Abstract
Germany was divided by military and political force, and each Germany was absorbed into a power bloc, each in competition with the other. Two unexpected consequences follow from a psychoanalytic approach. First, these structures of power formed an unconscious defensive organization, based on ‘paranoid-schizoid’ ‘splitting’ described by Melanie Klein. Despite the humiliation of defeat, the division of Germany stabilized its identity by breaking up its idealized, illusory omnipotence and sequestering it into the two nations. This conflict embedded a symmetrical set of defences; in effect, an unconscious collusion to marginalize memory of the Holocaust. Second, the reunification of Germany disrupted this collusive defence and brought out again the need to come to terms with the Nazi period in a reality akin to Klein’s ‘depressive position’.
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Notes
- 1.
Bergmann (1997) argues that the anti-fascist policy and self-image of the GDR, along with the conviction that fascism and anti-Semitism were problems of the capitalist West, invalidate ‘the psychoanalytic model, which theorizes that something can be overcome by being worked through, does not apply to societies as a whole’ (p. 24). Not only is Bergmann’s conclusion unjustified, but also it contradicts his own historian’s explanation, which links GDR ideology with transporting culpability to the West. In fact, his conclusion implies the very defensive retreat we have been examining, based on splitting within an organized social defence, with the further implication that reunification would undermine it and bring with it the pressure identified by psychoanalysis, either to work through the past, or to find another repository for the projection .
- 2.
I cannot go into other shifts evoked by intergenerational conflict of the 1960s. They included a recognition in the FRG of German responsibility for the partition of Germany and the cleansing by the younger generation of the Nazi-tarnish of the parental generation, thus repeating the latter’s detachment from the Holocaust (Domansky , pp. 189–90).
- 3.
In my view, the Mitscherlichs have made a major contribution to understanding the structure of German society in the post-war period, based on an anticipated catastrophe of losing a narcissistic illusion of German identity. The ‘inability to mourn’ refers to an unbearable recognition of, and responsibility for, inconceivable damage to the ‘good object’, embodied both by German culture without illusion and to the victims of German perpetration. Mourning builds on and promotes ego-reality in place of ego-illusion in an ego-merger with the ego-ideal . In its reparative dimension, ego-reality bestows reality on the object in a recognition of damage to it. Reciprocally, it reinforces an ego-capacity to be better, to bear the recognition of reality and an urge to make the object better. This process can be identified by the defences against it. For recent interdisciplinary assessments of the Mitscherlich thesis, see Brockhaus (Hg.) (2008).
- 4.
‘Reunification’ does not convey the relationship between the two former states. The former FRG in effect assimilated the GDR, perpetuating a condescension towards it.
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Figlio, K. (2017). The Unconscious Division of Germany. In: Remembering as Reparation. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59591-1_8
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