A Psychohistorian and His Wheat Field: Honoring Peter Petschauer

A Metaphor for Peter Petschauer

Imagine the following scene: Standing in his wheat field nearing harvest, a farmer clasps several heads of wheat in his hand

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and examines them closely for their health, ripeness, water content, and presence of rot. Imagine the same scene, except as viewed from a low-flying crop duster above the field. Individual grains of wheat have blurred into a large wheat field, the farmer still visible.

Now, imagine flying in a passenger jet airplane at, say, 30,000 feet above the same wheat field, many square miles now all simultaneously in view. Even the specific wheat field has lost its distinction and becomes part of a vast landscape or canvas. Finally, imagine some keen observer shifting back and forth among these perspectives to grasp a sense of “the same” place.

From my attending Peter Petschauer’s presentations since the 1980s at the International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA), to reading his essays in The Journal of Psychohistory and Clio’s Psyche, to reading his books (both scholarly and poetry), to reading and commenting on his manuscripts (and he, mine), to reading his many comments on the Clio’s Psyche listserv on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 through the present, I would think of my above vignette as a way of understanding how Peter Petschauer has long worked as a psychohistorian, and more deeply as a curious and painstaking scholar.

Self-reflective and self-critical at his core, he is ever-attuned to what a psychohistorian might project onto the subject under inquiry—currently, the white heat of controversy in interpreting the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its causes. It is a subject saturated with implicit ideology and personal agendas (both in and out of conscious awareness). Although I do not remember his using the term countertransference much or at all, he is keenly attentive to unconscious virtues and distortions in historical interpretation and explanation.

Signature

In this sense, Dr. Petschauer’s navigator’s voice, as well as his meticulous attention to detail and the big picture, are his signatures in whatever he is doing. It is as characteristic of his poetry as it is of his conference presentations, scholarly articles, and books. He takes with him his microscope and macroscope wherever he goes. In recent decades, much of Dr. Petschauer’s writing, narrative and poetic, is applied psychohistory—that is, addressing people beyond academic walls.

Dr. Petschauer’s substantive and thematic contributions are numerous: women’s history; art and art history; Russia and East

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Europe; fieldwork as well as scholarship; social movements/nationalism; German National Socialism; Russian and German history; the Holocaust; contemporary American life, culture, and politics; the interdisciplinary study of spatial experience and representation; the dangers and lures of totalitarianism; the exploration of all these topics through narrative social science and poetry; and the judicious use of psychoanalytic theory to help understand and explain all these (at least in part).

As large as his contributions to numerous subjects are, for me, his overarching contribution is the way Dr. Petschauer thinks and works. He is curious and attentive. He is not laden with what he should look and listen for. My opening story about ways of perceiving and imagining a wheat field illustrates his implicit method—although I doubt he would describe himself in terms of methodology and epistemology. This is, in my experience of hearing, reading, and being in a long, deep friendship with Dr. Petschauer, the way he approaches everything. Inseparable from his approach is his exquisite writing style, which fuses clarity and elegance.

For Dr. Petschauer, then, there are many complementary ways of knowing—and knowing is always tentative, never complete. Absent is the sledgehammer of dogma, ideology, absolutism, and theory for all occasions. Ever since I have seen, heard, read, and been fortunate to know him as my cherished friend, he has been a staunch upholder of the Reality Principle in both narrative social science and poetry.

His so-called “posts”—actually mini-essays—on the Clio’s Psyche listserv since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 are the finest woodcuts that distill broad scholarly sweeps of Russian history, the study of personal character, and lived experience in Russia, with his feet firmly planted in the political psychology of the present. Consider, for instance, the overdetermined fusion in Russian culture of group psychodynamics, intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the blurring of the present threat of NATO expansion with millennia of brutal invasions, occupations, subjugations, and enclosures. Dr. Petschauer’s “mere” listserv contributions possess the same compass of perspectives, thorough rootedness in data, clarity of argument, and respectful voice that pervade his larger-scale essays, scholarly books, and conference presentations.

Much like his contemporary psychohistorian David Beisel,

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Dr. Petschauer is not leashed to academic or clinical theory. Always open to multiple perspectives on a historical event, character, or era, he is no postmodernist relativist. History and psychohistory are rooted in facts, even disputed facts, or they are tendentious mythology. How can people learn from experience (W. R. Bion) if their sacred, immutable beliefs blind them to the very kinds of experiences they consciously and unconsciously defend themselves against having?

