recent clinical research
which is reflected in cultural studies. Following the examination of trauma by Sigrid Weigel (1999) who defines the figure of consciousness in cultural studies as a marking and
covering of the void at the same time, the discussion of trauma and the danger of interpersonal related and transgenerational affection leads in this discussion to coping strategies in
contemporary drama. Two questions should be answered by the interpretation of the two
plays Leedvermaak and Rijgdraad of the Dutch author Judith Herzberg:
(1) Are changes in feelings of traumatic experience possible with regard to the growing
distance of time to their causes?
(2) If intergenerational relations are still affected, how can this vicious circle be broken?
It is necessary to distinguish between the generation of the survivors with a survivors’ syndrome and the generation of the perpetrators who does not feel any comparative form of
traumatic wounding (for instance the case of collective amnesia during the fifties in Germany). However, the psychological research of Dan Bar-On (1989) on children of prominent Nazi murderers marks a different understanding of the second generation who partly
feels a mysterious desire to die. This can be compared with the depression of survivors and
their children who can’t cope with their feelings of poisoned roots and the unsolvable
question of why they live while many of their beloved are dead. So far a very complex
variety of classifications of the second generation has arisen from the last twenty years of
clinical research. This can also be reflected in the writings of Jewish and Non-Jewish
authors. Therefore I decided to limit this talk to only a few aspects of the complex relation2
One of the most striking examples is Flight to afar / Sansibar oder der letzte Grund (1957) by Alfred Andersch. In this context the use of The diary of Anne Frank as the worldwide best selling book about the Holocaust, can be explained by a need to be touched uncritically, which means a transfiguration and not the questioning of the circumstances. Anne Frank’s patriarchal father, whose attitude foiled the possibility of salvation of the children, rejected organized hiding in different families:
„Andererseits hat der Tod der Anne Frank sie uns auch irgendwie ausgeliefert, sie unserer sentimentalen
‚Lüsternheit’, kleine Mädchen zu beweinen, preisgegeben. Man liest das Buch gerührt, daher unkritisch; es
bietet keine Reibungsflächen. Wie könnte man das Tagebuch der Anne Frank kritisch lesen? Zum Beispiel,
indem man sich mit Bruno Bettelheims Vorwürfen auseinandersetzt. Bettelheim fand, dass Otto Frank seine
Familie ganz unnötigerweise in ein Rattenloch gesteckt hatte, aus dem es keinen Ausweg gab. (...) Wären
[die Mädchen] einzeln [bei verschiedenen Familien] untergetaucht, hätten sie eine Chance gehabt. Doch für
so einen Schritt war der alte Frank zu sehr der traditionelle, patriarchalische Vater.“ (Klüger 1992¹: 218-219)
3
ship between Jewish survivors and their children in respect to the phenomenon of transgenerational binding. The base of a transgenerational trauma concept in cultural studies is
given by Sigrid Weigel, who integrates Nicolas Abraham’s “Little notes on the phantom”.
Weigel makes the relationship between trauma, historiography and narration known as a
cultural phenomenon whose importance for the understanding of the Holocaust is still developing as time goes by.
Part I: From Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to a transgenerational trauma concept
So far, the trauma concept in the 20th century was an instrument to describe the late consequences of accident. The battle shock is a typical psychological and social phenomenon of
this period. Beside the description of symptoms, which led to the Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder PTSD, Sigmund Freud’s theoretical trauma concept in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) qualified the understanding of trauma as powerful excitations from outside,
which break through the personal protective shield causing strong counter-reactions and
paralyse the other psychological functions, which is the reason for latency in the process of
consciousness:
Cathetic energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of
energy in the environs of the breach. An ‘anticathexis’ on a grand scale is set up (34).
Becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible
with each other within one and the same system. Thus we should be able to say that the
excitatory process becomes conscious in the system Cs. but leaves no permanent trace
behind there (28).
