HAMBURG (dpa) – Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of children were affected.
The traumas, fears and terror which their parents suffered during World War II also burdened their children in the postwar era. Often, the results were psychological problems.
This phenomenon was first recognised among the children of concentration camp survivors and scientifically studied in the United States and Israel.
But now, psychotherapist Astrid von Friesen has for the first time examined the delayed effects of war-time traumas on the second generation of Germans whose parents and families either fled or were expelled from their home regions toward the end of World War II.
The families of Friesen’s parents came from the Saxony region of eastern Germany. Now the 48-year-old has set up a workshop in Dresden for people to meet and talk about their own situations.
Discussion starts with her book “Der lange Abschied” (The Long Farewell) in which for the first time men and women who were either children at war’s end, or were the next generation, speak about things they never told their parents.
In an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Astrid von Friesen said she only first came to the realisation late in her own life that she is among those affected.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the collapse of communist East Germany soon afterwards, her parents paid their first visit since the end of the war to Saxony.
She noticed how her parents returned somehow different after again seeing the homes, villages and landscapes of their childhood and visited family grave plots. The parents’ previous depressed mood had vanished – and it was only then that she realised that she herself had been an emigrant in western Germany all her life.
“As a child I always strongly felt the guilt of the Germans. I was very conscious of it as a ten-year-old,” Friesen said.
“So I always had the feeling that we weren’t allowed to be sad about our lost homeland or about how our relatives were mistreated, because we Germans had subjected the Jews and other people to endless suffering,” she said.
“It was taboo to have such a feeling.”
But in 1994 at a congress in Hamburg, there came an ironic twist: whereas Jewish delegates encouraged her to speak about it, German therapists protested that she could not be permitted to apply the second-generation syndrome, with its origins in the Holocaust, to Germans themselves.
Friesen said Israelis at the congress stood up and encouraged her to continue with her work and told her that this was by no means an exclusively Jewish problem.
Her book also examines another taboo subject: the problems of the nobility in eastern Germany. The problems were largely identical with those of most of the 12 million German refugees and expellees of 1945, but there were some significant differences as well.
Above all, there was the massive discrimination they faced in communist East Germany after the war. But those living in the west also heard themselves being negatively referred to as “Junkers” – the old Prussian military class – and made to feel unwelcome.
The children of the war refugees and expellees initially faced very specific burdens – no roof over their heads, torn from their original home roots, strangers in the west because of their dialect, and for many years, very poor.
The psychological effects of these burdens often only became visible in later years. Many of the cases of depression and other suffering among young people in postwar West Germany could well have been the result of the refugee traumas, but were not recognised as such at the time.
Many children had secret assignments, a term psychologists use. For example, many forced themselves into a behaviour which would help stabilise the marriage of their traumatised parents.
Others had the task, either openly or implicitly given them by the mother, to be a replacement for their dead father.
But there were other burdens to the children’s psyches as well. In one of the seven interviews which makes up the core of Friesen’s book, there’s the statement: “My family never said, ‘now let’s do something new’. Instead, they lived in the past and from the past.”
With such an attitude, many refugee families always lived provisionally and never adapted to life in the west, the interviewee said.
Other children suffered from the excessive efforts by their parents trying to start life anew. These children were put under extreme pressure to study hard in school.
Children also found themselves caught in between the tough reality of their parents’ lives and the idealised memories their parents had preserved of their lost homelands.
In other families, there was the atmosphere of revenge – parents’ fantasies of one day getting even with those who had expelled them – and even downright hatred.
One variation in the way the refugee generation dealt with their new circumstances was simple resignation, coupled with depression and addictions.
As Friesen’s book makes clear, the refugee and expellee families suffered special problems – in many cases, multiple traumas – which were different from those of the Germans who, though defeated at war’s end, were at least still connected with their home roots.
