![]() Figlio shows how Habermas's position – insisting that even the grandchildren were part of the identity that led to atrocity, that they too must accept responsibility and that there can be no writing out of the Holocaust – accords with the depressive position. There is a substantial chapter on the ‘Historikerstreit’ debates in the 1980s, which centred on the public role of history and the criticisms levelled by the influential sociologist Jürgen Habermas that some historians were seeking to avoid moral responsibility for the Holocaust. Reunification after 1980 brought about a crisis in memory, dissolving the psychic enclaves and giving rise to renewed social defences, enacted in the revival of anti-Semitic crime and violence during the early 1990s, and reluctance to recognize perpetrators and complicity in the Nazi regime. Two parallel ‘psychic enclaves’ emerged, defensive structures against guilt and the threat of annihilation. Then, through the Cold War and the division into two Germanys, guilt was subverted into fear and hostility towards the opposing side. ![]() In the immediate aftermath, the German people were focused on their own losses and the narcissistic wound of a nation once again defeated. The middle chapters construct a narrative of the memory of the Holocaust in the decades after 1945 in terms of oscillation between reparative and manic forms of remembering. It was the fear of sameness, Figlio argues, not of difference, that impelled German anti-Semitism nationalist extremists feared that the Jews ‘could be absorbed without anyone knowing it was happening, insidiously becoming German’ (p. Drawing on historians like Charles Maier and Omer Bartov, it reveals the basis of anti-Semitism in Freud's concept of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. It undertakes a careful reading of the voluminous historiography on the history of modern Germany and of scholarship on memory and memorialization. In one sense, the history of post-war Germany functions in the book as an example of the unconscious impulses and defences that animate group thinking, but the analysis goes well beyond schematic illustration. These chapters argue for the value of psychoanalysis in revealing the emotion-driven states that underlie social phenomena, and they set out a methodology for their study. Figlio argues that groups are even more likely than individuals to mobilize primitive defences, particularly when the group is formed through attachment to an illusory homogeneous entity like the nation. The social world may expose an ‘actuality that gives expression to the internal world’ (pp. 21) His interest is in the attachments that individuals make to larger formations, which can then exhibit and act in accordance with the unconscious motives and defences that operate within the psyches of individuals. ‘I do not claim that there is a social mind,’ Figlio states, ‘but that the social has properties of a subject’ (p. The opening chapters address the criticism often levelled at psychoanalysis that societies do not possess a mind and do not behave according to unconscious motives, and thus any attempt to apply concepts drawn from the treatment of individuals to the behaviour of groups is ontologically wrong. The social structures of post-war memory in Germany and the psychic structures of Kleinian psychoanalysis operate in a mirror image. They map onto central tenets of Kleinian theory, where the recognition by the infant of its aggressive urges may lead to feelings of guilt and remorse but can also result in manic reparation characterized by omnipotence and triumphalism which wills guilt away. Figlio calls these tendencies ‘remembering true’ and ‘remembering false’. Its central contention is that for the past 70 years Germany has been caught between two opposing impulses, on the one hand engaging in a form of remembering that identifies with the suffering of Jewish victims and accepts that Germany cannot be relieved of the burdens of the past, and on the other, striving to put this past behind it. ![]() In a series of short chapters, this book constructs a robust case for what historical understanding can gain from psychoanalytic thought, and how it can illuminate struggles over the memory of the Holocaust in post-war Germany.
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