- From the Jewish Lesbian Daughters of
Holocaust Survivors to Children of the Holocaust Anonymous, children whose
parents died in the Holocaust are lining up to claim the status of Holocaust
victims.
There is a growing tendency to interpret victimisation as a kind of disease
that can be handed down from generation to generation.
What is it about today's society that makes people so keen to get a piece
of their parents' trauma?
In our therapeutic culture, the politics of memory is on the rise. On an
individual level, and now across societies, past experiences are continually
reinterpreted.
The cultural manipulation of memory has been particularly controversial
in relation to what one side characterises as recovered memory syndrome
and the other as false memory syndrome. Yet from a sociological standpoint,
the most interesting aspect of this debate is not who is right and who
is wrong, but the fact that memory itself has become so politicised, and
that the representation of the past is so contested.
In one sense there is nothing new in the manipulation of memory. The rewriting
of history has produced rich and effective national and cultural mythologies
throughout past centuries. Now, however, the stakes have been raised. The
erosion of individual and collective identities has fostered an unusual
interest in the past, and given rise to fundamental cultural assumptions
about the decisive influence of the past over the present.
As a consequence, history today is rewritten through the language of emotionalism
and therapy.
During the past two centuries, the key motif in the rewriting of history
was the unique greatness of a particular people or culture. National myths
were based on heroic deeds and glorious events. Such myths were not simply
used as sentimental celebrations of the past - they were mobilised to construct
a positive vision of the future. The myth of the American frontier promised
a great destiny for US society, while British, French and German national
myths were mobilised to provide an optimistic representation of future
possibilities.
Today, the rewriting of history is driven by a very different impulse.
The manipulation of collective memory makes no grand claims on the future.
On the contrary, the historic memory serves as a monument to a people's
historic suffering. In a perceptive contribution on this subject, Ian Buruma
has drawn attention to the tendency of many minorities 'to define themselves
as historic victims'.
The Holocaust has become the icon for therapeutic history. The extreme
and singular brutality of this event ensures that those who perished or
suffered in the concentration camps are regarded with a reverence unmatched
by any other groups of victims. Jewish identity - even Israeli identity
- has been fundamentally recast around the Holocaust. Zionism, which had
traditionally promoted an optimistic modernist vision of the pioneering
new Jew, has in recent decades sought to forge a sense of community around
an emotional connection with the Holocaust.
Yet, as I know from my own childhood, many of the direct survivors of the
death camps talked very little in public about their terrible experience.
Their dignified, self-contained response stands in sharp contrast to the
behaviour of their children and grandchildren today: the so-called second-
and third-generation survivors. In recent years, some of the promoters
of second-generation survivor groups have even criticised their parents
for bottling up their emotions and refusing to embrace a victim identity.
The appeal of the Holocaust, as the basis for creating a sense of self-identity,
has attracted the attention of competing groups of people claiming a particular
identity status. Gay activists have insisted that their suffering during
the Holocaust should be recognised through the construction of monuments
and memorials. Other activists, representing gypsies and disabled people,
have also demanded that recognition should be accorded to their plight
during this terrible experience.
Second-generation survivor groups have criticised their parents for bottling
up their emotions and refusing to embrace a victim identity
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- The language associated with Holocaust
discourse - particularly the image of the traumatised survivor - has been
appropriated by numerous activists determined to stake a claim to the status
associated with emotional suffering. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s
has been reinterpreted as an abusive experience that continues to traumatise
people to this day.
The emotional power of the Holocaust has been co-opted and transferred
to other experiences such as the African-American holocaust, the Serbian
holocaust, the Bosnian holocaust or the Rwandan holocaust. In Germany,
anti-abortion campaigners hold forth about a holocaust of fetuses; in Canada,
animal rights activists denounce the holocaust of seals.
The custom of demanding that past wrongs - in some cases perpetrated centuries
ago - be put right has acquired momentum during the past few years. Saying
sorry has allowed public personalities to both embrace the victim and also
to share vicariously in their pain.
Politicians have been quick to embrace the ritual of the apology. The Australian
government organised a National Sorry Day on 26 May 1998, when Australians
were exhorted to express their sorrow for the injustices inflicted on Aboriginal
people. A month later, the German government apologised for the 1904 massacre
of African people in Namibia. UK prime minister Tony Blair has apologised
to the Irish for Britain's role in contributing to the suffering that people
experienced during the potato famine. And the Vatican has apologised for
the havoc that the Crusades wreaked on the people of the Middle East.
The demand for a public memorial to commemorate past suffering is not confined
to representatives of national minorities and ethnic groups. AIDS activists
have sought to construct monuments to commemorate the tragedy of AIDS sufferers.
Victim advocates have been particularly vociferous in innovating rituals
and symbols of remembrance. The wearing of a ribbon became a potent symbol
of remembrance during the 1990s, and has been appropriated by numerous
interest groups seeking recognition for their cause.
RoadPeace, a British advocacy group devoted to the cause of traffic victims,
self-consciously promotes semi-religious symbols of remembrance to gain
support (1). Its 'Red Flag Campaign' was launched in August 1997 'to mark
the start of an appeal for a permanent national memorial to road victims'.
RoadPeace publications continually emphasise the theme of remembrance.
Road victims - those 'who have died on the roads since the advent of motor
traffic' - are presented as the 'unnamed' casualties of a century-long
war. The European Federation of Road Traffic Victims has designated the
third Sunday of November as the European Day of Remembrance for road crash
victims. Candlelit vigils, shrines and roadside memorials are the typical
artefacts of victim culture.
The politicisation of memory has stimulated individuals to re-examine their
own biographies. In some cases individuals have literally invented a personal
narrative of victimisation. Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of Fragments -
a harrowing account of a Jewish childhood destroyed by the Holocaust -
had his memoir exposed as a fake. Wilkomirski was actually Bruno Grosjean,
a Swiss man who had invented his Jewishness and his Holocaust experience.
