The Flame of Trauma

Two examples for individuals accepting, even embracing traumatic experiences, come from two family friends; one lived near Munich, the other near Düsseldorf, Germany. Both men were captured in Eastern Europe in 1944 during WWII and spent more than ten years in Soviet captivity in Siberia. Benno Herrmannsdorfer was a young Wehrmacht soldier (Germany’s unified armed forces during the Nazi period) who took to the experience with gusto and learned to work successfully as a mason and developed other skills in freezing temperatures. Franz Battré was a Wehrmacht tank officer who somehow managed to survive by working as little as possible. After returning in 1955, with successful careers in the reemerging Germany, both died in their early 90s. I met them soon after their return from Siberia.

For some survivors of horrendous situations, trauma simmers as they disassociate themselves from it for extended periods of time and then, because of a specific trigger, it returns full force and possibly inspires a helpful resolution or becomes destructive. For still others, the flame never dies down and consumes them.

Benno, from a Bavarian farm family, told me several times of two key survival strategies he learned in Siberia: one, “always

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clean up your workplace when you leave in the evening so you can start fresh the next morning,” and two, “mix salt in the mortar if you want it to hold at below freezing temperatures.” Franz, descendant of a prominent German Huguenot family, reported that he did not usually have to leave camp for work because the women who checked the men’s rear cheeks to see “if we still had sufficient meat for us to work” usually let him stay behind; after all, “I have a French ass and there was never any fat on it.” He also managed to survive sporadic shootings; every so often the Soviet guards shot every tenth officer.

After he returned from Siberia, Benno could do almost anything, including building a house for himself and his friends. Franz picked up his major sales job with renewed energy and lived life to the fullest. (A similar story is featured in Birgitta Gottlieb McGalliard’s Years Stolen by the Russian Gulag: My Father’s True Story [2016].)

Aside from the unique stresses of Siberian captivity, several other men whom I met were unable to deal with it afterward; once lit, the fire of trauma burned them up. Two committed suicide soon after they returned from Siberia, unable to find anything positive in the camp experience and unsuccessful in their attempts to reconnect to their wives, families, and German society. Unlike the first two men, who seemed not to carry away deep trauma from the ten years of captivity under the most brutal circumstances imaginable, one could say as David H. Barlow did that these other men had either “general biological vulnerabilities,” a “generalized psychological vulnerability,” or a “tendency to focus anxious apprehension on the perceived danger of specific events, thoughts, or objects” (Thomas A. Widiger and Maryanne Edmundson, “Diagnoses, Dimensions, and DSM-5,” in David H. Barlow, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Psychology, 2010, 286).

Difficult Adjustments

Four other accounts tell of difficult adjustments after a trauma-creating event, or series of events, and how the individuals of whom they speak dealt with the rekindled flame. The first pertains to Zohara Muschinski Boyd, a very close Jewish friend and colleague of mine at Appalachian State University, who survived in plain sight from 1942 to 1945 with her father, mother, and her mother’s younger sister in Warsaw and thus escaped the Nazi genocide. Aside from the threatening experience as a whole, the collapse of a basement during a bombing raid and two German sol-

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diers wounding her father were particularly stressful.

During the particularly massive raid, the family, along with many others, cowered in the basement of a massive apartment building. A bomb, named “cow” for its mooing sound, directly hit the building; one side of it collapsed and killed everyone in it. Boyd’s side stayed upright and the family survived. She never forgot the choking dust and suffered fears of it overwhelming her, especially at night when a cold seemed to choke her.

The two soldiers who shot at her father most likely thought that he was placing a bomb in a trash can near their apartment complex, not desperately foraging for food. After it turned dark, as a three-year-old, she recalls a figure crawling toward the complex and her mother’s flowery dress turning completely red as she lifted the figure; it turned out to be her father. A bullet had glanced off his back and “blood seemed to be everywhere.”

For years, Boyd had two unique dreams about this event. One in which a coachman of a stagecoach in the West was attacked by robbers and shot in the back; every time, a red splotch spread across the back of his white shirt. The second dream was about a bank robbery in which a white shirted guard was hit by a bullet, a red splotch spreading.

For Dr. Boyd, the flame never burned out; sometimes she approached it, but for the most part she stayed away from it. For years, she did not speak about her uniquely stressful experiences in the Warsaw of WWII. She finally was able to deal with this past when she began teaching a Holocaust course with a colleague from Appalachian State University’s History Department and then by speaking later about her experiences with me in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities. The painful traumatic flame was in a sense fully reignited, but as an intellectual, she was able to approach it and reached a specific solution: she taught and spoke about it. She became a witness for those who could speak no more.

