The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2012, 72, (207–222)

© 2012 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/12

www.palgrave-journals.com/ajp/

A PSYCHOANALYTIC GRAVE WALK—SCENIC MEMORY

OF THE SHOAH. ON THE TRANSGENERATIONAL
TRANSMISSION OF EXTREME TRAUMA IN GERMANY

Kurt Grünberg and Friedrich Markert

In this article we describe a phase of a long-term psychoanalysis of a daughter of Shoah

Survivors. The article is part of a research project conducted at the Sigmund Freud-Institute
in Frankfurt/Main. The focus of the study is on the transmission of extreme trauma from the
First to the Second Generation, with special reference to Germany. “Scenic memory of the
Shoah” is presented as a concept that stresses the non-verbal, unconscious communication
between the generations. The so-called “concretistic” behavior of the Second Generation,
which has been described in the literature, is conceptualized here as scenic memory of the
traumatic experiences during Nazi persecution, that is, a highly symbolic and metaphorical
expression of the extreme trauma handed down to the patient by the parents.

KEY WORDS: transmission of trauma; holocaust; second generation; scenic

memory; concretization.

DOI:10.1057/ajp.2012.13

Understanding Auschwitz in full view of Auschwitz is comparable with

attempting to stare into the sun with open eyes. (Louis de Jong, quoted accord-
ing to Dan Diner, 1987, p. 186)

The research project in the Frankfurt Sigmund Freud-Institute entitled Scenic

memory of the Shoah—On the transgenerational transmission of extreme
trauma in Germany pursues the goal of comprehending the transmission
of Jewish survivors’ persecution experiences to their sons and daughters,
under the specific circumstances in the “land of the perpetrators.” On the
basis of one phase of a psychoanalytic treatment, we wish to demonstrate
the way in which a patient of the Second Generation scenically frames her

Kurt Grünberg, Ph.D., Sigmund-Freud-Institut, Frankfurt/Main; German Psychoanalytical

Association; International Psychoanalytical Association.
Friedrich Markert, M.D., Sigmund-Freud-Institut, Frankfurt/Main; German Psychoanalytical
Association; International Psychoanalytical Association.
Address correspondence to Kurt Grünberg, Ph.D., Sigmund-Freud-Institut, c/o Goethe-
Universität, Mertonstr. 17/Hauspostfach 55, D-60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany;
e-mails: gruenberg@sigmund-freud-institut.de; Friedrich.markert@t-online.de
Translated by Martin J. Walker.
208 GRÜNBERG AND MARKERT

parents’ history of persecution under the National Socialist regime within

the relationship to her Jewish analyst, who also belongs to the Second
Generation. The extreme trauma transmitted to the patient is re-transmitted
in the analysis. This opens up the possibility of investigating the transmis-
sion of trauma as a phenomenon.
The study focuses on one specific question concerning the way in which
the Shoah is recalled scenically rather than in a primarily verbal manner,
and the effect this form of remembrance has on the following generations.
Our basic assumption here is that it conveys central aspects of the trauma,
including the absence of language. This approach is based on the concept
of scenic understanding proposed by Alfred Lorenzer (1970a, b, 2002) and
Hermann Argelander (1967, 1968, 1970a, b), which has to be distinguished
from the concept of enactment. For Lorenzer (2002), in particular, the most
significant access to unconscious memories is obtained by the scenic
approach, with his initial question, “How can the non-verbal be grasped
in language?” (p. 170). Where earlier studies of the late consequences
of the Shoah concentrated on verbal communication of the trauma
(cf. Grünberg, 1997), this examination of the scenic memory of the Shoah
emphasizes the non-verbal story. Robert Prince (1985) also tried to detail
the complex layering of different unconscious channels of communication
in survivor families; resulting in the metabolization of traumatic history
mediated by multiple other realms of experience. Our perspective was
suggested to us by Hans Keilson (1984, 1998), who expressed the tenor of
his thought in the phrase, “Where language cannot reach.”
What is involved here is the inability to forget; the incomprehensible,
inconceivable and verbally inexpressible nature of the National Socialist
extermination of the Jews. Since the memories of the survivors are experi-
enced as hardly, if at all bearable and digestable, they are psychologically
subject to change. They become fragmented, dissociated and encapsulated
(cf. Abraham and Torok, 1972; Grünberg, 2004; Leuschner, 2004); and, as
we shall demonstrate, enacted unconsciously in scenes, that is, covertly,
even concealed in survivors’ relations with their progeny and their analysts.
In turn, the Second Generation passes these memories onto their children
and/or analysts.
Our approach casts doubt upon the concept of “concretistic” memory
(Bergmann, 1982, p. 344; Grubrich-Simitis, 1984; Kogan, 1995) or the
“world beyond metaphor” (Herzog, 1982), and argues for a theory of the
scenic memory of the Shoah, which may be understood as wordless
symbolism (cf. Langer, 1965).
Our study methodically follows the “multi-sited ethnography” approach
of George Marcus (1995). Participants are not questioned in only a single
“field” of inquiry, but in several different places: analyses, psychotherapies
 PSYCHOANALYTIC GRAVE WALK 209