Dr. Petschauer is one of the keenest observers of human beings—himself included—I have ever known. In his ethnographic visits to Russia and Poland, the smallest detail catches his eye, the subtlest inflection in the voice, his ear. Let me offer a story to evoke how this once took place—and in turn, became the subject matter for Peter’s and my visits over many years.

Peter Petschauer at Work: A Story

I remember him telling me stories of his interviews with Polish people in their towns and villages. As he pursued his planned topics, he noticed out of the corner of his eye, again and again, tiny painted-over nail holes on the doorposts of so many small houses. They were always on the same doorpost, always at a slight angle from vertical. He wondered what they had been for, what had been there, and why only tiny holes remained.

During his interviews delving into the town’s history, he asked many current residents who owned the homes if they knew anything about them and if there was some historical story behind them because they were so numerous. Most of the largely Polish Catholic townspeople were puzzled and said they had not thought about the mysterious, nearly ubiquitous tiny holes, that they knew nothing. A few people vaguely remembered that some Jews once lived here, but that was long ago. They had no idea where these Jews went.

The story haunted me, and I occasionally brought it up in later conversations with Peter. Eventually, I wrote a narrative poem called “Tiny Nail Holes,” which was eventually published in the literary journal Harbinger Asylum (Spring 2021). Peter knew the “forgotten” history, as did I. Its emergence and crystallizing into a poem (or scholarly article) exemplify the friendship Peter and I had for decades, how we told each other stories from our lives and our work (which often converged), and how we often sent our drafts to each other for reading, critique, editing, and most importantly,

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whether they rang true with either one of us.

In this instance, no one spoke of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the large population of Jews in their towns, the roundups of all the Jews by Nazi military and Polish collaborators, their forced loading onto trains, and the Jews’ disappearance into who-knew-where. Certainly, no one mentioned on-the-spot killings of Jewish villagers or the destination and destiny of the deported Jews in the concentration camps.

Peter and I spoke of how this disavowed history of the townsfolks’ residents, as well as their parents and grandparents, made for self-evident psychohistory, the conscious and unconscious denial, repression, mystification, fuzzy memory, and all other ways of personal, family, and community self-protection from knowing what, at some level, they already knew. The mysterious painted-over nail holes were the place where the Jewish residents had placed the Mezuzoth (Hebrew, meaning “doorpost”; a ritual object that consists of a casing that encloses sacred text from the Torah) when they had moved into the house. When the Nazi roundups and deportations took place, most Jews hastily removed the Mezuzah and took it with them as a symbol of their Jewish identity.

Wheat Fields, Nail Holes, and Three Decades of Friendship

The unbreakable link between my opening story about wheat fields and Peter’s fieldwork in Polish villages is the deep friendship between us that has been the crucible in which all our conversations have taken place about a myriad of historical topics and their interweaving with our lives. These include exchanges of drafts of essays and poems via e-mail; long visits over brunch at a New York delicatessen during annual IPhA meetings; intense conversations about our personal and cultural identities, his father, an SS officer; my family’s flight from pogroms and perishing in the Holocaust; the interweaving of personal history and subjects of our scholarly research; and perhaps most recently, our gravitation toward psychohistorical poetry when narrative scholarship proved insufficient to articulate what we were learning and feeling in our work.

After three decades of close familiarity with the man and the work of Peter Petschauer, I think that he and his life-work embody the aperçus (brief survey/sketch) of French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, who in his celebrated Discours sur le Style (“Discourse on Style”) lecture to the French Academy,

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on August 25, 1753, said, “Le style c’est l’homme même” (“The style is the man himself”). His speech and written word all bear the signature of his character. He is as much himself in his poetry as he is in his serious scholarship. His poetry extends and, in a way, completes his narrative writing—and in turn, feeds back into and informs his subsequent poetry.

What you see is how you look, where you look from, what you can bear to see and what you cannot, what you can allow yourself to see (what you have been allowed to see as a child and as a grown-up), and why. Un-self-blinded history and its counterpart in psychohistory urgently require each other. From imagined wheat fields to nearly concealed nail holes, this is what the life and life work of Peter Petschauer are about.

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