Haunting legacies: trauma in children of perpetrators

"Denying Germany its status as a civilized nation rests on a claim that the persecution of Jews and other minorities, the camps and the Holocaust were aberrations from the values of Western civilization. Recent analyses, particularly Agamben’s work, present a systematic attempt to refute this exceptionalist perspective, casting Germany as a significant moment rather than a deviation ofWestern civilization." Pp. 180"The war generation internalized the fear of a take-over as a psychic structure, extending it even to include literature and language more generally. It hence began to become all-pervasive and to operate indiscriminately at a more subliminal level. In some of its aspects, the parental generation displaced this fear onto the generation of postwar children". Pp.182"Most cultures share a tendency to silence traumatic histories. Traumatic amnesia seems to become inscribed as cultural practice. Yet, trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously. Suggesting that the silence intended to cover up a traumatic event or history only leads to its unconscious transmission, Abraham speaks of a haunting that spansgenerations. He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic ‘cult of ancestors’ (as defined by Rand) that allows the dead to rest and the living to gain freedom from their ghostly hauntings." Pp.186