- Trauma has no gender. The international conference "Gedaechtnis und Geschlecht (Remembrance and Gender)" at the Mahn- und Gedenkstaette Ravensbrueck
October 28 – 31, 1999
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Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstaetten
Mahn- und Gedenkstaette Ravensbrueck
Strasse der Nationen
D-16798 Fuerstenberg/Havel
Phone 0330 93-3 92 41 and -3 83 70
Fax. 0330 93-3 83 97
Email mgr@brandenburg.de
URL http://www.ravensbrueck.de
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Gesine Grossmann, Hannover Trauma has no gender. The international conference "Gedaechtnis und Geschlecht (Remembrance and Gender)" at the Mahn- und Gedenkstaette Ravensbrueck (October 28 – 31, 1999)
- The human mind tends to configure the past in a way which lends meaning to it. But the pursuit of narrative consistency and coherence not only determines memory but also prefigures the way current events are perceived, as psychologists attempted to prove experimentally in the twenties. These psychologists considered the preexisting forms (Gestalten) of perception and memory to be universal and innate qualities of the mind. Nowadays, social scientists expect these patterns to be highly dependent on changing society and culture. Our figures of narration are formed in an on-going process of social construction and thus serve today’s purposes rather than reflecting historical realities.
Where and how can these processes of structuring and making sense of the past be detected? And what specific role do gender images play, when it comes to the creation of history? These questions were the focus of an international conference initiated by Insa Eschebach (Humboldt University, Berlin), a scholar of religious studies, historian Sigrid Jacobeit (Mahn- und Gedenkstaette Ravensbrueck) and women’s art historian Silke Wenk (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg) in cooperation with the Mahn- und Gedenkstaette Ravensbrueck / Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstaetten.
Remembering the Holocaust
Remembering the Holocaust – certainly a most extreme and complicated area of collective memory – was chosen as the common background. The range of objects under investigation was wide. Representations taken from the realm of theater, film, photography, literary fiction and memorial art served to reveal narrative patterns and gender cliches in commemorative works. Comparisons of commemoration in different countries, especially in the former East and West Germany, added another perspective to the program. The location of the conference – the former Ravensbrueck concentration camp, liberated by the Red Army in 1945 and then used as a Soviet barracks till 1995 – appeared only too fitting as a site where one could reflect on suspected incongruences between historical reality and its reconstruction by later generations. In keeping with the conference focus outlined above, reception analysis was the method of choice; content analysis or iconography were of less interest in this context.
Historian Ulrike Weckel (Germany) applied this perspective most rigorously by examining book reviews and newspaper articles to elucidate the impact of Margarete Buber-Neumann´s autobiography (Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler) on postwar German society, revealing how the book was persistently used to the ends of Cold War ideology. The author’s experience of imprisonment under the Nazis and the Soviets served to support the assertion that the two political systems were equivalents, with both vaguely referred to as "hell", as an aid in avoiding a confrontation with the German past. Moreover, Weckel argued, the author’s gender was stressed and presented in a stereotyped way as proof of the constancy of qualities associated with females, such as moral and humane behavior, in spite of changing political systems. Using gender images served to gloss over the past and avoid a controversial discussion of Nazi crimes, Weckel concluded.
Identification with the victim
A number of contributors to the conference, especially those dealing with memorial art, presented examples of allegoric representations of femininity and their utilization to deny certain aspects of the past and to bring collective memory "into order”. Instead of pointing out shameful and intolerable developments in history, traditional and familiar images function to repress and cover up the past. Even memorials that were designed to question and criticize commemoration practices, like the Harburg memorial in Germany, came under close scrutiny. This so-called "counter-memorial" by German postwar artist Jochen Gerz was meant to confront viewers with their own repression habits and to call for individual action. But, as sociologist Corinna Tomberger (Germany) asserted, this attempt to come to terms with the past is built on the artist’s glorification of his own masculinity and his portrayal of identification with the victims of violence.
