Who am I? The Politics of Lying,Not Knowing and Truth-Telling in the West German History of Child Adoption

The centuries-old history of adoption is interwoven with secrets that often served to protect women and children from social exclusion and economic deprivation. ¹ It was not until the mid-twentieth century, however, that infant adoption became the norm—that is, the adoption of children whose memories did not extend back to a time before their adoption. ² At that time, adoptions were usually still a secret. Slowly, however, debates intensified about whether, how, and why children should be told about their adoption and their biological parents. Changing ideas about the importance of knowing one's origins for the healthy upbringing of the child played a major role in these developments, as well as the extent to which not telling or even lying would put a strain on the parent-child relationship. ³

While such disputes shaped the adoption debate in many Western countries, the discussion in the Eastern Bloc countries, especially the Soviet Union, was completely different. ⁴ The history of adoption in divided Germany is thus particularly revealing—not only in this light, but also because ancestry played a paramount role in Nazi Germany and had a significant influence on adoption practices. ⁵ This essay looks specifically at West German history and the particular tension between the knowledge of ancestry as part of a historical practice shaped by racism and debates about the importance of knowledge of origin and its veracity for identity formation and family relations. Post-1945 West Germany represents the heyday of adoption in Germany. As in many other Western countries, the number of adoptions skyrocketed post-1945: while roughly 3,000 children were adopted during the entire Weimar period, this figure rose to 4,279 children in West Germany in 1950 alone. ⁶ But that was just the beginning. Adoptions continued to rise steadily until the trend reached its peak in 1978 with 11,224 children adopted. ⁷ Today, the number of adoptions stands at just under 4,000 per year.

The first section outlines the legal and socio-political background of how child adoption went from being a rarely used and legally little-regulated practice to a publicly discussed process and increasingly visible phenomenon with high emotional expectations and close institutional and legal support. The subsequent section traces how adoption agencies, youth welfare offices, psychologists and social workers, as well as relinquishing parents and adoptive parents, negotiated the question of whether (or not), how, and why adoption and origins should (or should not) be kept secret from a child or others between 1949 and 1990. This paper explores how the parent-child relationship and the formation of identity became ever more closely linked to mutual honesty and openness, as well as knowledge of one's (biological) origins, while at the same time ideas about family were radically transformed. Concepts of truth and lies also changed: Was it a lie not to tell the child that he or she was adopted? Was knowledge of the “truth” of one's origins a necessary prerequisite for self-knowledge and the search for identity? Was knowledge, then, synonymous with truth, and was it beneficial under all circumstances to know this kind of truth? These questions were debated by all involved actors—but the voices of the adopted children themselves have become more prominent in these conversations since the 1990s.

These debates, as the third section will show, changed practices of adoption profoundly and thus the experience of adoption since the 1970s. They found their way into legal codifications including and up to today's disputes about the right to know one's origins, also for children born via sperm donors. Drawing on these discussions, the paper concludes by presenting some thoughts on how adoption history might be inscribed in the context of a broader history of truth.

This paper uses sources that allow both the reconstruction of the professional debate among psychologists, social workers, and lawyers, together with broader public discussions. The sources include articles from professional and popular journals, brochures, advice literature, and children's books distributed or recommended to prospective adoptive parents by adoption agencies, and documents on internal discussions from archival collections. The experiences and identity constructions of the adopted children, however, are only taken into account here to the extent that they have found their way into the public discussion as published self-reports.

Turning towards Infants: Adoption after 1945

Initially, adoption laws in post-1945 West Germany hardly differed from the situation created by the first codification in the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) (German Civil Code) in 1900. ⁸ There was still, unlike in the United States and many Western European countries, no possibility of a so-called “full adoption,” so that the adopted child remained legally in an intermediate position between the family of origin and the adoptive parents. ⁹ This is because ties to the family of origin were not necessarily completely severed with the adoption: The parents of origin could claim an inheritance from the relinquished child just as the latter remained entitled to inherit from the parents of origin. The biological parents’ parental responsibilities were merely suspended, but could be reactivated if the adoptive parents could no longer guarantee the child's support.

The legal relationship with the new family was also problematic because the adoption contract only established kinship between the child and the adoptive parents, while the adoptive parents’ relatives, such as their parents, remained legally strangers. This could also become relevant in the case of inheritance, for example, if the adopted child was excluded from a financial inheritance from the adoptive grandparents. These legal provisions served to protect biological relatives from the claims of an adopted child, who was thus assigned a lesser legal status than the biological child. The fact that the adopted child could learn of his or her adoption in this way only played a minor role in the legal discussions of the first half of the twentieth century.

