Abstract
The young people of today’s Germany and Israel did not experience the Holocaust, not even its aftereffects as children of survivors (Bergmann & Jucovy, 1982; Danieli, 1980) or perpetrators (Bar-On, 1989). Though we may still find such aftereffects among the third generation, these are not clear-cut and extensive (Bar-On, 1994; Segev, 1992). The young can try to ignore its effects or to reconstruct it through history books, the media, or public discourse, thereby expressing the collective memory (Friedlander, 1992). They also may try to make sense of it through the memory of their parents and grandparents. This is a painful process because of the dialectical tension within memory and between memory and history, described by Pierre Nora in the opening quotation. We discussed earlier a group process through which we tried to elaborate the issues of different collective reconstruction of the past and their impact on the present social and political perspective among German and Israeli students (Bar-On, 1992; Bar-On, Hare, Brusten, & Beiner, 1993; Brendler, 1994). Since then, many new social and political changes have taken place in both countries as part of the global changes between East and West: the peace process in the Middle East, the Russian immigration to Israel, the unification of Germany, and the rise of the extreme right in Germany. We asked ourselves: What effect did these processes have on the identity-reconstruction and -formation of Israeli and German students and on their relationship to each other?
Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unconscious to its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.... At the heart of history is critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.
Nora (1989, pp. 8–9)
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Bar-On, D., Ostrovsky, T., Fromer, D. (1998). “Who Am I in Relation to My Past, in Relation to the Other?”. In: Danieli, Y. (eds) International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5567-1_6
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