Emancipation through remembrance

The traumatic tyranny of the Nazi regime has left a deep mark on the emotional experience of many people. What was once experienced, repressed, or justified continues to have an impact today. But in many families, the past remains unaddressed. The Nazi generation is coming to an end, but there has been no major clean-up.

“Breaking free from false loyalty and repressive family narratives without abandoning family ties is an emancipatory act of self-empowerment.”[1] This sentence encapsulates a central tension in German remembrance culture in the context of the Nazi era: How can one honestly confront the Nazi legacy when one’s own family was part of this system or lived in its shadow? How can one reconcile family belonging and historical responsibility without resorting to repression or denial?

Psychologist Sabine Lück coined the term “loyalty contract” to describe this dilemma. She observed that children often unconsciously make an inner pact with their parents or grandparents. They not only adopt values and perspectives, but also silence, denial of guilt, or trivialization. This psychodynamic mechanism is closely related to the concept of transgenerational inheritance. What remains unspoken continues to have an effect—not only in family narratives, but also deep in the emotional and psychological structure of subsequent generations.

Such loyalties are not problematic per se. However, they become toxic when they block critical engagement with Nazi entanglements and instead cement a myth of family innocence or helplessness. Emancipating oneself from this distorting narrative requires courage: the courage to look, to tolerate contradictions, and to allow one’s own feelings—including guilt, shame, or anger—to surface. It is not about denying one’s family, but about freeing oneself from an inherited idealization and thus developing a self-determined attitude toward the past.

 

The journalist Alexandra Senfft[3] expands this psychological approach with a moral and political perspective. Instead of speculating about how she would have behaved back then, she advocates the opposite: “How should I behave today?” In her work on Nazi perpetrators and their descendants, she observes two very different reactions to the transgenerational legacy: “Some fulfill the unspoken mandate by reveling in right-wing ideology and become violent. Others want to explore from within how fascism burns itself into the soul.” This distinction highlights the existential significance of coming to terms with the past: it is not a purely historical practice, but a deeply relevant, even preventive one.

Senfft sees a worrying development in today’s society: the “Nazis‘ lack of empathy has found its way back into the light.” In the midst of a social climate that once again favors authoritarian, nationalist, and dehumanizing ideologies, coming to terms with the past becomes a moral obligation. Precisely because the unprocessed—whether individual or collective—does not disappear, but seeks other forms of expression.

The emancipatory act described in the sentence quoted at the beginning is therefore more than a personal process, more than just a private matter. Rather, it contributes to strengthening collective resistance to repetition. Those who sincerely confront their family’s Nazi past risk relativizing things they have grown to love. But it is precisely in this imposition that a real opportunity lies: the bond with the family can remain intact without perpetuating silence. And society can learn to distinguish between memory and responsibility—and to combine the two.

Today, Germany’s culture of remembrance faces a new challenge: the distance from the Nazi era is growing, while right-wing interpretations are gaining ground again. This makes it all the more important to have voices that break the silence, question loyalties without destroying them, and show that remembrance is not a burden but an opportunity. An opportunity for self-empowerment, empathy, and a democratic attitude.

Our generation, which personally experienced the perpetrator generation – as children or grandchildren – bears a special responsibility: to research family history through conversations or documents and not to keep it to ourselves, but to pass it on. For those who can tell of the beginnings back then – of exclusion, looking away, obedience, internal conformity – provide the present with an early warning system. It is not a matter of passing on guilt, but of providing guidance for a young generation that today once again has to stand up against authoritarian thinking, exclusion, and contempt for humanity.

For only those who acknowledge their own family history can actively shape the present. Memory is then not a look back, but an attitude.

 

About the author

Klaus-Peter Klauner is a sound engineer by profession. He has been dealing with transgenerational responsibility and German culture of remembrance for many years. With the website Kriegerdenkmal.org , Klaus-Peter Klauner has launched an initiative to redesign the many war memorials in Germany, and with the website lindenbergplatz.de , he is committed to fighting anti-Semitism in his home village, which has forgotten its history.

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