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When I was 11, in sixth grade, the teacher gave us a blank map of the world and asked us to go home and fill in 30 international cities. I was oddly excited about the homework assignment, and with my World Book Encyclopedia in hand, I rose to the task. When I handed in my world, beaming, the teacher appeared baffled. “Are you from Germany?” he asked. “No, why?” I responded. “Because,” he said, “you put all 30 cities in Germany.”
It took me more than half a century to discover why I saw Germany as the center of my young world. The revelation occurred in a psychodrama workshop in Poland dealing with the topic of how the Holocaust plays out in the present within families of perpetrators and victims. While on the psychodramatic stage, I realized that my father had returned as a soldier from Nazi Germany with post—traumatic stress and that the only one willing to listen to his war stories was me, his very young son. Not knowing what to do with his stories of brutality and terror, I internalized them, holding onto my father’s pain as if it were my own. And not only did I cling to my father’s stories for dear life, but also those of the generalized Jewish victims and survivors, some of whom came from my own extended family. When I grew up and became a professional, the generalized other asked me, “What is a drama therapist?” I responded: “A drama therapist helps people tell their stories.”
My stories of Germany are many and varied as I traveled in reality throughout the 30 cities of my childhood fantasies, establishing long—term relationships with Germans, then shunning everything German for many years after, until returning as a professional drama therapist in the summers of 2010 and 2012.
My first stop was Berlin, a city I initially visited in 1966. I came with old memories intact of distant people, bullet—scarred buildings, forbidding checkpoints and gray walls. Now, the city is vibrant, colorful, young and hip. Art projects and memorials—Denkmäler—are everywhere: bronze stumbling stones among the cobblestones, with the names and places of death of victims of the Nazis, the disorienting labyrinth of the Holocaust Memorial of 2,711 uneven slabs of concrete, the painted sides of the old walls from the DDR, with an iconic image of Brezhnev kissing East German President Erich Honecker, and the smart cultural graffiti of street art seemingly everywhere. In the Bavarian Quarter I learn that the school children research the lives of children of Jewish families who lived in the neighborhood until they were deported to the death camps. The local children write the long—forgotten names on yellow bricks and build a memorial wall in their school. Placards hang on light posts, with chilling edicts dating from the late 1930s: “Jewish actors are not allowed to perform in theatres, to sing publicly in singing groups, to go to schools.” On the other side of the placards are drawings—a curtain descending, a musical instrument, a classroom.
I work in Berlin and in Remscheid, a small city near Düsseldorf (one of my 30 cities), which hosts the yearly summer conference of the German Institut für Theatertherapie (Association for Dramatherapists). The work is deep and complex around the theme of working with myth and fairy tales through drama therapy. Although the participants are mostly young and removed by three generations from the war, the effects of the Nazi times are ever—present. On one evening in 2010, 100 participants gather to create a ritual commemorating its hold on the culture. Parallel lines of tape are laid across a wooden floor and the leader tells the group that each line represents a period in German history, beginning at the time of the Nibilungen, the ancient Germanic myth in which nearly all are killed at the end. The epochs proceed through World War I, the Nazi times, World War II, the present and the future. The leader instructs all to place themselves along one line and then to move, spontaneously, throughout the epochs, locating themselves in time.
Before long, the room is filled with a deep sadness as bodies get stuck in the second world war and its aftermath, some lying rigidly on the ground, as if dead. As a participant, I feel lost. This is not my history. But then I was born into a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro—Hungarian Empire, And I recall my father’s unwitting immersion into the depths of the war and the stories that tie us both to this unrelentingly seductive culture.
Feeling compelled to save those stricken, I reach out and pull as many bodies as I can toward the future. In the end, the room is filled with audible sobs. And then suddenly, an old man appears, leaning on a cane on the line of the mythic past. How could I have missed him? He walks slowly and deliberately to the line of World War I, through the Nazi times, finally stopping at the future. Later, he identifies himself as a World War I veteran, who survived great suffering and lives to tell the tales.
