Practitioners in identity : the impact of the German legacy of the past on the third post-war generation

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Practitioners in Identity: The Impact of the

German Legacy of the Past on the Third Post-War

Generation

Mathis Wolf

MSc. Conflict Resolution and Governance

Graduate School of Social Sciences (GSSS)

Date of Submission: 28.06.2019 Student ID: 11157844 Supervisor: Dr. David Laws Second Reader: Dr. Martijn Dekkers

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2 Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to all respondents who kindly agreed to participate in my research project and to tell me their stories. Without their voluntary

participation, this research would not exist.

I am also very thankful to my parents who have inspired me through their own stories and our many conversations to write my thesis about this topic. I consider myself very lucky to have their endless support for, and interest in, the things I do.

Moreover, my gratitude goes to Dr. David Laws who has supervised this thesis and has

greatly supported me in my struggle to make sense of the complicated puzzle I set out to solve by always having an open ear and an open door for discussing ideas.

I also would like to thank Dr. Martijn Dekkers who has kindly agreed to supervise my thesis as the second reader and who has been a very supportive teacher throughout the year of CRG.

And last but not least, I want to say thanks to all the friends I made during my year in the CRG program. The countless hours spent poring over our theses and providing moral support in “our” corner on the second floor of the library will not be forgotten. 

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Chapter I

‘Making Contact’ with the Past

When I arrived in the Netherlands for my studies in Amsterdam in September of 2015, I stayed the first three weeks at a Dutch friend of mine whom I had met during my Au Pair in Spain before the summer and who lived in a town very close to Amsterdam. While I was living at his place and desperately tried to find housing within Amsterdam, I joined my friend one night to go to a party at the house of one of his friends. Everyone at the party seemed to know each other so it was clear that I was someone new. Hence, people approached me to ask who I was and where I was from. I said “Hey, I‟m Mathis, I am from Germany” and started chatting and mingling with crowd. There was one incident, however, in making contact with the people at the party that stood out: When I told one of the Dutch guys that I was German, he smiled and in a comical way raised his arm with his hand pointing to the ceiling and said “Heil Hitler”. I froze and stared at him in shock, unable to respond. Seeing my bewildered reaction, the guy chuckled and told me “Ah, it‟s just a joke.” I did not know how to react in this situation; should I laugh about the joke or tell him that I felt uncomfortable? I thought: “I am at a party here, everybody is in a good mood and I am new. Should I really say something now or just let it pass?” In any case, I had to react in some way. So I tried to raise a smile at what was supposed to be a joke, but I could not help feeling uncomfortable because of my uncertainty of how to react appropriately. His joke was a reference to Germany‟s past; to the Nazis, the Second World War and the Holocaust. To me, it was implicit in this act of communication that Germans had done something terrible; something that this guy remembered; something that I as a German was connected to. Moreover it positioned the symbol for something I knew was terribly wrong, i.e. the Hitler greeting of the Nazis, as something funny. It seemed to me that the guy made the joke to give me a little test to see how I would react. Yet I was not sure whether he made this joke to relate to me in a friendly way because of the history that connects Germany and the Netherlands, or whether he wanted to „put me into my place‟ as a German whose country had lost the war and committed the Holocaust. Hence, the situation was ambiguous; I lacked information to interpret his behavior with certainty and so I felt left hanging in the air.

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6 This memory is one example of many situations where I have „made contact‟ with the past of Germany in my social interactions. In all these situations where, as a response to my introduction as a German, people made such references to the past, I felt a similar sensation of uneasiness. Yet, this feeling was always very diffuse and I could never put my finger on what was actually happening and why I felt the way I did in these situations. It seemed as if the German past still had a grip on me but I could not clearly articulate what it was. Thus, motivated by the desire to better understand this diffusely impalpable experience of mine, I tried to find out “what is going on here” (Goffman, 1986). Moreover, I was sure that I was not the only one who experienced such situations. Hence, I was interested in the way that other Germans in my generation would feel about these situations and how they dealt with them.

In approaching any topic of inquiry, researchers make certain assumptions about the reality that they are examining. While positivistic research assumes that observable phenomena in the social world exist external to the individual‟s perception, I chose to operate within the social-constructivist paradigm. Doing so meant to acknowledge that an understanding of the world is never truly objective but instead shaped by the constructs that individuals use to make sense of the world (Bryman, 2016). Because it is necessary for effective communication that the meaning of these artificial constructs is agreed upon, their use becomes relevant when individuals interact with others, that is, in social contexts. As such, the individual members of a community construct and co-constitute social reality through their language and behavior in social relationships (Gergen & Gergen, 2004). Assuming that social reality is relational and co-constituted by its members, focusing on the constructs that constitute it is a viable strategy to understanding aspects of it. Hence, in this research I attempted to shed light on what the legacy of the past meant to different members of the third post-war generation. My aim was to understand how Germans in my generation come to understand the meaning of the German Nazi past and their own relation to it. Moreover, exploring the ways in which the German past affected their social interactions was not only interesting for myself but is also of wider interest as this endeavor tried to better understand how instances of widespread violence can have significant social consequences long after the conflict is over.

Ruins of Memory and Identity: The German Legacy of the Past

The rise of Nazi authoritarianism in Germany; the Second World War; and the genocide of European Jews and other minority groups are commonly understood as the dark history of Germany. Especially the horrors of the concentration camps during the Holocaust, which

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MAKING CONTACT WITH THE PAST MATHIS WOLF

7 were disclosed to the international community during the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946), became a paradigmatic symbol for the monstrous crimes that human beings are capable of committing (Giesen, 2004). German society, which had previously been recognized for its culture of poets and thinkers, had transformed into a nightmarish eruption of racism, imperialist megalomania and utter destruction. As a result, millions of individuals experienced things that were so horrible and traumatizing that they could not be spoken out in the immediate aftermath of the war. Especially with regards to the Holocaust, many Germans struggled to make sense of what had happened:

“There was no way of telling a story about how it could have happened. Nobody could bear to look at the victims. All those who had devoted years of their lives to a movement [the Nazi party/the Third Reich], whose members had to consider themselves as collaborators in a mass murder, could not repair their ruined moral identity […] Everyone assumed that the others, too, had supported the Nazi regime and would therefore agree to be silent about their common shame.” (Giesen, 2004: 117)

