“Hooray, I am a Kriegsenkel!” - Transgenerational Transmission of World War II Experiences in Germany
Creators: name: Jakob, Lina Birgit
Publisher: name: Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Year: 2015
Subjects: transgenerational transmission of trauma
therapeutic culture
family conversations about WWII

description: For decades talking about the wartime suffering of the German majority population was felt to be a moral taboo. Out of shame about the inconceivable crimes Germans had committed in the name of the ‘Third Reich’, suffering of Germans was largely excluded from public discourses and psychotherapeutic practices. Recently, however, the topic has moved into public focus, and questions about the long-term psychological impact of WWII on the eyewitness generation and their families are being raised. My PhD focuses on the generation of the ‘Kriegsenkel’ - the ‘grandchildren of war’. Although born in the 1960 and ‘70s people who identify as Kriegsenkel feel that through processes of transgenerational transmission, war experiences were passed on to them by their families and underlie many of their emotional problems, from depression, anxiety and burnout to relationship break-ups and career problems. Kriegsenkel now meet across the country in self-help groups, workshops and Internet fora, sharing personal stories and discussing ways to overcome their emotional inheritance. Common psychological symptoms and consequences are extracted from Kriegsenkel life histories collected in popular books, contributed to special websites, and continuously negotiated in closed Facebook-groups. Drawing on more than 80 in-depth biographical interviews and on participant observation undertaken in 2012/13 in Berlin, I argue that through this process of ‘sharing and comparing’, driven by therapy-experienced participants themselves, a cluster of symptoms for a new psychological profile as sufferers of transmitted war trauma is slowly being assembled and associated by them with a Kriegsenkel identity. I show that this new identity is constructed, explored and performed within the framework of Western ‘therapy culture’ (Furedi 2004). Sociologists have critiqued therapy culture as cultivating vulnerability and victimhood and as promoting political disengagement and narcissistic self-concern. Looking from the subjective experiences of ‘consumers’ of therapy and self-help culture, I argue that that they also create meaning for emotional problems and offer therapeutic interventions, often seen as the only hope for a better and healthier future. In the second part of my thesis, I delve more deeply into individual life histories of the Kriegsenkel generation. I explore how mainstreamed concepts of transgenerational transmission form the backbone of my participants’ auto-biographical accounts, and what they often find to be a convincing explanation of their emotional suffering. I examine the strengths and weaknesses of common models of transmission in helping individuals to make sense of and address their problems. Lastly, I call for a broadening of these models in a number of ways to better capture the subjective experiences of descendants of families impacted by war and violence.