Gert Krell

On the long Pentecost weekend we watched the film “Auf der Suche nach dem Gedächtnis” (In Search of Memory). You may know it, and of course you know Eric Kandel, the famous Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist on whose book, which combines personal biography with the story of his scientific discoveries, it is based.

Eric Kandel’s family left Vienna in 1939, a year after the “Anschluss” and the November pogroms, when their situation had become unbearable. In an interview for German TV he said he had been afraid to cross the street, but that he crossed the Atlantic. Eric (I assume he was called Erich at the time) was nine years old when his parents sent him

and his brother to grandparents in the United States. They followed their sons six months later.

Of course, I connected Eric Kandel’s story with my recent reading of Brigitte Hamann’s book on “Hitler’s Vienna”. Eric Kandel himself established such a connection when he complained in another interview that the part of the ring road, where the University of Vienna resides, was still named after Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic popular tribune and one of Hitler’s political teachers. (A few weeks ago, I read in the papers that a group of Viennese students was trying to have this ring road section renamed, but it seemed an uphill fight.)

German industrialist Fredrich Flick

Yesterday we watched a German TV documentary about Friedrich Flick, one of Germany’s biggest tycoons of the 20th century. Flick built his first industrial empire in the 1920s and persuaded the government, with a mixture of political blackmail and financial lubrication, to save him in the crisis of 1932. They bought parts of his coal and steel works with taxpayers’ money for more than three times their worth on the stock exchange.

Friedrich Flick was heavily involved in the Nazi economy and in arms production during WW II. He was close to Hermann Göring and also a member of Heinrich Himmler’s “circle of friends,” which he supported financially. He greatly profited from “aryanization” and from forced labour, altogether increasing the value of his group fourfold between 1933 and 1943.

Flick was no. 3 on the Allies’ list of the 42 industrialists most responsible for the Nazi crimes. During the Nuremberg trials, he denied any active involvement in the Nazi era and depicted himself as a kind of involuntary fellow-traveler, even a victim in his own right. He got away with a sentence of seven years in prison, of which he only served three, and later used the mild ruling as proof of his essential innocence. The new German government and its new Western allies needed him for rearmament. Our first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, wrote to him and congratulated him on his “great and amazing life’s work.” So Flick began, even when he still was in his prison cell, to reconstruct a new financial and business empire, of which Daimler/Mercedes later became a central part for many years.

Flick had to make restitution of Jewish property, but he arranged clever deals which did not harm him too much. He never paid any compensation for forced labor. On his 70th birthday, one of his friends presented him an album of photographs from the Nuremberg trials in which he ridiculed the whole process and particularly the witnesses who had testified on the conditions in Flick’s factories during the war. By the end of the 1960s, Flick had become the richest man in Germany. He and later his son also continued the habit of (illegally) subsidizing the major political parties – the young Helmut Kohl is said to have been one of his major clients –, also trying to buy tax favours. This led to a political scandal in the 1980s and a trial in which one central manager and two cabinet ministers were (mildly) convicted.

According to the documentary, only one of Flick’s six grandchildren and heirs to his tremendous fortunes voluntarily contributed to the forced labor claims fund jointly set up by the German government and the business community in 2000 (when most of the potential claimants had already died), and another one only after public complaints had been raised about an exhibition of his collection of paintings worth several million Euro.

Eric Kandel was luckier than your mother, because his parents also survived and the family rejoined in the US. Yet even for him, the expulsion from his old Heimat and the Holocaust were traumatic experiences. In the book he writes: “In retrospect, my family was fortunate. Our suffering was trivial compared with that of millions of other Jews who had no choice but to remain in Europe under the Nazis. (…) Although my family and I lived under the Nazi regime for only a year, the bewilderment, poverty, humiliation, and fear I experienced that last year in Vienna made it a defining period of my life.” He had tears in his eyes when he said, in an interview about the film, that it was not easy to be a Jew.

In 1963, Friedrich Flick, one of the leading figures in the Nazi regime, was awarded the “Große Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband”, one of the highest decorations which the Federal Republic grants.

