Processes inherent in memories of childhood under Hitler and during the Second World War. Interviews with psychoanalysts in Germany. - in a project devoted to the memory work of German psychoanalysts with regard to their childhood under Hitler and during the World War U, the author draws upon the categories "intertextuality" and "deferred action" to identify traces of this work in the transcripts of the interviews conducted with them. Here the crucial issue is the description of the processes inherent in these memories and the delayed effects of childhood events rather than content aspects like "air-raid nights," "escape and displacement," or -absence of the father." These content categories are of course firmly established fixtures. But appreciation of their true significance was only achieved by relating individual experiences to collective history via deferred engagement with those experiences. The significance of personal, individual suffering as a child in wartime was frequently warded off by the later awareness of Nazi extermination policy and hence of collective guilt. The silence kept by the parent generation meant the question of whether one's own parents had perhaps been perpetrators had to be deferred. It is necessary to interpret this deferred revision of memory against the background both of the delayed effects of war traumas and of the denial of child vulnerability in the 1930s caused by the prevalence of Nazi values and norms. Summing up, we can say that psychoanalysis as a process of remembering, modifying memories, restoring dissociations, and working through the individual and collective past, can help bring about a reappraisal of one's own even traumatic life story.
