Description
Book SynopsisThe 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
Trade Review
"We know fragments of the Jewish horrors of the holocaust and the echoing reverberations. We need to hear, post-Holocaust, about the German Nazi dynamics and their echoes in the perpetrators and their children and grandchildren. In The Collective Silence we hear from therapists who dare to struggle with the family throes growing out of the silence of guilt. Read and weep -- again!"
- Carl A. Whitaker, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin
Table of ContentsWheeler, Translator's Introduction. Heimannsberg, Schmidt, Psychological Symptoms of the Nazi Heritage: Introduction to the German Edition. Picker, Psychotherapy and the Nazi Past: A Search for Concrete Forms. Anhalt, Farewell to My Father. Salm, I Too Took Part: Confrontations with One's Own History in Family Therapy. Speier, The Psychoanalyst Without a Face: Psychoanalysis Without a History. Hecker, Family Reconstruction in Germany: An Attempt to Confront the Past. Massing, Effects of Lingering Nazi Worldviews in Family Life. Bornebusch, "How Can I Develop on a Mountain of Corpses?" Observations from a Theme-Centered Interaction Seminar with Isaac Zieman. Behrendt, Unwilling to Admit, Unable to See: Therapeutic Experiences with the National Socialist "Complex." Stierlin, The Dialogue Between the Generations About the Nazi Era. Heimannsberg, The Work of Remembering: A Psychodynamic View of the Nazi Past as It Exists in Germany Today. Wielpuetz, The Difficulty of Speaking the Unspeakable: How an Article Entitled "The Nazi Past in Psychotherapy." Bar-On, Holocaust Perpetrators and their Children: A Paradoxical Morality. von Schlippe, "Guilty!" Thoughts in Relation to My Own Past: Letters to My Son. Harris, Translator's Afterword.
