They wanted the Germans to shake up. Margaret mitsch claimed already in the mid-1960s a critical discussion of the Nazi period. At the time, a taboo. 17. July would have been the psychoanalyst 100.
You came in 1917, to the world, daughter of a Danish doctor and a German teacher, was a Physician, left to the psychoanalyst training and has worked many years with her husband in this area. Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich: A famous academic couple, the conducted research, taught, wrote, and history has written.
The mitscherl I shaked taboos
The book, “to mourn, The inability” was a provocation. Created in 1967, in the middle of the Cold war and even before the student revolt, touched on long-held taboos. It is a polemic, a key text that shook up a little later, the students went to Germany on the streets not only to protest against the old pigtails to the universities, but also to the parents-generation’s attention to the collective denial of guilt, the lack of management of the NS-time, the false return to an ostensible normality.
Alexander Mitscherlich in 1976
It was a difficult book, many have not understood it at the time. Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, the question of why “the era of the third Reich was steeped inadequate critical”. They did this with the tools of psychoanalysis, a discipline that had not existed after the Second world war in Germany. Your representatives had been murdered or expelled. Margaret’s sisters had graduated, but already in the 1950s in London, a psycho-analytical training. In 1960, her husband had founded in Frankfurt and the Sigmund-Freud-Institute, the should be a centre of intellectual discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Germans are hardened in “nationalist self-centeredness”
The testimony of the mitscherl I wrote at the time, their German compatriots in the book, was bitter, and for many to cope with difficult: The Germans were indifferent and apathetic. Lacking in empathy for the victims of the Nazi genocide. They were hardened in “nationalist self-centeredness”. Guilt, shame, and particularly grief over the losses would be blocked. The vast majority regard the Nazi era as a kind of “infectious disease in child years,” and all of a sudden, only Adolf Hitler and a few of its leaders were responsible.
1967 unthinkable: Four years later, Willy Brandt, Egon Bahr, and Leonid Brezhnev met
The restoration of a functioning economy have priority in the Republic, however, the establishment of a democratic state had been after the experience of dictatorship and Terror, no inner need of the German, but the winners have been imposed on them. The theses, which did not want to listen to the majority of Germans at the time, and not to acknowledge it. You had the “economic miracle”, you looked back to the front. The picture of the world was clearly joined: The enemy was on the left, behind the wall and the barbed wire, in the GDR.
Criticism of the division of Germany
Margaret mitsch touched, and her husband, however, yet another taboo: they also criticized the false, the illusionary, yeah, dangerous dealing with the consequences of the German instigated war, with the division of Germany, the newly created borders. There is a lack of will and recognition of realities. You have to insist on claims. The authors diagnosed a “German Art, to love the Unattainable uncompromising” and spoke of a “orientation toward the unreal”. Thoughts, which had at that time, in wide circles, a veritable Outcry by the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt, the reconciliation with Poland, the basic Treaty with the GDR was still no speech.
Confrontation with the German past
To mourn “is the inability”, the book with the programmatic title, it was a Signal, a prelude to the confrontation of Germans with their past and, ultimately, the impetus for what we now call the culture of remembrance. A painful and hard, many years of continuous effort, an example and a model for others, an effort for the us today, many countries pay respect and recognition.
Feminist Campaigner
Margarete Mitscherlich, the fractious, self-deprecating, intellectual, has also published after the death of her husband in 1982. Not only books and scientific papers. Occasionally, they even wrote in a women’s magazine. She made herself as an intellectual representative of a militant’ feminism ‘ is a name, wrote in 1985, “The peaceful wife”, five years later, “About the hardship of the emancipation”, published a magazine and had in Frankfurt, a practice for psychoanalysis. Until recently, you should have held still, occasionally, meetings. Visitor reports on the couch of their apartment a plush sat figure: unmistakably Sigmund Freud. Margarete Mitscherlich died on 12.06.2012, at the age of 94 years in Frankfurt am Main.