The Second World War marked a new legal starting point in the history of adoption. At this time, a large number of children had been orphaned or separated from their parents in every European country. The reunification of families torn apart by forced adoptions, wartime deportations, and having had to flee violence or persecution was the primary goal of all institutions and governments engaged in this field. In this context, the concept of “family” took on a paramount importance in the desired reconstruction of Europe. Family became a refuge of social, economic, and psychological stability as well as an important anchor for establishing democracy. Initially, family was understood in this context in explicitly biological and national terms, and thus became contested terrain, especially when it came to the repatriation of children who had fled, been sent away or forcibly adopted. ¹⁰

But it is precisely this conflict that reveals that two different interpretations of family were already widespread in 1945–46, namely one that was biological-nationalistic in nature, and one that was psychological. Should Polish children who had been “Germanized” and adopted via the Lebensborn (“fountain of life”) program be returned without exception to their country of birth, even if they had developed strong ties to their adoptive parents? ¹¹ The Polish government demanded their return, as did the Soviet government in similar cases. They argued that taking these children, who “belonged” to their respective homelands and their biological parents, was a crime against humanity as determined by the Nuremberg War Tribunal. However, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) staff responsible for these children hesitated, at least in those cases where the biological parents were deceased or could not be located. Was it really in the “best interest” of such a child to take them from the adoptive family and destroy the emotional bonds that had developed only to return them to their birth nation where they would either be re-orphaned and placed in a home or a new foster or adoptive family? ¹² UNRRA's French, British, and American social workers often based their decisions on the insights gained during the war by ego and attachment psychologists such as Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, and Thérèse Brosse, who had argued, for example, in light of the London Blitz, that emotional attachments provided children with the crucial tools to cope with challenges such as war and destruction. ¹³

These emotional bonds were not formed by blood relationship, but by reliable maternal or quasi-maternal attention in the first months of life, as the British psychologist John Bowlby summarized in 1951 on behalf of the WHO and UN. ¹⁴ At approximately the same time, the Austrian-American psychologist René Spitz described what happened when this kind of care was not forthcoming, based on his studies performed in children's homes. Babies and toddlers who received only physical care lagged significantly behind in their emotional and later also mental and physical development when compared with children who had been cared for lovingly by their mothers or another permanent caregiver. The emotionally neglected children showed striking and disturbing symptoms, which Spitz first called deprivation syndrome, but which would later become known as “hospitalism.” ¹⁵ The results of differently weighted American studies from the 1930s, which had demonstrated that children adopted at an early age performed significantly better in intelligence tests when compared with children from homes of a similar social background, also argued for family placement as early as possible. ¹⁶

In light of these findings, adoption appeared to be not only a cost-saving alternative to institutionalization, but also an evidence-based method to protect a child from psychological degradation and mental stunting. Thus, in the first postwar years, youth welfare offices had two clear reasons for placing refugee children in institutions for adoption. However, the number of adoption applicants grew and the potential adoptive parents’ attention turned towards German refugee children as more and more media reports throughout the world highlighted their poignant fate. ¹⁷ The greatest “demand” for German children came from the United States, where numerous children from West Germany were placed during the 1950s, including those born to white German mothers and Black American occupation soldier fathers because they were considered unplaceable in Germany. ¹⁸

This established a lively connection between West German and American adoption agencies, through which the German agencies became more familiar with the practices and values of American adoption placement. From the German adoption mediators’ perspective, it was particularly noticeable that American parents seemed to be interested exclusively in the physical health of the child. Questions about the health, intelligence or lifestyle of the parents of origin, on the other hand, played no role in correspondence with the American parents, which the adoption mediators attributed to the Americans’ “great educational optimism.” ¹⁹

The “Perfect-fit” Family and the Delicate Secret of Origin

In Germany the situation was quite different. Here, information about the parents of origin retained its significance. This was because not all children who were to be put up for adoption were classified by the adoption agencies as “adoptable.” This underlying classification criteria had been created in the 1920s by the then recently established placement agencies. These agencies, which were operated by the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers’ Welfare Association), the Innere Mission (Inner Mission) and Caritas, among others, wanted to distinguish themselves from the competition of commercial intermediaries, who dominated the emerging adoption market in the Weimar Republic.

This “quality criteria” only considered children deemed “eugenically healthy” and born to “genetically impeccable” parents as suitable for adoption, as explained on a poster from the Verein für Säuglingsfürsorge (Association for Infant Care) at the GeSoLei exhibition in 1926. ²⁰ The possible exclusion criteria included mental inferiority, conspicuous maternal recklessness, unknown paternity, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and mental illness.

These criteria were radicalized under National Socialism and codified as binding guidelines of the Reichsjugendamt [Reich Youth Welfare Office]. ²¹ Even though this guideline was repealed after the war, until the late 1960s adoption agencies maintained that children of “doubtful” origin, as well as children with disorders or disabilities, should not be adopted but merely placed in permanent care—regardless of whether adoptive parents could have been found for them. ²² Since the intelligence and (mental) health of newborns could not be tested with sufficient certainty, two years old became considered an ideal age for adoption. ²³ At the same time, however, the accepted definition of health required that the intermediaries gather information about the birth parents.