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Gert Krell

I fully agree with what you write. There is no excuse, philosophical, ethical, pedagogical or political, for the poisonous educational tradition of “For Your Own Good,” nor for neglect, neither in the family nor at school. But the connection between education and mass murder is more complicated. I have now read Brigitte Hamann’s excellent book “Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship,” first published in German in 1996. Dr. Hamann has done original research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna until 1913, when he moved to Munich at the age of 24.

Hamann’s book not only shows that Alice Miller was empirically wrong to some extent in her own brief study of Hitler’s family background, but also that you have to address the cultural and political situation, if you want to explain how H. became what he was; in Vienna and later in Germany, of course. What I found most ironically disturbing: as a very young man, H. was only mildly anti-Semitic at most, probably not at all. His authoritarian and conservative father was clearly against anti-Semitism. The Jewish family physician, Dr. Bloch, liked Adolf as a boy and as an adolescent and considered his love for his mother exemplary. When H. was “down and out” in Vienna, and that was almost all of his time there, he had good and friendly business connections (very small business, at or below the existential minimum) with Jews, which he esteemed.

H. always had strong and somewhat manic political views and was always intolerant of other opinions, and he had strong inhibitions and was definitely femiphobic. So he was a bit strange, but he was no psychopath. To put it differently: his political and ideological environment was at least as “psychopathic” as he was. To be sure, Vienna was one of the early global cities and had a very modern multicultural side, where science and the arts flourished. Yet in her book, Brigitte Hamann deals with the other, the “dark side” of the city: the side of prejudice, anti-intellectualism, anti-modernism, and (racial) ethnocentrism, the side of the cranks who invented the strangest theories of the world’s origins or of the history of the “Aryan race”. It was mostly this side in which H. developed his world views. Certainly, World War I and the revolutionary upheavals towards and after its end were highly relevant formative experiences as well.

The political side of Vienna (and Austria-Hungary) before the Great War was one of permanent crisis:
– fast growth and industrialisation, large migrations, wide-spread poverty and other huge social problems, class war, and a political process almost completely stalled by competing nationalisms
– a (militarist) conservative-clerical elite who were anti-Semitic to a large extent (not the monarchy), with Dr. Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor, as a new type of Christian-Social popular tribune and one of Hitler’s most important “teachers”
– banal chauvinism and anti-Semitism of the masses, particularly the “Kleinbürger” (petty bourgeoisie), and the dilemma of the Jews between assimilation, new mass migration from Eastern Europe, and Zionism (it is often said that Theodor Herzl became a Zionist because of the Dreyfus affair in France; that is only part of the story, however: Vienna’s politics and its strong anti-Semitism were at least as important)
– several radical right-wing anti-Austrian and pro-German nationalist groups who were mostly even more racist and anti-Semitic than the Christian-Social conservatives

The dwindling Liberals and the growing Social Democrats were the only more rational and basically humanistic forces. It is very saddening to see how attractive radical nationalism and even racism were not only to the far right but in slightly moderated form also to large parts of the common men and women and to parts of the elite. It seemed so attractive at the time that even some Jews accepted it – Otto Weininger being the most obvious and tragic case: he became an ardent pro-Aryan anti-Semite and committed suicide. You can find traces of it even in early Zionism.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Here’s a summary of Alice Miller’s work in the obituary the New York Times ran last week:

painting by Alice Miller

“Unable to admit the rage they feel toward their tormentors, Dr. Miller contended, these damaged children limp along through life, weighed down by depression and insecurity, and pass the abuse along to the next generation, in an unending cycle. Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions. The Stalins and the Hitlers, Dr. Miller later wrote, inflict their childhood traumas on millions.“

Corporal punishment is one form of cruelty and I suppose, as you mentioned, it can be legislated. But there are other forms of cruelty that are less overt, difficult to legislate and equally damaging. For example, attachment to a primary caregiver is critical for a child to develop empathy and to form future relationships. During the first three years of life, the track is laid in the brain for future emotional, behavioral and social functioning.

Child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry

“Children without touch, stimulation, and nurturing can literally lose the capacity to form any meaningful relationships for the rest of their lives,” writes Dr. Bruce Perry, an internationally recognized authority on brain development and children in crisis. “…There are, however, many millions of children who have some degree of impaired bonding and attachment during early childhood.” How these experiences shape the individual, Perry says, depends upon how early in life, how prolonged, and how severe the emotional neglect has been. So neglect can be as damaging as abuse.

