The subject of this essay is profound, and for many of us it is, as it is for Dr. Rangell, one which elicits the strongest of personal feelings. It is longer than most Newsletter articles, but also is unusually substantive, timely, and deserving of your attention. This is sensitive, complex, and often ambiguous ground. Dr. Rangell is a Past-President of both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association.
The Editor
The next Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association will be held in Germany, the first in fifty-two years. The decision was made after a decade of discussion at previous Congresses. Some felt it would be a travesty to those who suffered and died to meet on German soil, others that rationality dictated that we do just that, to indicate our support of German psychoanalysis and the symbol it represents for the reestablishment of reason and a humane world. Nowhere was the poignancy of the debate more felt than in the passionate positions expressed in Jerusalem in 1977 by both sides, when Berlin was the city which had issued the invitation. A few years later an invitation from Hamburg was accepted.
I recently had a personal experience of psychoanalytic exchange in Germany which I would like to share as a possible preview and background for what is to come. A few months ago I fulfilled an invitation to be the Plenary Speaker at the national meeting of the German Psychoanalytic Association in Weisbaden. The theme of the Congress was
… for our conscience is not the inflexible judge that ethical teachers declare it, but in its origin is ‘social anxiety’ and nothing else. When the community no longer raises objections, there is an end, too, to the suppression of evil passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that one would have thought them impossible.
“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”
“Psychoanalytic Psychosomatic Medicine.” The experience turned out to be a moving and unforgettable one: stimulating, informative, disturbing, and challenging.
While the official theme occupied the first part of the proceedings, I quickly found there was a second agenda I had not known about, into which a considerable interest was invested. Among the subjects presented and actively discussed were: shame and guilt, agony and destructivity, integrity and reparation, mourning, reconciliation, forgiving and confidence as problems of psychoanalysis, from guilt to responsibility, and nuclear weapons. The congress was exceedingly well attended. A large percentage of the German analysts were present as well as numerous visitors from ancillary fields. The discussions from the audience were animated, frank, more copious and spontaneous than I am used to hearing in the American, either locally or nationally. The attendance remained full throughout. No one left the meetings as far as I could see.
Far from the initial concerns of the Program Committee of the International to impose a discussion of such subjects on an unwilling group, the German psychoanalysts have wished for this, sought it, needed it for further advance and progress. In this they no doubt reflect a microcosm of the psyche of the German people. Mitscherlich wrote of the effects of “The Inability to Mourn.” I would add: or to approach, let alone solve, conflicts deeper than mourning.
In addition to participating in the national meeting in Weisbaden, I also visited Berlin and spoke to the Karl Abraham Institute active and working there. The two cities are symbols of the divided country. The contrast between them also reflects the division in the individual mind, between defeat and rebirth. Weisbaden, a jewel city in Germany today, is singularly free of war scars. American planes, they tell me, dropped leaflets there instead of bombs, informing the populace that the city was being spared because it was designated to be the headquarters of the United States Air Force. Berlin, in contrast, is a desolate and depressing island, not only because of what surrounds it outside the wall, but for the shabby rebuilt structures within, covering the remnants which remain of its destroyed elegance and glory.
The experiences I wish to point to and share, not likely to be expressed in a group situation, are of poignant interest to all. As a lone and invited American guest, the impressions and stimuli I was open to were not only overwhelming
“My father was killed in Stalingrad, ” one young analyst told me. I found myself in sympathy with his loss when suddenly I did a double take, and remembered how I had fervently wished for every German soldier in Stalingrad to be killed. His father would have been included.
in number and intensity but were on a much more intimate and revealing base than is possible in the large group intermingling at International Congresses. I have known our German colleagues under such circumstances, but meaningful human interchanges are not that possible in group meetings. They admit to having been inhibited at the International even in the presentation of papers fearing criticism from hostility or prejudice against them.
The deepest and most affective insights come from individual interaction. My hosts and hostesses in Germany, whether at meetings or in a living room or on a ride along the Rhine, were warm, frank, and communicative, our exchanges meaningful and sincere. How does one judge sincerity, I was later asked, understandably, by a colleague who was a survivor. This is a question of sincerity and authenticity (Trilling, Rangell) which every individual, let alone psychoanalyst, needs to solve daily; it is no easier to do in New York or Los Angeles than in Germany.