Accordingly, in 1956 the Adoptions- und Pflegestellenanzeiger der Inneren Mission (Inner Mission's Adoption and Foster Care Gazette) was looking for parents for Dirk, who was just under one year old, with the words: “Illegitimate, healthy, normally developed child. The little one with blue eyes and blond hair is in a children's home. The child's father is a stamp maker. He has voluntarily acknowledged paternity. The child's mother works as a weaver. The child is being relinquished for financial reasons.” The following was written about Jürgen, who was the same age:

illegitimate, nice, appealing, healthy child, for whom nice adoptive parents living in good financial circumstances are urgently sought. The child's father has voluntarily acknowledged [paternity]. The mother is a widow and has two children from her marriage who are developing nicely in every way. One daughter attends high school. The mother herself is considered to be of good character. ²⁴

In this way, information about the parents of origin was also passed on to the potential adoptive parents, but not for the child to learn about their biological parents. As in Great Britain, the United States or New Zealand, the overwhelming majority of social workers and psychologists working in the German placement offices, as well as the adoptive parents themselves, were in favor of a “complete break” or “fresh start.” ²⁵ There was a consensus that the birth parents’ declaration of consent for adoption meant they lost every right and possibility to initiate contact with their child. In order to guarantee such a break, placement agencies and adoptive parents insisted, when possible, on an Inkognitoadoption, or an anonymous or closed adoption, the function of which was seen as beneficial to the child's welfare, and acknowledged by the Bundesgerichtshof [Federal Court of Justice] in a 1951 judgment:

The need to conceal the adoptive parents’ name from the child's biological parents, especially from the mothers of illegitimate children, is the result of experience. It has shown that especially unmarried mothers, who initially agree to the adoption of their child, later try to reconnect with the children, thus making it more difficult for the children to settle in their new environment. It is in the children's best interest to prevent these disruptions. ²⁶

In this type of adoption, the name and address of the prospective adoptive parents were kept secret from the birth mother. This actually contradicted the BGB, which stipulated that the birth mother could only release her child for adoption to a couple known to her by name. Therefore, the name and address of the adoptive parents had to be included in the declaration of consent signed by the biological mother. Nevertheless, the Reichsgericht (Supreme Court of the German Reich) had ruled in 1928 that a declaration of consent was also valid if it merely stated the prospective adoptive parents’ listed number in the adoption agency's files. ²⁷ Thus, in this case, the birth mother would not learn who was adopting her child. Closed adoptions continued to be practiced in this form after 1945, and only when the law was changed in 1961, could the courts refuse a closed adoption if the child to be adopted had been born in wedlock. ²⁸

In these cases, the importance attached to closed adoptions became particularly clear. Placement agencies used every means at their disposal to make closed adoptions possible, even in extreme cases by advising the biological parent(s) to contest the child's status as legitimate. This was the case for Evelin S., born in early 1949. Evelin's biological father was a Russian soldier who had raped Evelin's mother during her imprisonment in a Russian camp. However, because Evelin's mother was legally married at the time of her birth, Evelin was registered as a legitimate child, despite the fact that her mother's husband could under no circumstances be her father, as he had been missing since the end of the war. When Evelin's mother approached the Youth Welfare Office in 1952 to find an adoptive family for her now three-year-old daughter, the office recommended a closed adoption to make it easier to place her. The mother was advised, as she had been previously, to contest her daughter's paternity with the support of the Youth Welfare Office. This was, however, a rather lengthy procedure and would have further delayed Evelin's family placement. ²⁹

The defense of closed adoptions was two-fold. First, the unexpected appearance of the mother of origin was feared as a disturbance because she was perceived as morally dubious or even neurotically disturbed. ³⁰ Second, the child was supposed to grow up believing that it was the biological child of its adoptive parents. It was this belief that seemed to guarantee that the child would experience a healthy psychological development and build a “normal” emotional bond with their new parents. This view was resolutely propagated by those psychologists who shared psychoanalytic concepts, especially Freudian ones. For example, as late as 1961, the Austrian-American educator and psychoanalyst Lili Peller justified her vehement rejection of discussing a child's adoption with them by stating:

The repeated allusions to the child's adoption can achieve mainly one thing: convey to the child that he really is a stranger in the family. […] we may be able to convey to an adult factual information which is emotionally highly charged, […] the same task becomes very difficult when we deal with an adolescent or a latency child and completely impossible with a young child. ³¹

Thus, informing a child about their adoption early in life seemed problematic because this was a very sensitive period of development, characterized by fantasies. If these fantasies became focused on the child imagining itself as an adopted child, and thus disaligning their reality, it was believed that there would be catastrophic consequences for the child's psychological development.

The convictions of many adoptive parents were also shaped by an everyday understanding of family that dominated in the postwar period. Facts that were classified as incriminating should be withheld from children in order to give them a carefree childhood that corresponded to the ideal of the father-mother-child family. ³² This belief was the same in West Germany, the United States and Great Britain, for example. In West Germany, however, there was a specific problem: the original birth certificate was not, as in most American states, declared invalid or, as in England, kept in “adoption registers,” which were only accessible if the child's birth name was known. ³³ In West Germany, the original birth certificate on which the names of the biological parents were recorded, remained valid and had to be presented if the adopted child chose to marry, as it had been in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism.

