Dig Where You Stand! (article)

The Federal Republic of Germany came into being in 1949, the same year I was born as the oldest son of a small dairy farm family. The farmhouse in which I grew up in rural southern Germany still stands.

As a boy of almost three, my first deeply rooted memory is seeing the body of my grandfather, surrounded by candles and flowers, in the hallway of our house. I recall the men and women of our small-town saying goodbye to him. It is as if it happened yesterday. I did not realize the meaning of the word “death” then. No one spoke with me about the death of my grandfather, but the event and its symbolism entered my mind and feelings. When my father died in 1999, it seemed as if the same men and women returned to the same hallway; but this time I fully understood.

For ten years after my grandfather’s death, I grew into a world that was archaic in its thinking and feeling, a world in which witchcraft was alive and we experienced many social conflicts. This world was also rooted in National Socialist thinking; even in the 1968 elections more than 30% voted for the far right National Democrat Party.

Into this traditional world, West German politicians and educators in the mid-50s and beginning 60s returned to the idea that the country needed a well-educated population. The daughter of a Catholic-worker and the son of a small farm family, who were thus far considered an unused and unneeded reservoir, could thus think of attending high school (Gymnasium). However, my mother warned: “We cannot help you with school, but if it should be too hard for you, tell us. You can find work as a mechanic or a baker.”

National efforts notwithstanding, my parents needed additional persuading. One day a teacher from the nearby Humanistic Gymnasium visited our town, found us working in a potato field, and suggested that I attend his school. The pressure worked; for the next nine years, I first learned Latin and Greek, then added English in the sixth grade. Thus, I could hardly understand the words of the Beatles’ songs, nor Joan Baez’ bittersweet lyrics, or Pete Seeger’s Peat Bog Soldiers (1970), which he wrote, composed, and had first performed by former prisoners in the abandoned National Socialist concentration camp near Boergermoor.

Many boys in town lived with the accounts of the previous

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generation’s young men who were sent, like my father, to war in their early 20s. They could not attend Gymnasium. My father was wounded three times, thankfully saving him from the slaughter of the Battle of Stalingrad. Back home, as a second son without a chance to inherit his family’s land, he rode down the mountain from his family farm and guesthouse, wooed and married my mother, and they settled on her farm. I became their oldest son; a younger brother and sister followed later.

By contrast to my parents, the German expellees from Eastern Europe, including the four families who temporarily lived in our farmhouse after WWII, thought that a good education was an absolute necessity. Thus, I started to learn with their school-age boys before even starting elementary school. My father did not object; he was an open-minded man with cultural interests, loved his trees and hedges, but never had a chance to study. Nevertheless, I could not understand why my warm-hearted mother had to work in the fields, cook, and wash while he was lying on our sofa, sleeping or listening to operettas, especially on Sundays. I objected and started washing dishes without being asked—to the dismay of some.

I had just finished my nine years in Gymnasium when George M. Foster’s article, “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good” (American Anthropologist New Series, 67, 2, April 1965, 293–315), came to my attention. He described in detail the thinking and working in my hometown. In traditional societies, he argued, all goods and services are considered finite and one person’s profit is viewed as another person’s loss. Foster’s insight exploded this traditional concept and from then on I looked at my town and the agricultural production on which it relied differently.

It was important that while other boys and girls were beaten, my parents did not beat me, nor give me away during the height of the war. My village naiveté was undermined as was my rough language when I left home for service in a hospital as a conscientious objector.

The erosion of my traditional thinking and behavior progressed further when I studied to become a teacher at the pedagogical university in Nuremberg, which I did in 1974. As a student, I worked in a hospital again, this time with children and adults as they prepared for operations. Again, I had to cope with my helplessness when faced with the slow or sudden death of our patients.

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It helped to accept a surgeon’s words: “he will die and we assist him on the way.” I remember one old man in particular who died of uremic spasms; as a 21-year-old I held him in my arms and later washed him.

Almost 15 years later, Peter Petschauer’s Afers (1986) opened another door. My idea of the abandoning childrearing mode took on a more refined meaning when I read that he and his brother were “abandoned” to a farm family in Afers/Eores in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy. As the fronts moved closer, his parents endeavored to insure the two boys’ survival in a nurturing environment. My experience was different in that my family did not “give me up.” Nevertheless, I knew already then that many other families chose the same path as Petschauer’s parents; unlike in his case though, they did not always do so for the children’s long-term benefit.

