Katherine S. (her name has been changed), 62, belongs to a generation of Germans now starting to cope with their own psychological wounds from World War II and its aftermath in Germany in what till now has been virtually a taboo subject.
"My father, even though he wasn't even a German citizen at the time, was a medical doctor who was pressed into service in the Wehrmacht in the final two years of the war," Katherine said.
"He was just a normal battalion doctor treating wounded soldiers. But after the war there was a mix-up in his records and he spent four years in American prisoner camps for SS officers. I first saw him when I was five years old when he was released. He was a broken man," she said,
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
Like millions of Germans of her generation, Katherine grew up feeling the massive weight of the guilt from the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi German regime.
Given this guilt, they mostly kept quiet about their own sufferings, yet suffer they did -- from broken families, depressed and often suicidal parents and severe economic deprivation after the war, with the effects burdening them all their lives.
Now, 60 years after the end World War II, this generation of Germans is starting to come out with their feelings -- or being forced to when, all of a sudden, horrific memories from their early childhood overwhelm them.
The subject of the post-war German children will be taken up at a three-day international congress in Frankfurt titled "The Generation of War Children and Their Message for Europe 60 Years After the War".
For three days some 600 scholars, students and eyewitnesses from around the world will focus for the first time on the experience of Germany's generation of war children, people now in their 60s and early 70s.
"This will be a sensitive balancing act," commented Marianne Leutzinger-Bohleber, director of the Sigmund Freud Institute.
The aim is to discuss in public German post-war children's suffering, without, however, relativizing the subject of the Holocaust.
Social psychologists predict there will be an increasing incidence of Germans now in their 60s who will be forced to re-live the traumas of their early childhood in the waning days of the war and afterwards. An accident, illness, or possibly being mugged on the street can suddenly trigger waves of suppressed memories.
This was the case of a 70-year-old woman near Frankfurt who came away with spinal injuries from a car accident. Afterwards, she was plagued by panic attacks and sudden memories of herself as a nine-year- old girl trying to protect her little sister while their train was being strafed by bullets fired from British warplanes.
By various estimates, some 2.5 million Germans belong to the post- war children's generation who grew up with only one parent, and up to 200,000 who lost both parents in the war.
Kassel psychoanalyst Hartmut Radebold, 69, estimates that 30 percent of the German children suffered "serious and permanent" psychological damage from the war.
The three "central areas of damage" included passive and active violence, separation from or loss of parents, and the loss of the feeling of security and protection. In most cases, the victims suffered from all three.
"This has scarcely yet been recognized as a subject for scholarly research," Radebold said.
The Frankfurt congress will be opened by US development psychologist Emmy E. Werner of the University of California at Berkeley. Panel discussions and 20 different working groups involving psychologists, writers, medical doctors, historians, sociologists and others will examine the subject.
For Sigmund Freud Institute scholar Rolf Hauble, the congress also poses a chance to try to restore the broken-off communication between the post-war German generation and their parents.
Particularly in the 1960s student protest days, young Germans were accusatory in asking their parents about the war, often leading to a bitter silence between the generations.
"We belong to those who questioned their parents in such a way that they could not answer us," Hauble said.
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