Dr. Perry scientifically explains what Alice Miller has identified. So much more is known now about the brain and its development than when Miller was writing. Dr. Perry’s and Dr. Miller’s observations support the idea that one person can save a child by providing a safe, loving relationship. If no one loves the child, he or she may become a sociopath.

That, too, fits in with the concept of secondary injury, where the damage to a child is compounded because his feelings and his reality are not verified by some adult. Since children have so little understanding of the world, they need to know that what they see or what they feel is valid.

But the question remains, can World War II and the Holocaust be explained by upbringing?

I believe it is only part of the reason, as your psychologist friend suggests. Maybe this question is simply unanswerable…but what seems obvious to me is that we must intervene in the lives of these children at a young age to protect future generations. One program in Harlem, New York has created a school for new parents so that they don’t perpetuate the abuse cycle and they replace cruelty with love for their children. In addition, I’m hoping schools will offer more social education, cultivating empathy and emotional intelligence, thereby inoculating individuals from insensitivity that can lead to crimes against humanity.

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Gert Krell

It is interesting that you read “For Your Own Good“ in reaction to my first page. The German original, “Am Anfang war Erziehung,” was one of my favorite books in my therapy years in the early eighties. The first chapter, on “Schwarze Pädagogik” (the official English translation is “poisonous pedagogy”), establishes a strong connection between German educational theories and practices since the mid-18th century and the ideas and values of major leading Nazi figures.

Alice Miller died in mid-April, at the age of 87. She died at a time when the first Catholic bishop who was ever forced to give up his position in the Federal Republic of Germany resigned, because he had severely beaten children many years ago and had lied about it. Surprisingly, in the recent debate nobody had mentioned her, who fought against child abuse much of her adult life and who had appealed in private letters to the Vatican long ago to do more for the protection of dependants. The first two obituaries I saw did not establish the connection you instinctively did, only the third one noted the omission.

Actually, one of the obituaries viciously attacked Alice Miller for her “misrepresentation” of classical psychoanalysis, her “unrestrained simplifications”, her “almost insane interpretative monism”, and her “pathologicalization” of childhood experiences and their repression, an approach which is said to develop “openly totalitarian features” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 24, 2010, p. 36, my translations).

Can World War II and the Holocaust be explained with details from Hitler’s family background and his upbringing? Not alone, of course, if at all: the dehumanizing effects of Word War I, general cultural practices, institutions, ideologies, political dynamics, they all have to come in. But our history books are full of these aspects. Everybody knows about the importance of “The Great Depression” for the rise of the Nazis. We don’t learn much, however, about the other “great depression”, the collective psychological wounds and the urge for compensating grandiosity resulting from common family structures and educational practices which were just as important.

The real challenge to Miller’s wider theory, my good friend and psychoanalyst Martin tells me, is the fact that the great majority of the chief Nazi perpetrators and of the active fellow travellers were relatively “normal” people with “normal” childhoods and family relations. This is even more disturbing, but we need to be careful not to put all the blame on child-rearing. Norms and institutions, e.g., i.e. “bad thinking” and its institutional backing are just as and perhaps even more important.

The current scandals certainly are a vindication of Miller’s “obsession”. The Catholic Church and the liberal elite reform school in the Odenwald now openly admit that they had not properly cared for the victims, the children. “Though Shalt Not Be Aware” (the title of another famous book by Alice Miller) had literally been social practice for many years, by the institutions involved, by friends and colleagues, by the media, and by parents who could have known and even a few who knew what was going on.

You seem to sense a strain of determinism in Alice Miller’s thinking; perhaps there is. Yet she always insisted that children with harsh or non-responsive parents often find alternative sources of love and understanding, and that we can later “repair” some of our unpleasant childhood experiences with knowing and helping witnesses – “repairing” meaning “reliving” them and feeling what we were not allowed to or could not feel then, such as sadness, pain or anger, and all that in an environment of fond support. She was convinced that we can break the cycle of violence between the generations. On a personal level, I cannot agree more. I believe there is a lot of overlap between Alice Miller’s thinking and transactional analysis the way I got to know it: In TA theory, “don’t feel what you feel” is considered one of the most important and most harmful “injunctions” against the “free child”.