Several contributions from the perspective of the study of religion offered further insights into the phenomenon of identification with the victim and the repression of guilt. Here, certain elements of postwar commemoration in both German states and in Poland were seen as a "sacralization" of the profane. In keeping with Christian tradition, for example, legends about saints are created that offer a kind of personified orientation and meaning in the midst of the incomprehensible. Constructions of this kind, then, are held up to obscure the fact that Christianity ultimately failed as a moral power in the face of Auschwitz. Cultural anthropologist Stefanie Peter (Germany) illustrated production and maintenance of such a cult figure with a case study about the Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe. Following universal characteristics of a story of martyrdom, Kolbe´s voluntary death in a concentration camp was interpreted as an absolution from sin by his admirers, promising future redemption to those who remain faithful to their beliefs. Kolbe´s anti-Semitic comments, that would add considerable complexity to his story, are excluded from the legend, as Peter pointed out. Critique of Kolbe only serves to strengthen his followers in their faith. As a historical figure, Maximilian Kolbe has become a virulent locus of negotiation of today’s ideological disputes, which prevent a historically differentiated interpretation of his biography.
Ritually performed acts of commemoration are intriguing phenomena warranting further investigation. Here, collective memory is realized through singing, praying and processions. Insa Eschebach (Germany), a scholar of the study of religion, used the Andersonian term "imagined community" to characterize social aspects of highly symbolic and ritualized celebrations that construct memory for common purposes and ensure its continuity.
At this point in the discussion, critical scrutiny and discussion of the forms of commemoration of the victims of National Socialism would have been useful and enlightening. The descendants of Holocaust victims are sometimes prone to rely on collectively shared assumptions about a "true" narrative of the past. This became apparent in a drastic way in the debate about Binjamin Wilkomirski´s autobiography. These Memories of a Childhood in a concentration camp were applauded by reviewers and praised for their supposedly authentic and breathtaking descriptions, only to be later revealed as a possible fraud. Perhaps the longing for a reliable narrative harbors the danger of being dazzled by familiar stereotypes – seducing us to judge on the basis of aesthetics and neglect the criteria of critical analysis.
Investigating commemoration culture
The conference offered only few contributions from non-German scholars investigating commemoration culture from the victim’s point of view, for example Judith Tylor Baumel`s (Israel) research on female imagery used for Shoah memorials in Israel. Discussion, however, centered for the most part on commemoration in Germany.
In order to write about the past as history, one must produce narrative meaning. Well-established, traditional cultural patterns are frequently employed in this process, and every society is called upon to constantly subject these patterns to critical discussion and to refine them. Looking back at the conference, it becomes apparent that none of the participants were truly surprised to find traditional gender images at work in this process. At the conference, dissent did not arise around issues central to feminist debates, but from the juxtapositioning of trauma research and the analysis of commemoration practices from a more distanced standpoint.
The Holocaust trauma was the focus of three contributions from non-German researchers, each of which dealt with completely different issues.
Historian Atina Grossmann (USA) sketched a multi-facetted picture of the situation in Germany immediately after the war’s end. Taking a closer look at the years between 1945 and 1950, she contrasted existing idealized interpretations of the period with a reconstruction based on a variety of primary sources. Large numbers of Jewish survivors poured into Germany and were forced to wait in Displaced Persons Camps for a new beginning. Trauma seemed to have effects that today might be viewed as paradoxical. While survivors sought to suppress horrible memories in order to be free for the future – in many cases emigration to Palestine and the demands of Zionism –, a Day of Remembrance was proposed and the Central Historical Commission was established to collect as many eyewitness accounts as possible as well as poems or songs composed in the camps and the like. The parallel existence of remembering and forgetting reached its symbolic peak, Grossmann explained, with the remarkable "baby boom” among Jewish survivors shortly after the war. These babies – born against all rational expectations – were the most visible evidence of survival, and at the same time pointed to the painful past, when their parents gave them names of murdered relatives. To give birth to children, a most concrete but also highly symbolic human act, can here be interpreted as a form of commemorating and simultaneously overcoming the past.
