War is the worst crime against humanity – and the traumata experienced have an effect on the following generations. When Elin Goldberg* (62) was born, the Second World War was long over, but the horror of that time is still omnipresent.
When I was a kid, how did I get the idea to ask my father if he was a murderer? I forgot his answer to my killer question. It wasn’t because of the slap I got back then. We post-war children were used to that, we took them sporty. We all came from families bled by the war, in which violence, inhumanity, brutalization, flight, loss, and imprisonment played significant roles. What was a slap anyway?
A decade and a half after the end of the war, signs of destruction were still visible on the streets and among the people. Ruins on overgrown properties that aroused our curiosity as children, neighbors and uncles with prosthetic arms or legs. At an age when children naturally live from one moment to the next, I was already getting a glimpse of the past, omnipresent with leaden gravity and yet a mystery.
Again and again I saw the frozen faces of the survivors at the Sunday coffee table, conversations were broken off when we children ran back from playing into the living room, where the mood was meanwhile desperately heated by caraway and corn. On those Sundays my feeling intensified that what I was being shown and told did not match what I felt. A German version of the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.
My parents rarely spoke of the war – but it was always there
My parents rarely talked about the war, and meanwhile they practiced silence, spoke in fragments, with the same cliched phrases over and over again. About injuries, horse-drawn carriages on the ice, dead brothers, abducted grandfathers and lost youth. It sounded like an adventure to us children and didn’t reconcile with the parents, uncles and aunts whose names we bore.
It still amazes me that I accepted the mostly illogical parts of these stories unquestioningly. Some topics didn’t come up at all. We children made a strict distinction between good and bad, and our parents punished our transgressions quickly and severely. But why didn’t anyone talk about the evil that had made this destruction possible, about the evil that the war had brought into the world? I also never felt sympathy for the other, foreign victims of this war.
But the older I got, the more I got used to the upside down, contradictory circumstances. Night after night we woke up to the screams of our father, who – trapped by the alp – seemed to be reliving the same horror over and over again without ever solving it for himself. Morning after morning everyone acted as if nothing had happened, and I often wished I had just imagined it all.
If the war was as terrible as it seemed, why didn’t anyone weep and mourn during the day for grandfathers and brothers who had been kidnapped?
That wasn’t an issue in my family. Apparently emotionless, everyone settled into the hustle and bustle of economic growth. At the same time, as a child, I felt the neediness of my parents. Got used to sparing her my questions and solving my problems myself. The principle of care was reversed. I cooked for them, tried to comfort them, if they seemed lost again, I wanted to cheer them up, also to push away my own fears. The ever-present fear that something terrible could happen at any moment.
We made an effort to adapt to avoid becoming a burden to the parents, and by the age of eight the first of us developed eating disorders and mental asthma. When I started school, I found out for the first time that there were children whose fathers had not been in a uniform when they were young, and whose mothers had not fled.
Taken over feelings of guilt and internalized kinship
My best friend, the daughter of a war-disabled, one-armed violinist, understood me without many words. I looked for the answers to my questions in books. I devoured the “Star Children”. The more I read, the more I realized that my parents weren’t good people, and I was ashamed and longed for the unencumbered normality of a Lisa from Bullerby every single day during my elementary school years. Later, I took every opportunity to immerse myself in foreign family life during student exchanges. I perfected my foreign language skills. It was my greatest happiness when I was no longer recognizable as a German and was able to shed my feelings of guilt like someone else’s skin – for a moment!
In the 1980s, when I was attacked as “Mof” at a banquet in Rotterdam, I distanced myself radically from my internalized kinship for the first time. In front of all the guests, I congratulated the attacker for choosing where he was born. In Dutch. Later I chose the child of a persecuted Jewess as my partner, and in my everyday work I struggled with my seemingly insurmountable willingness to adapt, my fear of authority and my fear of conflict.
Why do so many of my acquaintances of the same age today have fears that have no real reason in their biographies, but are connected to the experiences of their parents?
I now know that war trauma is unconsciously inherited and carried on. But as a grown-up child, I can now, as I did in Rotterdam, distance myself from the feelings of guilt and shame that I inherited from my parents. Maybe someday I’ll be able to mourn that they weren’t the parents I would have wished for. And I’m passing on my question: What is the significance of this topic for the grandchildren’s generation, what concrete consequences does it have for the global players who study in Beijing and London, drink German brand beer worldwide and wear hairstyles that my Dutch girlfriend – now smiling – considers a Nazi -Chic called? What have we passed on to them?
*The name is a pseudonym