ABSTRACT
At the time I accepted Dr. Ira Brenner’s invitation to contribute to this book, I chose a 2009 essay written in German addressing the members of the German Psychoanalytic Society on the occasion of a meeting dedicated to “External and Internal Reality”. Both at the time when I wrote the essay and at the time I accepted to publish it in English, my intention was to warn against overestimating the function of remembering. Therefore, I gave the original title as “Don’t Turn Around Mrs. Lot” (Oliner, 2011). The essay assumed that at this late date, 2009, the audience and I were facing similar but not identical problems. The catastrophe of World War II and the German attempt at genocide was the event which memory had to assimilate. The differences were of course that I had experienced it personally, and for the audience it was the history of their families as possible perpetrators. While I expressed my misgivings about calling it nevertheless a shared catastrophe, I assumed that the audience was also negatively affected by this heritage. My focus was on factors affecting the assimilation of the historic catastrophe, the Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilisation). Consequently, I assumed that we shared the concern for remembering this history. Our motives for wanting to forget this history may have differed, but they were powerful, while at the same time recognising the need to remember. In the case of the victim as well as the perpetrator, the need to forget was based on the danger inherent in remembering a catastrophe of such dimensions that it could threaten the vitality of the individual who is implicated in this history. Hence, I appealed to the analogy to Lot’s wife who was warned against turning into a pillar of salt. Mental hygiene requires it.
