Transgenerational Trauma: Family silence breeds nightmares

In American it is said that one can remove a person from his ancestral area, but not that area from the person in question.

The family memoirs of Christiane Hoffmann, who has been a foreign correspondent for many years and has been deputy government spokeswoman since January 2021, prove that this principle also applies to generations.

Psychologists speak of

: the memories of parents and children move into one another like the tubes of a telescope or microscope.

And oddly enough, the less discussed in the family, the more intensely the traumas of the ancestors influence later generations.

Just as with a telescope or a microscope, with transgenerational memory one sees what is psychologically close and what is historically distant more clearly and dramatically.

The family's silence breeds nightmares.

From the tiny hints, symptoms and tics of the parents, hunches are formed.

But there is also a desire to understand, a desire for some kind of compensation.

The ghosts of the past should come to rest in one's own soul life.

A dark swampy ground

Christiane Hoffmann is the daughter of parents and granddaughter of grandparents who were traumatized in many ways by the Second World War and by the expulsion of the German population from Silesia - after the Allied decisions in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.

She was born in Hamburg and grew up in Wedel.

But due to the “spooky long-distance effect” of historical traumatic experiences, she is still a child of war in a way.

You could call her a granddaughter of war.

Your book vividly describes how

worked in her childish psyche.

"Even in my childhood there will be a dark, swampy bottom, like a bog, in which it is easy to sink, you have to be very careful to stay on the marked paths, always be home before dark and not go too deep into the ground Watching blacks can bring you down.

That is the certainty that you can lose everything overnight, from one hour to the next, from four to five p.m.: house and yard, sons, brothers and parents, homeland and even memories.” Today’s successful and resilient adults was a scared child.

And when her beloved father dies in 2018, she decides to embark on the inner and outer journey, the log of which is now available.

After visiting the Silesian village where her family came from – Rosenthal/Rozyna in the Polish Voivodeship of Opole – several times as a child with her parents, in January 2020 she embarked on the adventure of walking the footpath that her parents, her Uncle and her grandmother managed to emigrate again in 1945.

The expellees did not leave the Reich area in 1945.

Today the route leads through three states, from the area around the former ducal residence town of Brieg (today in Polish: Brzeg) over the Oder and the German-Polish border, through Zittau and then along the Czech North Sudetenland to the area between Eger and Plauen, where the West German post-war history of the family will begin.