Conclusion of the Psychology of Trauma Symposium

I am very grateful for the comments offered to my essay on the flame of trauma. Let me start on the personal level. As psychohistorians we need to be open about our involvement in our findings.

If I had known about it, my first serious issue was supposedly being born with emphysema in Berlin in 1939; WWII started soon after. Concerned about my well-being, my parents had me transferred from a small birthing center to the Charité, still a major hospital in the city. According to a note from the attending doctor to my father, my recovery was uneventful.

Another issue was this one: by the time WWII progressed into 1942, we had lived in Brixen/Bressanone, where my father was stationed, for over two years. The farm family with whom I spent the summers suggested that I stay with them permanently. My first memory is of standing in the hallway of the Egarter farm and being told that, “You must obey mother”—that is, the female owner of the farm, Mutter Egarter. She made the offer to take my brother and I in. In Lloyd deMause’s terminology, our parents abandoned us. In my later understanding, they did what many European parents thought necessary: save their children, their future.

Then came the death of Mutter Egarter, after a botched throat operation. It deprived all of us on the farm of a stern, yet decent and kind, leader. She was in her mid-50s, and I see her laid

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out in the living room, surrounded by candles. This was my initiation to the job of the alter boy; I spent many nights watching over the “ripening” dead.

The death of my brother, Klaus, of diphtheria followed a few months later in the middle of the winter. He died quietly in the arms of Agnes (Neas), whom I mentioned in the lead article, on the way to the hospital in Brixen. Even if our horse had dragged the sled faster, little could have been done for him there. I still see him stretched out on a board in what had been the Egarterin’s bedroom, his hands bound together with rope to hold them in a praying position. The morning sun was shining eerily on them. Then came the news of Albert’s death, which I have recounted. There were other issues, including failure in three monastery schools.

Why did these drastic events not lead to trauma? Or, why did I not accept them as traumatic? It is not because, as deMause would probably have said, I beautified or denied the horrors of my childhood. It was because of the positives that surrounded me.

Although my parents were usually not part of my life, the care and love of Mutter Egarter and her daughters Katharina (Kat’l), Neas, and Maria (Moitz) overcame this loss. Kat’l yodeled gloriously and played the accordion like no other. Neas and her younger sister Moitz, whom I mentioned by the troth when the former Wehrmacht soldiers reported about their brother’s death, became mother and sister to me. Moitz and I are the last survivors of the household of that time period.

I overcame these terrible occurrences in addition because of a sense of being at home. I learned the local dialect and still speak and write it fluently; in other words, I was included and felt safe. Important as well, on the farm we never went without food, clothing, or a roof over our heads. There were other forms of inclusion, like bringing the eggs from the chicken coop, carrying in firewood and water, and watching our five cows in the high Alps in the warm summers; a joy without bounds that still lingers with a sense of inner jubilation. Then there is our Baroque church that has some of the finest ceiling and wall decorations in the area with a choir in which most of my adopted family members sang and still sing.

In other words, my fate was not like that of the children who were truly abandoned, including those who were deposited on farms throughout Germany, or the Jewish children who were shipped by train from Austria to London. Many never saw their

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parents again or did not find common ground with them after the war, if they survived.

Dr. Zohara Boyd said many times publicly: we did not know that the bombs, in her case in Warsaw and in my case in South Tyrol, were anything unusual. Nor did we think our lives were unique; we did not discover that until later. That is when we realized that some of the agonies that plagued us were our trauma and that we had the capacity to handle it.

It was my father who caused that discomfort and dismay. We saw each other after ten years in Nuremberg, after he had been out of American prisons for three years and I was 13. He took me around the city, but I did not understand the meaning of what he recounted at the former National Socialist (NS) sites. Nor did I consciously see the many parts of the city that still lay in ruins. I looked up to him; sons tend to do that.

After I emigrated in 1957, we entered a correspondence that lasted until his death. In March 1964, he wrote about his disappointment with having joined the NS regime and complained bitterly about having been deceived by the criminals who led it. He wrote that they committed every one of the deadly sins familiar from the Catholic faith. Although I understood his dismay, he did not yet tell me then that he had served in the SS. That came in 1972 on his only visit to the U.S. He probably thought I was by then old enough to understand his decision to join the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) and later the Schutzstaffel (SS).

I was not prepared to find out about this part of his past. He had been a part of my good memories; the news felt like a betrayal. I carried the astonishment and resentment with me for years and only gradually overcame it through writing and speaking about his decisions and his tribulations.

The more I learned about prisons and camps, and the horrific stressors that our fellow human beings underwent in them, the more I began to understand his trauma. He wrote in the same letter that his life had basically been a waste and, if it were not for art, music, literature, his second wife Micky, and me, he would long since have given up on it.

