
October 20, 2015
Taken at a time when this optical illusion was still somewhat original ...
Taken at a time when this optical illusion was still somewhat original ...
As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.
Parents traumatized by war make their own experiences of suffering a core principle of education.
As a young married civilian, British poet Robert Graves describes his mental state after World War I. "Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me," he wrote in Goodbye to All That, his wartime biography. "Strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed."
Graves continued to suffer flashbacks and panic attacks for ten years. He felt he was not a hero but the victim of a senseless killing machine. Few traumatized soldiers had Graves' poetic power to portray what they had experienced and say goodbye.
"The birds that sing best, the cat eats first," was not a witty saying my grandmother or mother occasionally mouthed. It was the attitude with which adults met children after 1945.
A father traumatized by war and imprisonment observes his daughter eating one slice of dry bread during the time of food stamps so she can "properly" enjoy the second one with the few sausages she was allotted in a joyful, playfully staged indulgence. As soon as she finishes the first slice, the father grabs the treat and eats it.
To the crying girl he says, "You ate the first slice dry, you can just about eat a second. That's life, I've been through much worse!"
Behind such scenes, which have been reported to me several times, is the envy of inwardly impaired people for the capacity for happiness. And the jealousy of someone else's naive desire and confidence to still believe in a mini-drama of pleasure.
Traumatized parents make their own experiences of suffering a core principle of education. They steel their children against their own past and pass this off as preparation for the future.
The power of sensory impressions is almost limitless for a child. The world appears to a child exactly what these impressions convey. The people in their world are the only ones who exist. So if a child is brought up surrounded by stories of trauma, their childhood is snatched away.
Born in 1941, I was convinced for a long time that all children are like that, that they all experience childhood the way I did. I believed that my childhood was quintessentially childlike — not feeling conditioned by time. Gradually, I came to realize that my childhood was much more deeply marked by the war than I knew.
If a child is brought up surrounded by stories of trauma, their childhood is snatched away.
For a long time, I thought that children shared a basic feeling: To them adults were something like joyless giants who had no idea what it meant to have fun. Today — and my experience as a psychoanalyst may have contributed to this — I am sure that this conviction was influenced by history.
My belief was founded on the observation that people around me were destroyed, that my fears of adults was justified, and that my experience of adults not having a clue about children's needs was realistic. So it made sense to hide joy from them as much as possible.
War damages survivors' abilities to relax and enjoy themselves, which in turn steals the next generation the possibility of a happy childhood.
Traumatized parents cannot let their children grow undisturbed. They prepare them with subtle admonitions, overt pressure and personal examples to anticipate and adjust to evils. Patients born in the postwar period talk of fathers who were absent, who were "never there, even when they were there."
They describe unhappy, grumpily conformist, neighbor-oriented parents, churchgoers who didn't seem to believe what they preached, who thought highly of conformity and high achievements but couldn't convey to their children what it was all for.
Observations of severely traumatized people indicate that nonstop work is the best means of warding off tormenting memories and numbing feelings of inner emptiness. People who work do not think inappropriate thoughts. These personality changes were so ubiquitous after 1945 that they did not attract much attention.
During and after World War II, German children grew up in a vacuum of values filled by educated bourgeois or religious traditions. Too much was expected of children: To heal the wounds of their parents and to compensate for their mental limitations.
Parents were so preoccupied with survival and material reconstruction that they focused on caring for their children physically. Otherwise, they wanted to know them or talk to them as little as possible. Children were a nuisance when they took up time for such useless things as play or fun.
Children worried the parents because they stood for emotional diversity, vulnerability and openness, qualities which aroused envy and signaled a reality that the parents had lost through mental injuries and unconscious guilt complexes.
Doomsaying is as false as its opposite. There were families who were able to preserve love and empathy and draw strength from the carefree nature of their children. I myself have no memories of my father; he lies in a soldier's grave 90 kilometers south of Kyiv.
I did not consciously experience the loss, but felt the lack more often while growing up without understanding it. I owe my reasonable mental stability to the wisdom and energy of my mother. When in my psychoanalytic work I met traumatized fathers in the memories of their daughters and sons, I often wondered what it would have been like if my father had survived the war. But such gaps cannot be filled by fantasies.
My mother never let another man into her life.
My mother never let another man into her life after her six-year marriage. A brother two years older than me and I showed the way to modernity for the necessity-driven matriarchy. We made sure that telephones and TV sets came into the household, stayed under our mother's wing while we studied, and didn't move out until we got married, which in my case coincided with a dropout life in Italy.
There, in an olive garden, I once met a melancholic man who could have been my father and told me his life story. He had been captured as a soldier in North Africa at the age of 19 and summarized his story thus: La Guerra mi ha rubato la gioventù ... the war stole my youth.
For the children of the traumatized, it does not make much difference whether their parents suffered psychological limitations in a just or a criminal war. Extreme situations such as fear of death, witnessing life-threatening injuries, hunger, thirst, dirt and cold damage the survivors' abilities to relax and enjoy themselves. Thus, a shadow falls on the next generations.
It is one of the cruel truths about complex organisms that it is much faster and easier to damage them than to heal them. This is similarly true for a society. It is easy to arouse hatred, to set groups against each other, but it takes a lot of effort, time and strength to go the other way.
Every hour of war is one too many. It not only costs lives and destroys cities, it also poisons souls and contributes to the emotional coldness that all murderers possess.
*The author works as an author and psychoanalyst in Munich. His book on trauma in families (Er hat nie darüber geredet. Das Trauma des Krieges und die Folgen für die Familie) was published in 2008.
As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.
Vladimir Putin had planned to roll through Ukraine and splinter the West. While it has not gone according to plan, the destruction and uncertainty left in the path of the invasion has shaken the world.
A Ukrainian court has convicted the first Russia soldier of war crimes. Meanwhile, Moscow offers no news on the Ukrainian soldiers surrendered in Mariupol. The very meaning of this war may be contained in the different treatment of POWs.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.