On her website, Alice Miller writes: “Out of 192 members of the United Nations, only 19 have so far forbidden corporal punishment of children (Germany being one of them, GK). In the USA, there still remain 20 states that allow this cruel violence against children and teenagers. (…) When in Sweden legislation laws prohibiting corporal punishment were launched in 1978, 70% of the citizens, when asked for their opinion, were against them. In 1997, the figure had dropped to 10%. These statistics show that the mentality of the Swedish population has radically changed in the course of a mere 20 years.”

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Note: We interrupt this blog to bring you Dr. Gert Krell’s speech commemorating the end of World War II, May 8,1945. Dr. Krell spoke at the Arboretum at Eschbom near Frankfurt/Main, Germany on Saturday, May 8, 2010. The Arboretum is a large park, built on a former camp for prisoners of war, with trees from many areas of the world, symbolizing understanding and reconciliation.

I.
Sixty-five years ago today, the most catastrophic military conflict in world history came to an end, at least in Europe. I assume it will really come to an end only when the generation of those who fought in it or suffered from it, and my generation, whose lives began towards its end or shortly after it, have finally gone. We still have the war in our bones, some of us literally, and we cannot get it out of our minds or souls. It may well be that I became a political scientist and peace researcher, because I was born on July 1st, 1945, and barely survived, although the war had already ended. It may sound paradoxical, but the entry “war” in the register of my text book on international relations is by far the longest.

In 1945, Germany was destroyed and completely “on the ground”. “Those who sow wind, will reap storm”, said Walter Hoffmann, the mayor of Darmstadt, in 2006, when the city commemorated the victims of the large air raid of September 11/12, 1944; the raid which also destroyed my parents’ house and almost killed them (which did not prevent my father from believing in the “Endsieg”, the “final victory”, and openly talking about it until the very end). But wasn’t it rather the other way round? Had not Nazi-Germany sowed storm and reaped wind! 3.5 million, perhaps even 5.3 million German soldiers were killed in World War II; about half a million in its final 50 days, when the war had clearly been lost already. Between 2 and 3.5 million German civilians died in air raids or during the flight from the East. But the Soviet Union had to mourn the deaths of up to 17 million soldiers and between 12 and 17 million civilians, which is more than three times the casualties of Germany by which it had been attacked. Poland lost more than half of its soldiers and up to 5 million civilians, about 3 millions of them Polish Jews. In many parts of Eastern Europe and Russia, the Wehrmacht and the SS had left scorched earth, countless villages were burnt down, their inhabitants incinerated. In the greatest single mass crime in world history, around 6 million Jews altogether were murdered. About 500,000 Germans were involved in this process of annihilation. Very many had not really been forced to involve themselves. In fact, they believed they were doing their fatherland a necessary and useful service, even if unpleasant at times. And many, many more, a clear majority of the Christian or “god-believing” Germans had actively participated in the discrimination against and the exclusion and exploitation of their Jewish countrymen and -women, had explicitly supported or at least tolerated all that without opposition.

II.
Hardly any other country has dealt so intensively with its dark past and its enormous guilt as Germany has since 1945, and with ample reason. Those who publicly address war crimes in Japan, which are sometimes even officially denied until today, must expect to be visited and attacked by right-wing thugs. For decades, Austria had depicted itself as the first victim of German aggression; a serious working-through its active contribution to the war and the terror of the Nazi regime only began in the 1990s. Major parts of the Italian people have a very relaxed relationship to Mussolini. In France, collaboration had been a taboo for many, many years, and the war crimes in Algeria still are to some extent. In and during the Vietnam War, in which the US army committed several massacres of unarmed civilians, hardly any of the responsible officers were ever called to account, even if they had openly given orders to kill indiscriminately.

But Germany, which had by far the strongest reasons to take an honest look in the mirror, also tried to avoid it. A large number of the perpetrators and mass murderers not only survived, they even remained completely undisturbed. In sharp contrast to the survivors among their victims, they successfully continued their lives and careers as if nothing had happened. Not only were their crimes not prosecuted, they did not even feel guilty. Other supporters or many fellow-travelers of the regime at least felt bad about what “had happened”, but they eased their conscience by blaming Adolf Hitler, the Nazi elite, and the SS, who were responsible for all the misdeeds and had lead the others astray. It took a long time until it was clear, and an even longer time until it was accepted that almost all institutions had been actively and sometimes even proactively involved: the judiciary, trade and industry, the universities, the professional associations, the sports associations, the army, and even the churches to a large extent.

