PRESSURE AND GUILT: WAR EXPERIENCES OF A YOUNG GERMAN SOLDIER AND THEIR BIOGRAPHICAL IMPLICATIONS (PART 1)

Abstract

The psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich claimed in their widely discussed article (1977) that Germans would be incapable of mourning about and repenting of the disaster of the Second World War, the millions of deaths and suffering of the victims of Nazi terror. They argued that Germans would repress or deny what had happened to avoid suffering from severe depression. The Mitscherlich thesis is criticised in this study by displaying the wide landscape of deep personal involvement (called a `trajectory') in various autobiographical differentations of living within a world of total collective moral deterioration. The research necessary to prove or disprove such a thesis works with `autobiographical narrative interviews' conceived by the author. The research style of meticulous structural descriptions is developed to utilise formal text indicators for localising such phenomena like fading out, delayed recollection, and compartmentalised phases of working-through. Typical for this method, its data arise from interviewing single cases, here that of an ideologically non-committed German. As a young German soldier in the Second World War, he too showed phases of incapacity to mourn and repent. But the informant did not remain in that state. Severe crisis experiences in his later private life led to sudden recollections of encounters with victims of Nazi terror. He started to mourn and repent. Besides empirical evidence of the feeling of personal entanglement in collective guilt also among those not engaged in intentional acts of immoral behaviour, we encounter the interesting phenomenon of delayed mourning about and repenting of the moral deterioration within the collectivity of `We, the Germans'. This finding is corroborated by data from many narrative interviews with other Germans who were non-committed to Nazi ideology but active in the German war machinery.

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