Dr. Coline Covington’s forthcoming book, For Goodness Sake: Bravery, Patriotism and Identity, will be published in 2020 by Phoenix Publishers. The excerpt below, illustrating a particular patient’s struggle with issues of large-group identity and repression, is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Rupture and Restoration
Sophie had retired from being a secondary school teacher and in the ensuing months had suffered depression and insomnia. She came to see me a year later and at the start of her first session when I asked her to tell me about herself, she replied, “I’m German, my father was Jewish and escaped to England at the beginning of the war, my mother was English. She was Church of England. My grandparents and aunt and uncle stayed in Berlin and died in the camps. I was born here in London. I’ve spent my life teaching children English and raising my own children. I’ve tried to be kind and considerate of others. I have lots of loving friends. I love my husband although he can be very dictatorial at times – his nickname at home is Hitler but he is also a kind man. I thought everything was fine in my life but since I’ve retired I feel like I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I don’t know where I belong. I feel locked up and I don’t know how to get out of this state. I don’t feel myself and I’m not sure what that even means.”
From Sophie’s initial description of herself, it was clear she felt confused about her divided past, her German Jewish father and English Christian mother, coming from two countries at war with each other. After escaping to England, her father had met her mother, married after only a month of knowing each other, and joined the British army to fight against Hitler. During battle his left arm was injured and amputated and he lost the sight of his left eye. Sophie’s childhood had been focused on behaving well, thinking of others, not making a “fuss” and strong Christian principles of “turning the other cheek” and “forgiveness.” Life at home for Sophie and her little brother, Eric, was quiet and orderly, only punctuated by her father’s sudden violent outbursts of anger when he exploded over relatively minor infringements and mishaps committed by the children or at night when Sophie remembered hearing him screaming with anger and fear. Sophie’s mother explained that her father was still suffering from losing his arm and his eyesight in one eye. As an adult, Sophie thought her father had probably been suffering from PTSD but as a child, his night horrors had terrified the whole family. Sophie said that the best way to be in the family was to keep one’s head down and to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. No arguments or expressions of anger were allowed, neither was there much laughter or spontaneity. Sophie recognized that she had managed to recreate and perpetuate this controlled environment not only in her marriage to a man who, like her father, had a fierce and volatile temper but also in her workplace which was a school run on highly principled Christian ideals. Her retirement had suddenly left her adrift without the security of a repressive container.
Little by little, Sophie’s anger with her parents, especially with her mother emerged. At the age of thirteen, Sophie was diagnosed with curvature of the spine and had to wear a back brace throughout her teens. As a child Sophie had been praised for her golden hair and angelic appearance with the expectation that she would grow up being a great beauty. This discovery of her deformity came as a severe blow and, knowing it was a genetic inheritance from her father’s family, she felt betrayed by her Jewish heritage. Her Jewishness was nothing but a blight on her life. At the same time, she was angry with her mother for never standing up to her father’s treatment of her and her brother and for making her feel that she had all the opportunities in the world at her feet only to have these swept away when it was evident her back was deformed. Her mother kept insisting that she would be all right and that she should be grateful for the relatively privileged life she had. Sophie had no chance to be angry or sad or fearful.
At a later session, Sophie was talking about an injury her oldest son had incurred to his knee during a football game. The doctor had warned them that a muscle had been torn badly and that his knee might never heal properly. Sophie had tried to reassure her son that it really wasn’t so bad because he could do other things in his life and he still had his friends. I pointed out the similarity with her mother’s response to her about her back, minimizing what a loss this had been for her warning her not to make a “fuss” about it. Sophie then remembered an earlier moment in her life when she had been reprimanded by her father and mother for making a “fuss”. She was three years old and her mother had suddenly disappeared for several days. When she asked her father where her mother was, he simply said she had gone to collect a new baby for the family. Sophie was mystified and outraged by this news. She was the baby and what did it mean to have another baby? When her mother returned from hospital with baby Eric and urged Sophie to kiss him and make him feel welcome, she was overcome with hurt and anger. She ran to the loo and recalled locking herself in for what seemed like hours. She thought it must have been the only place where she felt it was safe to let her feelings out. Sophie was then able to compare this to the locked in state of mind she had complained about in her first session, a no man’s land where she could be hurt and angry but where she was also trapped.