What a turmoil the first exhibition critical of the Wehrmacht had created even as late as 1995! “The German soldier, in loyalty to his oath and with the fullest possible commitment to his people, has achieved things which will never be forgotten”, the last report of the supreme command of the Wehrmacht had stated in May 1945. Today, with few exceptions, the Germans have realized that not only the singular misdeeds of their army, the SD and the SS during the war but that the war itself was a singularly huge, unforgettable and unforgivable German crime. As we know from many letters and notes, the German soldiers had always been aware of what they were doing:

“Die Juden ermordet,
als brüllende Horde
nach Russland marschiert,
die Menschen geknebelt,
im Blute gesäbelt,
vom Clowne geführt,
sind wir die Gesandten
des allwärts Bekannten
und waten im Blut.
Wir tragen die Fahnen
der arischen Ahnen:
sie stehen uns gut.“

(Murdered the Jews,
marched into Russia
as a roaring mob,
gagged the people,
hacking away in blood,
lead by a clown,
we are the missionaries
of the one known everywhere,
wading in blood.
We carry the flags
of our Aryan ancestors:
they suit us well.”)

Thus rhymed Willy Peter Reese, who was killed in action in June 1944 and who left behind not only poems and letters but also a secret detailed report from the war.

III.
How was it possible that a large majority of the German people in Hitler’s “supported dictatorship” got so completely lost morally? That they took pleasure in belonging to a “master race” and assumed that certain groups or people were of “inferior value” or even did not deserve to live? That they really believed in the crazy idea that the Jews were a threat which had to be forestalled by exclusion, expulsion, and – if need be – extermination? Was it because of “poisonous pedagogy”, the centuries-old tradition of harsh, violent, humiliating and debasing child-rearing in Germany? Such as the impressive and depressing film “The White Ribbon” seems to suggest and as Alice Miller, the recently deceased childhood researcher and combative champion of a non-violent education, has always claimed?

To be sure, there are many connections between certain educational traditions and an urge for power over others and a readiness to resort to violence. But this relationship is not obvious enough to provide a satisfying answer to the questions posed and thus a clue to successful prevention. A large number of countries had educational traditions not much less “poisonous” than in Germany and its predecessors, but they were not involved in comparable collective mass crimes. American and German research into the mass murderers is even more disturbing than Alice Miller’s thesis: By far the most of them were quite normal adults, not different psychologically from the fellow-travelers or even from their victims. As social-psychological experiments in several countries have shown, it does not take very much to get a majority of people to kill or at least to involve themselves in the killing of another human being. Very important factors are the moral frames of reference and the social setting, and are the institutions which guide human behavior and extend or constrain latitudes of action. Much of what we abhor in war and in specific crimes of war is much closer to everyday life than we really want. As the recently discovered abuse scandals or the financial crisis demonstrate, moral standards are easily suspended even in peace, even if they are generally accepted and un¬controversial: because internal institutional controls don’t work, because everybody seems to be doing it, because it does not seem to create problems, rather grant psychological or mate¬rial profit or avoid loss of stature and standing.

No doubt, we must not train our children and our youths into simple schemes of order and obedience. Democracies need people who have learned to accept personal responsibility for what they are doing. Not like Adolf Eichmann, who admitted in his testimony that he would certainly have shown the courage not to obey, if he had been ordered to do so. To be able to act responsibly, we also need stable and enduring moral norms which we do not and cannot adjust opportunistically. The miserable center of the Nazi ideology was the distinction between a “superior” group of those who belonged and “inferior” groups of those who didn’t, were the morals of a fictitious pseudo-biological master race which found it necessary to eliminate so called “inferior life”, to put what they called “Volksschädlinge” (persons “harmful to the German people”) “out of action” and to expel and finally annihilate the Jewish and other “Untermenschen”. Mass murder began in their minds, in their thinking. Against all this we consider it to be self-evident that the dignity of man, and that means all human beings, is inviolable. This norm is the basis of our constitution, of course. It is a norm which we all need to keep in our hearts and minds. But it is also a norm which must be lived in all institutions and in all social arrangements. We are still far away from that.

