The Collective Silence: German Identity and the Legacy of Shame (review)

154 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No.1 Palestinians, beginning with the Palestinian exodus of 1948, through the Kfar Kassem massacre of 1956 and the rise of Meir Kahane as a member of the Knesset. Segev concludes his book with several interesting chapters on the question of the Holocaust and memory. This took several forms: first the naming of kibbutzim and some other settlements after places of heroism in Europe; secondly, the politics of building memorials, such as JNF forests, Yad VaShem, Yad Mordcchai, and Lochamei Hagetaot. Religious memory of the Holocaust is also discussed as a means of replacing secular memory. Segev mentions the attractiveness of the suicide story of the ninety-three members of the lkit Yaakov girls' school in Krakow. The power of the story is strong, but as Zev Garber has recently shown, investigation of evidence indicates the story may be fraudulent. Segevalso becomes involved in a discussion of Israeli school trips to Poland's death camps, what a colleague of mine calls "death and resurrection" experiences : Poland is death while Israel is life. This may be partially true, but it remains a dramatic oversimplillcation, since Jews prospered in Poland for hundreds of years. Segev's sarcasm on some of these questions of memory is well directed, although many Jewish readers may be offended. His reason for this approach, however, is to suggest that a more humanistic course for understanding the Holocaust exists, and the bottom line is that the lessons of the Holocaust must translate to the Israeli army in its relations with Palestinians under occupation, when Israeli soldiers may and do face the problem of carrying out illegal orders and brutalizing the enemy. Segev admits that Israel's life as a nation has been difllcult. However, terrorism and bloodshed, according to Segev, provide the ultimate test of how Israel will comprehend the lessons of the Holocaust. Stephen C. Feinstein University of Wisconsin at River Falls The Collective Silence: German Identity and the Legacy of Shame, edited by Barbara Heimannsberg and Christoph J. Schmidt and translated by Cynthia Oudejans Harris and Gordon Wheeler. San Francisco: JosseyBass Publishers, 1993. 254 pp. $27.95. Nearly half a century after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of its genocidal pursuits, some sensitive individuals among the post-war Book Reviews 155 generation have been moved to pierce the amnesic silence of their parents. In The Collective Silence: German Identity and the Legacy of Shame, the editors have collected essays by German psychotherapists in which they describe their often tortured personal and clinical experiences with the after-effects of the Nazi mentality on the transmission of values and coping strategies from parent to child. The burden of guilt and shame weighs heavily on the intergenerational relationship and the self-respect among the offspring of both perpetrators and passive followers or bystanders. Since the Hitler era earned the German Nation the onus of collective responsibility, the subsequent attempt to manage the awareness of a moral failure had been a defensive collective silence. Psychopathology tends to find fertile ground whenever the generations deal furtively with each other. Healing being the modus operandi of psychotherapists, their interest in the inspection and repair of hidden psychic wounds kindled the hope that honest intrafamilial confrontation, contrition, and conciliation would free energies from repressive struggles. Guilt, shame, and hopelessness needed to be relieved to allow the emergence of more creative living. Most of the therapists represented in this collection follow Gestalt and Family Therapy theories with emphasis on interactive rather than exclusively psychoanalytic principles. The fact of their professional choice speaks to the importance in their own lives of leading a self-critical, humanistic life-style. They perceive both personal and societal well-being as bound up in an empathic understanding of self and others. In short, they are a select group who, by their own admission, are unrepresentative of their fellow citizens. In these essays they portray the release occasioned by forthright exploration of residual inner conflict and the frustration with the conspiracy of silence which lies like a pall over so many of the Nazi generation. Most of the Collective Silence writers are concerned with historical discontinuity for a people who cannot...