[Contemporary thoughts of a psychoanalyst. On some hidden consequences of "coping with the past" in relation to the national socialism era].

Abstract

Many incidents awake the old suspicions about what kind of people the Germans really are, but the media are always poised to pounce on anything which looks like a reemergence of Nazi attitudes. So from this angle Germans seem to be a society which as a whole disapproves of violence and destructive behaviour. Both these images prove to be misleading. A kind of collective reaction formation has developed in Germany: intellectuals automatically assume that one can only speak about the Germans as a whole in critical and derogatory terms. Their views have developed a collective identity in which the Nazi past and the Holocaust play a central role. This deep-rooted distrust against one's own people reveals a more or less well concealed hatred directed against oneself. In the book of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich "The Inability to Mourn", which became a kind of credo for a whole generation of thoughtful young Germans, the authors prescribed a diet of restricted perceptions and collective self-hatred. The result is: German moral thinking shows signs of a aggressive, negative ego-ideal, and one aspect of this is collective self-castigation in the sense of a latent melancholic mechanism punishing the internalised father, because the bad past seems to have been his fault.