Thus, the emotions of shame, guilt, pain or fear that both the perpetrators and the victims of violence felt as a result of their experiences, led to silence on a subjective and on a societal level. This social phenomenon has been termed the „conspiracy of silence‟ (Danieli, 1988), „coalition of silence‟ (Giesen, 2004), or the „inability to mourn‟ (Mitscherlich & Mitscherlich, 2017). Nevertheless, the silencing of stories that contained shame or guilt in favor of narratives of suffering or heroic resistance against the Nazis became an issue of conflict in Germany when the second generation –the children of the war generation– started to ask questions about the past. Thus, the individual and collective suppression of the „indescribable and undiscussable‟ (Bar-On, 1989; Bar-On, 1999) was no longer possible. Dan Bar-On (2006) argues that “silencing usually transmits the trauma to the following generation” (Bar-On, 2006, p. 37). Although he mentions that some scholars have suggested that silencing is a necessary coping mechanism for the individual to be able to function (e.g. Bretznitz, 1983), he contends that most scholars agree that “silencing becomes dysfunctional” (Ibid.), especially in later stages when the effects of physical or moral trauma are passed on to the next generation.

Since the early 20th century, research on soldiers experiencing a so-called “shell shock” and victims of violence has shown how experiences of intense fear or pain exert extreme stress on

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8 the human body and mind and, as a result, can cause the development of a post-traumatic stress disorder (Alexander, 2004). More recently, researchers have found that the symptoms of PTSD and psychosocial malfunctioning also exist in the third generation of Holocaust survivors (Scharf, 2006; Mayseless & Scharf, 2011). Their studies suggest that psychological trauma is transmitted through social interactions between parents and their children. Some research also suggests that traumatic stress can have genetic implications and thus be transmitted through biological reproduction (Yehuda, 2009). Overall, there is quite some evidence supporting the claim that incidences of widespread violence produce a legacy for subsequent generations.

In contrast to the psychological legacy that the descendants of Holocaust survivors seem to inherit, Bar-On (2006) mentions another legacy that affects those who perpetrated crimes against others. Yet, the impact of this „moral trauma‟ is hardly captured within clinical definitions of trauma such as PTSD (Bar-On, 2006, p. 15). But what then is trauma and how does this term relate to the experiences of young Germans today? The concept of trauma has been defined in quite different terms. For instance, Caruth (1995) argues that “trauma does not merely serve as a record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned” (Caruth, 1995: 151). Other scholars have defined trauma even more broadly as “a not yet (fully) accomplished learning experience” (König & Reimann, 2018: 7). Yet, what is the learning experience that needs to be accomplished if one is not the victim of violence but instead the perpetrator of a crime? According to Giesen (2004), being a perpetrator (nation) can significantly affect the identity of individuals and collectives because they are excluded from recognition by others:

“Perpetrators are human subjects who, by their own decision, dehumanized other subjects and, in doing so, did not only pervert the sovereign subjectivity of the victims but challenged also their own sacredness. Every subject needs the recognition of others for its own self-consciousness, and it is exactly this recognition that is denied to the perpetrators. If a community has to recognize that its members, instead of being heroes, have been perpetrators who violated the cultural premises of their own identity, the reference to the past is indeed traumatic.” (Giesen, 2004: 114)

Hence, in the same way that recognition is essential for the individual‟s self-consciousness, the recognition of a collective by other collectives (e.g. the recognition of German society in the international community) is crucial.

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MAKING CONTACT WITH THE PAST MATHIS WOLF

9 Research Questions

Being interested in the impact of the past, my research was guided by the following research question: How is the identity third generation post-war Germans affected by Germany’s

legacy of the past? In order to answer this question, I divided my main research question into

the following three sub-research questions:

1. How do third generation post-war Germans form an identity in relation to the German legacy of the past?

2. How is the Legacy of the Past relevant in the social interactions of third generation post-war Germans?

3. How do third generation post-war Germans cope with the impact that the German legacy of the past has on their lives?

Academic and Social Relevance

Understanding the impact of large-scale violent conflict on society

Understanding the development of identities in relation to violent conflicts

Identifying potential areas of conflict that could result from a lack of knowledge of the impact of the past and thus contribute to the prevention of future conflict

Chapter Outline

The second chapter lays out the theoretical framework in which I take a social-constructivist approach in conceptualizing identity through stories, narrative and performance. Moreover, I use structuration theory from sociology and intersubjectivity theory from psychology to explain the development of identity and the ways in which internalized social and emotional structures are relevant in social contexts. The third chapter discusses the research design and the methods used. Moreover, since I am a member of my own target group, added a fourth chapter to critically reflect on my own subjective influence on the research project. The analysis consists of two chapters then; V and VI. In chapter V I show how identity develops while in chapter VI I demonstrate how the German legacy of the past is continues to „hang around‟ in significant ways in the lives of third generation post-war Germans. Subsequently, chapter VII discusses the third sub-research question in light of the previous analysis chapters and discusses the themes that emerged from the research. Lastly, chapter VIII concludes.

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Chapter II

Making Sense of Identity: Stories, Social Structure and Emotions

In order to make sense of the impact that the German legacy of the past has on the identity of third-generation post-war Germans, I needed a theoretical lens that helped me make sense of identities and their relationship to social conflict. Hence, in this chapter I describe how I operationalized identity in my research through stories and narratives. Based on this understanding of identity, I combined structuration theory (Giddens, 1979) from sociology with intersubjectivity theory (Stolorow et al. 1994) from psychology to explain how individuals (co-)construct and reproduce identities through performances in social interactions. Moreover, the concept of organizing principles within intersubjectivity theory helps to understand the motivation of human action in social systems. Giddens‟ structuration theory has been criticized for neglecting the importance of emotions and the subconscious (Phipps, 2001).Thus, by adding the perspective of organizing principles to existing efforts to include emotions in structuration theory (see Callahan, 2004), I hope to contribute to filling a gap in the existing theory.

