Sabine Bode. Die deutsche Krankheit--German Angst. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2006. 287 pp. 19.50 EUR (cloth), ISBN 978-3-608-94425-9.
Reviewed by Russell Spinney (Department of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University)
Published on H-German (February, 2008)
Peeling the Onion of Trauma, Fear, and Guilt in Modern German Political Culture
How should scholars approach notions of trauma, fear, and guilt? How about politicians, journalists, or ordinary people? In their comparative anthology on the social and cultural history of life in Europe after 1945, Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann suggest that it is time to come to grips with the social, psychological, and political history that reverberated from the mass death and violence of the Second World War.[1] One outcome of trauma has been the increased appearance since the 1990s of memoirs published by people who call themselves "war children" (Kriegskinder). Even as a few particularly notable authors have drawn public attention to their accounts of their experiences, scholars have raised questions about the characteristics of this focus on the trauma of German war children. This cultural activity offers an important chance to re-examine and compare systematically how Europeans have handled the effects of the Second World War and how individual experiences of trauma inform collective memory and politics. However, as Nicholas Stargardt has noted, employing the concept of trauma to societies and politics also raises questions about its heuristic limits as an analytical tool and about the moral consequences of its use to examine members of groups more typically seen as perpetrators than as victims of Nazism and the Second World War.[2] Moreover, what does "fear" mean in German terms and how does one respond to the problem of guilt? In this context, and despite the lengthy discussions already under way on this topic, Sabine Bode believes both that something remains to be learned from a closer look at the experiences of the German war children and that the victim/perpetrator problem can be more successfully resolved than it has so far.
In this book, Bode supports the idea that the development of German political culture is pathological. Appropriating the international perception of Germans as people who suffer from Angst, Bode argues that German political culture is characterized by a tendency to worry about the future. Furthermore, politicians and the media regularly invoke a sense of catastrophe in public discussion of pressing issues, but when it matters most, as in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia or in calls for welfare state reform, Germans are afraid to act.[3] Drawing from her research and her own personal history, Bode suspects that this political culture of fear is rooted in the inability of Germans born roughly between 1930 and 1945 to deal fully with their personal histories of trauma in the context of Germany's primary focus on fostering collective feelings of guilt and shame for the crimes of the Nazi regime (pp. 57-62). In response, Bode seeks to alert wider audiences to the psychological burden of the war children's generation and their families in order to help Germans develop a new collective cultural identity that both remembers the nation's Nazi past and the trauma of its people. This community of victims (Gemeinschaft der Opfer), as Bode sees it, would help Germans deal with a range of problems from the relationship to their national identity to real sympathy for the victims of the Nazis, greater tolerance for immigrants, and willingness to reform the social welfare state.
Bode's book has generally received positive reviews in the German press, but has also been criticized for weaknesses in research and analysis on the relationship of individual trauma, society, and political culture. The strength of the book lies in Bode's wide range of interview partners, including prominent politicians, historians, neuroscientists, psychologists, psychotherapists, and writers. Bode allows her interview subjects to express their own opinions on the topic of fear, disagree with her, and recall their own stories of growing up in the wake of Nazism. This approach makes for compelling anecdotal reading and has helped some readers see their own personal history in a psychoanalytical light, but makes it difficult for the reader to gain a full account of the problems involved with trauma and the connections of fear and guilt in German political culture.
