| Dialogue with the
Enemy Israeli psychologist
Dan Bar-On
develops the TRT-Process
[Hebräisch
/ German
/ Arabic]
Applause breaks out. Two men shake hands. Almost
two thousand listeners in the congress centre in Würzburg give a
standing ovation honouring the two speakers, Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On.
The Israeli and Palestinian embrace one another. A unbelievable gesture
in May 2001: There, where both come from, war rages. People are dying
daily on the streets and in their homes. The cycle of violence and
retaliation in Israel and Palestine already spans three generations. The
applause will not stop. Then, an older man in the second row goes
forward and puts his arms around both. It
is Martin Bormann whose father, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, was a
high-ranking Nazi and close associate of Hitler.
What so touches the audience, the majority of which are
therapists, is the sincerity of the reconciliation gesture which they
are witnessing. They have just heard two life-stories describing how
enemy images could be altered and how co-operation and friendship had
developed. The Israeli and Palestinian had each fought the other’s
nation in defence of their own rights. Meanwhile both men work for PRIME
– the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East of which they are the
founders and co-directors, for peace between the two nations. Dan
Bar-On, born in 1938 in Haifa, son of a Jewish doctor who had emigrated
from Hamburg and former Israeli army officer during three Middle East
wars. Sami Adwan, today Professor of Education at Bethlehem University,
fought as Palestinian against occupying forces in the West Bank during
the first Intifada. For this, he served a sentence in a special Israeli
prison in the Negev desert. The path from hostility to reconciliation in
an environment where the cycle of violence, revenge and retaliation
seems irresolvable, was a long, slow and difficult one. It has been
called "TRT – to Reflect and Trust" by those who have taken it. Martin
Bormann was one of them.
Initiator of the TRT process is Dan Bar-On, today
Professor for clinical psychology at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva.
The beginnings of TRT go back decades. TRT is not a new form of therapy.
It is a process of dialogue, the versatility and complexity of which can
only be grasped by tracing it back to it’s roots. One of the beginnings
was in June 1992. Eighteen people met at Wuppertal University for a
dialogue lasting over several days. All shared the same fate: the
silence of their parents about a central part of their own individual
biography. The parents of everyone in the Wuppertal group were either
Holocaust victims and survivors or organisers and perpetrators of the
genocide. Children of Nazi victims were to encounter the children of
Nazi perpetrators. The mere fact of meeting one another, spending
several days together, sitting opposite one another in a room and
talking, had meant a difficult step for most of them. Nearly everyone
went to Wuppertal full of fear and anxiety. They had taken this step, in
the hope it could be a way of breaking out of this prison of silence in
which they lived.
Most Holocaust survivors are badly traumatised.
Concealment of the degradations they had suffered was also a strategy
for returning to a normal way of life. The Israel of the fifties and
sixties was a nation of the strong and the victorious and, with the
exception of the official remembrance rituals, there was no place for
this kind of suffering. Consequently their pain and grief never received
the proper consideration and attention it deserved. For Nazi
perpetrators too, concealment of their actions and denial of any
responsibility for the mass murder was fundamental in order to continue
life as normal citizens. Suppression was also part of the official
culture in the country of the perpetrators. It was only at the beginning
of the sixties, almost two decades after the war had ended, through the
Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, that the effects of the Holocaust were
addressed in public for the first time. Hertha B., who was also in
Wuppertal in 1992, was twenty when she first learned, following the
arrest of her father and the subsequent trial, that he had been a Nazi
officer and had taken part in the mass murder in the Ukraine. The
realisation of having a mass murderer as father was to effect her for
the rest of her life.
Suppression and concealment eventually lead to illness,
physical or mental, whatever the social causes or context may be. During
the course of his therapeutic work with traumatised Holocaust survivors
and their families in the sixties and seventies, he discovered one of
the structural similarities between the after-affects of the Holocaust
on survivors and descendants.
He began to ask himself, how the grown children of the
Nazi perpetrators had coped. Since there had been no interest shown in
this area before, he decided to make it his research theme. Coming as he
did from a nation born of the Holocaust, he was never the "independent
scientist" or "objective observer", but because of his biographical
background, was always very personally involved in the research he was
doing: Due to his father’s foresight, close family members of Dan Bar-On
had survived: Hans Bruno, originally from Heidelberg, was a doctor in
Hamburg. In 1933, after his practice had been destroyed by the Nazis, he
emigrated to Palestine, which at that time was governed by the British.
Dan was born here, as second son in 1938: "I grew up in a German culture
in Haifa", said the Israeli. He speaks German without accent, because
German was the language always spoken at home with his grandparents.
During the early fifties, while still a young man, he broke his German
ties, adopted his Hebrew name and joined a Kibbuz. In the wars of 1956,
1967 and 1973 he fought as officer in reconnaissance unit of the army.
