7. “Those books the Nazis keep getting shown burning” were destroyed because student groups at German universities were taking steps to remove Jewish influence from German institutions to purify Germany of foreign, Jewish influence.
That’s why they burned and destroyed the work from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft; not because it was research on issues of trans and sexual identity and culture. Is it possible it would have been destroyed had it not been the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish man? Probably, because they saw anything championing LGBT rights and normalization as being by definition caused by and due to the influence of Jewish degeneracy. But Hirschfeld’s work was destroyed with works by other Jews in the spring of 1933 because they were works by Jewish people or seen as Jewish-influenced. You can’t separate the centrality and overarching goal of erasing what they deemed Jewish influence (defined as “Jewish degeneracy”) from Germany and the “Aryan” people.
It says it right there in the Twelve Theses: "Our most dangerous enemy is the Jew and those who are his slaves” and "We demand of German students the desire and capability to overcome Jewish intellectualism and the resulting liberal decay in the German spirit.”
Joseph Goebbels said it at the Berlin book burning: “German men and women! The age of arrogant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end! … You are doing the right thing at this midnight hour—to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past. This is a great, powerful, and symbolic act… . Out of these ashes the phoenix of a new age will arise… . Oh Century! Oh Science! It is a joy to be alive!””
8. THAT’S NOT WHAT INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA IS.
You want to know what intergenerational trauma is? Let me spell it out for all of you.
Having always known about the Holocaust but never remembering when you first learned about it. Growing up with the thought experiment constantly playing in the back of your head of which gentile friend would hide you if and when the Holocaust happens again. Having a go bag just in case your family needs to flee and not realizing that’s not a normal thing for a parent to have instructed you to have and furthermore not even remembering when a parent instructed it in the first place. Being terrified to shower in the locker room or any public shower because showers also mean gas chambers. It’s knowing from childhood exactly what the swastika, SS bolts, and reichsadler (eagle) mean.
Having recurring nightmares since childhood of being in line waiting for selection, smelling burning flesh, seeing emancipated people wearing prison uniforms marching to crematoria, and then finding yourself in an open grave full of dead, skeletal bodies, trying desperately to bury them while feeling guilty for surviving. Being constantly afraid you aren’t going to have enough food or essentials, so you end up overeating, hoarding, or both. Having parents and grandparents who “loved too much, who smothered us with their care, their solicitude, their ever-present, all-enveloping anxiety” such that we are incapable of entering into or having healthy, non-anxiety ridden intimate or platonic relationships.
And as an aside, no one said “genetic descent” was required. (However, studies have shown that descendants of Holocaust survivors do have altered stress hormones inherited from their parents’ traumatic experiences.) I was adopted at birth by Jewish parents and let me tell you a lot of this is learned and cultural behavior. Only either other Jews have heard me talk about this stuff with understanding or an aha! moment of clarity (“You mean this is a Jewish thing? It’s not just me?”) or other historically oppressed ethnic groups with collective trauma (for example, Dr. Joy DeGruy’s theory of “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” and this article from Social Work Today) have fully understood due to the intergenerational trauma they have from their historical trauma (specific shout-out to Romani people who also have fun cross-generational Holocaust trauma and get to hear people from other victim groups talk about how they would have been treated the same and it wasn’t just us who were killed because the Nazis hated everyone). (Sarcasm)
Intergenerational trauma is not losing a generation of research or culture. It’s not being able to imagine you would have been a victim of the Nazis had you been in Nazi Germany. It’s the living memory coupled with ongoing dehumanization, passed down through the generations through learned behavior and sometimes genetics, of trauma, oppression, and fear. It’s continuity of collective trauma passed from parent to child to grandchild and beyond.
