Limits of understanding: Psychological experience, German memory and the Holocaust

This article considers the relationship between traumatic history, narrative memory and the limits of understanding. It suggests that inherited traumatic memory is transmitted in family narratives that remain unconsciously organized and are guided by affective and dissociative processes. The author draws on autobiographical experience, particularly his German family’s own narrative of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. He suggests that what we remember or forget, what we know or do not know, is inherently connected to the narratives we inherit and rely on to make sense of the world. Using a hermeneutic perspective, he demonstrates the role of silence and of emotional processes, such as shame, which lead to the unconscious reproduction of family narratives. Until narratives and their affective processes are consciously organized, their meanings remain inherently ambiguous. The article shows how this ambiguity is powerfully at work in the German response to the perpetration and the traumas of the Holocaust. The author concludes by suggesting that a meaningful moral response to the Nazi past must account for both an articulated history and the feelings bound up in inherited memories, thus opening up a space for dialogue, acceptance and the creation of new narratives.