IV.
World War II holds another important lesson for us. Albert Einstein, one of the foremost pacifists of the 20th century, was also one of the very few intellectuals who understood what Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 really meant: a declaration of war against Europe and against the Jews. Einstein almost desperately tried to convince the public in Western Europe that it was necessary to build an effective deterrence against Germany, if it wanted to preserve a chance to avoid war at all. He found hardly any support, his old pacifist companions even accused him of treason. The maxim that one could not solve conflicts through war (a phrase often used in Germany these days in the debate about Afghanistan) certainly would not have been a consolation to those who were attacked from 1938/1939 on. And not all soldiers are murderers. (Another phrase used by radical pacifists in Germany today. It had been coined by Kurt Tucholsky after World War I. I am convinced he would have retracted it had he lived to see World War II and not committed suicide in 1935 in exile.) Those who cannot see the difference between the actions of the Jewish Bielski brothers on the one hand, who went to live in the forests as armed partisans with hundreds of civilians, in order to protect them and to fight against the “roaring mob” of the Germans, and the soldiers of the Wehrmacht or the SS on the other, who chased the Jews and burnt down the Belorussian villages including their inhabitants, should not be surprised that hardly anybody outside of Germany will take such a Pacifism seriously.

Of course we must strive to overcome the human habit of war. That is by no means impossible, but we cannot do it overnight; 65 years have not been enough. As more recent experience has confirmed, we will encounter – on our long way to a world without military violence – difficult situations in which endangered groups of people cannot be denied their right to defend themselves, or in which other endangered people may need and deserve support from outside. Under what conditions and how, are very serious and complicated moral, analytical and practical questions which need to be discussed openly and democratically. One thing we do know, however. Today it is no longer enough to say: “si vis pacem, para bellum” (if you want peace, you must prepare for war) – although even that is far away from the Nazi program of conquest, repression, and extermination. Today we know that we must prepare for peace, if we want peace: si vis pacem, para pacem. That’s why we are standing here, commemorating the end of World War II.

email for Dr. Gert Krell: mail@gert-krell.de

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Fern Schumer Chapman

These scandals are deeply disturbing on many levels. Of course, I feel for those who live with the memory of these traumas. In addition, it raises fundamental questions of why an individual would engage in harsh and humiliating treatment of children. In turn, I worry about how these children will re-enact these experiences when they become adults, thereby perpetuating the cycle of abuse.

I have been reading Alice Miller’s work, For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence. She summarizes her observations in this statement: “The scorn and abuse directed at the helpless child as well as the suppression of vitality, creativity, and feeling in the child and in oneself permeate so many areas of our life that we hardly notice it anymore. Almost everywhere we find the effort.to rid ourselves as quickly as possible of the child within us –i.e. the weak, helpless, dependent creature – in order to become an independent, competent adult deserving of respect. When we reencounter this creature in our children, we persecute it with the same measures once used on ourselves. And this is what we are accustomed to call “child-rearing.”

She claims that this practice, which has been reinforced by the tenets of some churches, has broad ramifications, particularly if the abused individual doesn’t have a person in whom he could confide his true feelings. Miller believes that the repetition compulsion of this behavior can lead to horrific acts of cruelty such as what occurred in Nazi Germany.

“People with any sensitivity cannot be turned into mass murderers overnight,” Miller writes. “But the men and women who carried out ‘the final

psychiatrist and author Alice Miller

solution’ did not let their feelings stand in their way for the simple reason that they had been raised from infancy not to have any feeling of their own but to experience their parents’ wishes as their own. These were people who, as children, had been proud of being tough and not crying, of carrying out all their duties ‘gladly’ of not being afraid – that is, at bottom of not having an inner life at all.”

While I certainly subscribe to some of her thinking, there is a frightening lack of free will in her beliefs. If our behavior is so psychologically driven and predetermined, there is little accommodation for individual experience and choice.

What do you think?

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Gert Krell

Germany has literally been swamped by reports about physical and sexual abuse in educational and other institutions for children. Most of the reports concern incidents from the 1950s up to the 1980s, with quite a few reaching into the 1990s and the new century. Most but by no means all of the offenders were Catholic priests and even a few nuns, but Protestant and non-religious institutions have their fair or rather unfair share in the scandals, which include boarding-schools for well-known choirs, even one famous very liberal and elitist reform school, orphanages or homes for “problem children”.