Some exchanges which struck me will indicate the present stage of the human dilemma, on both sides. Most German psychoanalysts today are fiftyish, on one side or the other. The average analyst was an adolescent while his country was at war. Candidates and very young analysts were younger, children or even infants. It is jolting to hear what they have to impart in moments of frankness when the atmosphere permits it. One such “middle-aged” analyst, warm, kind, liberal, analytic, with good human values besides analytic ones, looks for an opportunity to tell me, “I was disappointed when the war ended (he was fifteen or sixteen) because I wanted to be in the Wermacht.” Another confides, “I was in the Hitler Jugend. It was the happiest time of my life. I loved sports, we had uniforms, and I had many friends.”
In another case, when I remarked that the dashboard of a colleague's high-powered Mercedes looked like an airplane, he stated, hesitantly but not without pride, “I am a flyer. I was in the Luftwaffe. But I was only in training. And I was unhappy that I did not get to fly missions.” One analyst, previously a theologian, who was a young boy during the war, lost three older brothers in the Army. He remembers envying the brothers when they came home from the front, because of the attention the mother gave them, and the good food they then all had to eat. In some situations the conscious is as much to be analyzed and abreacted, and encounters as many obstacles, as the unconscious.
The analyst-visitor, or other observer-critic-judge from the outside, needs a double stance. While it may be difficult, one needs to distinguish German from Nazi, and even fascism or totalitarianism from the holocaust. There were then, and remain today, feelings of patriotism, pride in country, tradition, culture, even syntonicity with a war fought by Germany against its enemies, without the loathsome feelings we have come to associate with these historical events. Hillel Klein, an Israeli analyst who is a prominent speaker in Germany on his experiences and affects as a survivor, stated at the Weisbaden meeting that he returns to Germany because in addition to the trauma he suffered there, it was also the scene of the positive aspects of his childhood.
The International held a Congress in Rome with no discussion of whether this was in order, and no discussion of the issue of fascism. The Vienna Congress has come and gone, with the moving sentiments aroused upon Anna Freud's return; the scientific theme, however, was on “Aggression.” A Congress was recently held in previously-fascist Spain without comment or incident. Japan, which, in addition to its alliance with Germany and Italy, perpetrated the sneak attack which led the United States into war, is today a co-equal partner at every level. The abhorrent stimulus is one and one only, and extends to those in any way connected with it.
How far and to whom does this extend? To those who stood by and allowed it to happen? They are generally
included, with understandable justification. To their children? Up to which generation? The question may defy a rational approach but is there and living. “What do they want us to feel?” a young German analyst in his late thirties asked me, referring to the coming IPA meeting in Hamburg. “Do they want us to feel guilt? I feel ashamed but not guilty.” This same analyst later asked me, “What do they think of us in Los Angeles?” Incidentally, they love California. As we go to Europe, many of the younger Germans now travel to the United States, but especially California. They have seen all the sights and national parks there, usually in campers.
Shame they do feel, and remorse and a deep feeling inside the chest about the crime against civilization committed in their midst. Even an affective sense of responsibility, not necessarily based on guilt, is expressed by some. At least this is so with the analysts. My wife reminds me that analysts represent the humanistic and intellectual cream of any country and that their sentiments do not necessarily reveal the deep feelings of the common man. In Mainz I saw one vegetable vendor in an open-air market wearing a Nazi Air Force cap, probably with a superficial awareness, if any, of what it symbolized.
A passion among younger German colleagues is to find out “whether our fathers knew.” “My father was killed in Stalingrad,” one young analyst told me. I found myself in sympathy with his loss when suddenly I did a double take, and remembered how I had fervently wished for every German soldier in Stalingrad to be killed. His father would have been included. Stalingrad, within my memory, was the turning point of world history, which permitted civilized living to continue. Standing at the Brandenburg gate with a young German analyst and his wife, neither of whom were past the separation-individuation stage when Stalingrad turned back the forces of evil, I realized the irony, standing here now with German “friends,” looking across at the “enemy.”
On the eastern side was a huge monument commemorating the Russian soldiers lost at Stalingrad. On the western side was a homemade sign. On the side pointing east it read, “Den opfern der roten dictator” (victims of the red dictator) and on the side pointing into West Berlin, “Ihre freiheit ist unser antrag” (their freedom is our task). On the top of the Brandenburg monument, on the west side, soldiers on horseback who had always faced west had been turned around by the West Germans to now face east. Within sight on the west side was the Reichstag. Across the wall in East Berlin was a historic monument, with the flame to their unknown soldier. Inside an inscription read, “A monument against facism and militarism.” In front of the building, young German soldiers with red German uniforms goose stepped as they performed the changing of the guard. The western observer or visiting analyst will need an ego split.