The Importance of Identity in Social Conflict and how to understand it: Stories, Performance, Narratives and Memory

Since the notion of the „ego identity‟ was first introduced by Erikson (1956), the concept has been used and defined by a plethora of researchers in different contexts and academic

disciplines which makes it difficult to provide an all-encompassing definition of the „thing‟ that is identity (Mishler, 2004). In my approach, I borrow from Sara Cobb (2006) who, in turn borrowing from du Toit (1996), argues that identity is a set of “stories in which we live” (Cobb, 2006, p. 298). From this perspective, reality can be seen as a stage on which social actors perform their individual roles, i.e. identities. For instance, the identity of a male or female gender is performative by “constituting the identity it is purported to be” (Butler, 2006, p. 24). In the same vein as Cobb and du Toit, Butler argues that identities are embedded in language; more specifically, that identities do not exist outside of communication: “There exists no „I‟ outside of language since identity is a signifying practice” (Salih, 2007, p. 56 as cited in Lovaas & Jenkins, 2007). Language is a means of communication between

individuals, i.e. in social interactions. Hence, Lederach (2015) provides a good addition by defining identity as “a relational dynamic that is constantly redefined” (Lederach, 2015).

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STORIES, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND EMOTIONS MATHIS WOLF

11 Together, these definitions of identity imply several underlying assumptions that are

important: The first implication is that identity is not a physical entity but an imagined idea or a story that is subject to change through a process of continuous (re-)negotiation between individuals. In connection to this, the second implication is that identity is (only) relevant in social contexts, i.e. when individuals interact and have relationships with each other. Indeed, individuals only have to identify themselves (in relation) to others as they have to be

recognized as part of the in-group or the out-group. The definition of one‟s belonging is thus dependent on drawing distinctions between the “I” (or “us) and the “other” (or “them”) along various different characteristic features of an individual (e.g. gender, age, nationality, religion, etc.). This is why identity is about belonging and group-membership, as well as about claims of status. Being a scholar of conflict transformation, Lederach (2015) argues that identities are an important factor in understanding social conflict:

“While it is rarely explicitly addressed, identity shapes and moves the expression of conflict. At the deepest level it is lodged in narratives of how people see themselves, who they are, where they come from, and what they fear they will become.” (Ibid.) 1

In arguing that identity is “lodged in narratives”, Lederach connects to Cobb‟s definition of identity by suggesting that individuals make sense of themselves in the form of stories. Within stories, narratives are the essence of the plot; they define the relationship of the involved characters/actors (e.g. the hero/the villain) and the action, that is, what is happening or has happened in the story. Moreover, the roles of hero and villain are linked to status as the hero represents the “good” while the villain represents the “bad”. As such, the narratives embedded in stories entail claims about the identity of an individual or a collective by stating “who they are, where they come from, and what they fear they will become”. Therefore, narratives that entail references to a collective triumph or a collective trauma are important for the

construction of collective identities as they are „origin myths‟ (Feldman, 1991). This implies that identity construction is always dependent on references to the past and thus on memory:

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Quotes were taken from the second chapter “Lenses of Conflict Transformation” in John Paul Lederach‟s “Little Book of Conflict Transformation” (2015) which was published on beyondintractability.org (see

https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/transformation). Unfortunately, the website showed no indication of corresponding page numbers in the book, but the passages can be found under the section “Practice 5: Develop a capacity to hear and engage the voices of identity and relationship”.

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12 “Memory supports or even creates the assumption of stability, permanence, and

continuity in distinction to the incessant change of the phenomenal world and thereby sets up a horizon, a frame [...]. Like birth and death, which set the frame for the continuity and unity of the individual existence, referring to a past as a collective triumph or a collective trauma transcends the contingent relationships between individual persons and forges them into a collective identity.” (Giesen, 2004, pp. 112,113)

In this quote, Giesen draws a parallel between the natural boundaries of birth and death, between which the individual constructs a sense of its own existence, and collective triumphs or traumas as origin myths which serve as reference points for the construction of collective identities. These liminal horizons provide a “frame” that gives a sense of “stability,

permanence, and continuity” or, in other words, thse feeling that the individual or collective is part of an ongoing (hi)story. Moreover, Giesen argues that such liminal horizons are beyond communication and experience; “what we know about birth and death is from stories about the deaths and births of others who are assumed to be like us” (Giesen, 2004, p. 113). This means that individuals get a sense of “who they are” from the memories and stories of their community members.

Being embedded in the narratives of stories, we can now understand how identity is a

relational dynamic that can explain the expression of social conflict: Individuals express their identity by telling, and at the same time performing, a story about who they are to other individuals. Yet, if the stories of others contest claims in one‟s own story, there is a

competition of claims that can potentially lead to conflict. We can regularly see this potential for conflict when different individuals or groups of individuals claim ownership of the same resources (e.g. territory), based on contested claims regarding which of them “was there first” or has a (hi)story linked to the object of contention. Especially in scenarios where monolithic identities have formed on the basis of a violent conflict in the past, that is, where the conflict is an integral part of the involved actors‟ stories, identities can become a continuous source of conflict and violence, thereby leading to a protraction of the conflict (Cobb, 2006): Based on collective narratives of victimhood, loss and despair that portray members of the in-group as victims in contrast to the hostile other (i.e. the villains/perpetrators/the “bad” ones), they legitimize further acts of violence against the other under the rationale of justice, self-defense or self-preservation (Bar-On, 2006, p. 226). Thus, it is precisely the assignment of character

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13 roles in collective narratives that are a continuous source of contention and thus a key driver of social conflict (Austin & Fischer, 2016). Hence, in order to avoid an “endless cycle of victimization and countervictimization” (Cobb, 2006, p. 294), scholars have suggested that there are so-called “better formed stories” (Sluzki, 1992) that allow for multiple different identity performances instead of being exclusive: “They either move social worlds towards emancipation and learning, building connections to others, or they contribute to hear, repression, and social isolation” (Cobb, 2006, p. 299).This is why Cobb argues that it is important to transform narratives from exclusivity to inclusivity if identity-based conflicts are to be moved towards peaceful coexistence.