As Sophie’s rebelliousness against her own internal dictator strengthened, she began to be able to stand up to her husband’s hegemony in the family and to discover that getting angry with other people who had hurt or bullied her could have a positive effect. She became increasingly aware of how identified she had been with her compliant, all-suffering mother as well as with her harsh, all-suffering father who had persecuted the family by taking on the role of the victim. It was at this time that the news was full of accounts of Germany’s offer to reinstate German citizenship to all those who had fled due to persecution before and during World War 2. The offer was not only to those who had fled but extended to their offspring. Moving accounts of German immigrants applying for new passports along with their children were published in the press; for Sophie it was an opportunity to clear her family of the shame of expulsion and to reclaim what she felt was an inheritance that had been taken away from her. Through her father, Sophie had grown up with a strong sense of a highly principled and culturally rich Germany – a Germany that she associated with self-expression and freedom of thought. The country’s offer to restore citizenship to those who had been persecuted became significant in Sophie’s mind insofar as she saw it as a return to a set of values and beliefs that had become destroyed and perverted with the coming of the Reich. While we could both see the parallel with Sophie’s own wish to return to an earlier imagined “state of grace” when she was the only baby at her mother’s breast, this was not simply a nostalgic fantasy of the past. As Sophie said, “This is not just about saying we’ll make everything as it was before, it’s about admitting there was an injustice done to a whole group of people. I abhorred Germany before and, although it was always a silent presence in my family, I felt ashamed to be half German. I also felt ashamed to be Jewish! Now, with this door open, Germany is a country I can feel proud of.”
Sophie, along with her 3 children, acquired German passports and Sophie decided to take a trip to her “new country.” She had been to Berlin before with her husband to see the areas where her father’s family had lived but had felt alien dissociated from her feelings. She had described it as looking at a kind of display case that she knew she had something to do with but at the same time had nothing to do with. It was a closed world in which she had lost any part to play. She was curious to discover what she might feel now that she had a legitimate place there.
Sophie spent two weeks traveling around Germany with one of her sons and returned eager to share her experiences with me. She said it had felt very strange to have another passport and to be travelling on a German passport. She had expected to be stopped at the German border and questioned – what right did she have to be in this country and to be holding a German passport? To her surprise, when she showed her passport to the Immigration officer, he said, “Danke”, and she breezed through. She felt euphoric , saying, “I was allowed back!” She then remembered that she had left her British passport at home in London and suddenly panicked. She thought that if people needed to find her, they would find her British passport and assume she was still in England and that something had happened to her. At worst she would have disappeared. Sophie remarked on this in the session as feeling it was unimaginable that she could be in two places at once. By acquiring a German identity, would her British identity disappear? Or was one identity real and the other merely a doppleganger? Which one was real and which one a copy?
For Sophie, this entry into a “new country” which was nevertheless a country she had been connected to from birth, created a rupture in which she became aware of the importance of belonging to a specific country and what this meant to her image of herself, to her identity. As Gessen expressed, it opened up a new possibility, “this is who I could be.” At the same time it opened up the loss of “this is who I might have been.” This awareness gave her a heightened sense of belonging – to both countries – and a detachment that brought home the importance of choice in aligning herself with a set of values and beliefs. While in therapy Sophie was differentiating herself from both her parents and finding her own mind, with the acquisition of her German nationality, she was also discovering what it meant to see herself as German and what it meant to be seen by others to be German. In writing about his German Jewish grandparents’ assimilation into British culture, Ian Buruma observes that “identity is not only a question of how one sees oneself, but also of how one is perceived by others.” (Buruma, 2016) Sophie was to find out that describing herself as German or as British produced very different responses depending on who she told.
In the aftermath of Sophie’s visit, she talked about the importance of being “accepted” by Germany; she had convinced herself that taking up a German passport and entering the country as a citizen was an act of forgiveness on her part. Sophie’s Christian up-bringing came to my mind and I questioned whether this was in fact an act of “forgiveness” on her part or something else, asking her what she was “forgiving” them for? Sophie replied, “Well, I suppose I see it as some admission of wrong-doing on Germany’s part – and, if this is the case, it is important. But what it feels like is being recognized, that something that has been taken away from me and my family has been returned. I don’t think it heals anything but it acknowledges the theft – it was a kind of theft of our identity itself. The idea of “forgiving” the Germans now sounds a bit pompous to me – who am I to forgive them for a past I was never part of? But being given my citizenship back feels like I am no longer alien, I count as human and being German is an affirmation of this.”
