Page 63 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

family dynamics were inseparable from the history that bore them, and these connections needed to
be articulated through individual and group therapy. The quest for self knowledge would necessitate
a confrontation with history, and historical knowledge would be bound to the story of one's own
origins.
In order to comprehend their individual and national past, the children and grandchildren of
Nazi-era Germans had to recover these lost family narratives, a process that always threatened to make
strangers out of fathers, mothers and grandparents, and to create corrosive cycles of suspicion between
the generations. While, in the immediate post-war years, children and parents colluded to put the past
behind them, the public debate surrounding the 1964 Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt brought to public
attention that former Nazis were comfortably ensconced in the post-war bureaucracy. Student activists
took to the street to protest the Vietnam war and fascist, capitalist foreign governments. In Germany,
they targeted former Nazis who held positions in the police and judicial system. Nationwide student
demonstrations against the court proceedings of the 1967 Ohnesorg shooting and the assassination
attempt against SDS leader Rudi Dutschke culminated in the radical terrorism of the 1970s and the
protracted trials against the self-proclaimed leftist militant Fritz Teufel. The incidents of German
police brutality led not a few 'sixty-eighters' to conclude that the generation who had persecuted the
Jews had now turned their violent conservatism against their own children.21
At home, students became suspicious of their own parents. In his study of parent biographies - the
posthumous stories of Nazi parents written by their children - Michael Schneider finds that what
seems at first to be authors' political programme of revealing the German past through family history
is 'to a much greater extent, an interest in their own beginnings'. He continues:

The preoccupation with the political pasts of the parents, therefore, has a surrogate function,
and in some cases a retaliatory one - the child strikes out against the Nazi, but is really aiming
at the parent from whom he or she did not receive enough attention and love."

What is interesting in Schneider's account of these biographies are the recurring patterns of discovery
and blame. Children stumble upon their fathers' incriminating letters, photographs and diaries, and
are forced to reconcile the discrepancy between the man at the dinner table and the one photographed
in a Nazi uniform. Even when no concrete evidence presented itself, the children would look for
symptoms of guilt in their parents; slips of the tongue, strange ticks and quirks made all parents
suspicious in this new psychopathology of German everyday life. Repulsed by, but always seeking
to discover, the 'Nazi phantom-figures of their father', this generation was haunted, like latterday
Hamlets, by a kind of Nazi gothic. In Schneider's analysis, this search for criminal symptoms and will
to public protest was itself symptomatic of concealed longings and subjective motivations:

These radicalised sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie who took to the streets with flags
unfurled, clenched fists and political demands, were simultaneously protesting against
something else which could not be conceptualised in political or economic terms - namely,
the emotional deficits from which they were suffering because of childhoods wasted in
restrictive living conditions and numb joylessness.23

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