or groups, video interviews, house visits and the Frankfurt “Meeting Point
for Survivors of the Shoah.” Transmission of the trauma is not only explored
with the Second Generation, but also with the survivors themselves, the
First Generation; and thus delineating the scenic memory of the Shoah as
a trans-generational coping and mourning process, both individual and
social.
The project, tied with studies dating back to 1980, observes the long-
term psycho-social consequences of the Shoah, specifically in Germany;
and thus distinguishes the different post traumatic effects of living in coun-
tries like the United States, Canada or Israel (cf. Grünberg, 1983, 2000a, b,
2004; Grünberg and Straub, 2001). The processes of the scenic memory
of the Shoah (cf. Grünberg, 2012, forthcoming) are investigated from various
observer perspectives by a non-Jewish German psychoanalyst and a Jewish
analyst in Germany. Both have been engaged with this question for many
years in practice and in theory.
Since transmission of the trauma is not directly observable, it must be
extrapolated hermeneutically. We present this extrapolation in successive
steps. First, relevant scenes are selected from the analytic material and
described phenomenologically (cf. Markert, in print). They are then worked
through analytically and conceptualized. Finally, experts are consulted
on the psycho-social, late consequences of the Shoah, thus effecting
a further consolidation of the psycho-analysis of the scenic memory of the
Shoah.
This procedure will be applied to the following on the basis of a psycho-
analytical treatment. The psychoanalyst in attendance was Kurt Grünberg,
and Friedrich Markert accompanied the sessions as supervisor. The pres-
entation is punctuated by brief theoretical explanations with reference to
the specialist literature. The final part of the presentation offers a critical
discussion of the concepts of “concretism” and the “world beyond meta-
phor,” in order to offer contrast with our own approach.

FROM THE ANALYSIS OF NAOMI B.

Some years ago, Naomi B. came to me for analysis. She was a very attrac-
tive and likeable, 58-year-old woman with two grown daughters. She was
suffering an existential crisis, triggered when one of her daughters divorced
her Jewish husband. Naomi reacted to the divorce with a profound feeling
of loss and failure; for, after her own husband’s death, she viewed her
“life’s task” as ensuring her daughters married in the Jewish faith. Her treat-
ment lasted 5 years.
Naomi related her family history from the onset of analysis, and from
the onset I found myself profoundly impacted. The patient’s mother and
210 GRÜNBERG AND MARKERT