Sophie continued to describe her trip, particularly her impressions of Munster and Cologne. She said, “Both cities had been severely bombed and in Munster everything had been immaculately restored as if it had never been bombed. But in every church there were before and after photos to remind people of the damage that had been done and its restoration.” She continued, “It made me think about our work together, the repairs I’ve needed – but this is different from seamlessly restoring things as they once were, as if nothing has happened, as if there has been no irreparable damage. When I first came to you and felt so adrift, I had some idea that you could just put me back together again and all would be as it was before, even though ‘before’ had its own problems. Now I can see how much my identity rested on being a victim, a victim of my parents’ strict repressive regime, a victim of my bent back, a victim because I was half Jewish, and at times I have thought of myself as a victim in my marriage. I thought it could all be erased, like invisible mending. What was strange about Munster was that there were no scars and so it seemed like a replica of itself, in denial of the destruction that had been wrought. Maybe this is what it means to identify with the victim? Instead, in the cities where the remnants of the bombings had become memorialized, it was a reminder of the past and this is what made it felt hopeful too.”
Sophie’s own early loss of being the only golden baby in the family came to my mind. I commented that perhaps being allowed to enter Germany felt like trying to retrieve her special place in her mother’s mind and that her reflections on Munster and Berlin signified the huge difference between wanting to eradicate her little brother’s birth as if it had never happened and at the same time wanting her parents to recognize how traumatic this had been for her. I added that it was also important to see that Germany could recover from the war, just as she was discovering that her anger did not destroy her relationships with others close to her but actually strengthened them and, most importantly, that she did not have to continue to be a victim. Sophie welled up in tears and asked me, “How do you know so much about Germany?” I replied that I thought she wanted to know whether I could understand what it felt like to have something so important taken away from her and what it meant to recover from this loss and humiliation. Sophie said that she knew I understood this but her question was more how to live with this understanding, how to live with the different worlds within her, to belong to both and to be a stranger to both, and how to find her own country inside herself.
Although Sophie’s father had been an emigrant, he had taken pride in his assimilation within British culture. Perhaps as a reaction to his exile from Germany, he considered his adoptive country as his real country, the country that had saved his life. For Sophie, however, this was not the case; she had grown up with the ghost of having lost her German national identity and when she was able to recover it, it was both confusing and challenging because she was able to choose between countries freely and to hold dual citizenship. Although Sophie had been aware of the different characteristics and values of each culture, in taking up German citizenship she also became aware of how much her image of herself and her ego ideal had been shaped by her British upbringing and in particular her father’s experience of assimilation. In her essay, “Heimat”, Natasha Walter describes her grandparent’s experience of immigrating to Britain from Germany at the start of World War 2. She writes:
“Did they ever feel British? I never asked them. I doubt they would have said yes. Jews who arrived in the UK during the war were given a leaflet by the British Board of Jewish Deputies admonishing them to abide by British customs and never to speak loudly in public. They always knew that their too-German voices could disturb the British.” (Walter, 2017, p.12)
Assimilation meant repressing one’s native culture and behaviour and conforming to local customs so as to “get by” without being noticed as different. In the case of Sophie’s father, she felt that while he was grateful and proud to be British, it also meant that he felt he had to hide his German background and his sense of shame in having to seek refuge from a country that had rejected him because of his race. The effect this had on the family was profound and most evident in the emphasis placed on not standing out, being quiet, dutiful, not questioning authority, and apologetic if anything was out of place or at the slightest mistake. Being a good citizen meant above all being considerate of others and not putting oneself first. Sophie described her first trip to Germany as a German citizen as a strange liberation, “I entered the country, no questions asked and no mention of my imperfect German, and thought to myself, ‘Now I can be another person, not a person who cannot be a certain way, who is restricted, but a person who can be proud of myself and assertive. It’s not that being German means being better, but it suddenly felt as if some of the expected behaviour I grew up with was redundant and I was allowed to be loud and to say what I thought without endlessly qualifying it. It wasn’t just that I could see myself differently, I was also seen differently by others. I no longer felt alien. During my time there I became different in myself.” Sophie likened her experience of being re-connected to her father’s family and her German roots as that of a frozen limb that is gradually coming back to life, painful at first and then a relief that she has recovered its feeling and use. This was also a metaphor for Sophie’s experience in analysis as her repressed feelings surfaced and she became less censorious of herself.
Unless otherwise noted, IDI Blog Posts represent the opinions and/or work of individual IDI members working independently and do not necessarily represent the opinions and/or work of the IDI as a whole.
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