Wir Kriegskinder

Roughly six decades after the end of World War II an interest in the destiny of the generations of non-Jewish Germans born during the war has arisen during the last few years. The reason for the long-lasting ignorance toward the early destiny of these war-children, at least in psychoanalytic literature, is supposed to lie in feelings of guilt as a consequence of Holocaust, and in the danger to compare incomparable destinies with each other. Conscious of that danger, the author describes these war-generations in regard to some aspects of their self experience and behaviour. He holds the opinion that the inability of the adults to mourn (Mitscherlich), based on guilt, transgenerationally led with the war-children to an inner ban of feeling themselves. This caused a perversion of the thinking in the war-baby generations by gruesome experiences being declared the normality. Survivor’s guilt and guilt felt over trauma-induced self-hatred were additional psychodynamic factors, all together leading to what he calls “war-children identity”. It is characterized by a lack of self understanding and a distance to the own feelings, a certain toughness in coping with one’s life, and social adaptation. It is based on a strangeness to oneself which results in feeling strange also to others and remaining indeed a stranger to them. The decisive step in psychoanalytic therapy implies that war-children start to accept themselves as traumatized, to give up their denial and to acquire a positive war-children identity. This essentially means to develop the ability to be concerned of oneself, to feel empathy for oneself and to gain self-esteem. The way is leading through mourning over missed life chances and is accompanied continuously by the danger to break off therapy as if everything were not that bad at all.