ABSTRACT

The silence surrounding the Holocaust continues to prevent healing - whether of the victims, Nazis, or the generations that followed them.  The telling of the stories surrounding the Holocaust - all the stories - is essential if we are to understand what happened, recognize the part of human nature that allows such atrocities to occur, and realize the hope that we can prevent it from happening again.

Seeking to shed light on the collective silence surrounding the Holocaust in Germany, the contributors offer compelling accounts, histories, and experiences that illuminate the ways in which contemporary Germans continue to grapple with the consequences of the Holocaust. Denial in the older generations, as well as anger and confusion in the younger ones, comes vividly to the surface in these evocative stories of coping and healing. Told from the vantage points both of therapists and of patients, these stories encompass the psychological plight of all those facing the legacy of genocide - from the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official to the children of Jewish immigrants, from those raised in the Hitler Youth Movement to those born well after the war.

chapter |7 pages

Psychological Symptoms of the Nazi Heritage

Introduction to the German Edition

chapter |19 pages

Psychotherapy and the Nazi Past

A Search for Concrete Forms

chapter |12 pages

I Too Took Part

Confrontations with One's Own History in Family Therapy

chapter |12 pages

The Psychoanalyst without a Face

Psychoanalysis without a History

chapter |21 pages

Family Reconstruction in Germany

An Attempt to Confront the Past

chapter |9 pages

How can I Develop on a Mountain of Corpses?

Observations from a Theme-Centered Interaction Seminar with Isaac Zieman 1

chapter |24 pages

Unwilling to Admit, Unable to See

Therapeutic Experiences with the National Socialist “Complex”

chapter |8 pages

The Work of Remembering

A Psychodynamic View of the Nazi Past as it Exists in Germany Today

chapter |23 pages

The Difficulty of Speaking the Unspeakable

How an Article Entitled “The Nazi Past in Psychotherapy” Was Never Written

chapter |14 pages

Holocaust Perpetrators and their Children

A Paradoxical Morality