However, suppression and denial of his own origins took
it’s toll. While in therapy, following a breakdown after the October war
of 1973, he reflected deeply on his German origins: For a long time, he
had tried to ignore this part of his identity and banished any images of
the Nazi enemy from his consciousness. In 1983, meanwhile a trained
psychologist and university professor, and while on field-work in the
USA, he began to question, what had happened to the descendants of the
perpetrators. He came to Germany for the first time in 1985 and in the
following three years held more than ninety qualitative interviews with
grown children of Nazi perpetrators with the purpose of finding out,
what psychological effects the Holocaust had had on them. (In 1989 he
published "Legacy of Silence: Encounter with Children of the Third
Reich", Harvard University Press, which was also translated into French,
German, Japanese and Hebrew). During his research, he also contacted
Martin Bormann and met him personally. "It was a hard piece of work and
a difficult path", said Dan Bar-On. "For almost three and a half years
we had written and telephoned, and I faced our first personal meeting
with anxiety and uncertainty. His counterpart suffered from similar
fears. The fact that both men could admit these feelings to one another,
formed the basis for a personal relationship.
It was due to this healing experience through the
personal dialogue between a child of a victim and a child of a
perpetrator, that Dan Bar-On initiated the first encounter in Wuppertal
in 1992. The group called itself TRT and met annually until 1997 in
Germany, Israel or the USA. They worked with a method of story-telling:
Each member of the group told his personal life-story while the others
listened and reflected. In Wuppertal, Lena, Jewish wife of Dirk, son of
a Gestapo commander, was the first to begin: She told, how in 1942, at
the age pf three, she had survived the massacre of the Jewish peasants
in the Ukraine, how her Christian grandmother had dragged her from a
line of people in front of the Jewish ghetto and begged the Gestapo
commander for her granddaughter’s life and how she had hidden her in the
attic until liberation by the Red Army in 1944. Lena reported how she
found her mother again later in Israel, returned to Germany and got
married. Afterwards Martin Bormann told his life-story: He was born in
1930, Hitler was his godfather. Martin Bormann attended NAPOLA, an elite
school for Nazi children. By the end of the war, he was living in
Austria and from this point on, lived away from his family. He became a
Catholic, joined a monastery and worked in the sixties as missionary in
Africa. He gave up missionary work due to health problems. Later, he
left the monastery, married and taught Catholic religion and theology
until he retired.
This first encounter in Wuppertal lasted three and a
half days, until all members of the group had told their stories. "There
was a feeling of openness and energy which an outsider would probably
not have understood", remembered one member. After such a positive
beginning, everyone wanted to continue working together, and decided to
organise another meeting. As a result of the Wuppertal encounter, the
German descendants formed a self-help group which met regularly for
several years.
The second encounter, which took place in 1993 in
Israel, was much more difficult for several reasons: for the first time
they were officiating in the country of survivors of the Holocaust and
special security measures were necessary, especially for Martin Bormann.
Because the BBC was making a documentary on the proceedings, a hierarchy
arose in the group. This was a contradiction to the symmetrical
structure of the original meeting. Also, there was the difficult
decision of whether or not to continue with the group in it’s present
form: After the euphoric beginning, everyone had returned to their own
lives and social environment. Nearly all of them, both Jewish and German
members, had felt rejected and misunderstood by their families and
friends for what they were trying to do.
The TRT-group was faced with a dilemma: they could
resist the pressure, isolate themselves and carry on, or break up the
group all together. The group decided to endure the pressure, and
neither give up the trust and positive feeling on which the group was
founded, nor the relationships outside the group. Not all of them,
however, could face the dilemma: some members left the group and others
joined. Martin Bormann did not take part in the group’s third meeting
because he was afraid that American Nazis would use his participation
for propaganda purposes. Here is an indication of how history was still,
even after almost half a century, affecting the lives of individual
members of the TRT-group.
During the course of this long-standing dialogue process
which Dan Bar-On accompanied, the Israeli researcher identified several
structural similarities between the lives of both grown children of
victims and perpetrators. For the members of both groups the Holocaust
was always a presence in their lives. They felt alienated and rootless
and had experienced separation from their own parents as extremely
difficult. The dialogue was, for all of them, a liberating but also
painful process, enabling them to find a new way of living with the
past. For some it meant giving up part of their own identity, giving up
the hate which they considered a victim’s towards the wrong-doer. "My
hate was instinctive and boundless, it grew with every book, film or
article I had read about the Holocaust" said Miriam K. as she spoke
about her feelings before the TRT-process. "In the group, however, I
understood that there were honest and decent German people who felt
terribly ashamed and guilty for the crimes committed by their own people
during the Second World War, even though they themselves were innocent.
I realised it was extremely helpful to listen to the stories of others
and to be able to talk about my own past in an environment which offered
security. This healing process can only happen when people from both
sides come together. When you are in your own family or in a group where
you are all victims, it is so easy to persist with the pain, anger and
even the hate you feel and to get used to the victim role. The biggest
hurdle for those in the perpetrator group seems to be freeing themselves
from the immense feelings of guilt. It was because of my three daughters
that I had to confront these problems. On no account do I want them to
hate a whole nation because of something that happened in the past",
said the American Jew summing up her reasons for going through the
difficult process.