The main Freudian thesis that „consciousness arises instead of a memory-trace“ (28) in
combination with his consideration of Jewish identity as a continuous rewriting of repression and its return in Moses and Monotheism (1939), guided Cathy Caruth to the general
characterization of latency in every historical experience as a reworking of displaced accidents:
If return is displaced by trauma, then, this is significant in so far as its leaving – the
space of unconsciousness – is paradoxically what precisely preserves the event in its
literality. For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to
the extent that is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that
a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence. (1991: 187)
Weigel criticizes this reasoning of a widened trauma concept. She points out that Caruth’s
definition of the comprehension of life as an act of surviving in the sense of traumatic experience, levels out the man made disaster of genocide. In fact Caruth rejects the big challenge of a “cultural trauma concept” for the consequences of the Holocaust that can dem-
4
onstrate its growing importance a long time after it happened. While trauma was first only
connected with clinical experiences like the battle shock, Weigel emphasizes her respect
for recent psychoanalytical research on the second generation of the survivors. Haydée
Faimberg worked out a new model of transposition to the next generations, who also suffer
from the traumatic experience of the survivors of the Holocaust, named “telescoping”. This
“discovery of alienating identifications and their history which concerns three generations”
(Faimberg 1987: 141), is based on the effect of train accidents in the 19th century describing the way in which wagons rushed into each other like a folding telescope. Judith Kestenberg describes this change of paradigm from somatic to psychological trauma concept
with interpersonal chain reaction as a kind of time tunnel:
Children of survivors have a tendency to go back in time and explore their parents’
past. In their fantasies, they live during the Holocaust and transpose the present into the
past. (1989: 187)
In this manner does Kestenberg not account for the infinite reproduction of the untold and
the incomprehensible. Abraham’s “Little notes on the phantom” (1991) emphasize the uncontrollable character of invention, which does not fill in the remaining empty spaces of
the beloved with one’s own experiences. The creation of an endless and tremendous phantom is caused by sensations of obscure and sinister phases in the life of the deceased and
awakes like a haunting ghost that does not come from the grave but from those hidden
graves which the deceased carried during his life and which now leave behind a void that
cannot be filled.3 Therefore Adorno’s thesis of the experience of the Holocaust as a break,
cut, caesura and disorder can be modified. The experience which describes the Holocaust
as an alien element or foreign body that can’t be integrated, changes in the cause of time.
The arising of the phantom from the hidden graves of the dead, modifies the understanding
of a break in history to a process of unconscious transposing. That’s why I don’t appreciate
the argument of normalized understanding in West German historiography. In short, a
strong shift during the eighties is apparent in contrast to the experience of the first and the
second generation survivors. The “Historikerstreit” is opened by Martin Broszat (1985)
with the attempt to integrate the isolated Third Reich into ‘normal’ historiography. He tries
to make National Socialism comprehensible by embedding facts according to political
3
In the same manner, the assumption by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in The inability to mourn
(1967), which describes a psychological impoverishment of the self of the perpetrators, has to be modified:
The phantoms of the second generation are not concerned with the loss of beloved persons but with the tremendous void of their hidden graves. Therefore, M. Mitscherlich’s later repetition of the question whether or
not the Germans’ “inability to mourn” has changed, is not relevant to the case of traumatic experience in the
second generation.
5
continuity or discontinuity. Broszat doesn’t accept National Socialism, but rather wants to
get involved in a deeper awareness of its problems by trying to understand everyday life in
the Nazi era. The well-known critique of Saul Friedländer (1987) points out the suspicion
of wrong historical emphasis and relativity of terrifying cruelty as a denial of singular facts
in history, while others, like Ian Kershaw (1993), justly point out the explicit connexion
between everyday life and barbarity which allows a deeper analysis of the self-confidence
of meritocracy and its implications of pretended naturalness.
Without going into grater detail I would like to reject the presumption of historical evidence, meaning historical distance, in relation to the consequences of the Holocaust. Latency in traumatic experience increases these consequences by transposing the unspeakable
to the next haunted generations.
Part II: Judith Herzberg’s family plays between telescoping traumatic experiences
and first attempts to break through them
Judith Herzberg was born in 1934 and belongs to the second generation. Her play Leedvermaak (1982), “Lea’s wedding”, was acclaimed as the most important Dutch play since
the Second World War. It takes place in a Jewish family of the middle-class in Amsterdam
at the beginning of the seventies. The sequel, Rijgdraad (“tacking thread”), that starts in
1979, adds episodes in 1995 and ends with a short dreamlike scene in 2005, was first performed in Amsterdam in 1995.4
The protagonist of Leedvermaak and Rijgdraad is Lea, a violinist, born in 1941 in Amsterdam. Lea, her husband Nico and their former partners Alexander and Dory, form a buffer
between the faceless victims of the Holocaust, the survivors of the concentration camps
and the coming generation. On the wedding day of Lea and Nico (in Leedvermaak), the
dialog suddenly slips into arguments between the second and first generations. Lea’s parents, Simon and Ada, both survived the concentration camp and got back their little
daughter from the Non-Jewish adoptive mother Rieth, who secretly wished they would
never return. The character Ada represents the counter part in Rieth’s dream of a new start
with the adoptive child and Ada reiterates the instructions of the underground organization
for adaptations in ugly staccato. The chasm between the Jewish and the Non-Jewish characters culminates in sarcastic moments of misunderstanding. For example the Non-Jewish
4
In this text the original titles are used (no English translation available). The interpretation is based on the
authorized German translation and the following performances:
Leas Hochzeit, directed by Harald Clemen, Theater in der Josefstadt, Wien, TV-Production by ORF 1991.