Many people, some about my age or older, now speak up. Once again we are confronted with a legacy from the Nazi era reaching further back into a dark past: Germany’s tradition of extremely harsh and humiliating treatment of children (see our blog “The White Ribbon”). The sexual abuse in a major liberal educational institution is particularly disappointing.

As in many other respects, 1945 was not the radical break with deeply ingrained mentalities and practices in Germany which it sometimes seemed to be. As late as 1988, one of our highest courts had declared corporal punishment permissible, even beating with a “stick-like device” should not be condemned in general! Only in 2000, a new law finally stated clearly that children had a right to an education free of violence. Sexual abuse is a different story; it has always been illegal, of course.

The Catholic Church has sinned in both areas, and it has great problems addressing its current crisis. To be sure, there are a few signs of genuine concern and goodwill, but many of the reactions from the hierarchy here in Germany and from Rome are seriously wanting in credibility or even highly misplaced. German bishops have attributed the failures of the Church to the “sexual revolution” in the media, compared the debate with the agitation by the Nazis against their religion, or accused victims who went public of detracting from the faith. In one particularly outrageous statement, a high-ranking priest in Rome compared recent criticism against his Church with anti-Semitism.

Will the Catholic Church, which has faced and is still facing similar revelations in the United States, in Ireland, in Australia or in Austria, address the structural causes of its debacle such as its completely out-dated and hypocritical sexual morals (many priests have long-standing relationships with women which the Church tolerates as long as they remain concealed and unofficial) including its outrageous position on homosexuality, compulsory celibacy for priests, male dominance, and secluded decision-making? Many experts doubt it.

In one of the revelations in Germany, six men and women have independently accused one bishop that he had repeatedly maltreated them when they were young inmates in a Catholic home for orphans run by nuns and he was the town’s priest responsible for them. He denies that he ever used violence against children, and offers his accusers “spiritual support”.

The secretary of the German Bishops’ Conference says he believes him and that it was a situation of “his word against hers”. He literally used the phrase “Aussage gegen Aussage”, which means one statement against one opposite statement. Did he have to take that position, implicating that the six other Catholics, who had made their statements in lieu of oaths, were liars? The least he could have done was to admit that it was one word against six.

I had met this man as a young priest in my peace research years, in a group discussing arms control issues for a commission of Justitia et Pax, a more liberal Catholic lay organization. I had thought he was a man of integrity then.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Your entry reminds me of a line I think Jimmy Carter once said when he was president: “Corporations are only as good as the people who run them.”

Organized religion, like a corporation, is an institution. While religious institutions have a moral infrastructure, people determine the church’s or synagogue’s political positions. Therefore, even these sacred institutions are limited by human nature. As you point out in the last sentence of your most recent blog, even the best intentions can be corrupted.

Nazi Germany, recent scandals in the Catholic Church, and even the celebration of Confederate History Month in this country are reminders that we must be vigilant, carefully analyzing the forces, from religion to politics, that shape us. Sometimes it’s difficult to see what’s right in front of us and what will develop. And history isn’t always a reliable guide.

Often, ugly chapters of history are revised to suit political perspectives or a country’s identity. In America, for example, a huge debate ensued recently because Virginia issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month. The governor’s declaration honored “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens” without ever acknowledging slavery.

The governor apologized only after his own black supporters and the media pointed out the insult and pressured him to recant. But one newspaper pundit, Frank Rich of the New York Times, claimed that this was not an innocent mistake; it was part of “the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government.”

What actually happens is one part of the story. Who interprets the story is another.

I’m reminded of the blurb Rabbi David Wolpe wrote for my first book: “Motherland is a beautiful act of reclamation. In these gripping pages, we learn again that how we remember determines who we are.”

How we remember determines who we are.

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Gert Krell

A few days after I sent you my last page, I dreamt I was standing in a room with two other men who sat at a table. One of them made bad remarks about Protestantism. I protested and put a microphone on the table, warning him that I would record his statements, if he went on. When he did not stop his attacks, I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, pulled him out of his chair and pushed him out of the room.

