“About false Jews”: Transgenerational posttraumatic identity confusions in Germany

Abstract

In times of rising group-focused enmity and toxic polarizations between conflicted groups worldwide, a differentiated debate about the transgenerational complexities of German and Jewish posttraumatic entanglements of identity is needed. This article focuses on one specific and limited clinical phenomenon: the “adoption” by a few people in Germany of a Jewish identity that is not present in their own biography. An introduction to the phenomenon from clinical practice is followed by a brief historical and social contextualization, as well as theoretical models of explanation for the adoption of a potentially oppressed minority status. With reference to theories on social trauma and its transgenerational transmission to both victims and perpetrators, the psychoanalytic examination of a single case is used to develop the thesis that posttraumatic Jewish identity confusion and constructions are to be understood not only as an individual variant of “false-self,” but also as a form of transgenerational repercussion of the social trauma of the Shoah.

Key words:

• Shoah
• social trauma
• transgenerational transmissions
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To ensure the anonymity of the individual, the description of the single case is based on a combination of different patients with similar conditions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jasmin Spiegel

Jasmin Spiegel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her PhD (2017) in psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (thesis: “Countertransference and social trauma – A microanalysis of the scenic memory of the Shoah in videographed testimonies”). Her research interests are psychotherapy process research, implicit communication, video microanalysis, and posttraumatic disorders.