My work was initially about leading a group of professional drama therapists through a dramatization of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. The work quickly took on aspects of antipathy between Germans and Jews as the actors set their story on a boat, a loosely veiled reference to the peace ship from Turkey to Gaza that was attacked by the Israeli military in 2010. All at once, a simple fairy tales became contemporary. The perpetrators were no longer the Germans of the 1940s, but the Israelis of the 2010s.
Then in a two—day workshop, I led the group through a hero’s journey experience, introducing them to working with fictional stories to explore personal and collective issues. Again, the war surfaced, but subliminally, as the participants struggled to tolerate stories of trauma, however disguised from reality they were intended to be. As hard as I tried, I could not fully contain the pain.
I left in 2010 with unfinished business, the war still alive inside. Returning in 2012, I was determined to work within safer boundaries, taking time to build a stronger group dynamic, reminding all of the pedagogical nature of the workshop experience which, although potentially therapeutic, was not therapy, pointing out the complexities of work within liminal spaces between reality and myth. Still, the war surfaced quickly as the group informed me that the title of my workshop on the guide re—ignited a cultural issue of the acceptability of using the literal translation of guide, in German, der Führer. All agreed that the verbal invocation of Hitler was unacceptable in relationship to the title of a therapeutic workshop and is, for the most part, disallowed in common cultural parlance.
I led the group on a guided imagery about a hero in search of an unknown destination. As part of my model of the hero’s journey, each participant creates a fictional story involving the hero’s journey toward a destination. To get there, the hero must confront an obstacle of her making. Because the obstacle is formidable, she requires the help of a guide figure.
One woman, whom I shall call Ute, creates a story of a heart that needs to be cleaved in two by a guide figure in order to discover a means of repair. She directs her own story, carefully casting and observing the actors on the journey toward cleavage and reparation. I note that the cutting is weak and ineffectual, and I ask Ute to step into the drama as the guide and perform the difficult and delicate surgery herself. As guide and full of a complexity of feelings, she acts bravely, with bold gestures cutting the heart in two, then facilitating a reconciliation of the split off parts. In reflecting on the drama, she realizes that she must first allow her heart to break, recognizing and naming the two chambers, before being able to hold the split off pieces together, a task she continues to learn and practice.
Thinking that the story is more personal than cultural and war—related, I learn later that for Ute, this is a story of recovery from the trauma of the war. Growing up in a split family deeply scarred by the war, with a biological father who was a Nazi officer and a Jewish stepfather who survived Auschwitz, Ute comes of age with a heart broken in her attempt to hold together those too wounded to care for one another. She realizes how she has internalized the family wounds and that to survive well in the present, holding together the complexities of relationship, she must find an effective way to separate from the past, even if it requires an act of some violence.
At the end of our work together, we dramatize several stories of abused trust. One image that reoccurs as a destination is that of home. After working with the image of unsafe homes for two days and nearing our end, I suggest that the group create a safe house with their bodies. I ask one man, who has revealed a story of abuse, to find a way into the house. With some effort, he finds a way inside. I ask him what he wants and he says, “To be held.” I tell him to ask for it and he does. The group, that is the safe house, holds him and rocks him. He becomes very quiet and cries deeply. He feels held, contained in the present, as just for a moment he lets go of the past.
Germany is divided even as it works so hard to be integrated, to take responsibility for a traumatic past, to restore and re—story its cultural artifacts, its walls and its cobblestone streets. Its capital, Berlin, is a study in renovation, a city of young energy, of art, of celebration and transformation. Its loveliness is bathed in the darkness of its history, which as in most cultures finds a way to surface, generation after generation.
Berlin is one among the 30 cities that I inserted within Germany’s post-war borders as a young boy. Germany was my destination in the 1950s and it is my destination now. But returning in 2012, I am aware of how much that destination has shifted for me, as all destinations do over time and through deep reflection. The fear and darkness is still there and visible to all who walk among Germany’s Denkmäler. And yet, in its openness, it becomes more manageable somehow, more part of the long, hard line on the ground between the past, present and future.
As a drama therapist, I help people tell their stories, with the understanding that such stories are often disguised in imagery and myth. My job is not to interpret, but to urge another from another culture, another mind, to journey along a path that just might lead to the destination of the heart, the home.
