I – 14 – conformity in the family

Conformity Within the Family – 

I saw the U.S. historian Deborah Libstadt in Berlin at the launch of her book *History on Trial* and found her remarks on coping with psychological stress particularly interesting. An experienced lawyer advised her to shake off the events of the trial, just as one takes off dirty shoes at the front door to keep the apartment tidy.

Such a strategy is not possible for a child from a perpetrator family. Ideologues generally create a homogeneous zone in which there must be no conflicting or quarreling parties. This also applies within the family. The child must not be different from the others. To this end, the child is forcibly compelled, and thus the child internalizes the partisanship of those in power.

in the City Gotha in June 1942

The silent suffering of the abused child continues in the child’s own children. The political effect of coercive control persists: what is not told does not exist and is therefore, from a subjective perspective, not real either. This form of private revisionism and Holocaust denial within families has far-reaching consequences. In post-totalitarian societies marked by psychological numbness, it has repeatedly sparked revisionist sentiments over decades, making it difficult to operate politically.

In the photo on the right: 1942- cultural genocide and Gleichschaltung can appear inconspicuous from the outside. After all, the “way of life” is still framed by a traditional and formerly heterogeneous social reality. Gleichschaltung within families, however, involved dramatic events.