There have been cases where individuals have falsely claimed to be AIDS
sufferers in order to claim the status of a victim. The American social
scientist Carol Tavris has raised some interesting questions about why
so many women find their way into sexual survivor groups. She believes
that the 'sexual-abuse-victim story crystallises many of society's anxieties'
and therefore 'draws like a magnet those who feel vulnerable and victimised,
and who wish to share in society's sympathy'.
Clearly, the appeal of the victim story goes beyond that of sexual abuse.
In contemporary society, a cry for recognition and the desire to belong
often find their focus in victim identity. And there is a growing tendency
to interpret victimisation as a kind of disease that can be handed down
from generation to generation. This paradigm is most coherently developed
in recent studies of Holocaust survivors.
It is claimed that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors
ought to be considered victims just as much as their ancestors, who had
to confront the horrors of Nazi death camps directly. As a result, attention
has shifted to the problems of the so-called second generation of Holocaust
survivors.
Some studies contend that children born to Holocaust survivors became the
victims of their parents' own destructive experience. 'These children,
now grown men and women, have sometimes been raised in a psychological
atmosphere poisoned by the scarring that their survivor parents have brought
to their child-rearing tasks', claims one authority. According to proponents
of this thesis, second-generation survivors often grew up in a family atmosphere
where they were stifled by over-protectiveness, shame and mistrust. As
one writer on the subject argues, 'Most members of the second generation
whose voices have been heard feel that they have been damaged in some way
through their parents' Holocaust experience'.
The literature on the second generation provides useful insights into understanding
the social construction of victim identity. According to the accepted paradigm,
the compulsive behaviour of concentration camp survivors has led to negative
and stifling parenting styles, which in turn had a damaging impact on their
children.
Constituencies demanding to be recognised include the Descendants of the
Jewish Community of Augsburg and the Jewish Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust
Survivors
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- One of the most common claims made about
camp survivors is that they sought to become parents in order to acquire
a new identity for themselves. Parents often named their children after
a lost favourite relative. It is claimed that children, who felt that they
had been 'given the mission to be a link in the broken chain of families
and to fill the emptiness in their parents' lives', often 'felt burdened
and weighed down by such impossible expectations'.
Yet severe dislocation, suffering and tragic loss, which lead to distinct
overprotective parenting styles, are by no means confined to any particular
experience. Adults who have experienced the trials of war, hunger and death
will invariably inflict their insecurities on their family. And whether
such parental anxieties are particularly damaging for children is far from
evident.
The case of the 'second generation', with its redefinition of family life
as a conduit for victimisation, says more about the therapeutic discourse
of the post-1960s era than about the parenting skills of their fathers
and mothers. The invention of the second generation is, ultimately, the
outcome of a culture which increasingly links individual identity to the
experience of childhood.
Victim identity, and the moral authority accorded to it, seems to allow
people to make sense of their experience. Many who describe themselves
as second-generation survivors are involved in medicine, counselling, psychotherapy,
social work and education, and are drawn towards expressing their identity
through the vocabulary of therapy.
The activists in second-generation survivor groups recognise the predominant
role played by therapeutic professionals in this movement. Take this activists'
advice to survivor groups:
'Start your own "Rap group" by just getting together on a weekly
basis, or there is a good probability that one of your members may be a
social worker, or a counsellor of some type. In my first group there was
a clinical psychologist and a social worker.'
Second-generation survivor activists appear to be preoccupied with forging
a distinct identity - one that distances them from the experience of their
parents. For example, the host of the website 'Resources for Children of
Holocaust Survivors' carefully draws attention to the fact that his page
is not for Holocaust victims who, it is claimed, already have a lot of
resources geared towards their needs (2). The website is for their children.
'It is not about the legacy; it is about living with the legacy', he notes.
These 'Children of Holocaust Survivors' want to claim a separate and distinct
survivor identity both from their parents, and from one another. It is
evident that many individuals are not satisfied with being defined merely
as a second-generation survivor. There are numerous constituencies demanding
to be recognised as possessing a distinct victim identity: including the
International Association of Lesbian and Gay Children of Holocaust Survivors,
Descendants of the Jewish Community of Augsburg, Second Generation Children
from Nuremberg, and the Jewish Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust Survivors.
The representation of the traumatic harm faced by second-generation survivors
is usually promoted through anecdotes, and through the retrospective association
of private troubles with family background. The few studies that have attempted
to test the theory of the intergenerational transmission of trauma have
failed to find any validation for this thesis. But whatever the facts of
the matter, activists are busy constructing a victim identity through rendering
their family existence pathological.
Aping the American addiction and co-dependency movement, some second-generation
activists have even launched 'Children of the Holocaust Anonymous'. This
initiative has self-consciously borrowed the Alcoholics Anonymous '12-step'
support programme to support its constituents. And there is more to come,
as publicists are promising to bring the third generation of survivors
into the frame.
Predictably, the second-generation survivor paradigm is already being imitated
by other claimants to victim status. According to a survey carried out
by a psychologist in 1997, 750,000 British women are still suffering from
the stress and trauma of the Second World War. The psychologist Melinda
Waugh calls these women the 'forgotten generation', and states that it
is 'possible that children of the women bore the psychological scars of
post-traumatic stress disorder'. All this speculation was based on extrapolation
from a survey involving 100 women.
Watch this space for the fourth and fifth generation of victims. ___
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- Frank Furedi is a sociologist at the
University of Kent in Canterbury and is the author of Paranoid Parenting,
Penguin 2001. Buy this book from Amazon (UK)
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- http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000000545B.htm
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