6
maid Hendrijke tells Ada about her visit to Poland where she wasn’t able to leave out
Auschwitz because she felt a magnetic force of attraction. Ada replies cynically that in
1945 she had a similar experience.
Even more seriously the traumatic experience of the Jewish survivors causes them to become isolated from each other. Dory feels unable to relate to somebody because of the loss
of her father. She hopes to find her own identity by getting an impression of her father’s
face from Simon who met him in the concentration camp. Nico’s father Zwart (another
character of the first generation), who lost his first wife in the concentration camp, is an
alcoholic and doesn’t want to speak much about anything except torture and loss, even
with his second wife.
Lea’s mother Ada is the first character who decides to go to a psychiatric clinic in order to
come to terms with her past, even though her husband has threatened to leave her if she
does. Leedvermaak ends without reconciliation, but Lea makes a first step when she apologizes to her mother instead of renewing her reproaches.
In Leedvermaak and Rijgdraad there is a permanent change of scene, many cuts of dialog,
unanswered questions and moments of silence which guide the audience to a world that
annuls the rational laws of time. The Holocaust is always present, but impersonal, faceless
and even nameless – as mysterious as a shadow without somebody casting it. The splinters
of the past remain fragments of a picture without a frame which cannot be put together.
These fragments do not supply an acceptable explanation for the ever present feelings of
guilt.5
In Rijgdraad the first generation characters try to protect the second generation from the
pain of their torture which is reflected in their children’s anxiety to question their parents
past. The untold story penetrates the wall between mother and daughter without speaking,
but by using short visual contacts and hints. Only many years later, a couple of weeks after
the death of Ada, Lea starts a discussion with the ghost of her mother. While Lea accuses
her mother of causing her terrible suffering by not talking about her experiences, her
mother’s ghost tries to explain her silence as the only way that she could deal with her own
terrible suffering. In this way the author shows the paradox of the hidden graves. Ada’s
almost pathetic inability to cope turns into transposition like a vicious circle.
Heftgarn, directed by Peter Hailer, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Düsseldorf, first performed on 02-17-2001.
5
Another example of this would be Ruth Klüger’s testimony of her personal experience of the Holocaust.
Concerning the loss of her father she explains that even the most clear reminiscence tends to be untrue because the character of fragmentation does not admit a look beyond the limits of memory: Like dispersed
7
The telescoping of traumatic experience in Rijgdraad is also reflected by the fathering of
the boy Isaac. Dory (Nico’s former wife) gets pregnant by Lea’s father Simon. Ada explains Dory’s wish to have a baby with compensation for the loss of her father. Young
Isaac is fathered as a „memorial candle“ to foil the intension of the Nazis to murder every
witness of their atrocities and to prevent that anybody remained to mourn the dead. On a
second level Dory’s choice of a father for her child is determined by Ada’s husband because Simon is the only person who met Dory’s father in the concentration camp and who
can give her an impression of his face.
In Rijgdraad everybody has a different purpose in keeping the function of the telescoping
of traumatic experience concerning the three generations. The first generation is characterized by the stigma of victimization: Considered as calves going to the slaughterhouse6,
the Jewish survivors created a paradoxical feeling of guilt for having survived and kept
silent for so many years. The loss of their family roots and the shift from their origins to
the concentration camps led them to feel as if they’d never been anywhere else than in the
camps. Sometimes a keyword like “bread” is enough to release the pain. The split up between compulsive forgetting and remembering7 is pointed out by the characters of Lea’s
and Nico’s parents. On the one hand Simon refuses to describe the face of Dory’s father to
her and on the other hand he gives her his symbolic semen. Simon’s wife Ada can’t stop
remembering when she is alone. Nico’s father Zwart abuses the moments of family reunion
to force the others to remember the past.