Laws and Hajer (2008) argue that narrative development can be understood through the metaphor of a ball that bounces backwards and forwards and constantly adapts to new challenges (Laws & Hajer, 2008, p. 260). We can adapt this metaphor to the development of identity: With each time the ball makes contact with the floor or the walls, it picks up new layers of particles that add to it (i.e. it adapts to challenges). If we draw a parallel between the bouncy ball and an individual in a given social system: While the ball could be seen as a container that transports elements from the surrounding structures through time and space as it picks them from the surrounding structures, the individual, too, can be seen as a container that adapts to new stories and narratives as it repeatedly interacts with other social actors in its community in the process of growing up. This „making contact‟ can be understood literally and figuratively: The individual literally makes contact with other social actors, but it also figuratively makes contact with the stories, norms and routines, that is, the social structures, that are shared within the social system. Moreover, the individual reproduces the social structures in further interactions with other social actors and thus functions as a container that eventually contributes to the reproduction of the social system. In light of this metaphor, that regards identity as a construct that is shaped by interactions in a social system, I decided to use structuration theory (Giddens, 1984).

Structuration Theory

Structuration theory is a theory in social science that was developed to explain human action in social systems. Consistent with the social-constructivist paradigm that I am operating within through my conceptualization of identity through stories and performance, Giddens argues that social structures do not exist outside of (inter)actions (Giddens, 1984, p. 25). According to his theory, social structures are what shapes the behavior of social actors and, at

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14 the same time, make up the surrounding social system. Social structures consist of rules and resources. Fuchs (2003) argues that according to structuration theory, the rules and resources drawn upon in the production and reproduction of social action are at the same time the means of system reproduction: [social structures] are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors” (Giddens, 1984, p. 19 as cited in Fuchs, 2003, p. 140). Hence, structuration describes the

recursive relationship between human actions and social systems through social structures.

This process is captured in the concept of the duality of structure. More simply put, the duality of structure means that human beings are influenced by existing social structures and, as they use these structures in their social interactions with others, they reproduce the social structures, leading to a reproduction (or transformation) of the existing social system: “Man is the creator and created result of society; society and humans produce each other mutually” (Fuchs, 2003, p. 144). This relates to Laws and Hajer‟s (2008) metaphor as the individual is being shaped by the surrounding structures, but also functions as a container that serves to transport and reproduce the structures it was shaped by.

Rules of legitimation express the existing social norms by creating an “atmosphere in which things seem correct and appropriate” (Turner, 1991, p. 525 as cited in Callahan, 2004, p. 1429). Hence, legitimative rules contain information that informs an individual which behavior is considered appropriate and what is not appropriate in that specific social system. An example for a rule of legitimation would be “it is good to be on time for a meeting/it is rude to be late for a meeting”. The corresponding legitimative rule states more explicitly what counts as being on time or being late; for instance “five minutes late is still okay while ten minutes late is too late” and thus considered rude. In contrast to rules of legitimation, rules of signification are concerned with the „tools‟ of communication. Such tools include everything that humans use in their communication, for instance language use, clothing or gestures. Thus, signification rules say how the individual should communicate. In short, “legitimation is about how things should be, while signification is about how things should appear to be” (Callahan, 2004, p. 1430). Next to rules, there are two types of resources which can be used to explain power relationships (e.g. domination). These resources are authoritative and allocative. Authoritative resources allow the individual to exert power over other individuals on the basis of a formal position of authority (e.g. a teacher in school or a CEO in a company). Allocative resources, on the other hand, allow the individual to exert power over objects or „things‟ (Callahan, 2004, p. 1430).

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15 According to Callahan (2004), Giddens‟ structuration theory leaves room for unconscious emotions as catalysts but does not explain their exact function in social interactions (Turner, 1991; Callahan, 2004). Thus, he remarks that the role of emotions should be included in structuration theory and proposes emotion structuration as an addition to the existing framework:

“Emotion structuration is an attempt to reframe Giddens work to describe the elements that comprise the process of how emotions and social contexts interact and, as a result, modify each other. As a result, emotion structuration may be particularly useful in understanding the emotional dynamics of intra- and interpersonal relations in any given social context” (Callahan, 2004, p. 1428)

Emotion structuration is based on structuration theory. As such, it comprises of the same elements of rules and resources, but from the perspective of emotions. The following table summarizes the elements of emotion structuration.

(Callahan, 2004, p. 1433)

Thus, Callahan argues, in the same way that “emotion might be perceived as both structuring and structured by social systems” (Callahan, 2004, p. 1432), it seems logical to perceive that

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16 identity can be both structuring and structured by social interactions. Moreover, Callahan suggests that emotion systems (i.e. Based on the observed gap in structuration theory, I suggest adding another perspective from psychology to Callahan‟s existing effort to include emotions in structuration theory.

Intersubjectivity theory

Intersubjectivity is an emerging paradigm in psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic practice. As a theoretical perspective it embraces relational-perspectivism (Orange et al., 1997), presupposing that a patient‟s mind cannot be analyzed objectively by the therapist but that, instead, the subjectivity of both individuals informs the construction of their relationship in the social interactions between them (Stolorow et al., 1994). In other words, the interactions between the therapist and the patient resemble “an intersection of two differently organized subjectivities” (Weegman, 2001, p. 516). Thus, both the therapist and the patient co-constitute their relationship in their social interactions. Based on its assumptions about the nature of reality, intersubjectivity and easily matches with the social-constructivist paradigm that I am using by conceptualizing identity through stories, narrative, performance. Moreover, it‟s proposition that individuals establish organizing principles to order their experiences. These organizing principles are thus similar to the social structures that Giddens describes in the sense that they help order human perception of reality and inform behavior. Yet, organizing principles have a clear focus on emotions and thus add to Callahan‟s emotion structuration.