The second story took place in June 1945 when three former Wehrmacht soldiers arrived at the Egarter Farm in Afers/Eores of South Tyrol with the news that Albert Clara, the owner, had been killed in Yugoslavia. Three of us, Agnes (Neas), Maria (Moitz) Clara, and I sat at the cold water trough by the entrance of the main house, the firehouse, and listened to the men talk about their experiences and the man who was the girls’ beloved brother and my role

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model. On this sunny day, I remember tattered uniforms and awful news.

The young women at the trough were known as the “Egita Gitsch’n” (the Egarter girls). Their mother, the Egarterin, had borne 13 children; Neas and Moitz were two of the four surviving daughters. Albert had been the only surviving son. As one of them put it many years later, they stored the death of their brother in a drawer and let the flame simmer, so to speak. Then suddenly it was there again, fully lit.

Neas, the older, barely remembered the soldiers at the trough in front of the house until 10 years later and then again 30 years later when the whole agony reemerged. The first conversation with a survivor brought the case back for a few months and then 30 years later, another survivor told her the story about her brother’s horrific injuries and death in a military hospital.

For Moitz, the youngest of the Egarterin’s daughters, the issue also simmered until the time I began research on In the Face of Evil around 2013 about her mother and sister Neas. Moitz was by then in her late 80s. In several conversations with her and one of her nieces, she brought up her brother several times and hinted that I should discover the place where he died. One could say that I rekindled the simmering fire, but she let it return to simmer or maybe even become extinct when I reported to her that he had died in Madonna del Neve at the Sella Pass, near Bistrizza, and that a nurse had attended to him until his end (In the Face of Evil, 2014, 104). I never told her that Albert was most likely murdered after the end of the war when Yugoslavian partisans tortured and killed thousands of German soldiers.

In June 1945, at the scene at the trough, I was barely six years old, and yet it is one of my first memories. For me, too, the significance of this moment only came a lifetime later and along with it my understanding of a unique perspective of trauma; that is, the aftereffects of an acute stress disorder.

This set of stories would not be complete without two others. I have written about aspects of each, but never in the context of their coping with the acute stress disorder. One is about my father, Erich Petschauer. Today we call him a perpetrator and his trauma was surprisingly different from that of the others. His life-changing events began when he visited Dachau in July 1944, continuing with Germany’s loss of the war, his three-year captivity in

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13 American prison camps, and its culmination in his expression of disappointment with the National Socialist regime 20 years after the end of the war. In a letter dated March 25/26, 1967, he wrote to me that:

There was a time in my life in which I was full
of enthusiasm for that which at the time was
called Volksgemeinschaft. Later I realized that it
was not a peoples’ community at all, but rather one
characterized by fear, hate, envy (see the Seven
Deadly Sins) and the continuing abuse of all
the other divine laws.

As much as he tried after his visit to Dachau to disassociate himself from the ugliness of what he had seen and all that followed, the flame burned on and in the end burned up his body with diabetes and blindness. He tried to cope with it all and spoke about his disappointment as the first postwar Fasching Prince in Amberg; he joined the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party of Germany) as a way to save what he thought remained of Germany, but he left the party in 1968 when it became, as he wrote to me, “too brown.”

Even as the intellectual he perceived himself (his PhD was in journalism), he published neither about his stressful experiences nor the aftereffects, which was almost equivalent to PTSD. He only spoke about it a great deal with his second wife, Micky, and to me over one long weekend in 1972. His stint in the SS in a very real sense became my adopted or chosen trauma and, as an intellectual, I took the route of writing about it.

The fourth story tells of Gerhard Waldheim, the son of Kurt Waldheim, former head of the UN, and president of Austria. When I met Gerhard, he was still deeply concerned about rescuing his father from the accusations of having been a Nazi who participated in war crimes. He had collected every shred of evidence that showed his father was being accused falsely, even if he served as a first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht in Russia and Yugoslavia, of being a Nazi or having had positive opinions about them. As we spoke, I realized that I could help him exonerate his father, just as many others had before, but with the tools of a historian who has a reasonably good understanding of psychology and trauma; that is, both with a thorough investigation of the sources and psychological insight.

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In other words, this account is not about the father, but the son. Here was, and is, a decent man who was deeply offended and profoundly upset about the attacks by various groups in Austria and the U.S., and the misuse of documents and other evidence; all seemingly for no other purpose than political gain. I sensed that his highly developed sense of justice was being violated for purposes that had nothing to do with the man who was his father. “It is just not right,” he said many times.

