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Love after Auschwitz: The Second Generation in Germany and On the Myth of Objective Research after Auschwitz by Kurt Grunberg, might also be titled Confessions of an Empiricist. It is two books in one. The first is a sociology dissertation written some years ago comparing adult Germans (Jewish and non-Jewish) whose parents went through the period of the Shoah. The author asks two basic questions:(1) Are there differences in the intimate lives of the two groups? (2) Are there differences between the groups in terms of how they and their parents have or have not dealt on a personal level with the facts of the National Socialist period in Germany? The second book, interwoven with the first, is a retrospective commentary on the dissertation. It looks at some of the historical, sociological, and psychological forces at work now and while the research was being designed, carried out, critiqued, and litigated (see below). Both “books” are worthy of our attention, but they make for a difficult read.
Grunberg's “first book” is a summary of his dissertation. After reviewing literature on the second generation after the Holocaust, including analytic writings, he framed four hypotheses to test empirically using a nonclinical rather than clinical population. Working with an available sample (N = 20) matched for demographics, he found that secondgeneration Jews experienced more entanglement with their Holocaust survivor parents, including more pressure regarding the choice of a partner, than did their non-Jewish German counterparts. On the other hand, they had more authentic interaction with their parents about the parents' experience of the years under National Socialism. Second-generation Jews living in Germany also had more difficulty with their adult intimate lives than did their non-Jewish German counterparts. As a content area within conflict between partners, the subject matter of the impact of the years under National Socialism was more likely to be a source of conflict am