The Star Talks To Bettina Volz: Children Of Silence

Bettina Volz, 45, who has just received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the City University of New York, grew up in the southern German town of Ravensburg, which looks out onto the Swiss Alps. She lives today in the Amagansett woods, on the edge of one of the hamlet's few steep slopes.

When she met Juergen, not long after the Berlin Wall came down, he was in his mid-20s, a student at the University of Rostock. His thoughts, she found, reflected a growing trend among the under-30 generation in her native land.

Germany's history before and during World War II has disturbed Ms. Volz over the years. Her parents, she said, were "typical bystanders" during the war, and the Holocaust has always been a "troubling issue" for her. She wished, she said, that her family "had helped the Jews."

"What did I inherit?," she sometimes wonders. "Could this bad thing come up in me?"

She shared her insights over a tranquil cup of coffee last weekend.

Silent Interval

Seldom in history have a nation's deeds evoked as complex a response - within and without its borders - as the Holocaust. Of specific concern to Ms. Volz is the silence, over the half-century that has passed since the war ended, of both the perpetrators and the death-camp survivors - in particular, how that silence has affected their children. The guilty and their families have kept quiet because they bear "too much shame," she said; the survivors, because they were so profoundly and horrifically "victims."

The silence matters, she explained, because it represents "an interruption in the life narrative." The history curriculum in her own high school, in a suburb of Stuttgart, "ended in the 1930s and picked up again in 1950."

World War II

Ms. Volz's studies come at a time when debate and revelations about World War II are at a high.

Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" was seen by an astonishing 63 million people when it aired on prime time network TV two weeks ago. Swiss bank accounts and art treasures in France and elsewhere, thought to be Jewish property confiscated by the Nazis, have been uncovered. Aging witnesses to atrocities, encouraged by Elie Wiesel and others, are coming forward for the first time.

Not only has the disclosure that three grandparents of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were Jewish and died in Nazi gas chambers "transformed" her personal biography, as The New York Times observed recently, but the war itself is "the source of issues engrossing her department and the foreign policy of the United States."

The number of scholarly works about the Holocaust is surging.

Among them is the recently published "French Children of the Holocaust," translated by Howard Epstein of East Hampton, about the 11,000 Jewish children turned over to the Nazis by the Vichy Government. Photographs of the children have been widely publicized in an exhibit that may go on national tour.

"Hitler's Willing Executioners," on the role and responsibility of ordinary Germans during the war and afterward, has been a best-seller here since its publication last March - and in Germany, where it has set off a nationwide storm of controversy. Its author, Daniel J. Goldhagen, holds the recently endowed Holocaust chair at Harvard.

No Guns In The House

Ms. Volz's father, she said, was recruited into the Wehrmacht, the German Army, and served as a medic, tending wounded at the front. While she was growing up, there was "very little discussion of the Holocaust" at home, but she remembers that he "felt proud" he had not served as a soldier.

Her father never permitted guns in the house, even as toys, she recalled. In fact, she said, he was "suspicious of any group activity."

Both parents "complained that the war had deprived them of their youth," said Ms. Volz, but expressed "no sense of sadness."

Repression Therapy

"I never saw remorse," she said. "They were so repressed, they could not even cry . . . the younger generation is doing more of the crying." She herself took "a week to recover," she said, after seeing "Schindler's List."

Ms. Volz practices psychotherapy, specializing in children and adolescents, at the Harborview Counseling Center in Sag Harbor. Her research, she hopes, may help to uncork the kind of repression therapists often encounter in the children of Nazi-era Germans - in psychological terms, "build a bridge" of resolution.

Almost as soon as she arrived in the U.S. in 1973 after college, to study psychology for a year at Vassar, Ms. Volz realized that Germany was "a depressed place."

"A huge burden fell off my shoulders when I got off the plane," she said. "It's very freeing here," without the "authoritarian" quality she was used to.

Older Germans Can't Let Go

The authoritarianism, obedience, and idealization of leadership that enabled Nazism to flourish "also made Germans unable to come to terms with the Nazi past," Ms. Volz postulated.

Older Germans especially, she said, have trouble "letting go," because that would mean they were wrong about who or what they idealized.

A person who has had an "ambivalent relationship with someone who has died," she explained - a parent or other relative, perhaps - may not acknowledge that person's negative qualities and so gets "stuck in idealization."

The survivor is left with ambivalent feelings, though. To keep the image intact, the negatives are "turned inward, bringing on depression."

Such, Ms. Volz said, is the collective human condition in Germany. To heal, she said, one must "let the idealized images go" and face the truth about the negative past.

As part of her dissertation, she interviewed German students about the Holocaust: how they had learned of it, how they felt about it now, whether they could imagine being part of such a process, how they might tell their children about it.

Ms. Volz measured each respondent's level of "empathy," "tolerance" of uncomfortable situations, and "defensiveness," as well as "how they form relationships."

Many of the students, she said, "fell apart" when talking specifically about the Holocaust. Though they "sounded articulate," they had not "worked through emotionally" the events of the past.

"Willing Executioners"

Nevertheless, she said, young Germans "have a hunger to talk about it," while the older generation is far more reserved. Older people initially "panned" Mr. Goldhagen's book - which charges among other things that the Wehrmacht knew about such Nazi evils as executions and death camps, and stood by or even helped the perpetrators - as "too one-sided."

The German Army had previously been portrayed as removed from the atrocities.

"Hitler's Willing Executioners," summed up Ms. Volz, deals with the "deep-rooted anti-Semitism which allowed individuals to kill - even after the war was over."

"Unable To Mourn"

Josef Joffe, a leading German commentator, said this month that the nation's younger generation "can relive the fascination [with the past] without reliving the fear and stigmatization. It can look the evil in the eye."

Not entirely true, said Ms. Volz. Germany, she said, is still "unable to mourn." The "emotional barrier" remains.

Ms. Volz moved to Amagansett six years ago. She lives with her husband, Don Lenzer, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and their daughter, Antonia, 6. The East End, she said, "is a good place for my daughter."