Organizing Principles

Intersubjectivity theory shares similarities with other strands of psychological theory such as self-psychology as both approaches emphasize empathy and introspection as guiding

principles. Yet, in contrast to self-psychology which focuses mainly on the concept of the selfobject, intersubjectivity theory holds that the desire to structure and organize experience is a central motive in the patterning of human action (Stolorow et al., 1994, p. 78). Therefore, scholars suggests that every person develops so-called organizing principles that are unique to each individual and help it interpret the behavior of others, thereby providing guidance in informing the individual‟s own behavior. It is important to note that this activity of structuring experience is happening unconsciously. As organizing principles operate in the unconscious, they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that an individual perceives its subjective reality as the objective reality and thus, through its actions based on its

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17 interpretation, creates that perceived reality for itself. This is why intersubjectivity theory emphasizes introspection and reflection:

“In the absence of reflection, a person is unaware of his role as a constitutive subject in elaborating his personal reality. The world in which he lives and moves presents itself as though it were something independently and objectively real. The patterning and thematizing of events that uniquely characterize his personal reality are thus seen as if they were properties of these events rather than products of his own subjective interpretations and constructions.” (Stolorow et al., 1994, p. 79)

Moreover, Orange et al. (1997) define organizing principles as “emotional conclusions a person has drawn from lifelong experience of the emotional environment” (Orange et al, 1997, p. 7). This means that organizing principles develop through repeatedly making contact with an emotional environment, that is, through interacting with other individuals in one‟s social surroundings. Moreover, Fuchs et al. (2013) refer to organizing principles as „relational affective investments‟, arguing that they “lie at the heart of individuals‟ views, whishes, and fears about relational consequences” (Fuchs et al., 2013, p. 142). Under the assumption that individuals are emotionally invested in the relationships they have with other people, this transactionist perspective suggests that individuals –like real investors– seek to protect their emotional investments and are thus wary of taking unpredictable risks. This aversion to negative social consequences, or sanctions if we look at the emotion structuration framework, is useful in explaining behavior of social actors in relationships and social interactions.

Organizing Principles and German Subjectivity

In their exploratory case study, Fuchs et al. (2013) have identified eighteen organizing

principles that they propose to capture the emotional investments of third generation post-war Germans. As emergent from their analysis, they grouped these organizing principles into clusters that formed four discursive positions or „themes of self‟(p. 151) that the young Germans, including the researcher, used in their conversations. These positions comprise of the „default‟ German; the „bad/ashamed‟ German; the „defensive‟ German; and the „good‟ German. The figure below shows an overview of the clustered organizing principles in the four positions.

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(Fuchs et al., 2013, p. 158)

According to their analysis, these positions were layered and appeared repeatedly throughout the interviews. Importantly, the different discursive positions of the “default” German; the “bad/ashamed” German; and the “defensive” German were all taken by the respondents and the researcher himself. Ultimately though, all of them tried to take the position of the “good” German as it seemed to be the most effective protection against any possible convictions from others. Hence, Fuchs et al. (2013) identify the discursive positioning during the interview as coping mechanisms that the individuals used to protect themselves against potential negative social consequences.

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MATHIS WOLF

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Chapter III

Making a Plan for studying Identity

My aim in this thesis is to contribute to understanding the impact of large-scale violence on society, in particular on subsequent generations. Therefore, this research project focused on the impact of the Second World War and the Holocaust on the identity of third generation post-war Germans. In this chapter I lay out my research design and the methods used in this project. Moreover, I discuss some possible benefits and limitations of my approach and reflect on ethical considerations, as well as my own subjective influence as a researcher who is part of the group he studied.

Research Design

Given that we understand identity as a set of stories that the individual lives in, the stories that an individual tells about itself and others are an important object of study to gain insights on the identity of the individual (Mishler, 1999). As stories are complex and unique to each individual, their full depth of detail is difficult to capture through standardized questions. Hence, a quantitative approach seemed less adequate. Instead, I required a research design that allowed for the collection of rich qualitative data. Conducting an interview study thus seemed an appropriate approach to this research project.

Because I initially had no clear idea how to describe the impact of the past on young Germans, my chosen approach was inductive and exploratory rather than a deductive. I basically lacked the words to describe what I had experienced myself and suspected others in my generation to have experienced in their lives. Being unable to put the essential pieces of the puzzle into concrete terms, this meant that the process of my data generation and analysis was not guided by the endeavor to test a premade hypothesis. Instead, motivated by a vague initial idea and my interest in the experiences of other young Germans, the data was first generated and then analyzed. Using existing theories thus helped me to make sense of the emerging themes.

What is more, I made two important choices in my research design regarding the target group of my research: First, I chose to focus on students. Second, I chose to focus on students who live abroad, i.e. in an international environment. Because I resided in Amsterdam in the

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20 Netherlands during this research project, I chose to focus on German students who live in the Netherlands. As such, my research question could be adapted to incorporate choices made:

How is the identity of German students who live in the Netherlands affected by Germany’s legacy of the past? I made these limiting decisions mainly for reasons of practical feasibility.

Yet, doing so implied a significant impact on the results of my study, which is why they should be reflected upon.

Why Focus on German Students in the Netherlands? Defining the Target Group

First and foremost, it is important to know I defined German nationality for the purpose of selecting an adequate sample of participants. Hence, all respondents were required to have the German nationality and to have been raised (for the most part) in Germany in order to qualify for my target group. However, this did not exclude the possibility that the respondents‟ parents or grandparents were from a different country. I thus asked the respondents about the nationality of their parents and the nationality of their grandparents. Being aware of such differences in the family history, I was able to explain potential differences in the respondents‟ feelings regarding the Nazi past and their personal connection to it.

Secondly, I needed to define who counts as part of the third generation of post-war Germans. As mentioned in chapter I, the grandchildren of those Germans who experienced WWII and its immediate aftermath are generally considered the third post-war generation. Yet, there exists no clearly defined age category for the third post-war generation. For lack of a concrete definition in terms of age, I limited my target group to students, assuming that they would fit the category of the third generation. Moreover, I chose to focus on students who live abroad. My underlying assumption was that living in an international environment would prompt the subjects to come in regular contact with other nationalities, implying a high exposure to national stereotypes and questions of national identity, i.e. what it means to be a German.

Of course, it is only a certain proportion of young Germans in the third generation who are students and there might as well be some German students who are not part of the third post-war generation. On top of that, only a certain fraction of all German students goes abroad and, of those that do, only a certain percentage studies in the Netherlands. The experiences of third generation Germans may thus vary greatly depending on their occupation, educational background, regional upbringing (East or West Germany), urban or rural residence, parental socio-economic background. With regard to the country of study, the specific relationship that

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METHODS MATHIS WOLF

21 the Netherlands have with Germany as a result of their roles during WWII, could significantly impact the experiences that German students make in interactions with Dutch citizens in comparison to those in other countries. Moreover, students in Amsterdam could make different experiences than students in other cities due to regional differences in the Netherlands. Incorporating all these aspects would surely provide a more sophisticated image. Doing so, however, would have gone beyond the capacity of this research project.

