Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 76, June 2017
Special Issue: Preparing for the Berlin Symposium
Special Issue: Preparing for the Berlin Symposium
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Germany and ‘coming home’<br />
By Robi Friedman<br />
Newsletter – Summer <strong>2017</strong> 59<br />
My first association is: “we did the journey”. By “we” I mean those<br />
who were enemies, the children of victims and the children of the<br />
perpetrators. By “the journey” I mean a complex personal/social<br />
development, which, I think, probably took 60 years; this development<br />
is a tale of transformation from hate, rejection, estrangement,<br />
revenge…to closeness, tolerance, acceptance, inclusion and<br />
eventually love. “We” have worked through hate, rejection,<br />
scapegoating and “we” have reintroduced guilt, shame and empathy.<br />
“We”, Germans and non-Germans, did the journey at the same time,<br />
we did it together, as strange as it sounds, everyone in their own way,<br />
but unconsciously connected and reciprocally influencing our<br />
emotions and relationship.<br />
Every part of the “we” did his personal and family and<br />
community work. Germans had to distance themselves from their<br />
parents, and terribly painful intergenerational conflict had to been<br />
fought to get to this point. On the other hand, I grew up with beloved<br />
family members who were traumatically hurt, in one way or another,<br />
by Germany and Germans. For many decades, many of us could not<br />
be in any way ‘neutral’ to Germany. My favourite aunt, an Auschwitz<br />
survivor, with whom I grew up, and who had lost large parts of her<br />
family, including a 3-year old son, had the most benevolent attitude:<br />
“I don’t hate Germans”. But my cousin (her second son) and me had<br />
to struggle most of our lives to turn this hate into emotions which<br />
enable dialogue and even friendship. Now “we” will meet in Germany,<br />
to make another step towards an even more productive relationship.<br />
There is no real “cure” for the rejecter and for the rejected<br />
without some kind of “coming home”. Not everyone can walk this<br />
path and we should accept that there are many ways to fill the void<br />
caused by the tragedy of WWII and the madness of a soldier’s matrix.<br />
But for those who find it important to “make the journey”, for those<br />
who are willing to meet in Berlin at the <strong>2017</strong> GASi Symposium, we<br />
look ready to struggle for the great next step in our relationships, and<br />
not only between Germans and not Germans.<br />
Robi Friedman<br />
President, GASi<br />
robif@netvision.net.il
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