father had both been married to other partners prior to the Shoah. Both
spouses and their respective children were murdered by the Nazis. When
the deportation of children took place in the ghetto of Lodz in September
1943, her mother believed she had saved one of her daughters by concealing
her under her coat, but her ruse was discovered by a German soldier. He
tore the child from her arms and threw the girl onto a truck. Naomi’s mother
herself became the victim of medical experiments by the Nazis, being
“disfigured” in such horrific way that many years later a neighborhood
child ran away screaming when witnessing her physical deformations.
Naomi’s father also became a victim of Nazi persecution. He witnessed
his heavily pregnant wife and 2-year-old son being “sent into the gas” after
so-called “selection.”
These traumatic experiences left their mark on the atmosphere in Naomi’s
family. Daily life was suffused with dejection and hopelessness. The outside
world was felt alien and inimical; they lived a completely secluded life.
The air was thick with the permanent sense of the danger that “it” might
happen again. The parents, both illiterate, sat with their children in a dark-
ened room in the evenings. There was an unspoken understanding that it
was not appropriate to turn on the light or withdraw to another room. The
family stayed together, nobody was allowed to be missing, but no stranger
was permitted to join them either. There were photos of the murdered family
members hanging on the living room wall. Life was an endless “sitting shiva”
for the dead (Jewish mourning ritual). It was clear that the parents suffered
from survivor guilt and the panic of loss, which stiffed all signs of life.
Notably, her father objected to everything that was alive. The present
was always compared with Auschwitz, “Nothing else counted compared
with that,” Naomi said. Her father could be indignant, “Wus lachst Di?”
(How can you laugh?). Any form of cheerfulness was nipped in the bud.
Even when her father took his daughter on his motorbike, his trauma came
along for the ride. For instance, when he had stopped at a crossroad, he
had the habit of driving off when the lights were red for all traffic. He
refused to follow rules that applied to everybody, as if to say, “After Ausch-
witz I am never going to let myself be told what to do or not to do.” He
was even “playing” with the lives of his children by re-enacting a possible
catastrophe in this way, actually tempting fate.
Naomi’s mother particularly suffered from this family life. She preserved
a certain zest for life and attempted to connect with other people despite
her terrible history of persecution. Sometimes, she had to “run out of the
house” in order to escape the family isolation, if only for a little while.
Naomi could identify with this aspect of her mother, her attempts to come
in contact with the world outside, as she undertook the task of dealing with
the outside world where family affairs were concerned.
 PSYCHOANALYTIC GRAVE WALK 211

There was little room in their family life for being a child with needs and
wishes. Naomi began washing the dishes on her own initiative when she
was 4-year-old, using a little stool to reach the sink. She increasingly felt
the family’s well-being and fortunes were dependent on her initiative. Every-
thing seemed to be loaded onto her shoulders. Naomi and her sister not
only had to take care of themselves, but also their parents; and later, Naomi
was solely responsible for organizing the countless family relocations.
Naomi’s parents were massively traumatized, they were so involved with
their traumatic memories (cf. Krystal, 1968), it was difficult for them at
times to sufficiently take care of their children. Mario Erdheim (2006)
described the way in which parentification (cf. also Stierlin, 1978) in such
families leads to a dissolution of generational borders, meaning “the child
is treated as an adult and must as a rule carry out similar functions”
(Erdheim, 2006, p. 25).
Too much care giving and loving attention are at times closely related
to survivors’ difficulty in empathizing with their children’s world. As well,
the children’s profound loyalty to their parents often prevents them from
being able to identify and argue through conflicts with them.
The following example illustrates this concept. Naomi’s parents had
managed to buy beautiful patent-leather shoes for their daughters; shoes that
would have been unthinkable in the world of Auschwitz. They were convinced
their children would wear such shoes with enthusiasm and gratitude, without
considering the shoes were anything but suitable for the children in the cold
of winter. They were right. Naomi suffered from freezing cold feet, just as
her parents froze in the camp. Unconsciously, the parents transmitted this
memory onto their children. She did not dare ask for warmer winter shoes—
a conflict that later became her adult compulsion of buying excessive amounts
of shoes so she would never have to suffer from cold feet again.
Naomi was the daughter her father desired and preferred. He called her
sister “kalecke” (Yiddish for cripple). He “promenaded” Naomi on the street,
her mother and sister had to sit at the back of the car while Naomi sat next
to her father in the front. Conversely, she had to tolerate her father’s failure
to acknowledge her achievements. When she had received her high-school
diploma he said, “Wus toig dus? Ma Sin wat gewein a Dokter in Dane Juhrn!”
(What’s the big deal? My son would already have his Ph.D. at your age).
It became clear that Naomi was a “replacement child” compelled to
experience her own life as “Ersatz” for the life of her murdered siblings.