Limiting the focus to this very specific group of participants means that results were very context-specific. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the findings of this study cannot be of wider significance. It is often held against qualitative research that its results are highly context-dependent and cannot be formally generalized to a wider population, that is, that no predictive conclusions can be drawn from it. One can argue, however, that producing predictive theory is not a feasible objective in social science in the first place, and that it is more useful instead to view qualitative research as a process of learning and understanding (Flyvberg, 2006). In fact, Flyvberg holds that it is a mistake to dismiss qualitative case study research as useless, precisely because it is undertaken “not in the hope of proving anything, but rather in the hope of learning something!” (Eysenck, 1976, p. 9 as cited in Flyvberg, 2006, p. 422). As my motivation in this research was to learn about the experiences of my German peers and to better understand the impact that the German past has on the third post-war generation, this quote by Eysenck fittingly describes my attitude towards this research project.

Narrative Interviews

Narrative interviews are a method of scientific inquiry in which the researcher asks the respondent to tell him about a certain topic of interest in form of a story, that is, through the individual perspective of the respondent. Usually, these interviews are interested in the personal experiences and world views of the respondents and try to exert as little influence as possible (Bryman, 2016). Storytelling as a method of scientific inquiry through narrative interviews has proven very valuable for research on identity-based conflicts and reconciliatory efforts (Bar-On 1989; 2006). Narrative interviews are unstructured in the sense that the researcher does not rely on a pre-made questionnaire but instead asks open questions that have little control over the respondents‟ responses. Instead, the aim is to get a highly individual and detailed story. Nevertheless, the researcher usually has a topic in mind that guides the general focus of the interview (Weiss, 1995). Moreover, insights from previous interviews can inform questions in further interviews and thus provide some form of structure

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22 that develops as the fieldwork progresses. This method has close ties to grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1979) in the sense that the researcher starts out with few preconceptions and then develops an understanding through going back and forth between data and theory until a certain level of saturation is reached.

Data Collection

Participants were gathered randomly through snowball sampling: I first approached German students in my vicinity and on campus and then asked them whether they could put me in contact with other Germans they knew. The fieldwork was conducted in April 2018 and comprised of conducting interviews with 13 participants (N = 13); all of which have the German nationality and were raised in Germany. Some participants have lived abroad for some periods of their childhood but all of them mentioned German cities as their place of origin and upbringing. The duration of the interviews was aimed to be one hour and usually varied between 50 and 70 minutes. The data was collected through semi-structured narrative interviews and recorded with the respondents‟ consent for transcription and analysis. Except for one interview, all of the interviews were conducted in English language and needed no translation by the author. The interviews usually started out with the same demographic questions in the beginning (e.g. age, occupation, residence, nationality, nationality of parents, nationality of grandparents) and then proceeded to ask participants about personal memories of experiences through which they developed an understanding about Germany‟s „legacy of the past‟. Depending on the answers, I followed the participants into various directions of interest, including memories of and relationship with grandparents and other family members; school education; experiences while living abroad; feelings towards national symbols; feelings regarding the respondents‟ perceived relation to the German past; or contemporary politics in Germany and Europe.

Data Preparation

The interviews were recorded and transcribed as soon as possible after the interview. Moreover, I wrote short reflections on the process of the interview. Transcripts were made in true verbatim, that is, the respondents‟ answers were not paraphrased but transcribed as close to the actual recording as possible. This was important to be able to analyze subtle nuances in the respondents‟ answers. The data was then coded according to themes that emerged during the data gathering process. Subsequently, case examples were selected for the analysis and slightly edited to improve readability (e.g. cutting away extensive use of filler words such as

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METHODS MATHIS WOLF

23 “like”). Reading the analysis, it might seem a bit repetitive to the reader that I summarize the answers of the respondents while introducing terms that are relevant for the analysis. I did this, however, in order to stick as close as possible to the material since I am working with qualitative data. The transcript files remain with the author. Pseudonyms were used to protect the identity of the participants.

Limitations

As already mentioned in the definition of the target group above, the scope of this research project was limited due to capacity and time constraints. Consequently, the sample was narrowed down to a very specific group that only represents a very specific share of the third generation of post-war Germans. Including more diverse demographic factors in the selection of the target group would surely result in a more sophisticated image of the impact of the German legacy of the past on the third generation. Further research into this topic is thus encouraged to take these additional factors into account. Still, one could criticize that the results of my qualitative interview study research are too context-dependent to allow for the development of general propositions and theories. Yet, this objection can be contended as context-dependent knowledge is the precondition for any expert activity; for without it no individual could develop from a rule-based beginner to an expert (Flyvberg, 2004, p. 421). Another important aspect that should be considered is the influence that I as a researcher exerted on the results of the study. Since I am a young German who studied young Germans, my subjective perspective certainly played a role in the way I approached the topic and my research subjects during the interviews. One could consider this both a disadvantage and an advantage at the same time: On the one hand, I might be blind to aspects that other non-German researchers would have identified. On the other hand, I have a lot insight into the topic as a German myself and, based on my own experiences, might therefore be better able relate to the respondents. Consequently, it might be that young Germans were more open to me as a member of their group. Yet, precisely because of this fact they might also feel inhibited to disclose certain information; or I as a researcher might feel inhibited to ask certain sensitive questions. Thus, it is crucial to balance this source of bias through transparency and reflection regarding my role in the process of the research. Therefore, in the following chapter I reflect on the interviewing process using the field notes I produced throughout the fieldwork period (e.g. after interviews and during the transcription process).

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24 Ethical Considerations

As the research design in this project implied interactions with participants, it is important to take some ethical considerations into account. Generally, the ethics of doing research require the researcher to make sure that no participant incurs any form of harm as a consequence of participating in the research. Since the participants share personal and potentially sensitive information with the researcher, (s)he must pay attention to have the participants‟ informed consent and to protecting the anonymity of the research subjects. Therefore, I informed all respondents about the interest and the procedure of the research prior to starting the interviews. I then recorded their consent to record and transcribe the interviews and to use their answers them in my analysis. Moreover, I asked all respondents whether they wished their name to be changed to a pseudonym. Most respondents said they were indifferent, but some asked for a pseudonym to be used. Thus, for reasons of consistency, I decided to give pseudonyms to all participants. Moreover, as I saved the recorded audio files in a cloud and thus exposed them to potential concerns of data security, I made sure to not record the participants‟ names or any other information that could be linked back to their identity in the interviews. Furthermore, it is important to create a safe space for the participants to answer and to establish a relationship of trust with the respondent. This was especially important because my chosen topic of interest lied with the personal experiences and feelings of the respondents with regard to the German Nazi past. Therefore, I had to pay attention to not cause the respondents any discomfort that could affect their psychological wellbeing during and after the interview.