The late diagnosis of transposed traumatic experience in the eighties has deeply affected
the second generation. This is reflected in the characters of Lea, Dory and Nico. They take
on the sensation of poisoned roots which leads them to separations and moments of distance in which they need to find a place to exist on their own. The transposing of the unspeakable culminates in the fathering of young Issac, who awakes multiple feelings of
hope and fear in his family. The climax in Rijgdraad is reached when panic grips the
whole family one evening in 1995. Isaac forgets to come back home early and everybody
pieces of a moment whose reunification remains helpless and leads only to a gapping void (Klüger 1992²: 2728).
6
The song “On a wagon bound for market there’s a calf with a mournful eye” of Scholom Sekunda (transl.
of “Dos kelbl” by Jtschak Katsenelson, a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto, murdered in Auschwitz
1944) f. e. precedes the taboo of the post-war-era which hindered many survivors to speak about their experiences.
7
Primo Levi figured out two different groups of survivors: “It has been observed by psychologists that survivors of traumatic events are divided into two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc and
8
fears for his life. Just a little disorder is sufficient to make the family lose its equilibrium.
So far in Rijgdraad the shadows of the Holocaust predominate the attempts of coping with
everyday life.
Coda: The third generation
Judith Herzberg’s plays Leedvermaak and Rijgdraad should be acknowledged for the selfcritical mise-en-scène of the fears and worries of the second generation of Jewish survivors
of the Holocaust. Herzberg creates a kaleidoscope of relationships from the bosom of one
familiy and describes convincingly the double wall of silence between the generations that
awakes in Lea’s case the haunting ghost of her mother.
However, the characters of the third generation that appear in the second part of Rijgdraad
remain noticeably vague like missed chances of change. The angry youngster Chaim rejects any communication with the new wife of his father and believes in the return to oldfashioned Jewish values as a promise of new family roots. Young Xandra remains lethargic. Her parents died in an accident and didn’t tell her about the work of her mother as a
prostitute. Why didn’t she try to discover where the money came from? Her remark that
she only sits ‘there’ doesn’t get an explication. And in the end there is young Isaac who has
to say only one sentence in the last scene that takes place in the year 2005. He got his name
from a faceless grandfather who was murdered in the concentration camp. As a “memorial
candle” he has to cope with the projection of every hope, trust and fear of the whole family. Doesn’t he feel this overwhelming weight on his shoulders?
Dan Bar-On describes the relation of the generations with credit to the work of the second
generation as an active buffer between their parents, the depressed survivors, and their
children who now manage to find a new and independent way of life.8 Judith Herzberg
doesn’t feel sure about the new way of life of the third generation. Her characters’ conditions don’t permit a normal life. Did the second generation fail in their attempts? Perhaps
they did not have enough energy to break through the transposing trauma of their parents
and open the dialog with their children? Herzberg neither accuses nor slips to emotional8
„Auf Grund der Selbstdarstellung der befragten Eltern neigen wir heute dazu, die zweite Generation nicht
nur als passive ‚Opfer’-Generation der durch den Holocaust gezeitigten ‚Abnormalität’ ihrer Eltern zu betrachten (wie sie in der Regel in der Literatur dargestellt wird), sondern auch als aktiven ‚Puffer’, der – mit
unterschiedlichem Erfolg – die Erfahrungen der ersten Generation für die dritte ‚filterte’. Dadurch wurden
Angehörige der dritten Generation in die Lage versetzt, ihre eigenen Lebensentwürfe zu entwickeln. Ohne zu
sehr von dem, was ihre Großeltern im Holocaust erlebt hatten, betroffen zu sein, genießen sie das Faktum, im
Unterschied zu vielen ihrer Eltern überhaupt Großeltern und darüber hinaus eine sich neu konstituierende,
‚normale’ und wachsende Familie zu haben (...).“ (Bar-On, 1997: 157-158)
9
ism. The open ending leaves it up to the audience to open the double wall of silence between the generations. Reminding the quote of Helmut Dahmer who called Germany a
carcass field, the shock of the Holocaust has to be converted again into the intention of
breaking the silence. He wants us to prevent ourselves and the others from new wars and
genocides by getting to know each other, grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators, and
rebel against war, torture and misery. The challenge the third generation faces, requires the
necessity to know about ourselves and our relationships with the elder generations.
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