“I consider this provision to be criminal,” wrote a Berlin dentist and father of two adopted children in 1953 to a lawyer involved in the matter. “Because,” he elaborated

in my example, the daughter—now over ten years old, has no knowledge at all that she is adopted. She came to us as a two-year-old child. Also our son, who came to us as a six-year-old, believes that he was displaced in his first years of life because of the war and that he came to us permanently only after the war. Why does a law that was perhaps reasonable at the time, but is certainly absolutely wrong today, bring these unnecessary conflicts into families. […] Why does a child and its spouse suddenly have to know that it is an adopted child? Cui bono? ³⁴

The question of “Cui bono?” was obvious to the addressee of his letter, he responded, “As a doctor, I think of possible incest. Imagine how easily an adopted child could [accidentally] marry his own sister.” ³⁵

The legislature also adhered to this argument, although it accommodated adoptive parents starting in 1969 when only the legal parents, rather than biological, were noted on the birth certificate. ³⁶ In 1970, however, the certificate of descent was newly introduced, on which the biological parents remained registered. This ensured that information about the biological origin of the child, which was considered significant from an eugenic point of view, would not be lost. Accordingly, from 1970 and until 2009, it was no longer sufficient to submit the birth certificate at the time of marriage, but it was also mandatory to submit the certificate of descent. ³⁷

Thus, nothing really changed about the fact that the majority of adopted children would learn of their adoption, at the very latest, as adults. The placement agencies pointed this out to the adoptive parents with a specially printed form letter. In view of this unalterable fact, the staff of the placement agencies and youth welfare offices finally agreed that the children should be informed about their adoption before they started school, if possible, in order to avoid a “traumatic” explanation by others. ³⁸ However, married couples who explicitly said they would never inform their child about their adoption were still allowed to adopt. ³⁹ Some adoptive parents reported completely unabashedly to the placement agencies that they had successfully “camouflaged” the arrival of their child with a birth announcement in the newspaper. ⁴⁰

Family, but Different: New Visibility and the Problem of Identity

This attitude about hiding the birth parents from an adopted child changed fundamentally in the early 1970s. Responsible for this was, on the one hand, a change in family concepts and realities, and, on the other hand, a different assessment of “truth” in parent-child relationships.

Adoption applicants were confronted with a new situation since the late 1960s: With the introduction of the pill and slowly changing attitudes toward unwed mothers, fewer babies and young children were being put up for adoption. At the same time, adoption was now more strongly understood as a valuable form of assistance to needy children. In this form it became a public issue that gradually altered the social image of adoption as a “makeshift” substitute for family. The student movement had begun already in the 1960s to denounce the conditions in children's homes as a symptom of societal aberrations. Their “poisonous pedagogy” (schwarze Pädagogik) and the emotional neglect suffered there was also considered responsible for extreme disorders. This is evidenced in the public debate led by Ulrike Meinhof and the Swiss child psychologist Alice Miller, among others, about Jürgen Bartsch, a man who had lived in one of these homes for eleven months and was convicted in 1967 of murdering children. ⁴¹ In these years, magazines like Stern set out to rescue children from the children's homes via adoption through photo features of tightly packed cribs and sad-looking children. ⁴² Against this background, the attitude toward the “adoptability” of children changed fundamentally—experts now agreed that “with appropriate assistance, most children can be placed.” ⁴³ The crucial question was now aimed at the parents: Were they fit to be good parents to this particular child?

This was emphasized by newspapers and magazines such as Brigitte, which launched a veritable campaign to find parents for children with developmental disorders and mild disabilities, each of whom had a specific profile of requirements. ⁴⁴ Here, adoption became completely public—the children were presented to the reading public with a large photo and their first names. This was also true in other respects. Since 1967, when Terre des hommes started an aid program for children from Vietnam, more and more parents in Germany adopted children who came from different crisis regions of the world and were recognizably not the biological children of their adoptive parents. The majority of these children came from Korea, but many also came from Latin or South America, and later from Africa. ⁴⁵

But even if the adopted child “fit” visually into the family, the adoption was often no longer kept a secret. In guidebooks such as the Kleine Schule für Adoptiv- und Pflegeeltern (Little School for Adoptive and Foster Parents), published in 1976, it was explained to parents why they should in all cases tell their child about his or her adoption. Because otherwise

[they] constantly expose themselves to stress and suffer from the tension: ‘I hope the child doesn't find out!’ This conscious or unconscious secrecy thwarts an open and trusting parental relationship from the beginning. It is imbued with the feeling: ‘We are constantly deceiving the child, although we want to encourage him to be honest and truthful.’ This dichotomy is felt by the child. ⁴⁶

