Page 62 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

S E X AND FAMILY HISTORY
Perhaps more central to this film cycle, the Mitscherlichs began to investigate the aggregate effects of
uncathected guilt on later generations and the apparent inability of the children to adequately process
their inheritance:

With a shrug of their shoulders the young repudiate any imputation of responsibility for
the infamous behaviour of their elders. Of course, identification with the parent, and with
the problems connected with the parents' sense of guilt, continues to operate unconsciously.
Anyone, anywhere, who dares oppose the political views of these young people is promptly
branded as a 'fascist'.17

Subsequent studies of post-war family dynamics, most of which were published in the 1980s,
confirmed this 'second generation syndrome' — the guilt that comes with being the child or grandchild
of Nazi perpetrators and collaborators. Noting that patents and grandparents hid from their children
those ghastly, but formative, stories of World War Two, psychologist Sammy Speier claimed that
the conjunction of historical denial and parental amnesia had, in effect, created the '"don't care"
generation' who seemed to be without a past or future. The erasure of family history had produced a
psychic and narrative vacuum in the subsequent generations:

Since Auschwitz there is no longer any narrative tradition, and hardly any parents and
grandparents are left who will take their children on their lap and tell them about their lives
in the old days. ... Nowadays, however, the parents' and grandparents' repertoire of stories is
no longer made up of'simple' war and adventure stories, but rather of questionable, shameful,
even dangerous and horrible stories, which can drive you insane.18

Faced with either apathy or psychosis, second generation patients abided by the 'rule of abstinence'
to avert the difficult confrontation with an unreal reality. It became clear to Speier that Freud's
ahistorical family romance and the univetsal enigma of sexual difference were alone no longer
sufficient to explain the founding trauma of German citizenship:

It is easier to talk with patients in psychoanalysis about the bedroom than about the gas
chamber. However, the formula, 'that's oedipal', does not make the repressed reality of Ausch-
witz disappear.19

On the surface, generational animosity had become pointedly political, but this conflict, psychologists
argued, was in fact constitutive of suppressed inherited culpability. 'In the psyches of those born after
1945', write Barbara Heimannsberg and Christoph Schmidt, 'diffuse anxiety and feelings of guilt can
be the half-erased traces of the Nazi past. ... [M]any Nazi values were retained and unconsciously
passed on to the next generation - as were the traumas.'20 Driven by the quest to discover, decode
and decontaminate the psychic engrams of Nazism, psychotherapists emphasised that sexuality and

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