ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a coherent account of "trauma" and its transmission across generations. It explains shifting and evolving cultural representations of the survivor in the USA and make a connection to the survivor's post-Holocaust experience. The overwhelming political agenda in the immediate post-war period in the USA was to respond to the threat of Communism and a strong Germany was perceived as a crucial ally. Thus, after the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, whatever interest there was in the survivor—some of whom was distrusted as possible Red sympathisers—was far subordinate to rebuilding Germany. Consideration of the generational effects of historical trauma from the perspective of identity creates a triangle with culture at the base. The concept of trauma has evolved from just punishment, trauma as something that makes sense of the world, in a world governed by theodicy, to a reflection of moral cowardice and feminine weakness, to, its medicalised place in the psychiatric literature.