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Chapter IV

Learning from Practice: A Critical Reflection of the Interviewing Process

The practice of interviewing is an art form in itself (Bar-On, 2004). For any researcher, conducting field work and generating data is a process of learning. In this particular case, it is even more important to reflect on the process as I, the researcher, was a member of the group I set out to study. As such, there was a lot of potential for error, that is, “a mismatch between what I expect and what I get” (Schön, 1995 as cited in Laws, 2010, p. 600). Nevertheless, Schön argues that an error must not only be seen as a mistake that leads to a distortion of results, but can also be seen potential for surprise. As I have argued, a researcher‟s approach to a topic and his presentation of results already imply a subjective interpretation and thereby preclude the possibility of objectivity. Thus, the best way to prevent a distortion in the reader‟s understanding is to provide transparency on my own errors and to reflect on my own subjectivity in the process of my work.

Getting into Cases

One difficulty that I ran into during my fieldwork was that respondents often could not remember situations or “cases” to tell me about. I asked them to tell me about situations in which they felt “confronted” with the German legacy of the past in their social interactions. I told them that I used the term “legacy of the past” to refer to the rise and collapse of the Third Reich; the Second World War and the Holocaust. Yet, many respondents said that they never encountered situations in which they felt confronted, or that they did not recall any situations at that moment. This made me wonder whether I asked the wrong kind of questions or if my framing of the question was misleading. For instance, through asking for situations in which respondents felt “confronted” with the German past. I thought that this framing as “confrontational” could have primed the respondents in a way that they did not think of the kind of everyday situations that I thought were interesting. Subsequently, I tried to re-frame my questions as “encounters with the past” in social interactions, or situations in which the past of Germany “came up” in their family or abroad. I realized that there were different possible definitions of the topic and thus a risk of talking past each other. With regard to the art of interpersonal inquiry, Donald Schön (1991) has argued that “we inquire with each other and we inquire with each other in relation to this it that we‟re dealing with together and which we are defining in the course of inquiring with each other.” (Schön, 1991 as cited in Laws,

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26 2010, p. 598). Hence, I realized that my approach to framing the question could have been influenced by my own previous experiences; for instance the situation in the introduction in which I felt confronted the question of what it means to be German. Obviously, I then realized, this did not mean that the respondents must have made the same experiences or felt the same way about them. Another reason for the same result could have been that I told respondents before the interview about the interest of my research in identity; which is a concept that is difficult to grasp and could have influenced the imagination of the respondents with regards to the answers that they thought would be relevant for me. Weiss (1995) emphasizes that it is important not to overpower respondents with abstract concepts. I thus started to change my initial description, telling respondents that I was interested in their personal everyday experiences and memories of growing up in Germany and living abroad as Germans. This re-framing highlighted my interest in the respondents own experiences. I believe that this change had a positive effect on the data collection process.

Gender Bias? The Importance of Self-Disclosure and Trust

I also realized in the first interviews that, in my perception, the conversations with male respondents yielded better results, in terms of concrete case descriptions, than my interviews with female respondents. I thus pondered whether there could be a gender bias that influenced my results; for instance whether male respondents were more relaxed in talking to me or whether I was more relaxed in talking to male respondents than with female respondents. This made me think whether the interviews implied a sort of disclosure of sensitive information or personal insecurities that could be influenced by a difference in gender. Whatever it was, I could not really put my finger on it. It must be said, however, that as I did more interviews, I got more confident asking questions and also got better results in general. Hence, one of the potential “conditions for error” (Schön, 1991; Laws, 2010) might have been the initial vagueness of my questions rather than a gender bias. Nevertheless, the question to what extent disclosing information in interviews is influenced by gender differences is interesting and could be explored further.

Another practice I learned from my interviewing process was self-disclosure: My own recounting of situations I experienced helped the respondents relate to me and, as a result, find experiences in their own memories that related to my interest. Self-disclosure on my part was therefore a good instrument of finding suitable cases. Moreover, I learned that it was conducive to establishing a relationship of trust between the respondents and myself:

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27 Sometimes I did not know any more questions or how to ask them and thus struggled to continue with the interview. In my interview with Max, I therefore decided to stop the recording and explain to him what was going on in my mind. This took some pressure off me to be the professional researcher and also acknowledged some insecurity on my part which, I think, greatly contributed to the creation of a safe space between us. Therefore, taking breaks in the recording was not only good for the process of the interview; the exchanges during the break also gave the respondents space to come up with a case that was exactly what I was looking for. Orange and Stolorow (1998) actually argue that self-disclosure is, from an intersubjective perspective, essential in psychotherapy and should not be seen as unprofessional or detrimental to the psychoanalytic process:

Within any particular psychoanalytic situation or intersubjective field, two subjective worlds are continually self-revealing and attempting to hide. Even withholding is a form of communication. The question is what fundamental psychological convictions (emotional organizing principles) guide the content and manner of our [mutual] revealing and hiding, both witting and unwitting” (Orange & Stolorow, 1998, p. 532)

Hence, the intersubjective perspective proved not only useful as a theoretical lens to analyze my collected data, it also was valuable in informing my practice as a researcher during the data collection process itself.

