Holocaust successor generation

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Yehuda Poliker's self-testimony in Villa Wannsee .

The Holocaust successor generation , sometimes also called the Second Holocaust Generation , is the term used to describe children born to survivors of the Holocaust after the National Socialist genocide . In the first decades after the end of the war, the discussion about the Holocaust was generally suppressed . This population group has been the subject of scientific research since the 1960s, and since the mid-1970s it has been increasingly addressed artistically.

historical overview

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, there was neither the willingness nor the ability to deal with the catastrophe of the annihilation of millions of people. Survivors, who had often become emigrants, tried first and foremost to adapt linguistically and culturally to their new surroundings, to find a livelihood and to build a new network of relationships, and refused, both in public and in the family environment, to to report on their war experiences. However, efforts have been made to break this silence since the early 1960s. Josef Rosensaft (1911–1975) founded a Bergen-Belsen youth magazine in 1965 and called on the children of survivors from Bergen-Belsen to take part in commemorative events. During the Eichmann Trial as well as before the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War , when fears of a new impending mass extermination were voiced in Israel, there were talks with Holocaust survivors, but without the significance of the Holocaust for the children was raised by survivors.

In the course of the civil rights movement in the USA, awareness began to develop among children of Holocaust survivors at American universities in the 1970s. An article by Helen Epstein on the children of Holocaust survivors, published in The New York Times on June 19, 1977 , attracted international attention. Since then, over a hundred dissertations have been published on the psychological effects of childhood as a descendant of Holocaust survivors.

The American television series Holocaust - The History of the Weiss Family generated enormous public response in Germany from 1979 onwards and initiated a previously unprecedented, broad discussion.

Among the literary works by children of Holocaust survivors is the comic Mouse - The Story of a Survivor by Art Spiegelman . In the late 1980s, Israeli singers Shlomo Artzi and Yehuda Poliker released songs that addressed the Holocaust. The artistic exploration of the subject will continue in the 21st century, remembering the buildings by the architect Daniel Libeskind .

A major step in the public recognition of the dignity of Holocaust survivors came with the broadcast of the 1985 film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann . In the late 1980s, the Amcha organization was founded in Israel , with a branch in Amcha Germany . This association provides psychosocial help for Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hillel Klein: Survival and Attempts at Resuscitation. Psychoanalytic studies with survivors of the Shoah and with their families in Israel and in the Diaspora . Foreword by Yehuda Bauer . Ed .: Christoph Biermann, Carl Nedelmann (=  supplements to the yearbook of psychoanalysis . Volume 20 ). 2nd Edition. Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-7728-2562-0 .
  2. ↑ Natan PF Kellermann: 'Inherited trauma'. The conceptualization of the transgenerational transmission of trauma . In: Tel Aviver yearbook for German history . tape 39 , 2011 ( tripod.com [PDF; 137 kB ; accessed on July 6, 2020]).
  3. ^ Deborah E. Lipstadt , Eva Fogelman : Children of Jewish Survivors . In: Fred Skolnik, Michael Berenbaum (eds.): Encyclopaedia Judaica. Second edition . tape 9 . Thomson Gale, Detroit, New York, San Francisco, New Haven (Conn.), Waterville (Maine), London 2007, ISBN 978-0-02-865937-4 , pp. 382 (English, jevzajcg.me [PDF; 41.0 MB ; accessed on July 14, 2020]).