One problem in the book is Bode's fragmented overview of the scholarship on war children's traumatic experiences. Bode does offer some data on what is concretely known about the war children's generation, but admits that it is harder to quantify how Nazism and war have affected the war children and hence their own children's lives and the nation's politics. Fourteen million Germans were born between 1930 and 1945. Bode adds that in West Germany in 1950, there were 9 million displaced persons, 2.5 million widows, 1.5 million seriously wounded in combat, 2 million late returning persons and 4.5 million wounded in the bombings of German cities (p. 52). Similar data for the population of the GDR is, however, omitted from her account. The eastern provinces, for example, lost over 20 percent of their adult male population in military deaths compared with more than 12 percent nationally.[4] Bode later notes that 16 percent of Germans grew up without fathers and 40 percent had single mothers into their teens, but it is not clear which group of Germans these statistics represent (p. 184). More disconcerting is the absence of similar statistics for children born during the same period in Germany in families deemed "non-Aryan," "asocial," or "hereditarily ill." Bode does refer to the American trauma researcher, Rachel Yehuda, who studied children who survived the Holocaust. Yehuda found that when one parent who survived the Holocaust suffered post-traumatic effects, 50 percent of children in those families displayed similar effects. When both parents suffered post-traumatic effects, 80 percent of children were affected (p. 172). The other studies Bode cites are either of limited significance in her account or more removed in space and time.[5] Yet with these studies as basic measures, Bode suggests that anywhere from 5 to 30 percent of German war-era children suffer from the effects of trauma (p. 227). Given the shakiness of this estimate, the effects of trauma in the lives of these children and on their social relationships and political culture remain even harder to measure.
Bode does differentiate between different types of experiences that may help guide further research. Her interview partners suggest a range of familiar psychological problems resulting from traumatic events, including assumption of parents' suppressed feelings, disassociation of one's own thinking from one's feelings, loss of memories of trauma, and increased domestic violence. Keeping track of stories she hears during her travels, Bode claims to have found a new set of cases in younger war children, whom parents often ignored or assumed to be more resilient than older siblings. She also notes as unique categories to keep in mind the cases of children who experienced dive-bombings, grew up in families with weakened fathers, no fathers at all, parents who were perpetrators, or lives subject to two different dictatorial regimes. Finally, Bode draws attention to the tendency of psychotherapists and others who treat psychosomatic ills to ignore the absence of fathers in the lives of the war children; she suggests that this factor may play a role in explaining the problems these children have faced in their own marriages, families, and personal health histories. Bode is on shakier ground, however, when she links these children's trauma to a list of other problems including increasing antisemitism, nativism, anti-Americanism, the German relationship to nationalism, and inability to intervene in the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. These are interesting and important problems in their own right, but the links between individual trauma, these social issues, and politics remain unclear, fragmented, and incomplete in her investigation.
A second difficulty that arises from Bode's analysis is her failure to present the complexity of the suffering the war children experienced. She thereby risks conflating different traumatic experiences and ignoring the moral context of the original violence. From Bode's perspective, since both the children of the "racially pure" and those who survived Nazi persecution are innocents, both groups are suffering from similar traumatic effects. Yet, most of her interviews reduce the reader's perception that the history of wartime trauma belongs primarily to the experience of ethnic German children. The few interviews Bode includes with German-Jewish subjects do point out some distinctions, such as the sense of alienation from German society that Jewish Germans have experienced and the perceptions that sympathy from Germans has not been sincere. At some place in the book, however, Bode needed to address more clearly the role that a sense of victimhood plays in German political culture. Part of the problem lies in Bode's failure to differentiate between the status of these children as survivors. Other scholars, such as Stargardt, have presented voices from their sources directly, but have drawn stronger lines between memories in two distinctly different forms: in his case, those of the "defeated" and the "liberated." Stargardt also notes the necessity of viewing war-era children not as passive innocents, but more complexly, as actively involved in environments and social networks with their own wishes and responses. Bode's analysis misses the opportunity that Stargardt's perspective presents to complicate the assumptions about the war children's ethnicity and their lack of agency. Bode could go further to open up the discussion of war children's experiences by including a fuller range of survivors' voices and exploring how they have actively dealt with trauma in postwar Germany.
