The Jewish and German Roots of Psychoanalysis and the Impact of the Holocaust

The Holocaust is an event in world history, an important event in the twentieth century, a terrible century that is just coming to a close. But it is also an event in German history that has to be faced and an event in Jewish history that has to be mastered. I and a group of colleagues spent ten years studying the effect of the Holocaust on its victims and their children. One of the painful events we had to face was that the Holocaust is transmitted by the survivors to their children and even to the third generation. In that book we also included a chapter on the children of Nazis and we made the discovery that came as a surprise to all of us, that children of Nazis who knew about the participation of their parents in the Holocaust often identified themselves with the Jews and feared that they would be annihilated by their parents should they show signs of any weakness.

Beyond the Jewish tragedy we all were forced to recognize that given certain social circumstances such as a national humiliation, unemployment, and loss of religious and humanistic scruples, a democratic society did the equivalent of suicide by allowing an evil genius embodying the frustrations of many socially powerless people to gain power. Once in absolute control, he and his associates plunged the world into a devastating war. Were it not for the grace of God and the fact that so many European atomic scientists found refuge on these shores, the atomic bomb could have been discovered in Germany with results none of us dare imagine.

We psychoanalysts have learned to differentiate between at least three attitudes toward trauma: (1) The trauma has never been mastered, the Holocaust remains for its victim the only psychologically real event. One remains Hitler's victim for