The fact that lying and hiding no longer seemed appropriate had thus little to do with moral considerations. The focus, in fact, was on the emotionally based relationship between the parents and the child. Unlike before, it was now thought of as a bond built upon mutual trust in each other's openness and truthfulness. Here, the child no longer appeared as a vulnerable and naïve being who was to be protected from burdensome information and complicated feelings by the caring parents. Instead, the child was viewed as a person of equal status who was sensitive to their parents’ hidden emotions and would experience emotional growth by confronting the truth of their origin, together with their adoptive parents. If the child was lied to, they would experience doubt and close themselves off to others. This would not only steal energy necessary for psychological development, but would also thwart the child's innate curiosity—with potentially fatal consequences for the child's intelligence. ⁴⁷

Against the background of these considerations, adoptive parents were advised to begin talking about adoption already with their infant, and to do so in intimate parent-child moments, so that the child would associate the word “adoption” with positive feelings. ⁴⁸ Suggestions along these lines included telling the child the story of their “second birth” as the story of a conscious choice that the adoptive parents had made. The topos of elective parenthood also appeared in children's literature, such as in the 1981 story Peter und Susi finden eine Familie (Peter and Susi Find a Family), in which Peter declared to a schoolmate, “I am just a very special child. My parents chose me out of hundreds of children, and they like me a hundred times better than you because of that.” ⁴⁹ This was the first time that the adoptive family was explicitly characterized as “different” but at least equal.

The legal disadvantage of the adoptive family compared to the “normal” family was abolished in 1976–77. ⁵⁰ At that point it became officially a matter of “adoption as a child,” and was no longer “the placement of a child.” Full adoption became the standard by law. Two additional provisions were changed: First, the minimum age of adoptive parents was lowered to twenty-five and twenty-one years old, respectively, and second, the birth mother was allowed to sign the irrevocable consent to adoption as early as eight weeks after the birth of her child. Both provisions responded to a development that had begun later in West Germany than in other Western countries. More and more parents now desired to adopt an infant because attachment-psychological considerations had become more important than hereditary-biological concerns. The placement agencies as well as private “providers” responded to this longing for a baby by expanding maternity services for pregnant women, which had existed previously but to a lesser extent. ⁵¹ Now, however, some of these initiatives received support from abortion opponents, who presented the release of a child for adoption to women with unplanned pregnancies as a morally unobjectionable solution that was preferable to abortion in every case and for all concerned. The extent to which dubious business interests also played a role in some of these initiatives, who demanded a “fee” from the potential adoptive parents for the costs incurred by the expectant mother's stay in the home, eventually became the subject of excited media reports as well as debates in the West German parliament. ⁵²

Women who did not want to or were not allowed to keep their child were offered a place in a mother-child home during their pregnancy. The expectant mother could live there free of charge until the birth in exchange for taking over light household duties. The delivery was carried out in a nearby clinic, often under anesthesia so that the mother did not witness the birth. The baby was not shown to her, but was taken to an infant ward immediately after birth, while the mother woke up from anesthesia in the regular gynecology ward. The baby was eventually transferred directly from the clinic to the prospective adoptive parents, who had already been selected during pregnancy, for adoptive care. ⁵³

This shows that an early, complete separation from the birth mothers was still considered necessary in the 1970s. This created a certain dilemma for the adoptive parents: How should they speak openly about the adoption with the child without talking about the woman who had birthed them? How should they answer when the child asked about her? From a psychological point of view, it seemed necessary to convey to the child that they had not come into the world “unwanted” nor had they been given away by the “womb mother” due to indifference or rejection. How this could be done was demonstrated, for example, by Kirsten Boie's children's book Paule ist ein Glücksgriff (Paule is a Lucky Find), published in 1985. Boie introduced explanations suggested by the advice literature via Paule's adoptive mother:

Maybe the child's father is no longer around […] And maybe the mother is all alone and has no one to help her. […] And maybe she is still very young […] and she is afraid of suddenly being a mother, when she is almost still a child herself. […] And then maybe such a mother thinks that her child should have it better than they can have it with her, that they get a family that is happy about them and has a lot of time for the baby. And because she wants her child to have it good, she then says that the baby can get other parents. ⁵⁴

This image of the responsible, relinquishing mother certainly coincided with the experiences of the adoption mediators and reflected their changed view of unmarried mothers. ⁵⁵ At the same time, however, not all birth mothers corresponded to this idealized image. To help adoptive parents convey such a positive image without having to lie, at a conference in November 1975 one social worker recommended that

It might be better [if] adoptive parents do not know the reason for relinquishment. Then they have the possibility of explaining ‘There are many reasons for not being able to take care of a child by yourself, but I think your mother had good reasons for making sure you grew up in a happy environment.’ ⁵⁶

Accordingly, adoptive parents in the 1970s often knew less about the parents of origin than they did in the 1950s. However, they always had one crucial piece of information: they knew the names of the birth parents. These names were listed in the birth register, which the children were allowed to consult once they turned sixteen years old, assuming they were informed about this right. ⁵⁷ This differentiated decisively from the situation of adopted children in other countries in the 1960s and early 1970s.