From the standpoint of German cultural criticism, one of the most interesting aspects of the book is Bode's analysis of the Generation of '68 and its impact on German society and politics, in comparison with that of the war children's generation. Bode believes that despite their success in ending postwar domination by a West German culture of victimhood, the '68ers have not found a way for Germans as a group to deal effectively with feelings of guilt and shame about the Nazi past. This failure has dogged their politics; it occurs because of their inability to deal with the feelings they appropriated from their parents. Instead, they have sublimated their emotional distress in material and professional pursuits, ultimately undermining their ethical and moral positions. From Bode's perspective, even well known analysts of this generation, such as Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, turned a blind eye to the psychological impact of Nazism and the war on their subjects and their parents. Perhaps most controversially, Bode suggests that the large numbers of current German single-mother households stems from the '68ers attack on traditional family values in a unconscious transferal of the trauma of the absent father from one generation to the next. Bode's cultural criticism also takes aim at East German dissidents who facilitated the end of the GDR (in unfortunate ignorance of what they have done since 1989). Bode sees them as pioneers, accustomed to catastrophe and chaos, who have been unable to engage meaningfully in today's calmer politics. In Bode's view, they have been impatient, austere, or unscrupulous, and have become either grumblers (Nörgler) or hesitant (Zögerer). Such assertions slight her fellow citizens while suppressing their voices. Furthermore, in criticizing the 15 percent of West Germans who identify with the '68ers, Bode neglects the ways in which both East and West Germans and many of her interview partners have worked to deal with their families' pasts and to make contributions to the development of their children, communities, and politics.
The larger context of the book will also be problematic for some readers. Although Bode aims to promote a new culture of identity among the victims of the Second World War by helping them to deal with their personal traumas, her inspiration in the ways that New Yorkers mourned collectively in the wake of September 11, 2001, passes over the context of how U.S. citizens have dealt with fear via the ongoing "War on Terror." In lieu of the loss of traditional institutions and practices such as religion, Bode makes some intriguing suggestions. The proposal that religious leaders play a greater role in dealing with trauma or that Germans inaugurate a national holiday on the eve of every May 8 with a collective vigil of silence are probably wishful thinking, not to mention that there are already church holidays such as Totensonntag and Volkstrauertag. Her suggestion that secondary educators enhance relevant school curricula may be a more fruitful idea that could help introduce children to the links between German and personal family history, or provide children with knowledge to help them deal with the effects of trauma among the aging war generation.
Bode's book facilitates greater awareness of the psychological issues stemming from the experiences of the German war children and may help some of these children come to terms with their pasts. Although some of her analytical assertions may stir debates that are important for Germany's political culture, her use of a concept of trauma to examine society and politics has limits in terms of its explanatory and culture-generating capacities. Stargardt's suggestion that researchers first focus on the complicated experiences of war children before more broadly applying a concept of trauma to political culture and a wide array of other problems has a merit that is not exploited here. Bode is right, however, that coming to terms with how the past has shaped one's life and career is an important task for the war children and will influence their legacies to German society and culture; that task will be necessary for future political and moral debates. How particular this perceived political culture of dealing with trauma, fear, and guilt is to Germany should remain the focus of more thorough historical examination and further comparative study. As the war children across Europe age and die, the enormous task Bessel and Schumann set now seems more crucial than ever.
Notes
[1]. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1-13, and especially its first essay on PTSD by Alice Förster and Birgit Beck.
[2]. Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children's Lives under the Nazis (New York: Knopf, 2006), 3-19.
[3]. In one of its most extreme forms, to which Bode only alludes, this thesis would assert that the seemingly timeless characteristics of Germans such as their alleged obedience, social integrity, parochialism, and defensiveness stem from the trauma of the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). From this view, prolonged religious and international war was the collective experience of devastation that has shaped the way Germans have historically responded to problems: with apocalyptic assessments of crisis, subsequent needs for security, calls for people to obey strong authority figures, and intolerance for people and ideas deemed foreign (Gordon A. Craig, The Germans [New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1982], 15-34).
[4]. Stargardt, Witnesses, 337-338.
[5]. See Bode's endnotes, n. 32, n. 47, and n. 48.
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Citation:
Russell Spinney. Review of Bode, Sabine, Die deutsche Krankheit--German Angst.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14240
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