My young German analyst-host and his wife had gone to great pains to find the answer to the painful question, “Did our fathers know?” Thinking first that they did not, certain letters convinced them that they did, and with it came an overwhelming sense of sadness and shame. “But I loved my father,” the young woman went on. Would a psychoanalyst find that difficult to understand? “My father was not a Nazi; he was a German soldier. He still says his days in the Army were the happiest in his life.” Another warm, kind, friendly, outstandingly cultured and communicative woman put it differently with even more to think about. Speaking about her father, an important judge in Germany throughout the war, she said, “My father was not a Nazi. He was a normal anti-Semite”! At another time this same person frankly confided, “I don't know if I would have acted differently under the same circumstances.”
In the study of a situation far less malignant but in which the principle was the same, I pointed out that thirty-nine of the forty so-called “men under Nixon” “went along” with behavior they knew was wrong. I suggested that this ratio can be extrapolated under comparable conditions to the general population. The one person who desisted walked out because his wife threatened to divorce him if he did not. Archibald Cox, on a sabbatical at Oxford after serving as prosecutor during the Watergate trials, was asked whether he would have acted differently. “I wish I could say yes,” he mused as he puffed his pipe, “but I can't honestly say I would have.”
While analogies may be odious because of the gap in severity, a principle is pointed to. During World War II, many of us in the United States military forces wondered more than once whether Nazis were only on the other side. I would like to interject here a thought I have had, large in its implications, which cannot be solved, but which I feel has a right to be inserted. Watching many recent historical retrospectives, one must ask whether FDR and the isolationist American Congress would ever have entered the war against the Nazis were it not for Pearl Harbor. I have come to wonder whether Japan did not in effect make the move which resulted in the defeat of Hitler.
“Going along,” whether with a mugging or a murder, or, even if bureaucratically, with a mass massacre, can be one of the most malignant forms of social behavior, not limited to Germany or Germans. The most dangerous trait of the individual within a group, it can also be manipulated to include a massive turning against the self, as in the Jonestown phenomenon. In milder and less traumatic form, merging with the leader or group is a more ubiquitous phenomenon than we would like to think, and is to be found within psychoanalysis itself.
Every nation, as every individual, is divided. In addition to collaborators, to Schultz-Henke and the Göring Institute, the Germans also had their heroes among them, anti-Nazis at great peril, some of whom escaped and returned. There was Mitscherlich, who walked over the mountains at night to the Swiss border to escape, and de Boor, of a similar intense anti-Nazi background. Both have since headed the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. Other current German analysts owe their present positions to accident and fate. When I commented how well one colleague spoke English, he explained that he learned it in England. He was captured there, was a POW, then stayed on, later went to the Tavistock Clinic and is now a solid, leading and contributing child analyst.
German analysts I know are as pained by the history of the German holocaust as anyone in the world who are not survivors. German individuals, and much of the German nation today, are antifascist and antimilitarist; in fact, they consider the United States the militarists to be opposed. One analyst expressed deep concern about the strong anti-American feeling around him. His wife and daughter marched with the Greens, protesting above all the Pershing II missiles, fearful of aggression and the cold war.
There is also the opposite, an identification with the victors, Americans and British; McDonald's and pubs are interspersed among the beer halls. On a less healthy basis, this is not too different from the previous identification with the aggressor, with the part it played on
the road to disaster. Hans Richter, an important activist and public figure, as well as a respected didactic analyst, in connection with his political-scientific interests made what I consider an interesting theoretical statement in Weisbaden, that the distance between concept and action should be less. I have myself approached this subject from several directions, from the standpoint of unconscious decision making, and the psychoanalytic understanding and furtherance of action to balance the interdiction against acting out.
One analyst told me of taking his family, wife and children, to Auschwitz several times, where they observed, and all of them cried. Some who never knew a Jew feel a deep sense of loss and responsibility. An analyst-wife-schoolteacher took her class of children to Dachau to know and feel what happened. They are intent at exorcism and abreaction of the event and period. One young wife went to work in New York at a Jewish summer camp. She had an anxiety attack in London on the way over for fear of how she would be received. The experience was tense at first, then became a highlight of her life. She left her new friends with tears and love on both sides.
A young son in his twenties of an analyst in his fifties went to Israel to work on a kibbutz. He brought back with him an Israeli girl whom they all love and whom he will marry. He studied Hebrew abroad, after having first studied it in Germany. He pointed out the synagogue in Berlin where he had enrolled as a student. It was a bombedout structure in central Berlin with an old arch preserved over the new entrance. The building had been destroyed, not by the allies but by German storm troops. Spending some time in Berlin, one had to wonder why these young analysts, many from other places, chose to live there. I asked several. They are there not in spite of that city being in Germany, but “because this is the heart of Germany.”