A glance at the United States is particularly instructive here, as American adoption practices had been an ongoing reference for West German social workers and psychologists. Until the early 1950s, both American social workers and psychiatrists agreed that adoptive parents should tell their children early on that they had been adopted. ⁵⁸ They also provided adoptive parents and grown-up adoptive children with information about the social or medical history of their birth parents. Starting in the 1950s, this overall consensus came to be challenged by a number of psychiatrists from a psychoanalytical background. But a majority of social workers refused to follow the psychiatrists’ advice and continued to emphasize that children should know about their being adopted. ⁵⁹ However, social workers became much more hesitant with regard to disclosing information about the background of the child, and especially about its biological family. There are several reasons for this shift, one is that the family background of children placed for adoption in the United States changed. Prior to 1945, many of these children were born in wedlock and were only given up for adoption as older children because their biological parents could no longer provide for them. In the 1950s and 1960s, most of the future adoptive children were born to single mothers—a stigma from which social workers wanted to shield the children. At the same time, the biological mothers asked the adoption agencies not to reveal their “shameful” secret. ⁶⁰

In addition, some social workers were influenced by psychoanalytical thinking insofar as they thought of unwed, biological mothers as neurotic and of adoptive children searching for their biological mothers as seriously disturbed. ⁶¹ As a result, most adoption agencies stopped providing identifying information about biological parents and only passed on more general positive information about an adopted child's background, if at all. That is why American adoption records became increasingly difficult to access in the 1960s and 1970s. Those children who grew up during this time often had to fight for access to this information in court. This process was described by the American Betty Jean Lifton in a book published in 1975 under the title Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter, which was also translated into German in 1981. ⁶²

This book became a best-seller in adoption literature because it recounted the long, obstacle-filled, and emotionally charged search that Lifton, born Blanche Rosenblatt in 1926, had undertaken. She had not learned until adulthood that her birth parents had not predeceased her adoption, as her adoptive mother had told her. Part of the book's success can be explained by the fact that Lifton's narrative repeatedly reflected on what the secret surrounding her birth parents had meant for her identity:

I said, ‘Who am I?’ Looking into the mirror, my eyes searched for clues. There were none. Nor were there likely to be. For I am adopted. […] I learned to accept that the branch must be separated from the tree, that the roots must take hold in alien soil. As a tree sleeps in winter, so did some part of me stay sleeping, even while the rest of me bloomed. […] I did not expect to be the king's daughter, but I knew I could not resist that call to adventure, which is the call to self. ⁶³

Lifton captured these reflections on the importance of origins to her identity in the language of mythology, on the one hand, and in the language of psychiatry, on the other, which at the time was discussing the problem of an identity fragmented as a result of violent experiences. She thus participated in an important shift of the Adoption Rights Movement (ARM) in the early 1970s, the medicalization of the sealed adoption issue, which made it much more popular and influential. Whereas early activists such as Jean M. Paton had portrayed information disclosure as adoptees’ constitutional right, later ARM spokespersons such as Arthur D. Sorosky emphasized that concealment led to identity conflicts that could only be cured by successfully tracing genealogical roots. ⁶⁴ Lifton herself referenced the significance of healing identity conflicts by weaving conversations with two world-renowned experts in the field into her memoir. One expert was her husband, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who made a name for himself beginning in the late 1960s with studies of Hiroshima survivors and later of Vietnam War veterans. He is also one of the pioneers of the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. ⁶⁵ In addition, Lifton sought conversation with psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, whose work revolved around ego development and ego identity.

The question raised by Betty Jean Lifton of how the identity development of adopted children would be disturbed by the withholding of information about their origin now became the point of reference for a series of psychological and sociological studies, which at the same time formed an initial focal point for self-help groups for adopted people. These raised the demand that all adopted people be made aware of the truth about their origins, so that the child's identity, fragmented by adoption, could be reassembled. In 1987, the UN Declaration on Youth Welfare, Foster Care, and Adoption cautiously recognized this connection by stating in Article 9: “The need of a foster or an adopted child to know about his or her background should be recognized by persons responsible for the child's care, unless this is contrary to the child's best interests.” ⁶⁶ The German Federal Constitutional Court went beyond this in a landmark ruling in 1989, stating a fundamental right to know one's parentage:

The right to free development of personality and human dignity ensures each individual an autonomous sphere of private life in which he or she can develop and preserve his or her individuality. Understanding and development of individuality, however, are closely linked to knowledge of the factors constitutive of it. These include, among others, descent. It not only determines the genetic makeup of the individual, but helps shape his or her personality. Independently of this, it also occupies a key position in the consciousness of the individual for finding individuality and self-image. ⁶⁷

Based on these considerations, new models of adoption were developed that implied greater openness between the adoptive family and the birth parents. ⁶⁸ The German model of open adoption envisages that both families get to know each other, possibly already in the maternity hospital, where the biological mother personally hands over the child to the adoptive parents. Regular personal contact is to follow. ⁶⁹ However, this model is still rarely practiced in Germany. Much more popular is the semi-open adoption, in which the parents of origin do not know the adoptive parents by name, but both exchange information via the youth welfare office, which is to be made available to the child. ⁷⁰ By a child's sixteenth birthday, they have the opportunity to seek contact with the parents of origin on their own initiative, and thus to discover what part the biological parents play in the image that looks back at him or her from the mirror.

