The German-Jewish Second Generation in Generational Discourse on the Holocaust

WHEN ONE CONSIDERS THE CONCEPT OF generations with regard to post-Second World War history and culture, the immediate reference point that comes to mind is that of the “second generation” of the Holocaust. Originally referring to the sons and daughters of Jewish Holocaust survivors, this term developed above all in the American context beginning in the 1970s to designate what psychologists, journalists, and children of survivors themselves identified as a unique legacy of the history of the Holocaust transmitted from survivor parents to their postwar children. During this time a number of texts endeavored to define the second generation as a group and describe the impact the parents’ Holocaust experience had on the lives of the children. Helen Epstein, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, published a groundbreaking compilation of interviews with the children of survivors entitled Children of the Holocaust (1979) in which she “set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived.” She described this body of individuals as “that quiet, invisible community, that peer group without a sign” and referred to them simply as the “children of the Holocaust.” A few years later, Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy established a designate for this peer group in their edited volume Generations of the Holocaust (1982). Focusing explicitly on the ways in which the experience of the Holocaust is transmitted generationally, both in families of Jewish Holocaust survivors and in families of Nazi perpetrators, Bergmann and Jucovy and their contributors employed the term “second generation” to describe what they saw as a distinct group characterized by a certain psychological legacy. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the concept of the second generation took hold, particularly in Anglo-American and Israeli contexts, where it was established as a standard signifier for a narrowly defined group of people whose experience became the prominent focus of both cultural discourse and academic research on the aftereffects of the Holocaust. During this time further psychological studies emerged, including Robert Prince's The Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychohistorical Themes in the Second Generation (1985), Aaron Hass's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (1990), Dina Wardi's Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (1992), and Dan Bar-On's Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (1995).