Anti-Semitism is of intense scientific as well as personal interest. Mortimer Ostow was in Berlin while I was there speaking on the subject to the Free University. One analyst attends a seminar group regularly in New York on the holocaust and anti-Semitisim, bringing back what she hears from Ostow, Jucovy, Kestenberg and others for discussions with her German colleagues. Psychoanalytic articles as sensitive as any have been written on survivors and descendents of survivors (see Grubrich-Simitis, “Extreme Traumatization as Cumulative Trauma,” Psa. St. Child, 1981, on the effects of concentration camp experiences on survivors and their children).
It was in Germany that psychoanalysis was first accepted outside of Vienna, even more than by the city of its origin. Berlin was the first Training Institute. My hotel in Weisbaden was next door to the Rosa Hotel, where the first International Training Commission was set up at the Congress in Weisbaden in 1932. The small, struggling group starting over now, in the former apartment of Dr. Müller-Braunschweig, continues the difficult struggle again not without a hostile surrounding environment. But they stay on to study and train and work. They seem to have already had a considerable influence on their surrounding intellectual world, medical as well as wider humanistic. I was taken through the Deutsche Klinik fur Diagnostik (DKD) in Weisbaden, known as the German “Mayo Clinic”. The Director of Psychiatry there, Dr. Günter Maass, is an analyst who practices analysis in his office at the hospital, largely on psychosomatic problems. Psychoanalysis seems more openly accepted there than in our own Mayo's at Rochester or other major medical centers in this country.
There are sad and poignant feelings for the analysts they lost to America. At the dinner meeting during the Weisbaden Congress, they asked me to speak spontaneously about the German analysts who emigrated to the United States, names they know from the literature but mostly analysts they never saw. I widened the circle to include European analysts in general, from Vienna and elsewhere as well as Germany. I told them about Hartmann, Nunberg, Kris, and Loewenstein in New York, Waelder in Philadelphia, Bernfeld in San Francisco, and especially, they wanted to hear from me, about Fenichel and Simmel, who had been in Berlin and came to Los Angeles, and how they had directly influenced me. Almost every city and Institute in the United States had some émigrés, often couples, the Bibrings and Deutsches in Boston, the Katans in Cleveland, the Sterbas in Detroit, Buxbaum and Shmidl in Seattle, also
Beata Rank, Jenny Waelder-Hall, and Margaret Mahler. The discussion was listened to with strong and mixed emotions. Over the tragedy, I felt there was ironic pride in what they had supplied to us and which was our gain.
None of this means that there are not still the Klaus Barbies on the loose, nor unrequited Nazis, nor anti-Semitism in Germany and elsewhere. This is not by way of inviting us to forget. The judgment of the end of the line of guilt is to be separated from forgiveness, and the forgiving of those who did not participate from forgetting. The decade and its events are never to be forgotten, nor those who participated ever forgiven. In a preface to the searing photographic essay by Roman Vishniac on the agony and survival of the Jewish ghetto, Eli Wiesel writes that these records will not allow “oblivion to defeat memory.” The shtetl, the author states, will be “a vanished but not vanquished world.” The greatest ultimate need is for events such as these to be affectively understood, never to be forgotten, but to be seen differently and better, hopefully toward acquiring predictive and preventive ability.
I once gave a talk to the Israel Psychoanalytic Society on the subject of “Psychic Trauma.” In the discussion which followed, an analyst remarked with considerable affect that I had not included the holocaust. This indeed was true. I had written the paper for a symposium in New York and covered much other material but not that. Although Hillel Klein feels that some aspects of this subject are beyond the reach of psychoanalysis (as Freud felt in 1929 about certain of the deepest traumata before he could know about the holocaust) the unique contribution of psychoanalysis is still the unconscious aspects, even of the most painful experiences of life. These, reach to the most primitive anxieties in the face of degradation even before what will be survival or death.
There was concern on the parts of some against the discussion of this subject at Hamburg, which Martin Wangh had orginally suggested. The psychoanalytic aim, among both victims and oppressors, is the same, against repression and toward understanding. The subject of the Hamburg Congress will be “Identification and its Vicissitudes,” a felicitous handle conceived by the Program Committee which, involved in neuroses, perversions, and group psychopathology, can well serve as a path to the subject at hand. Included will be a plenary session which will examine the subject in relation to the Nazi phenomenon. The meeting offers a tense but necessary, timely and constructive possibility.