Getting into Detail

Another obstacle to getting detailed case descriptions was that the respondents usually recounted their memories in a summarized fashion. This made sense because their experiences lied in the past. Therefore, the events that already been processed by the respondents and integrated it into their pool of experience not in their full complexity. If we imagine the human memory as a big shelf, to put it into a visual metaphor, the experiences or the respondents had been stored in a certain drawer of the shelf. As a result, they told me about the gist of the story in the context of their understanding, rather than the sequential unfolding of the event in its full detail. It was my challenge, therefore, to make the respondents open the drawer and unpack it. Upon realizing this challenge after several interviews, I tried to strategically ask for “irrelevant” details of their stories; for instance how the weather was like in that particular situation or how many people were present. My rationale was that this would make the respondents project themselves back into that situation;

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28 to dive into their memories more actively and to reconstruct their experiences in more detail as a result. However, the problem I encountered was that thinking about how to get more detail made me focus less on the content of what respondents told me. It was difficult to do both at the same time; to keep in mind the direction of the interview whilst listening to the respondents and reacting to what they said. Thus, I faced a dilemma in having to decide between steering the interview, that is, keeping respondents from going “off the rails”, and going along with their answers.

As I started transcribing, I realized that my desire to make the respondents give me detailed descriptions of experienced they had made, was partially self-defeating. I was anxious to get „useful‟ data and tried to get as much detail as possible. Yet, I noticed that I often interrupted the respondents by, for instance, suggesting words to help them finish a sentence when they got stuck, or by coming back to a previous question that I had still been thinking about while actually the respondents stopped talking at a very interesting point that I did not explore because I tried to get „back on track‟. Hence, by making these observations in the process of my fieldwork, I realized that my “theory of action” (Schön, 1991) (e.g. my belief that little interference would produce useful material) differed from my “theory in use” (e.g. that I often interrupted my respondents, for example with questions for detail). Consequently, I tried to be more aware of my own behavior during the interviews. It took me a while to effectively abstain from interrupting the respondents with such questions or by “supporting” the respondents with my suggestions for words when they seemed to get stuck. I usually do so in casual conversations and I realized that this behavior was not conducive to my interviews because my “help” could actually impose my own framing on the answers of the respondents and thereby distort the results of the study. Hence, although the setting of the interview was that of an informal conversation, my observations and my field notes helped me I realize how important it was to strictly stick to certain rules of interviewing, for instance, to keep waiting for at least five seconds after a respondent had stopped talking.

An important Piece to the Puzzle

One more aspect that is important to understand this thesis and its relevance more generally has to do with a part of the theoretical framework. But to explain this I have to take the reader on a small detour so bear with me. What we can see from the reflection thus far is that I encountered some difficulties during my fieldwork. However, I could not really make sense of what was going on or what the reasons were for the insecure awkwardness with which the

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29 respondents and I tended to talk about our relation to the past. I found an important piece to my puzzle when I found the exploratory study by Fuchs et al. (2013). The main author (Oliver Fuchs), himself a German, set out to better understand the emotional reactions that engaging the Nazi past invoked in him (p. 134). Being intrigued by some questions left open by a previous research, he and his co-authors analyzed their existing data anew using a psychoanalytic framework – more specifically the intersubjective approach of organizing principles (Stolorow et al., 1997; Orange et al. 1997). I was flabbergasted when I read their paper and realized that I had, unknowingly, repeated the exact same research; that is, a qualitative interview study that tried to shed light on the confusingly impalpable impact that the German past still seemed to have on young Germans today. Moreover, the fact that other researchers had embarked on the same journey as me gave me a boost in confidence. After all, it assured me that I was not just merely groping in the dark, trying to make things up that did only existed in my perception. Their thoughtful analysis helped me make sense of my puzzle in a new way, which is the reason why I included their theoretical approach in my framework.2 Moreover, considering the lack of subconscious emotion that has been ascribed to structuration theory (Callahan, 2004) I found that this psychological perspective provided a valuable addition to the sociological approach of human action in social systems.

Unfortunately, I found Fuchs et al.‟s paper only after I had conducted my interviews and could therefore not adapt my questions to test the themes they have identified and thus build on their research. Nevertheless, since their study was a secondary analysis of the same data using a different framework, I saw no problem in applying their theoretical perspective to my data even though I had already collected it and not included more specific questions that incorporated attention to the organizing principles identified by them. Overall, I believe that the data I collected in this research project supports their findings and thereby lends more weight to the claim that the topic of German subjectivity in the third post-war generation is worthy of further scientific inquiry.

As a critical objection, one could ask “so what?” and thereby question, with some legitimacy, why it should be of academic interest to examine the discomfort or uneasiness that young Germans, one of the most privileged demographic on this planet, experience while many

2_{In fact, I highly recommend reading their paper in connection with this study as my description of their work}

does not do justice to the depth and insight of their analysis. Their paper can be found at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08873267.2012.694127

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30 people in other countries are experiencing actual suffering. I will address this potential criticism in the discussion after the analysis.

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Chapter V

Learning about the Past

In this chapter, I analyze excerpts from my data in order to solve the puzzle I set out to understand. The reader recalls that the overarching research question posed in this project was: How is the identity of third generation post-war Germans affected by Germany’s legacy

of the past? In order to provide some guidance in reading, the analysis is structured in two

main parts: Chapter V seeks to answer the first sub-research question posed: How do third

generation post-war Germans form an identity in relation to the German legacy of the past?

Subsequently, Chapter VI aims to find answers to the second sub-research question: How is

the Legacy of the Past relevant in the social interactions of third generation post-war Germans? Then, in combining insights from Chapter V and VI, Chapter VII discusses the

third sub-research question: How do third generation post-war Germans cope with the impact

that the German legacy of the past has on their lives?

Before jumping into the analysis, I would like the reader to keep in mind that the material I gathered during this project was very rich in quantity, detail and complexity. Thirteen hours of conversations with intelligent and reflected individuals were certainly a pleasure for me. On the other hand, such an amount of recorded data was also quite a behemoth in terms of transcribing, identifying themes and making choices. Therefore, it was practically impossible to do justice to all the nuances in the respondents‟ answers. Moreover, I could not include all the different interesting stories and emerging themes, although I very much wished that I could have; there were simply too many leads to follow and too little time which gave me a very tough time in deciding which cases to select. Thus, there are still vast possibilities left to explore and analyze the collected data.

Different Contexts – Different Stories

After some demographic questions at the beginning of the interviews I asked my respondents how they, growing up in Germany, came to develop an understanding of Germany‟s past and what it meant for them as Germans. All respondents said that they learned about the Third Reich, the Second World War and the Holocaust through extensively dealing with the topic in school. Moreover, they learned about the past through their families, yet to a lesser extent:

Practitioners in identity : the impact of the German legacy of the past on the third post-war generation