"the traumatic effects of growing up among a generation of children of a perpetrator nation... I am one of the 'children of the enemy,' invoked in Ursula Duba's poem" (178)
"Moreover, it seems important to acknowledge that the German Holocaust, even though unmatched in its cold, mechanistic and industrialized machinery of death, draws on a relentless drive to subjugate or annihilate other people that reveals many affinities to Western colonialism and imperialism more generally. Ultimately one would need to ask where the drive to subjugate and annihilate the other comes from, a question that reaches beyond the scope of this article" (179)
"We know that a pervasive silence weighed on Germany after the war, bespeaking a futile attempt to avoid facing the atrocities of the war. Yet, one cannot escape collective shame and guilt and their transmission across generations. The more the acknowledgement of shame and guilt was silenced in public debates, the more they migrated into the psyche and the cultural unconscious. For the generation of perpetrators, the knowledge of the Holocaust was relegated to a 'tacit knowledge' (Polanyi) that became taboo in public debates in any but the most superficial ways. For the postwar generation, it became something like a national secret, only to be revealed as brute fact, usually in the early teens, in the cold abstraction of history lessons" (180)
"I think we need trauma discourses that look at the dynamic between victims and perpetrators and see that both of them are suffering from the psyche deformations of violent histories, albeit in different ways and with different responsibilities. Pervasive in violent histories is the transgenerational transmission of trauma or, as Abraham and Torok put it, a history of ghostly hauntings by the phantoms of a silenced past. This haunting transmission of trauma across generations will be the more narrowly defined focus of my article" (181)
"This ambivalence is not unlike the ambivalence Fanon describes about the reception of Shakespeare in colonial education. Literature, we need to remember, is a highly ambivalent and risky tool of colonization or re-education since it can so easily be appropriated for a much more critical reception than the one intended by the powers that be" (182)
"The German word Widerrede refers to one of the worst transgressions of children against their parents. The word means 'talking back' or simply 'arguing.' Thou shalt not argue with your parents' as the hallmark of German authoritarian education reaches back of course at least to the Bismarck era. However, this silencing of children took on a new quality and urgency after the war when arguing carried the threat of exposing the parents' active or passive complicity as perpetrators" (182)
"It became nearly a philosophical problem to explore whether language could become a poisonous substance" (184)
"psychoanalysis is invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived, or lived only via the detours of its narrative and psychic transmission across generations. Traumatic historical legaices may be transmitted individually via unconscious fantasies of parents and grandparents as well as collectively through the cultural unconscious. Psychoanalysts have theorized such transmission as a form of psychic haunting, arguing that both children of victims and children of perpetrators of trauma unwittingly live the ghostly legacies and secrets of their parents and parental generation" (184)
"The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok develop their concept of the crypt, that is, a psychic space fashioned to wall-in unbearable experiences, memories or secrets. Abraham talks about the 'phantom effects' that haunt the children of parents who have lived through a traumatic history" (185)
"In violent histories, the personal is inseparable from the collective and the political" (185)
"Abraham's concept of the phantom is particularly relevant for an analysis of the transmission of historical trauma through the cultural unconscious" (185)
"Finally, Beloved demonstrates that trauma cannot be healed individually but needs communal support and a joint effort to face the ghosts of the past. In order to deal with collective historical trauma, we therefore need a theoretical framework with a transindividual perspective. Abraham and Torok's concept of the phantom and of transgenerational haunting not only moves psychoanalysis beyond individual life experiences and their intrapsychic processing, it also deals with the cultural legacies or the unfinished business of one or more generations of a people and their transmission to the descendants" (185-186)
"Yet, trauma can never be completely silenced since its effects continue to operate unconsciously. Suggesting that the silence intended to cover up a traumatic event or history only leads to its unconscious transmission. Abraham speaks of a haunting that spans generations. He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic 'cult of ancestors' (as defined by Rand) that allows the dead to rest and the living to gain freedom from their ghostly hauntings. Yet, to achieve this freeing from the past requires one first to awaken the dead and to revisit the trauma. This process in fact is what we commonly call mourning" (186)
"In this case it becomes a tacit knowledge, shared by everyone yet treated like a taboo subject. People who bring it to the surface are often treated with passionate hostility as if they threatened a fragile sense of balance" (186)
"Psychoanalysis is, of course, a practice based on an ethics of contained uncovering. It works with the assumption that violent or traumatic events that are repressed or denied will continue to come back in haunting ways until there is a proper working through. The latter requires both taking responsibility for one's actions and mourning of losses. In uncovering traumatic histories, psychoanalysis at times resembles paradoxical 'unburial', that is, a digging into a community's or a nation's deadly secrets, or into the secret life of a dead person that has never been properly buried" (186)
"The exhumation of the ghosts of the past is, in other words, also indispensable for trying to avoid the repetition of traumatic history or its displacement onto other people" (187)
"Language is the first tool and mode of introjection. Abraham and Torok point out that even the starving infant is less helpless once it finds a way to voice the feeling of hunger, or once 'the empty mouth can be filled with words.' But how can one find a language for something that is unconscious? How can one tell the story of a history of which one is a protagonist without ever having experienced it directly?" (187)
"In 'Notes on the Phantom,' Abraham speaks of this language in terms of a 'staging of words' that speak traumatic experience... "We must not lose sight of the fact that to stage a word - whether metaphorically, as an alloseme, or as a cryptonym - constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm"" (187)
"The 'staging of words,' while it may contribute to socio-psychic health, is not yet a solution in itself and may, in the worst case, obscure real political processing. Traumatic narratives can become charged melancholic objects that sustain the tie to old traumatic injuries while deflecting from the urgency of addressing new violent histories in the present" (188)
"Perhaps because I have experienced the guilt of claiming a voice, I have come to believe that both the descendants of victims and the descendants of perpetrators need to break the silence. They also need to escape their mutual isolation and begin talking about their different traumatic histories together, thus creating a dialogue that may help to trace what Abraham calls 'shared or complementary phantoms'" (188)
"In his pathbreaking study on the psychology of colonialism, Ashis Nandy points to that, while the broad psychological contours of colonialism are now known, the concomitant cultural and psychological pathologies produced by colonization in the colonizing societies are less well known" (188)
"Abraham and Torok define encryptment as a psychic response to trauma in which an intolerable experience becomes walled in, silenced and removed from consciousness and the public sphere. Such intolerable experiences can occur on the side of victims who cannot face unbearable loss, humiliation, destruction, torture or genocide. They can also occur on the side of perpetrators who cannot face their own violence, guilt or shame" (189)
"Ultimately, she took revenge on me for having lost him because I did not bring him back" (191)
"Only those who dig deep into the archeology of this town's cultural unconscious can see what the plates tell without telling, the town's hidden history of genocide" (194)
