“ THE INABILITY TO LOVE” is an allusion to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s groundbreaking study of 1967, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (English, 1975, The Inability to Mourn). The Mitscherlichs’ innovative psychoanalytical approach to explaining German attitudes and behavior after the Second World War is still significant to understanding how and why transferred trauma affects contemporary Germans despite ongoing public Holocaust memorial culture. According to the Mitscherlichs, the Germans’ over-identification with Adolf Hitler and enthusiastic support of National Socialism resulted, after the fall of the Third Reich, in an intense defense against guilt, shame, and anxiety, which in turn led to the absence of mourning and perpetual melancholia. In accordance with this early attempt to explain the results of transgenerational guilt and shame, Vamik Volkan recently contended that traumatic memories cannot be handed down intergenerationally; what is instead “deposited” to the next generation are “the scarred self-images of the parents who have been unable to mourn the damage done to their individual and group selves.” Consequently, today, we deal with “children’s reactions to parents.” A. Dirk Moses has emphasized that such reactions can be broken down into two separate groups of German identities: the “non-German” Germans who deny their unbearable past, and the “German” Germans who use displacement strategies to make their national past bearable and affirmable.

While historians and sociologists, especially in contemporary antisemitism studies, often regard this nexus of transgenerational guilt among Germans as an “either/or” paradigm, and much of the debate on contemporary antisemitism in Germany seems to follow this dualistic pattern, my literary analysis explores the tensions between these two extremes.