Even before I wrote the most significant piece about his father (Peter W. Petschauer, “Uncomfortable Realities: Drs. Erich Petschauer [1907-1977], Gerhard Bast [1911-1947], and Kurt Waldheim [1918-2007],” Life Writing: Taylor and Francis, 12[3], July 29, 2015, 341-52), he let me know one day that “I cannot do this anymore; it is hollowing out my core and hurting my family.” He realized that his wife was being deeply affected by his unrelenting quest and that it was unfair to her and his children to be drawn into it. Worse, the flame was “eating him alive,” as one would say in some parts of the U.S. He had taken on this assault on his father, and indirectly of course on him as well. If he wanted to stay healthy, he either had to lower the intensity of the flame or turn away from it. His turn away from the defense of his father was a healthy response; he had done all he could.

But alas, when his mother died in February 2017, an article appeared about her having been a member in the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel), that is, a Nazi. The reality is that Waldheim senior insisted that she leave the organization before marrying him. So much for disassociating oneself from the flame!

Reflections Regarding Individual Trauma

As Howard Stein indicated to me in a phone conversation during November 2017, we all write our lives and our history; we do so continuously and tend to disassociate ourselves from unpleasant experiences. We paint a rosier picture, for example, of experiences from our childhoods, leaving out the abuses we embellish. I especially like the German verschönern (beautify); it captures the process well. Also, different sorts of individuals deal with it in very different ways.

Some people look at it carefully, maybe talk about it, write about it, dream about it. Still others transform it so people can understand it. Then there are others who approach it in the guise of another topic. Others put it onto others, maybe blame them. The

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way people deal with their past stressful events may have a great deal to do with their personalities and with other experiences they bring to the events.

It seems also that some individuals literally do not recall the entire traumatic event itself; they simply, say in a rape case, recall a ceiling or man standing in a door. In this case, something like a national debate, an analyst, or a close friend, may much later reignite the flame.

The intellectual may write about it, but the writing may not be specifically about the stressful event itself or the trauma that followed; it can be another topic altogether, but is somehow related to the trauma. Stein suggested that the professor may engage in related research. The salesman may do that with other people, talk it out literally. The artist may paint it, or something related to it. The director may conduct certain types of music.

To put dealing with a life-altering event in another way, they may put the poison that lingers from it or the heat from the flame outside of themselves. They could be looking at it from there or endeavoring to avoid it altogether, only to find it still exists.

Some people keep their trauma inside for decades and often lure themselves into thinking that the fire will never burn again, but in old age some are willing to let it burn hot once more. Finally, acute stress disorder—in other words, a life-changing and influencing experience of a child—can create later adulthood behavior. For example, if a father/mother beats, rapes, and otherwise abuses a child, he/she may later also beat, abuse, and rape. If this is widespread behavior, a society can thus be left with devastating consequences.

Parting Thoughts

The above stories are individual and immediate, yet they are also societal and ethnic. That is, they are German, South Tyrolean, Jewish, or Austrian stories, with effects on/in those societies, that came about because of violent authoritarian leaderships and their oppressive behavior and policies. In a way some were also chosen; that is, they became more than simply a powerful event in a person’s life. They can even be a constant unwanted or wanted presence and can be passed on from one generation to the next through accounts of the distressing event itself and the trauma, or changes in the human body. Some authors speak of “Transgenerational phantoms” and a meaningful example of that is Françoise Davoine

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and Jean-Max Gaudiliere’s History Beyond Trauma (2004) and the first volume of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (1994).

Because of my background, two books in German speak to me quite directly: Sabine Bode’s The Forgotten Generation: The Children of the War Break Their Silence (2012) and The Grandchildren of the War: The Heirs of the Forgotten Generation (23^rd ed., 2017). Bode has interviewed hundreds of children of the German war generation and their children and has come to the conclusion that trauma is indeed transmitted from one generation to the next. It makes sense even in my family’s case. My father shared and passed on his trauma to me and I in turn have shared it with my daughter, his granddaughter. She was additionally affected by the stories that her grandmother told her many a night about the unrepeatable brutalities of the war in Yugoslavia.

Quite obviously, these stories deal with war and war’s surrounding circumstances, including the stressful events that those affected directly by war carry with them in some fashion or other. As Dr. Boyd empathetically said about her experience: “No one came out of that mess intact, regardless of age or circumstance.”

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