In 1975, Betty Jean Lifton wrote, “An adoptee's past is like a mummy bound in layers of shroud, wrapped in years of secrets, mysteries, lies, deceptions, confabulations, mythology.” ⁷¹ Thus, the 1950s appear as a time when so many layers of secrets were superimposed that the child did not learn that he was adopted, nor who his birth parents were. In order for a child to develop healthily, their family should be a “normal” one. For the sake of this purpose, the adoptive parents were allowed to lie. This lie was considered a concealment that the parents took upon themselves for the sake of their children, but which did not seem to interfere with the parent-child relationship or their emotional development, because the children were not thought to have such a form of sensitivity to the adults’ secrets.

This permission to lie was challenged during the 1960s. Based on psychoanalytic findings, it was now assumed that people sensed the repressed, unspoken, and hidden feelings of their counterparts. Truthfulness thus became an essential factor in the emotional relationship between a child and their parent. ⁷² Accordingly, it was advised to educate adopted children at an early stage. The adoptive parents, on the other hand, were now largely deprived of concrete information about the parents of origin, so that they could paint an ideal picture of the loving mother who was willing to give their baby up out of responsibility for the child, without having to lie.

Since the 1980s, the question of the extent to which identity depended on a conscious confrontation with a difficult and burdened past became the focus of many psychological and psychiatric, and eventually also social, discussions. Thus, truth was transformed from a medium of relationship to an element of identity and psychological healing: the right to know one's own origins was recognized and finally framed as a fundamental right in Germany. Today, the lasting consequence is that children born via sperm donation are also granted the right to receive information about their biological father.

Thoughts on a Post-1945 History of Truth

Does this development fit into a more general history of truth in the second half of the twentieth century, ⁷³ or is this merely a trend that applies to disputes over “somatic” or “genetic truths”? ⁷⁴ In the first decade after 1945, adoption records and birth certificates were sealed and concealed in many countries of the Western world—more completely than at any other time in the twentieth century. Hiding the “truth” by silence or lies was supposed to serve the well-being of the adopted child while their close relatives would carry with them this hidden knowledge about the child.

This constellation is strongly reminiscent of the way diagnoses of serious illnesses were dealt with in those days: while the closest relatives “knew,” the sick person themself was not told that they were suffering from a fatal illness, so as not to burden or even destroy their last span of life with feelings of despair and hopelessness. ⁷⁵ This practice of “benign deception” had a longer history, as in the case of adoption, but gained fresh legitimacy in the postwar period. ⁷⁶ This renewed culture of deception and secrecy was informed, first, by a strong emphasis on the irrational part of feelings such as fear, and second, by psychological studies of survival in concentration and prisoner-of-war camps, which concluded that negative feelings could destroy health and the will to live, while hope appeared as an essential factor of psychological and physical health. ⁷⁷

But how does this logic fit against the series of trials held in Nuremberg from winter 1945 to spring 1949, in which—as Norbert Frei emphasized—in addition to justice and punishment, the aim was also to learn and make public the truth about Nazi crimes? ⁷⁸ Is that a completely different story? The answer is somewhat ambiguous. In Nuremberg, the truth about Nazi and other war crimes was selective and framed in a thoroughly pedagogical way. One striking example is the manner in which the Katyn massacre was dealt with at the trial. Although this was not falsely blamed on the German Wehrmacht, as the Soviet prosecutor had intended, the charge was dropped in silence in order not to question the authority of Allied proof during the proceedings. ⁷⁹ Here, too, a strategy was used that could be qualified as “benign deception.” Deception, silencing and active non-knowing became privileged strategies in the 1950s and the early 1960s when it came to the country's Nazi past. In the states formerly occupied by the Western Allies, it was not until the early 1990s that the Nuremberg Trials were taken up again as a model for establishing the truth. ⁸⁰

Similar to the history of adoption, the number of those who pleaded for “bedside truth telling” grew over the course of the 1960s in the debate on medical ethics. Here, too, the impossibility of maintaining lies was initially in the foreground because so many knew that the “perfect” lie could not be sustained, but above all because the hidden feelings of the other person would be recognized by the ill person. ⁸¹ The decisive argument against “benign deception” was also in this case less moral or strategic than psychological, and focused on the far-reaching consequences of lying for the relationships that were vital in this situation, meaning the relationship between the sick person and their relatives, as well as between the patient and doctors or nursing staff.