So Protestantism may be a stronger part of my identity than I have been willing to admit. On the rational level, I sympathize with the rebellious as well as the individualistic parts in its tradition, and I see it more open to other philosophical and religious discourses than Catholicism. I know that there is a strong authoritarian element in Protestantism as well (see “The White Ribbon”). And Protestants were more likely to support the Nazis than Catholics, perhaps because Protestantism was doctrinally less cohesive and had less of its own strong supranational hierarchy. And of course I am also aware of the strong anti-Semitic current in the history of Protestantism.

On the other hand, “my” Church was among the first institutions, probably the first in post-war Germany to accept and admit that it had failed and burdened itself with tremendous guilt during the Nazi era, and it demanded reconciliation with “the East” very early, which also meant accepting the territorial results of the Second World War and the losses of Germany’s Eastern provinces. (Which would appear self-evident, but wasn’t at the time.)

While I still feel connected to Protestantism, I also consider myself a religious cosmopolitan who tries to see the good and the bad in all major denominations. I do not rejoice at the current crisis of the Catholic Church, but I tend to agree with critics who now consider it a “spent force” in the developed world, because of its inability to reform. Its sclerotic male hierarchy is quickly giving away whatever credibility it may still have had, the German pope included. I have always felt that Benedict XVI represented one of Germany’s unpleasant traditions: Teutonic rigidity.

I feel much closer to core elements in the Jewish religious and cultural tradition, such as you have described them, although Jewish orthodoxy is completely alien to my way of life and thinking. (There are other reasons for my empathy with the Jewish experience, political as well as personal.) Working for a better world is part of my post-war national German identity, too.

Even this is not without risk. “Good Germans” sometimes hold arrogant “Gutmensch” positions vis-a-vis others who apparently have not seen the light yet, which can be extremely embarrassing in criticism of Israel, e.g. And, as I had to learn in my own intellectual and political development, even ideas of improving the world may subvert the best intentions and turn into a murderous ideology.

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Judaism's big tent

Fern Schumer Chapman

Our conversation is giving me lots to think about, too. Any belief system must be instilled in children at a young age…otherwise, it simply doesn’t take. The idea of a loving or omnipotent God is completely foreign to me, simply beyond my understanding.

Therefore, I can’t even debate his (or her) existence. I see that religion and God play an important role in other people’s lives and I do not judge them. But for me, it’s simply not part of my worldview.

After I wrote Motherland and began to fully comprehend the accumulated losses of my life – family members, personal history and family stories, religion – many people asked me if I would join a synagogue and begin to practice Judaism now. That was too much of a stretch for me. I didn’t know where to begin and I don’t think I could feel authentic as a practicing Jew.

But, as I said earlier, I define myself through other aspects of Judaism. It is unfortunate that the Holocaust is one of those aspects. Yet, given that I am the daughter of a survivor/refugee and I have told her story in two books, it would be impossible not to define myself through that experience. Unfortunately, I have suffered the emotional fallout as well since that trauma has been transmitted to me. Consequently I have had to investigate and understand the history and psychology of this legacy. I try hard to keep this part of my identity in check since I don’t want to define myself through anger and losses. But, I am aware of these forces in my life.

I also embrace Judaism’s teachings. For example, I have tried to give my children some of what I value in Jewish culture. For example, nothing was more important in my family than education – from school to music. That is true in many Jewish homes. When my husband learned to read at the age of five, his grandmother dipped her fingers in honey and touched his lips so that he would remember the sweetness of learning.

In addition, my parents taught me that I have a responsibility to leave the world a better place. My father instilled the idea that I must make some contribution, that what matters is how I live my life on earth (since Jews are primarily focused on life here and now rather than on the afterlife.) That philosophy complements the Judaic concept that we must contribute to social justice. “Tikkun olam” is a Hebrew phrase that literally means “world repair” and serves as a call to social action for Jews, to make whole what is broken. For centuries, Jewish religious leaders have emphasized this philosophy. For example, Hillel, 30 B.C.–A.D. 10, is known for the “golden rule“ handed down from generation to generation: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.“ He also said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”

So you see I have cobbled together a philosophy and an identity from loose religious principles and a fragmented past. My husband, who was raised in a more cohesive Jewish home, often assures me that my “Judaic“ worldview is just fine.

“Judaism,“ he says, “is a big tent.“

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