“The Possibility of Happiness”: Trauma and Ideology

In her autobiographical debut novel “The Possibility of Happiness,” Anne Rabe constructs a direct connection between the socialist education system and the experience of a cold lack of empathy in a (her?) childhood in the GDR that was marked by mental and physical violence. One thing – the formation of “all-round educated socialist personalities”, as it was called in the GDR – inevitably requires the other, namely a structural brutality that extends to the smallest cell of society, the family. Rabe was nominated for the German Book Prize this year for her literary treatment of her own childhood. In the end she didn’t get it, but just being on the shortlist means recognition and widespread attention in the country’s feature pages.

There the novel was received and discussed predominantly positively. This is no wonder, wrote Franziska and Jonas Haug in “nd.DieWoche” on October 28, 2023. Rabe’s settlement with her parents is at the same time an indictment of the system in which the parents were actively involved and their children lived according to its maxims » behaved”. With this diagnosis, the book opportunistically fits into the West German narrative, according to which the GDR is described solely as a cold and bad-tempered “dictatorship” – the quotation marks are placed by the two authors, which suggests that they also use the term ” Dictatorship” for the GDR as a West German bias. In general, the book prize is a purely West German affair, which is why material is usually ennobled that uses stereotypes about life in the GDR and confirms the West’s prejudices.

Break with the West German narrative

The tide in the domestic German debate has changed dramatically for some time now. The anger of those born later is taking hold over the West’s continued paternalism of the East for thirty years, which is sometimes perceived as colonial behavior. Dirk Oschmann’s book »The East. A West German invention«. For many, his polemic articulated the unease with the pan-German discourse that had previously been so difficult to put into words. Oschmann tried to break the interpretive sovereignty of the West German elites and to call to mind the soliloquy of the East Germans that began in 1989 but ended abruptly in 1990 with the takeover of the East German media by the West German top dogs. He called the prevailing image of the East a media invention of the West, from whose discourse East Germans are largely excluded to this day.

However, one must be careful not to go to the other extreme out of defiance against the preponderance of West German interpretive sovereignty and to gloss over the GDR or to sense the West German narrative behind every critical description of the GDR reality. It is undoubtedly a step forward that life in the GDR can now be described more ambivalently and in all its contradictions and that there is a new awareness of the complex connections and shades that elude simple judgments. Nevertheless, it remains fundamentally correct to describe the GDR as a dictatorship under whose structural violence people suffered. This also explicitly refers to the educational system, whose goal – the creation of a socialist community of people that is as homogeneous as possible – included a considerable degree of coercion and pressure to conform.

There is no need to use the notorious youth centers or even worse disciplinary institutions as key witnesses. In every phase of the usual educational path, from daycare to the party apprenticeship, the declared goal was not the education of mature, even critical individuals, but rather the subordination to the ideal of the socialist collective, behind which individual needs and characteristics had to take second place. What didn’t fit was made to fit. The supposedly greater cohesion in the GDR was in reality more of a forced community. Those who suffered from the pressure to conform were all the non-conformists, birds of paradise, lateral thinkers, individualists who ended up being sorted out into some niche or who, as unwilling dropouts, lived in marginal jobs with no chance of career advancement.

Systemic experience of violence?

For those affected, the paternalistic educational dictatorship was definitely a violent experience. It was not just the state as a faceless entity that exercised this violence, but often the parents as the transmission belt of the state’s will. These mechanisms have certainly been described in (East German) literature; one thinks of Peter Wawerzinek’s “Rabenliebe” or Lutz Seiler’s “Kruso”; Authors who can hardly be accused of pandering to the West German literary world. The question is whether the often noted coldness and lack of empathy of the parents’ generation, as described by Rabe, was a specifically East German phenomenon and therefore inherent to the system.

Anne Rabe constructs this connection, Franziska and Jonas Haug vehemently deny it. Both sides are wrong: the Haugs because they do not want to see the potential for violence inherent in the system and negate it, Anne Rabe because her analysis falls short and excludes essential aspects. In her focus on the GDR as an unjust state whose legitimacy she denies, she ignores and neglects the actual roots of the hardship and mercilessness from which she suffered as a child. You don’t need any particularly strong historical or psychological knowledge to recognize how long-term and across generations the traumatic devastation and devastation of the Nazi era, the war and the post-war period, had. And this damage inevitably occurred both in the east and in the west, which means that similar fates as Rabe describes can be found in abundance on both sides of the Elbe.

Everyone knows the kind of grandparents who never spoke about their experiences in the Second World War throughout their lives and took their silence to their graves. Before that, however, they passed on their trauma to their offspring. There are enough studies that prove the connection between the raw and deeply hidden experiences of war, the experiences of loss of control and the mass killing and death all around, and later domestic violence towards children (or wives). There are also dark spots in the family history of the author of these lines.

My mother was born in Dresden in 1942 and experienced the destruction of the city, the end of the war and the post-war period as a small child. Her own mother died of tuberculosis in a hospital soon after the end of the war, and her father’s second wife turned out to be the proverbial evil stepmother from the fairy tale, with beatings, imprisonment, and unkindness. One cannot imagine the psychological devastation such a childhood had on later adult life. Her own marriage ended in divorce at an early age, she put the children in the crèche, where the dear little ones were dropped off on Mondays and picked up again on Fridays, giving them a new experience of loss week after week. She was unable to pass on the motherly love that she had never experienced herself to her children. Nowadays she would probably have been considered severely traumatized and could have received appropriate therapy. At the time in question, psychiatry was still in its infancy and the panacea for depression was to “pull yourself together.”

Unresolved trauma

My mother found a parental replacement and a certain level of security in the SED, which she joined early on and served as a loyal party soldier until the end of the GDR – like the parents in Anne Rabe’s novel. The parallels are obvious. Over the years, the traumas suffered in the war, which resulted in a hardening of souls, combined with the ideological pressure and the structural repressive potential of the GDR education system to form a melange. However, to draw the conclusion, as Rabe did, that a child who bathed too hotly should be blamed on socialism is certainly wrong. The mental and physical cruelty towards the children that Rabe deals with in her novel has its roots in the traumas of the World War that were repressed and never dealt with in the GDR.

A study published about two years ago on children in care in both German states came to shocking results: from the post-war period to the end of the 1970s, despite the differences in the system, there were similar structural deficiencies in East and West Germany. The children and young people suffered from massive physical violence, humiliation, disregard for privacy or restraints. Despite different political systems and different health policy requirements, there was no difference between facilities in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. Anne Rabe was only born in 1986, when the two German societies had consolidated (and one was already in decline again) and humiliation and beating were no longer part of the standard repertoire of education. But war violence has cross-generational consequences for survivors and experienced trauma can even be inherited, as science now knows. Neglecting this connection and placing all the blame for the suffering experienced on the GDR system is a crucial weakness in Anne Rabe’s otherwise very readable book.

Anne Rabe: The possibility of happiness.

Klett-Cotta 2023, 384 S., Hardcover, 24 €.