In the meantime, in the early 1980s, the so-called historians of everyday life began to write. Among the most influential publications was Arthur E. Imhoff’s Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today (1996, English translation, as are most subsequent sources). I was deeply impressed with his and other historians’ explorations and by the phrase “Dig where you stand!” to gain a better understanding of our past. These individuals created history-festivals all across Germany, which worked on local history, using the term history workshop for their groups.

My father almost immediately objected to my research in local history. He became an abandoned child at about age six to eight when his mother was placed in custody for nine months. She was suspected of having set a neighbor’s barn on fire. Although she was released when it became known that another neighbor had set the fire, my father carried a deep inner anger from that time on; this rage led him to physical assaults. He feared that I might find out what happened to him.

Listening to and reading the work of historians of everyday life, the following question arose: “Where were the children in all of this?” But how to explore the answer when the topic was too close to us? We were young and in our own way criticizing the so-called social historians of the day. This was before I read Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s History and Psychoanalysis (1971).

In the meantime I worked as a teacher in a secondary gram-

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mar school and had become chair of a teachers’ union in Nuremberg. There I met another mentor, the 35 years older Robert Mueller. He was born in 1914 into a social democratic family, socialized during the “social-democratic 1920s,” trained to be a typesetter, and then in 1933 went on the road for a year until the Nazis forbid this practice. After that, he served for two years in the Reichswehr (realm defense), worked in his profession, and during WWII became a soldier and, finally, a prisoner of war in the Caucasus. Upon returning in 1948, he became Secretary of the Nuremberg Social Democratic Party and worked as a teacher in his profession until his retirement. Continuing the work of his father, he collected “the forgotten history of the social-democratic Weimar Republic” and showed me “the other Nuremberg.”

With the exploration of this man’s biography, another perspective had entered my thinking. What did I learn from Mueller’s childhood and youth? Ludwig Janus put it this way: “It is astonishing how this worker family retained its coherence and values during the difficulties of the time.” In 1984, we finally made the film, In Search for the Lost History, of the first 18 years of Mueller’s life.

The real breakthrough to psychohistory came for me when I discovered the history of childhood; it filled a gap in everyday history. “There is no one here at the Institute who teaches courses, nor do I know any courses in psychohistory you can attend,” that’s what Lloyd deMause wrote me in a letter dated November 20, 1980. I could not follow his suggestion to attend the International Psychohistorical Convention that year because of my teaching schedule. However, one afternoon in August, during a visit to a friend in New Jersey, I went to deMause’s office on Broadway and returned home with a stack of issues of The History of Childhood Quarterly. I was hooked.

I originally learned about deMause in the German edition of Psychology Today. In March 1980, I was struck by the headline: “The Strauss in Us.” Gerhard Bliersbach entitled his article “Projecting onto Strauss,” and elaborated on the psychological dimensions of the forthcoming elections in Germany. Bliersbach applied the new science of psychohistory, and the ideas of Lloyd deMause, the man behind it. Bliersbach used group fantasy analysis, highlighting as examples two well-known candidates running for the office of chancellor: the northern Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt and the Bavarian Christian Democrat Franz Josef Strauss.

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Only one month later, on May 3 and 4, 1980, deMause sat at a heavy table in the castle of Heidelberg, explaining the stages of childrearing, fantasy analysis, and the psychogenic theory of history; I was one of the listeners.

DeMause had given me a few names in his above-mentioned letter. After my return from New York, I found a group of men and women (e.g., Aurel Ende, Peter Orban, Helm Stierlin, and Christian Buettner) who met yearly in Berlin, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and other German cities; I began to take part in their conventions and listened and learned. Later I met Winfried Kurth, Florian Galler, Ludwig Janus, and others of a group that collected and discussed historical group fantasies, mostly in cartoons. After 2003, I also started publishing in the group’s Yearbook of Psychohistorical Research (Jahrbuch für psychohistorische Forschung).

Much later I discovered that childhood is also political. With time, I engaged more in work for the German Psychohistorical Association; there I met younger psychohistorians and tried to encourage their work. Among them is Sven Fuchs, a German blogger about childhood and author of Childhood is Political (2019).

Today I serve as co-editor of our association’s yearbooks with Winfried Kurth (the main editor), and executive co-president with Ludwig Janus of the German Psychohistorical Society (GPPP). We organize conferences and encourage through phone calls and the Internet all aspects of psychohistory. In the process we try to gain ground in mostly non-university connected efforts to inspire and spread the meaning and usefulness of psychohistory.

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