Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma

In Haunting Legacies, literary scholar Gabriele Schwab discusses the transgenerational transmission of trauma, using her own experience as a child of German parents as a starting point to discuss this matter in a wider historical, cultural, and geographical context. Schwab intervenes in the perpetrator discussion by drawing parallels between the children of perpetrators and victims and by giving the discussion on transgenerational trauma a multidirectional perspective.

The book consists of six chapters; chapters three and four are the most interesting from a perpetrator studies perspective. In chapter one (the introduction), she articulates the aim of the work as follows: “Haunting Legacies explores the psychic life of violent histories as translated into and recreated in literary texts, memoirs, and creative nonfiction” (3). The theoretical framework consists of “psychoanalysis and trauma theory as well as other critical, cultural and social theories and philosophies that work toward understanding fascism, colonialism, war, and genocide — or even more specific and widespread forms of violence such as torture, rape, and humiliation” (3). The second chapter discusses the effects of traumatic experiences on the mind and memory, as articulated in testimonies and writing, using as case studies both Holocaust memoirs and US narratives dealing with slavery and colonialism.

The third chapter concerns the legacy of second-generation children of perpetrators or perpetrator countries, in which Schwab mostly draws on her own experiences of growing up in Germany. She extends Abraham and Torok’s “phantom effects” to the titular ‘haunting’ of traumatic experiences, which occurs not just on an transgenerational, familial level (as Abraham and Torok discuss) but, as Schwab argues, also on a cultural, collective level (78). She argues that there are shared experiences between the children of both victims and perpetrators, and that a space for dialogue needs to be created in order to trace “shared or complementary phantoms” (82). For example, both can experience what Ashis Nandy calls “isomorphic oppression,” in which oppression is passed on from one generation to the next. The example Schwab uses is German parents trying to eradicate any signs of ‘otherness’ in their children, even after the war. Such a dialogue needs to be complemented by a productive, collective mourning not just for the victims but also for the perpetrators, in order to break out of what Abraham and Torok call “encryptment”: “a psychic response to trauma in which an intolerable experience becomes walled in, silenced, and removed from consciousness and the public sphere” (84). Schwab extends this notion to include “cultural or national crypts” (84). Germany’s culture of silence is then an example of a national crypt, in which the silence does not need to be literal but can also pertain to silence about certain areas or aspects which are left out of the mourning process. Mourning and acknowledgement are thus not productive on their own, but need to be accompanied by a psychosocial politics that also addresses the responsibility, complicity, and guilt, which breaks the crypt open and promotes a more open cultural environment going forward. She ends the chapter with two short personal narratives as examples of transgenerational trauma.

In the fourth chapter, Schwab addresses identity issues that can be explained with Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation,’ meaning the “hailing of subjects into specific, cultural, political, or legal positions” (92). She addresses these issues in multiple contexts (such as colonisation), including the identity issues of the post-war generation of German children, once more using her own experience as examples. These second-generation identities were shaped by internalised guilt, shame and self-hatred and often resulted in self-silencing and a rejection of the German identity. Rather than this “inner exile,” the collective needs to move towards a depressive position in which mourning and reparation can lead to a productive way of taking on responsibility for the acts of perpetration in order to move forward and address the issues of the present: that too, she argues, is the legacy of the second generation (95). Schwab takes a multidirectional perspective on the process of decolonising the mind, which is not only crucial for the victims but also for the perpetrators, both in the first generation and those that come after, in order to break down the ‘double wall’ (Dan Bar-On) that they both put up around their traumatic experiences. Once more turning to literature, Schwab advocates using the cultural imaginary for this process (for example identification with both victim and oppressor through literature), in order for victims and perpetrators (and the next generations) alike to make sense of and acknowledge their complex identities. For perpetrators, decolonising the mind would entail working through issues such as rejection of identity and idealisation of an earlier heritage to move towards an acknowledgement of one’s conflicted identity.

The fifth chapter discusses the ‘replacement child’ as a manifestation of transgenerational trauma, as the replacement child functions as a specific response to the traumatic loss of a child. The sixth chapter “analyzes torture as an illegitimate and politically dysfunctional response to political conflict” which affects not only the victim’s life but also the perpetrator’s life, family, community and country (38). Overall, Schwab discusses the various aspects of transgenerational trauma from a psychoanalytic and literary aspect, using not only literary works as her case studies to discuss these matters, but stressing also the function of literature and writing in working through these transgenerational traumas.

Author of this entry: Lotte van den Eertwegh

Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. Columbia University Press, 2010.