ANALYTIC RELATIONSHIP
Naomi enquired about the development of the analytic relationship in one
of the first sessions. I remarked almost jokingly, “Of course you will fall in
212 GRÜNBERG AND MARKERT

love with me.” Naomi rebuffed my response with some force, as I thought,
“Wait and see.”
A few sessions later, Naomi spoke of a “grave walk” (Grabeswanderung)
she was going to take. At first, I thought this was a parapraxis: hadn’t she
meant to speak of a “walk on the edge” (Gratwanderung)? It was both. And
now our “grave walk,” being at the same time a “walk on the edge,” began
in earnest. Naomi repeatedly recalled her father’s depictions of Auschwitz
and his death march. Her descriptions were so immediate and “lively” as
if she had been there and experienced it herself. I was fascinated and deeply
moved by everything she told me, so much so, I was fully prepared to
accompany her on this grave walk through Auschwitz; a place with no
graves at all. I was unwilling, however, to leave her alone with her memo-
ries and thought, “We can handle it together.”
Naomi found words for many things that she remembered from her
father’s stories. Something happened scenically in the analytic process,
something that could not be verbalized, where language cannot reach. It
involved my own walk, following the trail of my own father’s death march.
I, too, had no words for it at first, and only understood that later.
During that phase, not only in her retelling, but also non-verbally, Naomi
plunged deeper and deeper into the world of the murdered and the survi-
vors. Escape seemed impossible, as she seemed to have physically arrived
at the concentration camp.
Barocas and Barocas (1979, 1980) described the following phenomenon
as “the most important aspect of the psychology of children of survivors”
(see Kestenberg, 1989), “The children of survivors show symptoms which
would be expected if they actually lived through the Holocaust [….] The
children come to feel that the Holocaust is the single most critical event
that has affected their lives, although it occurred before they were born”
(ibid.) (p. 67). Although Robert Prince (1998), however, clarifies the problem
with such references to Children of Survivors; namely, the conflation of
characteristics and attributions leading to over-generalization, and, there-
fore the necessity to acknowledge the heterogeneity of both survivors and
children.
As though in a time-tunnel (Kestenberg, 1982, p. 141), Naomi and I
immersed ourselves in the world of persecution and annihilation. “Trans-
position” is what Judith Kesterberg calls this unconscious identificatory
participation of the Second Generation in their parents’ traumatic life story
(ibid., p. 148), but also understanding it in the sense of mourning of lost
family members (ibid., p. 157).
Naomi increasingly withdrew from social life and lost more and more
weight. So much so, in fact, I was shocked and alarmed to see her looking
like a concentration camp inmate. Her downward spiral caused great
 PSYCHOANALYTIC GRAVE WALK 213

