The Trauma of the Past: Remembering and Working Through edited by Hella Ehlers and Joyce Crick (London:  Goethe Institute, 1994); reviewed by Ann Scott

This remarkable book, unassumingly presented, takes the reader into the painful world of Holocaust survivors from a complex perspective: that of individual psychoanalytic work, alongside the evolution of both German psychoanalysis after the Second World War, and of the wider German culture. The Trauma of the Past: Remembering and Working Through began life as a lecture series at the Goethe Institute in London in 1993 that coincided with an upsurge of neoNazi racism in Germany. Such a political background brought both urgency and a heightened sense of cultural disturbance to the room; at times one feels them vividly. As Karin Herrmann and Elmar Brandt of the Goethe Institute say in their Foreword, ‘it seemed as if some Germans had forgotten the past and at the same time were unconsciously reviving it: hostels of asylum seekers were set on fire, foreigners and immigrant workers were attacked’, at the same time as many other Germans were protesting against this ‘return of brute force and terror’ (p. 3). The organizers therefore sought to create a dialogue between those who are ‘still affected and troubled afresh by the Holocaust and its aftermath and want to think about it and deal with it in a constructive way’ (p. 3). Those attending included psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, sociologists and historians ‘of the older and younger generation’ from Britain, Germany, Israel and Switzerland. The exchanges are described as disturbing, enlightening and at times passionate.

Four papers are presented: by Martin Wangh, from Jerusalem, on the working through of the Nazi experience in the German psychoanalytic community; Dinora Pines, from London, on the impact of the Holocaust on the second generation; Volker Friedrich, from Hamburg, on the internalization of Nazism and its effects on German analysts and their patients; and Andre Haynal, from Geneva, on central European psychoanalysis and its move westwards in the Twenties and Thirties. The book ends with an edited transcript of