According to Dan Bar-On, the Holocaust will always be a
presence for the descendants of perpetrators and victims, but its
negative impact on their lives can be reduced through the conscious
working-through process which occurs in the TRT-Dialogue. The
consequences become less threatening and self-destructive because
through the dialogue, it is possible for all of them to find new and
more bearable ways to live with it.
During their sixth meeting in 1997, the TRT-Group
decided to give their work a new dimension. They wanted to share their
own positive experience with the dialogue, in coping with their own
personal trauma, which is part of a collective trauma, with people
living in present conflict situations. The Hamburger Koerber Stiftung
offered support for this step. So, in early summer of 1998 in Hamburg
the TRT-Group met "multipliers", invited from three countries which were
experiencing decades of on-going conflict: Catholics and Protestants
from Northern Ireland, black and white South Africans as well as
Palestinians and Israelis. This time the participants experienced the
difference between holding a dialogue on a past conflict or a present
one. Miriam K. remembered how she very much wanted to take part in the
South African group, but then realized, that she had to confront the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For Miriam K., listening to the Palestinian stories was
almost unbearable: "When the first Palestinian talked about his life,
his past and the painful reality of his present life in the West Bank, I
noticed I was defensive. I felt embarrassed, shocked and annoyed. It was
difficult for me to believe that this was no exception and it was
therefore unfair to behave as if this was normality for all
Palestinians. Naturally, I didn’t dare say, what I was thinking".
Miriam K., as descendent of Holocaust victims, told her
story again, but this time she felt her identity as victim beginning to
crumble: "When the next Palestinian spoke, something in me changed. It
was another story about persecution, fear and unbearable degradation. I
could not believe what I heard. How could this happen? The more I heard,
the more I shocked I became. I was ashamed to be a Jew. I could not bear
the thought that my Jewish countrymen inflicted so much pain and were so
gruesome to these people. I wanted to defend their actions, to explain
that it was part of the Israeli need for security to protect themselves
against terrorism. But I could not even convince myself that these
reasons were good enough. I was exhausted and wished I were somewhere
else."
Miriam K. and her partners in the dialogue, one of whom
was Sami Adwan, experienced, by listening to one another, expressing and
enduring one’s own pain together, the growth of a new mutual
understanding. "As the days passed and we heard more and more terrible
stories from both sides, I felt that the walls beginning to tumble. We
cried together, comforted one another, and it felt as though we were
building bridges."
However, this understanding was still extremely fragile,
and it seemed threatened when a Palestinian woman questioned whether the
Holocaust had ever happened. Then Martin Bormann, a believable witness,
told his story: "The Palestinians were evidently spell-bound. The whole
situation seemed unreal: Jews tried convincing Palestinians about the
meaning and truth of the Holocaust while the son of a notorious Nazi
perpetrator gave the facts". More than a year after the TRT-dialogue in
Hamburg, Miriam K. describes what she had felt at the time: "Once again
my view of the world was shattered. In my opinion, Jews were always the
victims, but I don’t believe this any longer. The workshop in Hamburg
had catapulted me out of this victim category and I had to find a new
place for myself. I am grateful to our conflict group for the courage
and openness it showed in sharing it’s pain. They were dealing with
uncomfortable facts, were open for new information which meant a
challenge for them".
The most difficult encounter in Hamburg was definitely
the Palestine-Israeli group. However, the practical consequences which
arose from it, continue to exist today: The personal meeting between
Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On gave birth to the idea of PRIME – Peace
Research Institute for the Middle East. The research projects of this
institute serve to prepare the joint future of Palestinians and Israelis
in the region. Even under the difficult, warlike conditions, they
continue to work on joint projects and keep in contact with one another.
Sami Adwan was granted permission to leave the country again for the
first time to attend the congress in Würzburg. He told the listeners,
how during the first Intifada, while in an Israeli prison, he began to
see the human faces behind the enemy mask for the first time, and how
realised that violence was not the way to solve conflict.
Dan Bar-On sees the TRT-Process as a possibility for
achieving long-term solutions for ethnic, national and religious
conflicts. Also, even those for which political and legal solutions seem
to have been found, for example in Northern Ireland or South Africa, the
effects of decades of violence go deeper: "Conflicts may change at an
obvious level, but this does not necessarily mean that they have
disappeared altogether; conflicts, believed to be forgotten, can flare
up again at any moment". The researcher gives the ethnic conflicts in
the Balkans as an example. Outwardly, it seemed that ethnic tension in
Communist Jugoslavia was eradicated, which a mixed-marriage rate of 46
percent seemed to confirm. However, the decentralisation of power in
Jugoslavia following the collapse of the Communist system, allowed
former hostilities surface again, causing extreme bloodshed - even among
close neighbours and friends. It is clear from this, says Dan Bar-On,
that these conflicts were merely suppressed, and that from a
psychological point of view, no working-through process had taken place.
"A reconciliation process such as the TRT-process has to deal with this
hidden aspect before there can be a lasting and successful resolution of
conflict".
Elisabeth Gruendler
hagalil.com / 18-02-02
haGalil onLine 18-02-2002 |