anxiety in me as I worried she would not survive our grave walk together.
I wondered now how to rescue her from the existential distress of the walk
on which I had accompanied her.
It was not until working through this phase of treatment in the research
project that I realized Naomi and I had been enacting a joint “death march”
and a joint grave walk. Not only did I identify with Naomi’s father, but
also with my father, who I felt very close to at the time. On my father’s
death march, he and his friend, David de Haas, had supported, held and
literally pulled my father’s cousin, Walter, who was weakened and tired.
When Walter finally collapsed from exhaustion, they had to leave him
behind. Walter was shot—only minutes before the German soldiers had
“suddenly gone on the lam” because of the approaching Soviet front. They
were free, minutes after they had to abandon Walter.
This formed my initially unconscious fear that Walter’s misfortune might
be repeated. Naomi might not survive “our death march” because I had
not sufficiently held and carried her. Perhaps, I should have preserved her
from going on this march from the start. Above all, I feared my guilt of her
not surviving, just as my father lived all his life with the guilt of assuming
responsibility for Walter’s death.
Some weeks before this crisis and probably influenced by my own life
motto, I had intuitively told Naomi about Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search
for Meaning (1959) (its original German title, translated as “Nevertheless
Say Yes to Life”). A short time afterward, she began to read Frankl’s book.
She was particularly impressed by his description of the time shortly after
the liberation from Auschwitz, in which he wrote:

We are going […] through the fields, a comrade and myself, towards the camp
from which we have only recently been liberated; suddenly there is a field with
young seedlings before us. I involuntarily try to avoid them, but he grabs my
arm and pushes me through the field with him. I mumble something about not
crushing the seedlings. He gets annoyed: there is an angry look in his eyes and
he shouts at me; “You don’t say! So they took too little from us? They gassed my
wife and child—not to mention all the other things—and you want to stop me
from crushing a few oat shoots ….” (Frankl, 1959, p. 145)

Naomi was quite sure her father would not have shown consideration
either. He would have said, “Sa wi sa—is toig gunish. Es hat alles keinen
Wert—alles in Drerd” (“Anyway it’s all useless. It’s all valueless. Into the
earth with it!”) Her father would have “put one foot before the other, step
for step, no matter what he trod into” without taking consideration of
anything or anybody.
Now I began to fight for Naomi’s survival, asking about her food intake
and emphasizing that analysis was not about ending one’s life. It was about
214 GRÜNBERG AND MARKERT

living. Her father, I said, had impressively displayed his will to survive;
however, mechanically he moved along the rut in which he found
himself.
Naomi plunged deep into the horrors of Auschwitz and the death march.
Yossi Hadar (1991) states that though the “chronological time” of the
Second Generation actually began after the Shoah, the time of birth as
experienced emotionally is in the concentration camp. The Second Gener-
ation was “born into the Holocaust,” so to speak, “unlike their parents,
who were born in the normal world that existed before the Holocaust”
(ibid., p. 163). Naomi’s emaciation process might therefore be inter-
preted as a physical re-enactment of the concentration camp situation
(cf. Küchenhoff, 2000).
We experienced and suffered through the death march and grave walk
together for a long time. It was not only talking about that terrible time,
but also in particular, a non-verbal, scenic, wordless process, where
language does not reach. It was only in supervisory discussion and working
through the material in the research project where I gained sufficient inner
distance from my own involvement in the analytic process. That allowed
me to recognize that a scenic memory of the Shoah had manifested itself
in the analysis.
This recognition had a liberating effect. I realized we had to end the
death march in a way that ensured Naomi would not collapse and fail, but
to find a way to “nevertheless say Yes to life.” In my interpretations,
I repeated my realization that we were “scenically remembering” the death
march and grave walk together. Naomi felt profoundly understood by this
interpretation, which created a special closeness between us. At the same
time, she frequently said that she had no energy left and did not know
whether she would ever manage to get out of the misery and suffering she
was experiencing.
But I began to hope we could make it through together. I recalled my
remark at the beginning of analysis that the patient would “of course” fall
in love with me. Naomi’s aggressive–destructive vital force became evident
directly after a session when she stepped on the gas instead of the break
and rammed into a parked automobile, causing an axle fracture. She had
only bought the car on her analyst’s advice because she believed she could
not afford such a beautiful new automobile. My interpretation pointed to
her potential aggressive and destructive powers, whereas she tended to
negate her vitality. She most likely rejected my endeavors out of guilt and
anxiety by turning her destructiveness against herself, instead of integrating
it into the analytic relationship. These vital elements were similarly
suppressed in her relationship to her parents, who were deeply injured and
traumatized. All the same, this accident appeared to be constructive,
 PSYCHOANALYTIC GRAVE WALK 215

