Miriam Gebhardt - Crimes Unspoken - The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War

There are some indications at least that the ability and willingness of Germans to face up to their own war suffering has changed since the millennium. This is reflected in the collective memory but also in personal therapeutic work.

The psychoanalyst Uwe Langendorf, to take just one example, made the publication of Crabwalk by Günter Grass in February 2002 and the series ‘Die Flucht’ in Der Spiegel a month later a point of reference for his own sudden realization that certain observations in the twenty years of his psychotherapy practice could have something to do with a collective war trauma. A few months later, a conference in Berlin of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für psychohistorische Forschung dealt with the same topic. [91] October 2002 in the Institut für Psychotherapie e. V., Berlin. It only struck Langendorf now that over a third of his patients had a refugee background, either through their own childhood experience or from having grown up in a refugee family. In many cases, the trauma was cumulative: loss of home and property and the associated loss of status, mistreatment and rape during flight and expulsion, rejection and contempt from the people where they settled, feelings of guilt at having survived and leaving behind the homes and graves of ancestors. A frequent family constellation among his patients were the numbed and depressive mother and the physically or emotionally absent and weak father. As adults, the patients were then frequently over-ambitious, unwilling to form relationships, restless and uprooted. [92] Uwe Langendorf, ‘Heimatvertreibung – das stumme Trauma: Spätfolgen von Vertreibung in der zweiten Generation’, in: Analytische Psychologie , 136/2 (2004), pp. 207–23.

In the meantime, public attention has been drawn to the transgenerational consequences of war experiences for children, and even for grandchildren. To date, however, these recollections have been maledominated. Much of the early systematic study of ‘war childhood’ and ‘growing up without a father’ has been conducted by men. By contrast, there has been little said about the collective female experience of mass rape and its possible long-term consequences. Remember, we are talking here about at least 860,000 victims of sexual violence and even more families of their descendants.

Researchers agree today that collective trauma can be lasting and cumulative over several generations: ‘It is the result of unconsciously residual psychological processes and fosters dissociated perception and recollection and hence numerous psychological and psychosomatic symptoms.’ [93] Bertram von der Stein, ‘“Flüchtlingskinder”: Transgenerationale Perspektive von Spätfolgen des Zweiten Weltkrieges bei Nachkommen von Flüchtlingen aus den ehemaligen deutschen Ostgebieten’, in: Radebold et al., Transgenerationale Weitergabe , pp. 183–91; see also Jürgen Zinnecker, ‘Die “transgenerationale Weitergabe” der Erfahrung des Weltkrieges in der Familie’, in: Radebold et al., Transgenerationale Weitergabe , pp. 141–54. It is thought that children and grandchildren assimilate unprocessed feelings and hence also the characteristic personality features of their parents and grandparents and unknowingly attempt to solve the problems for them – for example the grief, reconciliation, recovery of loss and defence against powerlessness. [94] Stein, ‘Flüchtlingskinder’, p. 185.

This does not occur without conflicts and collisions with the present-day reality, however, leading to feelings of guilt by descendants about having been able to grow up in a better time than their traumatized parents and grandparents. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Bertram von der Stein describes the case of a 50-year-old single woman whose mother was raped by a soldier while her eldest sister was shot by another soldier. The patient denied her own sexuality and repressed her aggression ‘as a defence against transgenerationally communicated trauma’. She found aggression and sexuality to be life-threatening. [95] Ibid., p. 187.

The passing on of familial stress, such as that resulting from war-related rape, does not occur in the form of a simple transfer from top to bottom. The older and younger generations both participate in the transfer, which is more in the form of an exchange, in which the significance and assumption of the cultural heritage are negotiated. [96] Zinnecker, ‘Transgenerationale Weitergabe’, p. 143. Thus, later descendants have an influence on the processing of bad historical experiences in their family. Psychologists believe that the confrontation with painful memories is vital in this process. The trauma of the past must be faced up to, the personal family history reconstructed and the unconscious destructive consequences dealt with therapeutically. The aim is to distinguish between fantasy and reality in the collective history of earlier generations and to learn to stop identifying with the suffering – even today. This makes the history of mass rape after the war of continuing relevance. Only through knowledge can the ‘society of survivors’ recover from the suffering experienced at the time.

Knowledge of the events after 1945 is also still important for the few survivors. For that reason, the geriatric carer and dream therapist Martina Böhmer travels through the country to visit old people’s and dementia homes. She has repeatedly seen how rape victims are traumatized again by rough treatment, the banging of doors in the corridor, insensitive remembrance rituals in the homes and even through chance meetings with Polish nursing staff, for example. She told me of the case of a resident of an old people’s home who refused to allow herself to be undressed and washed, particularly by male carers. She had been raped after the war. In another case, an old woman had panic attacks because her roommate had an American husband and her language catapulted her back to the long-past rape by a GI. This follow-up trauma, says Böhmer, is often misdiagnosed as dementia and incorrectly treated with drugs. In only a few institutes, such as the Henry and Emma Budge Foundation near Frankfurt, which has Jewish and non-Jewish residents, are the psychologists routinely trained to deal sensitively with this history. It would be useful if this were the case in all care homes in Germany.

We can only speculate on more general after-effects of the mass rape by occupying troops. How has the unprocessed experience impacted in general on the relationship of the sexes to one another and on the handling of sexual violence in Germany? This is a subject requiring further study. One thing is certain: German feminists, as discussed earlier, are notable throughout the world for having difficulty in abandoning the perpetrator–victim scheme of the 1970s and their one-sided approach to the subject of sexual violence and abuse. Is there an unprocessed historical connecting line here? And there is another possibly striking symptom: just before this book was published, a long-overdue problem was once again placed on the political agenda in Berlin – namely, the fact that courts still regard only non-consensual sex with the threat of violence as rape. A new possible revision of the law on sexual offences is now addressing the problem of testimony by victims. Is it a coincidence that this badly needed reform is going to be implemented at a moment when a large number of refugees are entering the country – including many dark-skinned men who conjure up old fears of sexual violence?

After having read hundreds of reports that in a few compressed lines describe the course of the rapes all over Germany in more or less the same terms, I am forced to ask whether these incidents have not almost inevitably cast a long shadow on the sense of security, especially in the case of women. In rural communities and small towns, the danger for a child or women of being dragged from the street into a car in broad daylight, and more especially at night, and taken to a field or wood to be attacked by one or more soldiers was omnipresent. Certain places and areas, particularly close to barracks and later to military training areas, were particularly hazardous. There was not usually any possibility of resisting or of having the perpetrators punished afterwards. I remember how I myself was also warned in the 1970s of all kinds of dangers that, as a teenager, I found implausible – in particular, of course, bars, which were known as hang-outs of the occupying soldiers.