“About false Jews”: Transgenerational posttraumatic identity confusions in Germany

Abstract

In times of rising group-focused enmity and toxic polarizations between conflicted groups worldwide, a differentiated debate about the transgenerational complexities of German and Jewish posttraumatic entanglements of identity is needed. This article focuses on one specific and limited clinical phenomenon: the “adoption” by a few people in Germany of a Jewish identity that is not present in their own biography. An introduction to the phenomenon from clinical practice is followed by a brief historical and social contextualization, as well as theoretical models of explanation for the adoption of a potentially oppressed minority status. With reference to theories on social trauma and its transgenerational transmission to both victims and perpetrators, the psychoanalytic examination of a single case is used to develop the thesis that posttraumatic Jewish identity confusion and constructions are to be understood not only as an individual variant of “false-self,” but also as a form of transgenerational repercussion of the social trauma of the Shoah.