considering that Naomi had thought of killing herself on the freeway by

crashing into a concrete pillar.
One evening, a colleague asked about the “pretty girl” coming out of
my office. I realized I had lost my initial erotic perception of the patient
on the grave walk and death march. My rediscovery of the erotic element
now inspired my hope that such feelings were alive in the patient
as well.
A short time later, I got a call from Naomi’s younger daughter. She was
concerned that her mother might do something to herself, especially now
that she was about to move to another town the following week. Naomi
came to the next session wearing make-up and elegantly dressed with a
pink coat that had been on loan to her daughter. She maintained she no
longer saw any point in living, so much so when she awoke at night she
wondered whether it was worth living, through the next day. She said it
had nothing to do with anyone else, including her daughter and grandchil-
dren. There was nothing to take home from the analytic sessions; though
I was the only one with whom she could speak candidly. She felt that she
was thrown back on her own resources “as a girl.” Instantly, I felt a smile
come to my lips, and told her about the remark made by my colleague,
who had also called her a “girl,” and a pretty one at that. I reminded her
of the beginning of analysis when I suggested that she would inevitably
fall in love with me—and of her spontaneous riposte, “That will certainly
not occur! You are married, I would never do such a thing.”
Naomi remembered that particular session very well. Later in the session
I said, “I sense a certain aliveness in you, though you apparently don’t
perceive it yourself because you are so preoccupied with your suffering,
your family’s suffering and your mourning for those who were murdered.”
I also reminded her of the car accident she had caused after a session a
few months prior, “You were very alive at that moment!” A big smile spread
over her face, “That might be true,” she said.
At the start of analysis, Naomi said she had seen her deceased husband,
who she loved very much, in me. I wondered in my counter-transference
what it would be like if the loving feelings for her deceased husband came
out into the open, and the love for her father (during the time he was
“promenading” with her) came out in the transference.
Naomi had created a safe, secure space in the analysis, much like a
primeval cave, one from which she could observe the hell of Auschwitz.
On the “front stage” of the analytic process, the death march and grave
walk prevailed for a long time; whereas now feelings and aspects of the
personality appeared which had long been pushed to the “backstage.”
Perhaps, Naomi needed “permission” to end the death march, in itself an
expression of Naomi’s great bond with and loyalty to her parents.
216 GRÜNBERG AND MARKERT

Haydee Faimberg’s concept of “telescoping” was developed specifically

to indicate the difficulty for the progeny of survivors to separate from their
parents and live their own lives. It describes the unconscious condensation
of three generations in survivor families of the Shoah by means of identi-
fication. According to her, telescoping made the Second Generation’s indi-
viduation and separation processes extremely difficult (Faimberg, 2005).

CONCRETISM VERSUS SCENIC MEMORY OF THE SHOAH

We understand Naomi’s re-enactment of the death march and grave walk
as an identification with her parents’ history of persecution. Following Judith
Kestenberg, we consider a transposition to be involved (1982, p. 191). As
though traversing a time-tunnel (ibid., p. 179), the analyst and analysand
descended into the horror of the Shoah to understand the unspeakable
suffering of the parents. According to Yolanda Gampel (1982), “all children
act out a scenario of which they have no knowledge, a scenario that is not
theirs but, in fact, belongs to the history of their families, and especially of
those that have survived the Holocaust” (p. 120, cf. also Gampel, 2005).
Many authors describe the phenomenon of concretization in the specialist
literature on psychoanalytic treatments of the First and Second Generation.
Maria Bergmann (1982) was one of the first to apply this concept. For her,
a pathological feature manifested itself in the final analysis because it was
not possible for the progeny of survivors to verbalize or symbolize the
experiences handed down to them. She says:
“The behavioral phenomenon defined here as concretization refers to fantasies
lived out, grafted upon the environment, and woven into current reality, rather
than verbalized” (p. 302). It has been observed repeatedly, she says, “that mas-
sive traumatization in survivors and their children has destroyed (our italics) the
capacity for fantasy formation. It appears that this is the reason why so many
fantasies shared between parents and children have to be concretized and lived
out in the environment before an affective connection to their inner representa-
tions with symbolic meaning can return in the psychic reality of the survivor, or
be established in the survivor’s child” (p. 302). She adds that “trauma lowers the
capacity for cognitive and affective control; there is a regression in the capacity
for symbolization and in the use of words in favor of action.” (Bergmann, 1982,
p. 304)

