- Introduction to the book reviews section
- First and foremost, I wish to present here reviews of titles which have just been published and which are more or less directly related to the focus of each issue. My second priority will be reviews of books and essays dealing with interdisciplinary research into the broader field of traumatization, violence, and genocide in general.
To promote the interdisciplinary nature of our enterprise, I would also like to initiate - as a project for the future appearing under the heading "re-lecture" - a series of reviews dedicated to a work which is already of "classical" value to the scientific community of trauma researchers. These reviews should be written by someone whose affiliations are from the same disciplinary background and commented by a second person whose profession differs. Any proposals for books and reviewers are welcome!
My first proposal is
Kleber, Rolf J. et al (Eds.)
Beyond Trauma. Cultural and Societal Dynamics.
New York, Plenum Press, 1995
Those interested in writing some lines about this important anthology (comment and co-comment) are kindly requested to contact the editor via email Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de
- Contents of Trauma Research Newsletter 1
- Since the first issue focuses on testimonies and witnessing, two reviews dealing with these topics follow.
Tanja Hetzer, a young historian of literature who has worked since 1997 for the independent expert commission on Switzerland during World War II [Unabhaengigen Expertenkommission: Schweiz-Zweiter Weltkrieg], has written a dense study about children’s perspectives on the Shoah, as they are represented in the works of three different authors, who have in common that they themselves were victims of repression and persecution during the Nazi period. The myth of the child as an "uninvolved observer" - whether on the side of the perpetrators or the victims — is thoroughly destroyed in all of these literary memoirs of childhood. Ursula Hien summarizes how Hetzer asserts and substantiates her argument. Hetzer´s study has not yet been published in English, but Hubert Fichte’s childhood memoir The Orphanage and Danilo Kis´ novel Garden, Ashes are available in English.
Tanja Hetzer
Kinderblick auf die Shoah. Formen der Erinnerung bei Ilse Aichinger, Hubert Fichte und Danilo Kis [Children’s perspectives on the Shoah. Forms of memory in the works of Ilse Aichinger, Hubert Fichte, and Danilo Kis].
Wuerzburg, Koenigshausen & Neumann, 1999 [=Epistemata, Reihe Literaturwissenschaft; 271]. 157 pp.
see review
Childhood memories also play a significant role in Dina Wardi’s book "Memorial Candles". As the children of Holocaust survivors reach adulthood, they often need professional help in establishing a new identity and self-esteem. During their childhood, their parents have unconsciously transmitted to them so much of their own traumatic experience and invested them with so many memories and hopes that they have become the living "memorial candles" of the title. Frederik van Gelder dedicates his review to the work of the Israeli group therapist Dina Wardi, who combines in her moving book verbatim transcriptions of dialogues from individual and group psychotherapy sessions with analyses of dreams, fantasies and memories. Wardi also examines identity disturbances typically found in second-generation Holocaust survivors including, above all, identification with death. I am especially grateful that Frederik van Gelder, himself a child survivor born at the end of World War II in the Netherlands of Jewish parents and now living and working in Germany, agreed to write a review. He mentions briefly the problems arising from "the fact that this book on Holocaust survivors is being discussed in Germany, with all which that implies in terms of the (unequal) confrontation between children of victims and children of perpetrators going on in this country". His review then concentrates on Wardi’s outcomes, which are important not only for Holocaust survivors and their families or for psychotherapists, but for all those who are interested in the intergenerational transmission of - a traumatic - history.
Dina Wardi
Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. London, Taylor & Francis Books Ltd, 1992. 288 pp. (In German under the title Siegel der Erinnerung. Das Trauma des Holocaust - Psychotherapie mit den Kindern der Üeberlebenden. Translated from the Hebrew by Almuth Lessing, Antje Clara Naujoks, Christoph Trunk. Preface to the German edition by Tilmann Moser; foreword by Prof. Haim Dasberg, former director of the psychiatric hospital "Esrat Nashim" in Jerusalem.
Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1997 (Page references are to the English edition.)
- see review
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Citation Cornelia Berens, Hamburg, Introduction to the book reviews section. In: Trauma Research Newsletter 1, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, July 2000.
URL: http://www.TraumaResearch.net/review1/intro1.htm
Copyright © 2000, Cornelia Berens 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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