Abstract
When Bruno Bettelheim emerged from almost one and a half years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, he found refuge at the University of Chicago. There he wrote about his experiences in the Nazi camp, but his article was rejected by psychoanalytic journals, always for one of two reasons. First, the journal editors did not believe him; they did not believe that Germans could do such things. Second, they claimed that since Bettelheim had been in the camp, his report was subjective, and hence not “scientific.” Only Gordon Allport’s Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology accepted the paper, which was finally published in October 1943. Sixteen years later, Bettelheim was able to collect himself and publish this as one of his major works, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Bettelheim 1960).
Now, some seventy-five years after the Nazi attempt to systematically wipe out all Jews, books on the Shoah proliferate, among them this most recent profound contribution, whose contributors include such luminaries as Ira Brenner, Salman Akhtar, Zvi Lothane, Anna Ornstein, Dori Laub, Vamik Volkan, Peter Loewenberg, Werner Bohleber, Yolanda Gampel, and Ilany Kogan. Such a list should be enough to elicit our attention. Perhaps the book will be read; but if it is, what difference will that make? There is a rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe and the U.S. (let alone its festering in Middle East countries). Nevertheless, the chapters in this volume are compelling. They include painfully personal details of the writers’ experience with the Shoah: Ornstein’s recounting of her murdered mother’s eyes, the death of all her husband’s siblings and father; Loewenberg’s narrow escape from Germany with a holdover in Shanghai; Ira Brenner’s memory of his father’s number tattoo from Auschwitz. Here we have psychoanalysts, who have pursued examined lives, speak from an informed heart. Let us listen.
Laub, who recently died, himself edited a book on the Holocaust, one that focuses on testimony; it received a glowing review by Kogan (2018) in this journal. Laub was one of the first analysts to realize that many Holocaust survivors who were hospitalized as psychotic were in fact suffering the “psychosis” of their Shoah experiences and responded more favorably once this was recognized.
I will bring the reader through the substance of this book. But first I feel obligated to reveal my connection with the Shoah (which is perhaps why I was asked to review the book).
I am an anomaly; I shouldn’t even exist, at least by Las Vegas long odds. My father was in the Lodz ghetto until his family moved to the Warsaw ghetto. At its peak, that 1.3 square mile ghetto held 460,000 Jews. About 392,000 died there, from murder or starvation. In the summer of 1942, 253,000 were sent to Treblinka, an extermination camp. In 1943, the Jews in Warsaw rose up and were crushed. Before their defeat, though, my father, with his blond hair and blue eyes, removed his Jewish star and roamed Warsaw scrounging for bullets and guns. Most often, the bullets didn’t match the rusty guns. After the Warsaw uprising was put down, he was moved first to Treblinka, then to Majdanek concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz. Subjected to Mengele’s selection, he was initially chosen for the death line but escaped to join the work group. His brother was with him, the only one of his five siblings he thought was still alive. An SS officer kicked my father’s brother in the abdomen; writhing in pain, he died overnight in my father’s arms. My father begged to bury him, but was refused. Of the one million Jews who entered Auschwitz, only 65,000 lived—6.5 percent. On May 8, 1945, an American officer riding a motorcycle led a tank battalion to liberate the camp, as did the Russian army. My father had collapsed on a death march and awoke in a Catholic hospital, where the nurses wore the “flying nun” cornette. When he opened his eyes and saw the nun in her white cornette, he thought he had entered heaven.
This gives the reader some basis to read this review.
The book has six sections: History; On Surviving; Transmission of Trauma; From the Dark Side (by German psychoanalysts); Creativity; and Never Again?
The section on History, anchored by Zvi Lothane, is not only scholarly, but begins with Zvi, a six-year-old refugee in 1939. He reminds us that German anti-Jewishness was rooted in Martin Luther’s 1543 advice on how to treat Jews: “their synagogues should be set on fire . . . their homes be broken down. . . . [These] ‘poisonous bitter worms’ should be stripped of their belongings ‘which they have exited usuriously from us’ and driven out of their country ‘for all time.’” Well, quite a firm foundation for the January 20, 1942, Wannsee conference for the Final Solution, held in a confiscated Jewish villa. Lothane distinguishes genocide, a term introduced by Lemkin about 1943 to describe erasure of Jews as a race, from the many politically motived mass murders, such as Stalin’s or Mao’s.
Loewenberg, an historian and psychoanalyst, brings together Weber’s concepts of bureaucracy and charisma to help us wrap our minds around how Germany came to embrace Hitler. Loewenberg integrates Freud’s views about the role of anxiety in politics, and the controversial distinction between the concepts persecuted and victim. Decades later, Kohut spoke of narcissistic rage. All these ideas attempt to explain the Nazi mind. More sensitively, speaking of the Jewish victims, Loewenberg cites observations by Blos (1990) and Bettelheim (1960) to the effect that “Jews’ very compliance and law-abiding innocence’s a denial of the extreme situation in which the conventional rules of morality did not hold” (sic, p. 23).
“On Surviving” is anchored by Anna Ornstein’s moving rethinking of mourning, in which she details her experience, and that of her husband Paul, in the concentration camp and enumerates the many in their family who were murdered. I heard a preliminary version of Ornstein’s reconsideration of Freud’s landmark work Mourning and Melancholia in Israel. Before her presentation, but after she and her husband had co-taught my class at the Hebrew University, Paul spent the afternoon in my home, remembering his father and also his analyst, Kohut. Tears glistened as he spoke.
“Transmission of Trauma” includes Ilany Kogan’s piece on intergenerational transmission. She gives a detailed analysis of the daughter of Shoah survivors complicated by her own unique countertransference as the daughter of survivors. Kogan “found it easier to empathize with [her] patients’ traumatization than elaborate upon her [own] aggression,” a painfully honest recounting (p. 101).
Yolanda Gampel summarizes her lifetime of work on transgenerational fallout, work mentored by Judith Kestenberg. But she begins with a quote from David Grossman (whose son was killed on the last day of the second Lebanese War). After Grossman’s young son asked him, “What did the Nazis do?” Grossman felt that if he told his son what happened, his child’s purity would be contaminated. Does one speak? How does one speak? When? Gampel tells us of the unspeakable and how to handle this in treatment.
“From the Dark Side” is the German voice, introduced by Werner Bohleber’s courageous words and the painful recounting of the decades needed for Germans to even speak of their accountability, even now often dismissed. (Witness the Polish Government’s making illegal any writing about its contribution to the murder of Jews.) Bohleber has an understated style that brings into relief how he speaks courageously, from the heart, but from a heart informed by reason. Despite this, anti-Semitic sentiment continues to rage today in Paris, and indeed even the United States.
The Creativity section begins with Adorno’s infamous statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (1955, p. 34). Sabbidini reviews films, Brenner the stage, and others literature. Ironically, perhaps the most persuasive poet, whose words rail against Adorno’s, is missing here. Paul Celan (2002), whose parents were murdered, wrote enviously to an Israeli poet that Israelis can write in Hebrew, while Celan wrote in the German language of his parents’ murderers; ultimately he drowned himself in the Seine. Though he renamed himself, transforming his name from Ancel to Celan, apparently he could not overcome the darkness of his parents’ murders.
The book’s contributors write with hearts informed by reason, often from personal experience in the Shoah or as direct descendants. We should thank them for their candor, thoughtfulness, and their wish to help us understand the unspeakable. Brenner in his first paragraph recounts his earliest memories of the numbers on his father’s powerful forearm, numbers burnt in at the camp, numbers to replace a name, an identity. Those who read this book will find its words emblazoned on the horizon of their thoughts and hearts.