The literature is filled with reports of the detrimental effects of miserable childhoods or the bending of children to a certain

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ideology. Aside from the inherited inner resiliency, a supportive childhood is indeed a major reason some people cope, that is, avoid constantly relighting the fire that simmers underneath and can all too readily be rekindled. I did everything one can do to not reinvigorate the flame and yet, when a colleague sent a 1942 photo of my father in Brixen that I had not seen before, the flame burst out as if it had never been subdued (see Peter Petschauer, “Never Without IT,” in Hopes and Fears: Past and Present, 2018, 61-62).

The effect on a community or a nation that has many children who neither have inner given strength nor a supportive childhood will undermine a whole society’s ability to cope with detrimental experiences like moral injury, combat, prisons and prison camps, the murder of family members and close friends, trekking along as refugees, or losing everything in a bombing raid.

Most children of perpetrators and children of victims never realize what their parents did or what they suffered. Some children’s unwanted realization that their parents had been perpetrators or victims shaped the denial that runs through their societies. Most could not express their frustration, thus leading to guilt and trauma. It still shapes Jewish families in this country and German society; there it is in part connected to the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Let me add a comment about the thousands upon thousands of perpetrators in Germany and other European counties, including Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, and even Italy, who survived the war. As Minna Falk, a beloved professor at New York University, wrote in her History of Germany (1957), it was simply impossible to arrest and try all of these perpetrators (a word not used then).

So what happened? Unless they emerged as high profile cases, like those tried in Nuremberg or later highlighted for political purposes like Kurt Waldheim, some of the vilest criminals once more became judges, policemen, and served in other important positions in the countries in which the NS regime held sway. They held back the democratic impulses in these societies and in Eastern Europe today they still do. Unlike some of the children who were traumatized by these men, few seem to have felt remorse and thus probably avoided trauma to the detriment of their societies. I consider myself once more one lucky son whose father saw through the NS elite’s chicanery and disassociated from it. Because of that, he suffered a trauma whose flame rarely simmered and usually burned

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with an all-consuming vengeance.

Allow me to offer a few additional reflections about Professor Fred Alford’s point about moral injury that is also reflected in his Trauma, Culture, and PTSD (2016). He writes that it takes a group to overcome moral injury; his point is well taken and yet one might want to add to this perspective.

My first response deals with Primo Levi’s quote (4). My dear friend Zohara, who survived Warsaw in plain sight and whom I mentioned on several occasions, felt guilty for some time about having survived when so many millions of others were incarcerated and murdered. With time though she worked herself through to realize that she survived for a purpose: to offer testimony and honor the others who did not “make it.” She spoke out, she taught, she wrote. Others followed. She now says she can “live with myself.”

The other example is of Franz Herda, whom I honored in the poem, “Franz Herda-American-German” (Petschauer, Hopes and Fears, 62-63). He spoke out against National Socialist Germany and married a Jewish woman; they survived because he was an American citizen. I don’t know if Herda felt guilty, but we know that he felt ashamed about the NS politicians’ activities. He represents the tip of an iceberg. By 1943, the Security Service of the SS reported subtle and open opposition to the regime throughout Germany (see, in German, Reports from the Reich. Selections from the Secret Situation Reports of the SS Security Service, 1939-1944, ed. Heinz Boberach, 1968, 313ff). A significant number of ordinary individuals and some officials made the point: aren’t you ashamed? A few were arrested, but the protests—for example, not wearing the NSDAP pin or not using the NS salute—are to me an indication of an individual protest that was taken up by an increasing number. Herda fits right in and it took men and women like him to stand up. They felt morally injured and spoke up, even at personal risk.

I am thinking as well of the many voters who felt morally injured and possibly traumatized by Donald Trump’s immoral behavior and voted Democrats into Congress in November 2018. This breakthrough, or this spurning of a trauma, came as individuals could not tolerate the immorality any longer and ran for governmental offices.

My point is that it does indeed take a group of persons to overcome a moral trauma, just as Alford argues. We are speaking of trauma like that inflicted by the NS regime and the current

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American administration. Nevertheless, individuals constitute groups. It is these persons who had or have the courage to stand up and through this enable others to do the same. The flame of trauma may still simmer and may relight, but at least for the time being it has been contained.

Finally, this: the first realization that there is such a phenomenon as trauma goes back to the American interviews of German and Italian prisoners of war at the end of WWII as they were about to return to Europe. In the meantime, Western democracies have carried out wars in several places and have been able to refine the understanding of the phenomenon. That is, we have had peace at home and thus the luxury to explore post-traumatic stress disorder for other wars and to expand and elaborate the definition of trauma. In other words, without peace at home, we would not have been able to pursue these contemplations.

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