Trauma

Gert Krell

I have written a review of two books by German authors who both grew up after the war and gained part of their personal and political identity by working through the silence of their en¬vironment about the crimes of and during the Nazi regime. Both later became involved in the Middle East, and they both describe the biographical backgrounds of a number of Jews and Arabs and their political activities; of people who in spite of traumatic historical and current experiences in their families are still working for peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians, some of them jointly in bi-national groups.

One book focuses on meetings between Israelis and Palestinians (and a few Germans who remained in the background) who – in spite of a number of very practical difficulties – jointly visited the Yad Vashem Memorial and ruined Palestinian villages which had been destroyed and deserted during the 1948 war. This is what Shlomo Shpiro, one of the participants, has to say: “If you don’t talk, there will be no hope for understanding. Understanding does not arise from textbooks or nice thoughts about peace in the world (…). Understanding grows from everyday communication, from communication which touches everything (Henning Niederhoff, Trialog in Yad Vashem: Palästinenser, Israelis und Deutsche im Gespräch).”

Shpiro also feels that the politicians in the area do not address the core questions of the conflict adequately: the fear of annihilation which the Holocaust has instilled in the Jewish side, and on the Palestinian side the feeling that they were thrown out of their own country in 1948. He does not compare the two traumas, because they are not comparable. But he adds that he was just as moved by visiting the ruined and deserted Palestinian villages as he was by his visit in Yad Vashem. It makes a big difference when you see the manifestations of traumatic experience with your own eyes. Nothing can remain as black and white as it may have been for you.

One of the Palestinians, Albert Aghazarian, comes from an Armenian family whose father survived the Turkish genocide as a child, went to Syria first and later to Jerusalem. This is what he says about trauma: “Every traumatizing experience, if you survive it, can lead to one of three results: Either you turn numb, without sensation; or you insist you have a monopoly on the suffering and no other suffering compares to yours. Or you become hypersensitive and hyperactive against anything that shows the slightest similarity to what you have experienced yourself. You must make up your mind. I have decided to act and to react instead of castigating myself or claiming the zenith of all suffering”

I think we may have to split the third reaction into a more destructive and a more constructive variant. Trauma may lead to an amplifier in your brain and your soul which enlarges or even distorts much of your everyday normal experience (neutral, mildly negative or even positive), pushing it close to the traumatizing event. Or it may make you sensitive in a more positive sense, increasing your awareness of humiliating behavior, e.g., and your ability to feel and act in solidarity with those suffering from it. (As when you say that you suffered from your mother’s traumatizing experience but also learned intensively how to empathize.)

I have tried to translate this into collective and my personal experience, but I would like to first give you a chance to react to what I have written so far. You know a lot about trauma. What do you think and how would you translate the options developed by the Armenian-Palestinian?

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