Second generation of immigrants from German speaking countries ("Yekkes")

AB spent his first 2 years in Beit Eshel in the Negev, the family then moved to moshav Hayogev in the Israel Valley (the moshav was founded by young couples of German and Austrian origin). He finished his highschool in Afula, and then studied electronics for one year. Between 1966 and 1969 he did his military service as a Signal Officer. Afterwards he started studying Psychology and Education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he got his PhD in Clinical Psychology in 1986. From 1986 until 1990 he worked as a chief psychologist at the Psychiatric Department of Hadassah Medical Center Ein Kerem. Since 1987 he also did analytical work at a private clinic in Jerusalem. He is teaching at several university-institutions and publicizes about psychoanalysis. AB married in 1969 and has 3 children. ; AB talks about his parents' immigration, they didn't know Hebrew when they immigrated. His mother's younger sister emigrated to Israel later. His maternal grandmother survived Theresienstadt, married again and lived in Germany. She used to come to Israel in certain intervals though, to spend an entire year with her daughter's family. ; AB heard a lot of German as a small child. The interviewer asks for associations with German deriving from his infancy, to which AB answers that those associations were hardly ever negative. He grew up with the German cultural assets. His parents somehow remained in their Yekkish milieu. AB thinks his Hebrew language and his way of thinking were formed by the German language. He first absorbed German from his parents' and his grandmother's language and later by reading professional psychoanalytical literature in German (Freud and Jung). He considers punctuality and reliability as important virtues of his education. AB experienced only little physical affection during his childhood, he had to get used to physical contact when he became an adult. In his family RB had the role of the child who is always happy (“Sonnenkind”, Sunshine). ; AB's grandmother, who very much identified with the German culture, refused to answer any question about her time in the concentration camp and denied any general German guilt. AB noticed his grandmother had feelings of guilt because she did not allow his mother's younger sister to join a “Kindertransport”. AB visited Germany for the first time in 1972 together with his wife, it was by no means a traumatic experience. His positive attitude towards Germany was motivated by his strong relationship to his beloved grandmother. AB's brother lives as a painter and therapist in Haifa. When they were children they did not dare to ask their parents about the past, they respected their vulnerability. Their father suffered more from feelings of guilt than their mother, because he had to leave his mother behind. AB's parents were always motivated by the symbolic power of their actions, the agricultural work in the moshav was an expression of idealism. Furthermore they were religious. AB only learned to read and write German as an adult. In 1987 he visited Austria together with his family, mainly Vienna. Later he went there again, together with his father. His father still has a good friend in Vienna, who also came to see him in Israel. AB's children are still slightly formed in a Yekkish way. His wife's roots are Polish, one of his daughters married a man with German roots. AB's father just finished his doctoral thesis written in Hebrew, but his German writing is still better. ; AB discusses analogies with the Jungian psychological theories. He analyses the contradictory feelings of the Yekkes towards Germany, which he also noticed in his family. The less people have family members living in Germany, the less relation they have to the country. He assumes that Yekkes deny their German roots for reasons of self-defense. AB does not feel uncomfortable about his roots, he rather considers the emigration itself as a reason for traumata. Among his patients he often notices a transfer of heavy traumata from former concentration camp-prisoners to their children. AB analyses the Zionist dream of cultivating the “mother earth” with one's own hands as an expression of the trauma of separation after the emigration. Within the Israeli society Holocaust victims were partly treated like lepers. As a child AB was already very much interested in the Holocaust. A considerable part of his patients have a Holocaust background.