“My mother and grandmother’s stories about the war have merged with my childhood memories. Memory implants that I retain as the first inscriptions of my history”-home is usually the first historian individuals encounter“My memories of these stories have an almost eerie quality of a lived reality. I remember them differently from the way I remember other stories.
As the only theory able to trace the effects of unconscious experience, psychoanalysis is invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived, or lived only via the detours of its narrative and psychic transmission across generations. (184)This dynamic also underlies, I believe, the psychological deformations of perpetrator cultures more generally. One of the most common deformations is the internalization and hence internal repetition of patterns of violence in the perpetrator culture.
Schwab (2004) wrote about trauma from the complicated position of oppressors. Schwab opened up about the ghosts in his family tied to the violence of his hometown, in post-war Germany. Schwab emphasized the importance of reparative work and open discussion to address the ghosts that many families keep after traumatic periods of history. Ultimately, Schwab’s piece challenges the binaristic categories of oppressor and sufferer by detailing the legacies of trauma for those on seemingly opposite sides of violence.
"the traumatic effects of growing up among a generation of children of a perpetrator nation... I am one of the 'children of the enemy,' invoked in Ursula Duba's poem" (178)"Moreover, it seems important to acknowledge that the German Holocaust, even though unmatched in its cold, mechanistic and industrialized machinery of death, draws on a relentless drive to subjugate or annihilate other people that reveals many affinities to Western colonialism and imperialism more generally.
Education as a tool for reconstructing postwar Germany and German subjectivity“The only open critics of such a refashioning of Germany were the teachers of German literature who shunned the Anglicization of German language and forbade us to use ‘foreign’ words. They also lamented the fact that postwar children grew up without German literature after it had almost instantly been replaced in school curricula with those allegedly ‘uncultured’ books by new American authors such as Hemingway, Steinbeck or Pearl S Buck..
"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.
This was a really interesting piece because I have thought a lot about perpetuator guilt, shame, trauma, and the effects of becoming complicit in a historical legacy, regardless of one's true internal politic.
“internalization of hegemonic structures and ideology”“Information technology has collapsed time and space so that we now suffer the mass-mediated experience of living in and through one crisis after another as if it were right here, right now—no matter where in the world it occurs. This steady diet of violence creates a traumatogenic culture that at any moment might puncture our defensive efforts to maintain what Winnicott (1960) called a sense of going-on-being.
Sociologist Zygmund Bauman (2006) described “liquid fears” to capture how our terrors move seamlessly from one potential dread to another, including, as I mentioned earlier, economic dislocation, authoritarian politics, terrorist fundamentalism, weapons of mass destruction, and ecological disaster. Twenty-four-hour “you are there” access to their devastation via television and social media continuously fuels our sense of being threatened.
Hollander (2017) primarily used Gramsci’s work to integrate hegemony in psychoanalytic theories and practice. Ultimately, Hollander contended that psychoanalysis needed to show how power and sociopolitical conditions altered the psychological state of people (as both analysand and analyst). People’s psychological conditions were tied to their sociopolitical status. This was crucial to better developing psychoanalytic theories and treatment.