Ilse Grubrich-Simitis describes the “ego-function of metaphorization and

the damage done to it by the Holocaust trauma” (1984, p. 17), and the
“concretism” of the Second Generation as phenomena repeatedly appearing
in the treatment of the latter. “Patients often conceive of what they commu-
nicate in a thing-like way, that is, not as something imagined, thought,
remembered; it has for them neither a semiotic character nor that of a
 PSYCHOANALYTIC GRAVE WALK 217

fluctuating fantasy but a curiously immoveable concretistic quality” (ibid.,

p. 5; our italics). She describes the goal of progressing from “concretism
to metaphor” (ibid.) as a “generalizable orientation of treatment” (ibid.).
The acting out by patients in such therapies should “at least at first not be
regarded as something undesirable or merely as a form of resistance that
must be overcome as quickly as possible” (ibid., p. 20). The acting out has
rather to be seen as an appeal to overcome the concretism in the psycho-
analytic treatment by a joint effort to achieve understanding. James Herzog
(1982) also affirms the concretization concept with his idea that survivor
families live in a “world beyond metaphor” (p. 103).
Similarly, Ilany Kogan (1995) regards concretization as one of the “core
processes” of the treatment of survivors’ children. She defines concretiza-
tion as “the compelling unconscious need to recreate and relive the parents’
traumatic experiences and their accompanying affects in their own lives,
as if these were their own story” (p. 149). Kogan says “an important func-
tion of concretisation is the avoidance of psychic pain,” adding, “this
phenomenon refers to a pragmatic way of thinking about people and events,
and implies a lack of emotional response to crucial moments or traumatic
losses in the lives of the people concerned” (p. 153).
Kogan’s thesis that concretization constitutes an attempt to avoid psychic
suffering implies the separability of physical and psychic experience and
pain,1 thus ignoring the fact that every bodily action contains a portion of
affect: posture, facial expressions, gestures and movements all correlate
with both affective states and processes of speech production in which
speech rhythm, voice modulation, volume and speech tempo are significant
constituents of the act of speaking. As stressed by infancy research and
mentalization theory, the idea that the body is concrete in an unmediated
way, and hence incapable of realizing symbolic content, denies the exist-
ence of the psycho-affective feedback of bodily experience and the signif-
icance of bodily expression as the primary signal system. The fact that the
body is the basis of symbolization processes has, in the realm of art, been
demonstrated both in expressive dance and in mime. This can also be seen
as the poetry of body language; its non-verbal character possessing as much
symbolic force as the above-mentioned artistic forms of music, painting
and sculpture. If these expressive means of body language had no symbolic
content, they would be indecipherable and interpretable by the observer.
The symbolic character of body language reveals itself in the use of the
body as an instrument for the performance of communications, whose
conscious and unconscious purport may be both encoded and decoded.
The basis of scenic expression in body language and interpretative under-
standing is mimetic reenactment, beginning in the early interactive process
between mother or father and baby (matching), and found in the preliminary
218 GRÜNBERG AND MARKERT

