Comments of Dr. Holli Levitsky Director, Jewish Studies Program Associate Professor of English Loyola Marymount University of the Bernd Wollschlaeger, M.D. event Aug. 21, 2013 sponsored by Western Region of the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem in conjunction with the Men’s Club of the Sephardic Temple in Los Angeles

I am deeply honored to be here tonite to introduce this truly remarkable man.

Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger will tell you, in his own words, the story of his birth, his family, his determination to know his history, however painful, and to confront that history in the most personal and deliberate way.

I am here to provide you with some understanding of what those words mean. I would like to focus in particular on 3 issues of great concern historically, and personally for Bernd: 1) the postwar culture of silence about the atrocities committed during World War II that predominated in Germany and the rest of Europe, and in the United States as well, although I will only discuss Germany 2) the transmission of  trauma to the future generations, or what some scholars have called, the inheritance of a “haunting legacy”; and 3) the idea of healing, or redemption after the Shoah.
The reconstruction of Germany was a long process. It seemed there was no interest in talking about the devistating loss of a war and the atrocities committed under its government when the country needed to focus on housing,food, employment and other resources for its citizens..As soon as 1945, the Allied forces worked heavily on removing Nazi symbolism from Germany in a process dubbed as "Denazification.” Both the German Democratic Republic and Western Germany had their own agendas, and the military occupation of West Germany didn’t end until 1955, the same year it was allowed to join NATO. It wasn’t until 1973 that West Germany joined the United Nations, and finally in 1991, a unified Germany was allowed by the Allies of World War II to become fully sovereign, after signing the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.
To be sure, the Germany of 2013 is vastly different than its postwar counterpart. The massive Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the center of Berlin was publically  discussed and planned for ten years before it could be built and given that lengthy name. Rabbinical and cantorial colleges have opened at Potsdam University, the first such academic seminary for rabbis and cantors in Continental Europe after the Shoah, and stands in the tradition of the Institute for the Scientific Study of Judaism which was closed down by the Nazis in 1942. Other German centers of higher education have re-embraced Judaism; the Abraham Geiger college is now a member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism and accredited by the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Jewish Studies programs have developed, or, in some cases, returned to major universities. Many cities and even small towns in Germany have built public memorials to their displaced and murdered Jewish citizens. Sadly, anti-Semitism has not disappeared, nor has the Jewish population increased significantly. But German citizens and communities are now free to deeply confront and process publically the extent of the atrocities without fear, and begin to understand how much was lost.
Historians have long understood that the pervasive silence that weighed on Germany after the war was born of many things. Germany was a war-torn nation struggling to rebuild itself on the embers of a shame-filled loss which no one wanted very much to talk about. Raised on that landscape of silence, it was impossible for the postwar generation to know very much—or even anything at all--about the facts of the Shoah, let alone to deeply confront and process the  extent of the terrible deeds perpetrated by their own families, neighbors, friends, and fellow German citizens.We know from history that collective shame and guilt cannot, finally, be escaped. Even if it’s not addressed in the lifetime of the perpetrators, it will be transmitted to the children and to future generations. The more the acknowledgement of shame and guilt in Germany was silenced in public debates, the more they migrated into the psyche and the cultural unconscious. For the generation of perpetrators, the knowledge of the Holocaust was relegated to a “tacit knowledge” that became taboo in public debates in any but the most superficial ways. For the postwar generation, it became something like a national secret, only to be revealed as brute fact, in the cold abstraction of history lessons. For many decades, there was virtually no public forum for anything like a discussion of this national history.
There is a wide range of defensive reactions against the knowledge of belonging to a family—and nation—of perpetrators. One of them is to remain frozen in guilt and shame; another is to remain lost in denial.

Indeed, it was the German war generation that after the war coined the term, “inner exile,” to signify an illusory escape from their complicity with, if not excuse for, the Nazi atrocities, whether as active participants or as bystanders. Most Germans simply went on with their lives. But what about their children? What happened to them once the culture of silence was breached? DId they inherit the “inner exile” of their parents’ generation? For many Germans of the second-generation, the “inner exile” of their parents became for them a condition of impossible national belonging, that is, being German but not wanting to be German and thus associated with the crimes of the past.
Yet, given that background, Bernd’s story is not what you might expect--that of a second-generation German who runs from his own culture, internalizing the guilt of the perpetration through shame and self-hatred, or even denial, at the same time feeling as if he will never belong to another culture.What makes Bernd’s story so unique is the way he made this history, this legacy personal. He didn’t abandon his culture so much as seek out a righteous space within it.
One might say that Bernd will share with you a haunting legacy. Why is it a “haunting legacy?” It is haunting because he was born in the shadow of all that we know about the violent history of World War II and the Shoah, the murderous campaign and attempted genocide against the Jews of Europe as perpetrated by the German National Socialist government under Adolf Hitler.

It is also haunting because it is Bernd Wollschlaeger’s personal history, an experience of transgenerational trauma shared with many others of that post-war generation, children of Jews and children of Germans.  The bigger question raised by Bernd’s life trajectory is how he became the person he is today: from German to Israeli and American citizen, teacher, healer, repairer of the world. Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger is the kind of man who defines history rather than letting history define him.