Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 17
questions and memories led me back to the UK. Reflecting on this
history now, I realise that my leaving betrayed a cultural norm that
families should stick together with a common voice. I had further
irretrievably broken it by converting to Judaism and learning more
about our father’s heritage.
There is little doubt in my mind that my family is living with
the aftermath of trauma but until now I could never piece the narrative
together. The trauma of my mother’s birth coupled with my father’s
refugee and internment experiences were consciously left in Europe
but unconsciously came with them all the way to other side of the
world. While my father was still with us having different life
experiences and different opinions could just about be tolerated. With
his death, the psychic distance so optimistically travelled after the war
collapsed as the past invaded the present. As the only member of the
family who had held the thread of [his] story to the past, I was
unconsciously held responsible.
Reflecting on being told I had the personality of Hitler, I
recalled my father saying, “You know with the Nazi time everything
got turned upside down. What was lawful previously became
unlawful and what was unlawful became lawful. Nothing and nobody
could be trusted.” There are resonances with the current political
situation. In my family, it seems as though I am seen as unsettling a
much-needed equilibrium and not to be trusted. I remember when the
Berlin Wall came down my father wept but he did not understand why.
It was as if watching the wall being taken down opened him to the
pain of leaving his beloved city as a lone teenager. Until then it had
not been possible for him to take in what growing up in Berlin and
having to flee the Nazis had meant to him. Now the opportunity for
me to be in Berlin with group analytic colleagues feels like a very
special celebration to a family that has struggled with the Nazi legacy.
Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
teresa@justdialogue.com