Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Threads back in Time
By Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
Newsletter – Autumn 2017 13
More than eighty years ago my father tired of singing about “Jewish
traitors and scum”, walked out of morning assembly at the Goethe
Schule in Brandenburgerstraße, Berlin and was immediately expelled
for “putting himself outside of the community”. Two years later, in
the autumn of 1936, he took the train from Berlin Zoologische station
to Harwich as a lone 15-year-old to take up a scholarship at an English
public school.
I knew this story as a child but it was not possible to
understand it living on the other side of the world in New Zealand.
Growing up I realised that there was something important about
holding on to the threads of history but knowing that did not protect
me from its painful consequences. When memories are loaded with
anguish, the history seeps through a mist of incomprehensible moods
and silence inadvertently leaving subsequent generations with a
haunting that cannot be easily understood. 1 In my family a tradition
of physically moving away from one location to another made any
comprehensible telling of history even more difficult.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, we immigrated to
New Zealand “to get as far away as possible from the constraining
atmosphere of the British class system and the threat of the Cold War”.
My parents were full of optimism. My father would always delight in
looking at the globe to show NZ on the opposite side of the world from
Europe. He had made a conscious decision to break the threads to the
past: to leave the traumas of his earlier life as a Jewish refugee and
British internee behind. My mother’s history, although not so
obviously dramatic, enabled her to join him in the adventure.
My parents also had unconscious reasons to move away to
the other side of the world but these were difficult to decipher as a
child. Growing up in NZ I imagined digging a tunnel through the
centre of the earth and coming out the other side. I guess I was trying
to make sense of the unconscious message, “Don’t go back across the
ocean. You must not ‘know’ about what we want to forget”. Clues
were always there but I could not connect what lay in ‘the old country’
with life in ‘God’s own’ until I made the journey back to the UK and
1
Schwab, G., (2010). Haunting Legacies: violent histories and
transgenerational trauma. New York: Colombia