stages of identification as mimetic desire (as posited by René Girard,

cf. Emrich, 2007, p. 193). The mimetically acquired desire in the transmis-
sion of trauma and its bodily reenactment is the wish to undo the trauma,
accompanied by the simultaneous unconscious and conscious awareness
of the impossibility of this desire. The high level of symbolic content recog-
nized by Freud in hysterical enactment contradicts the concept of concre-
tism, as does traumatic enactment, which repeatedly reintroduces the
unintegratable experience on the inner stage of both the traumatized and
their progeny. Memory is not only a cognitive process, but also a neuronal
and muscular process involving affective mimicry and gestural elements;
the latter of particular significance in cases where access to conscious
memory is blocked (cf. Moré, 2005).
Seen from the perspective of our scenic memory of the Shoah approach,
the concepts of concretization or concretism and the world beyond meta-
phor shared by the above-mentioned authors appear to be pathologizing
interpretations. In contrast, Prince (1985, 1998) emphasizes the affirma-
tively formative and resilient functioning of both survivors and their
offspring. That which is unbearable and partly unverbalizable is declared
to be pathological. The authors perhaps describe phenomena that are
observable and significant in the psychoanalytic treatments of the Second
Generation, but can it be claimed that the fantasy formation of the First
and Second Generation is destroyed? Is psychic suffering really avoided by
the progeny of survivors? Is there a lack of the ability to symbolize?
While many analysts would deem Naomi’s behavior in the analytic
process to be a concretization or even concretism, it is precisely these
behavioral phenomena in which we recognize a scenic memory of the
Shoah, the highly symbolic and metaphorical expression of the extreme
trauma handed down to her by her parents, who—like their daughter later
on—could find no words for what had been done to them and their people.
With our concept, we want to clear the way for a more profound under-
standing of such enactments, expanding the perceptual space for the purpose
of gaining new and different observations from which we may infer and
confirm the transgenerational transmission of the trauma. Our further inquiry
into this subject will have the goal of clarifying whether the scenic remem-
brance of the Shoah as a “special case” implies and requires an expansion
of the concept of scenic understanding, both on principle and in method.
Following the writings of Alfred Lorenzer (2002, p. 63 ff) and Susanne
K. Langer (1965, p. 86), we view scenic enaction as presentational, word-
less symbolism, which is to be distinguished from discursive symbolism.
The presentational, the non-verbal is expressed, for instance, in music,
painting or sculpture. It is, as Susanne Langer explains (1965, p. 107),
“peculiarly adapted […] to explicate ‘unspeakable’ things.”
 PSYCHOANALYTIC GRAVE WALK 219

To plunge into the horrors of the Shoah is to be infused by Nazi poison

and never to shake off that malignant introject. According to Joachim
Küchenhoff (1998), “destructiveness, once experienced, turns into a destruc-
tive inner object that sets itself in opposition to loving experiences [and]
inscribes itself in the child’s psyche” (p. 14). The terrible memories of the
survivors, eluding any meaningful context and inscribing themselves like
persistent foreign bodies or malignant introjects in the psychic life of the
victims, are handed down from the First Generation to the successive
generations. The toxin of degradation, dehumanization and extermination
used by the Nazis to poison Naomi’s parents ineluctably penetrates the
bodies and souls of the survivors’ progeny. This can be conceptualized as
“contaminated generativity” (Grünberg, 2007).
The phase of Naomi’s analysis, presented above, itself became a collab-
orative death march and grave walk. In this phase, her parents’ memories
of the pain inflicted upon them, impossible to cope with psychically, are
condensed in various forms, becoming what we define conceptually as the
scenic memory of the Shoah. The death march and the grave walk were
not merely relived in words, but in a joint experience of suffering, which
went as far as actual life-threatening danger and becoming a question of survival.
Scenic remembrance intensified to the extent that Naomi began to resemble a
concentration camp inmate. Her parents’ experiences of persecution were in
this way re-enacted both in the analytic relationship and in her own body.
Naomi’s body became the locus of the scenic memory of the Shoah.

NOTE

1. We owe the following reflections to an intensive personal exchange with Angela Moré.

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