Roots in Jewish and Christian Soil: A Portrait of the Holocaust Researcher as an Involved Person

Abstract

Having grown up in a postwar Germany characterized by a social climate of unmourned losses and crimes, the author traces his family roots through its two distinct lineages: the Catholic maternal and the Jewish paternal family (which, however, had converted to Protestantism in the late 19th century). He reflects on his early adolescent experience of digging into this history, covered by collective silence, and connects it to his later decision to become a psychoanalyst and a Holocaust researcher.

Keywords:

• postwar Germany
• Jewish roots

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Hamburger

Andreas Hamburger, Ph.D., born in 1954, is a full professor of clinical psychology at International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin/Germany, psychoanalyst (DPG), training analyst and supervisor in Munich, senior lecturer for psychoanalytic psychology at Kassel University and research fellow at the Sigmund-Freud-Institute, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He is the speaker of the international research network Trauma, Trust, and Memory - Social Trauma and Reconciliation in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy and Cultural Memory. A DAAD research network in Central and South Eastern Europe. His current research interests are the further application of this method to developmental trauma and videotestimony evaluation, social trauma research, psychoanalytic supervision, and film psychoanalysis.