The parallel existence of memories of traumatic events and the orientation towards a normal future seems to be passed on to daughters and sons of Holocaust survivors. Psychoanalyst Ilany Kogan (Israel), reporting from her clinical experience, illustrated a state of being that she defined as "living in a double reality": The children’s present life is controlled by intensive fantasies produced by them about their parents’ past. Children do this because, in relation to their parents, they experience a "psychic hole" – a lack of knowledge – which is then filled with fantasies. Kogan reported on the case of one of her clients, a young woman, who was diagnosed as suffering from a compulsion to concretize these fantasies on her own body in order to confront and finally overcome them. This woman was able to overcome her compulsion and be free for an individual future no longer controlled by the past only after she repeated and worked through her parents’ trauma.
The role of gender images seemed more difficult to discuss in this context. Removing or destroying female attributes was once way in which women in the camps were degraded. On the other hand, biological sex was a motive for immediate murder – women were murdered because they were pregnant or because they were holding little children (which did not have to be their own). In the face of such experiences, postmodern discourse about biological sex as a product solely of cultural construction quickly appears as a dubious academic enterprise. "Race came before gender" was one conclusion of discussions at the conference, but not an unanimously accepted one.
Contributions dealing with the effects of trauma from a psychoanalytical perspective created a sharp contrast to the previous papers. Whereas studies of commemoration practices uncovered various distortions and functionalizations and revealed dichotomous gender constructions, in the private sphere of the victims, memory itself seemed to force its way to the surface. According to psychoanalytic interpretations presented at the conference, repetition of the past seems to take place without being influenced by changing personal or political contexts.
Ravensbrueck testimonies
Historian Irith Knebel (Israel) emphasized, in contrast, the reciprocity between individual memory and the cultural influences which may play a role in the construction of memory. In her methodologically elegant analysis of Ravensbrueck testimonies given over a period of five decades, she showed changing attitudes to the past on the part of the women testifying as well as on the part of the interviewers. During early testimonies, interviewers asked for a detailed and neutral reconstruction of life in the camp. Later, in the eighties, attention shifted towards a complete biographic narrative including emotional expression and personal assessment. Nowadays interviewers often appear to model their expectations and thus their reactions after narrative patterns taken from Holocaust films and fiction.
Instances of unintentional matching between motifs of the interviewer and those of the testifying person were revealed. This happens, for example, when the woman testifying prefers the presentation of "bare" facts in order to avoid a painful emotional confrontation in the interview. Knebel argued that changes in narratives can be interpreted only in part as reactions to the interviewers’ changing way of conducting interviews. The shift in interview styles towards less structured forms and settings has opened up spaces which facilitate the expression of inner processes of transformation. Knebel also compared different testimonies given by the same woman over a period of time. As the time span between imprisonment and testimony increased, this Holocaust survivor reported on more and more comforting human anecdotes and acts of humanity amidst the terror. It seems as if she was able to increasingly draw valuable personal meaning from her experiences.
During trauma therapy, the construction of meaning is considered to be one of the most important steps towards recovery. Integrating the extreme event into one’s own biography enables the survivor to re-establish the continuity and coherence of past and present experience. This is necessarily an individual accomplishment that can be supported by the therapist in that she or he can accompany the survivor and offer metaphors for symbolization. The construction of meaning apart from historical facts is a product of the client’s personal belief system and thus does not claim to be historically accurate. But to retell the past as a historical narrative which is as valid and undistorted as possible remains a task all of us must face.
Translation from German: Gesine Grossmann, Paula Bradish
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Short biographical note Gesine Grossmann studied psychology, philosophy and sociology at Berlin Free University. She has done experimental research in the field of external memory and worked on the history and historiography of psychology. Recently, she started to work on psychological perspectives on trauma and is planning a dissertation project about collective aspects of trauma and memory. She is now working at the Institute of Psychology and Sociology at Hanover University.
Gesine Grossmann
Email grossmann@erz.uni-hannover.de
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Citation Gesine Grossmann, Trauma has no gender. The international conference "Gedaechtnis und Geschlecht (Remembrance and Gender)" at the Mahn- und Gedenkstaette Ravensbrueck (Oct. 28 – 31, 1999). In: Trauma Research Newsletter 1, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, July 2000.
URL http://www.TraumaResearch.net/net1/confrep1/gros.htm
Copyright © 2000, Gesine Grossmann and trauma newsletter, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the trauma newsletter. For other permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
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