In cancer history, this discussion merged directly into a debate that emphasized the value of truth for a person's own existential decisions and identity. Without knowledge of the diagnosis, it was impossible to decide how to live in the face of approaching death or who to be in the last part of life after their diagnosis. ⁸² Since the 1960s, the discussion about how to deal with the Nazi past has also included arguments that the repressed “truth” about one's own (guilty) past could negatively effect someone's person and identity. This started with the Mitscherlichs’ postulation in 1967 that Germans’ inability to mourn the loss of the Führer had led to their general “emotional rigidity” (Gefühlsstarre). ⁸³

Independent of the context of Germany's Nazi past, the search for historical truth acquired some weight in the 1970s as a result of the human rights violations committed in Chile and other South and Central American dictatorships, in particular the practice of making political opponents disappear without a trace. ⁸⁴ Finding out the truth about the fate of these people was increasingly recognized by victims’ and human rights organizations as a way for the relatives of the disappeared to reconnect with their own reality. In the language of trauma research this was known as allowing a person to establish coherence between their experience and reality, and in this way to overcome their psychological injury, meaning their trauma. ⁸⁵ Thus, similar to the discussion about the right to know about one's origins in the context of adoption and reproductive technologies like sperm and egg donation, the aim here was once again to enable the individual to establish a healing relationship with their shattered or questioned identities. These arguments finally led in 2006 to the right to truth (for relatives of the disappeared) being recognized by the UN as an independent and inalienable human right. ⁸⁶

Despite all the undoubted differences between the three strands of a history of truth outlined here, it can thus be seen that arguments and justifications for a shift in the use of truth point to similar directions: concealing incriminating truths, if necessary also by lying; the psychoanalytically based discovery of truth as the foundation of a person's affective relationships; and the need to know the truth about the hidden aspects of someone's personal past and present in order to be able to piece together one's own broken or fragmented identity into a reality-based whole.

But has the quest for truth reached its goal when all of the hidden nooks and crannies of our origins, our pasts, and our bodies have been brought to light? Is being fully informed the same as knowing the truth? And does this kind of truth always bring about healing? Today, popular documentaries, TV shows and best-selling autobiographical writing often unconditionally embrace this notion of truth and depict it as wholesome in every circumstance. But increasingly this emphatic understanding of truth as the result of revealing all secrets and knowing all details is called into question—as is the therapeutic capacity of this “truth”. This applies to all three fields mentioned here, specifically that sociologists observe that some terminally ill people do not want to “know” and do not wish to die aware of dying, ⁸⁷ and that people who lost relatives during a past dictatorship found listening to the “truth” told by these victims’ perpetrators to be re-traumatizing. ⁸⁸

In the third field, the field of child adoption and reproduction, there are likewise debates about the value and effects of “truth”. John Eekelaar, a specialist in family law, firmly insists that children have a right to what he calls “physical truth”, and that only this knowledge would eradicate the prejudice and stigma that might prevent them from living an authentic, self-determined life. ⁸⁹ Sociologist Carol Smart, however, challenges this exclusively positive notion of physical or genetic truth as well as the denunciation of secrecy as a means to disempower the children. She asserts that withholding information “might serve as a form of protection” while truth might bring about vulnerability, especially in kinship and other social relations that are defined by inequal power positions. ⁹⁰ In addition, Smart points to the fact that the current emphasis on “genetic truths” often leads to a systematic underestimation of other “truths” such as kinship relations based on caring and responsibility. ⁹¹ This paper does not argue for a clear cut answer to these incredibly complex questions. But in drawing attention to how the trend towards unconditional truth-telling has been shaped by changing historical contexts, it reveals that the answers are context-bound, that it is advisable to carefully ponder what effects the overarching emphasis on a single form of truth (or secrecy) may have, and what dangers it may hold.

One such danger is what the author Steven Uhly wrote his novel Glückskind (“Child of Fortune” (2012)) about. In it he tells the story of a baby found in a garbage can by an elderly man. As it turns out, the baby was placed there by an overwhelmed and desperate mother who had tried to get rid of her child. The man takes care of the girl in secret, grows fond of her and develops the intention to raise her into adulthood. But inspired by a conversation with a pediatrician, he begins to think about what kind of truth he would have to tell the girl, Felizia, later in life:

No matter when and how he tells Felizia the truth, whether she will still be a child or already an adult—how is he supposed to explain something to her that not even he himself understands? […] Your father has left you and your mother … Hurt you for the sake of your own good, is that even possible? […] There is only a desperate desire for the perfect lie, for a lie that is no longer rooted in a denied truth that you can dig up and show off. It would have to be a lie that stands as firm as this house, no, firmer still, as firm as death. ⁹²

Because this perfect lie does not exist and the truth he would be creating by claiming her as adopted is unbearable to him, he instead decides to return the girl back into the care of the woman who left her for dead. In this way he hopes to establish another truth for her. It is a great risk to this child's life, but he takes it because he is convinced that even the most terrible truths must still be told.