Inherited Memory

I was barely eleven, waiting for the tram with my friend Ulli.  Someone walked up behind me, reaching over my satchel.  Intense pain sizzled from a spot on the back of neck.  I jerked around.  Torsten grinned, as he tossed his cigarette butt to the ground.  I registered the sprouting facial hair on his chin - he was in my class but had been held back at least twice.  Ulli screamed at him, but I just clenched my jaws.  My only goal to not react, not give him the satisfaction of seeing the pain he’d caused.  Ulli kept yelling at him as she pulled me toward the slowing tram.  Then she turned to me: “Why didn’t you say anything?”  

Over the years I often wondered why my automatic response is not fight or flight, but freeze.   Was it the repeated border crossings when I was still an infant - watching my mother pretending to be meek while the guards treated her like she was subhuman?  Or does it go farther back?  

Last year, I came across this article:  Memories pass between generations. Recent work in the field of epigenetics shows that genes can be altered by trauma and those altered genes modify the behavior in offspring.

It felt like a revelation and confirmation.  Memory transmitted between generations.  Perhaps now I could stop blaming myself for shutting down like a frightened rabbit whenever anyone in uniform challenged me.  Maybe my fears and anxieties aren’t a defect of character, as I’ve always believed.  

Shortly after “Dreaming in German” was published, I received an email from Michael Reddy, a healer, coach and shaman.  He had come across the book on Amazon and wanted to know if it  might be useful in his work with family constellation therapy.  Here’s an excerpt: “I’'m wondering if you know about family constellations--which came out of Germany originally?  Individual trauma, if it is serious enough affects the families of ancestors as well as the individual, can lodge in the higher level family system (or family soul), where it stays until some descendent lives out something similar.  It's like the unresolved in the family soul resurfaces.  This is a chance to heal it, but few people understand that.  Family constellations are a tool for revealing and clearing these kinds of systemic traumas.  The US is the laggard in this kind of work, while it is growing very quickly around the world.”

We traded pdf’s of our books. His is titled Health, Happiness, and Family Constellations - How Ancestors, Family Systems, and Hidden Loyalties Shape Your Life - and What You Can Do About It. I found it fascinating reading.  Bert Hellinger, who developed this work, was born in Germany in 1925, the same year as my father.  He served in the German Army, became a prisoner of war ( though in Belgium, not the US). After the war, he became a Catholic Priest and spent 16 years as a missionary living with the Zulu in South Africa. The connection with ancestors ( a central feature in Zulu beliefs) is critical to family constellations theory.  Hellinger is not without his flaws, yet the central ideas of family constellations therapy resonated with me.  The basic premise, as I understand it, is that people experiencing trauma are frequently in survival mode and cannot process their experience, so they shut down and keep functioning.  This leaves their unresolved trauma for their children and grandchildren to resolve or relive.

My Father (front and center) as a POW

Home Movies

“We convert your old video and movies to DVD!”  I drive past this sign at least once a month, but this time it grabs my attention.  Hurry, I think, before that pile of VHS tapes ( and even worse, the 8 mm tapes that I never got around to editing and transferring) become so obsolete they’ll be trash.   So I drag myself down to the basement where the library of videos has found a home.  

It’s not a new problem.  My Opa Gustav was what we now call an “early adopter.”  If there was a new appliance or gadget, he got one of the early models.  Sometime in the thirties, he acquired an 8 mm movie camera.  We inherited it in the fifties - made of cold, black metal, so heavy I could barely hold it up.  When I was a child, I could rarely persuade him to dust off the portable screen and set up the equally heavy and ancient projector.  Fleeting images flickered into view:  my mother on a swing, a glimpse of her sweeping the courtyard. When this snippet jerked into view my mother whispered to me that when she was young,  her sister would shriek: “ Look at her, she’s a lefty!”  every time.    As an only child, I flinched at the obvious intent to injure.  Opa also owned two purchased cartoons, each about 5 minutes long, one of Mickey Mouse and the other of Donald Duck. His possession of these American imports hinted at a time before the War,   before Western decadence was censored by the Communist Party.   I have no idea what happened to these precious strips of celluloid.  They probably went out with the garbage when the medium changed to 16mm.

Sometime in the 80’s my father had his reels of movies (8 and 16mm) transformed to video.  It was this set of three VHS tapes, titled “Poser Family Memories”  that I first dug out and took over to my father’s.  At this age, he is often withdrawn and shows little reaction to anything.  The movies got his attention.  His eyes focused, and as the images slid by, he began to supply names and places.  

What struck me was not just the magic of seeing my younger self and a parade of people who exist only in memory.  As a memoir writer, what intrigued me was that I couldn’t remember most of these events.  When you head out with your camera, you record happy moments. Vacations, holidays, visitors.  Most of the time, you are not stealthy, so your subjects put on a show.  They smile, they wave, they put extra effort into enjoying being alive.  If we didn’t have home movies, most of these moments would evaporate.

Real memory records the mundane, the daily trivia, the odd detail.  The color of a longed-for bicycle, the light illuminating the living room rug, a dog seen daily on the way to kindergarten, the numerous complex hooks and eyes on my grandmother’s corset.  Or the dramatic.  Getting caught in a lie and punished.  The squealing tires from a crashing motorcycle just around the corner.  The look of surprised agony in my mother’s face when she told me about being teased for being left-handed.

But here’s the painful thrill of watching my mother unpack a picnic lunch for my six-year-old self, secure in some Bavarian meadow, South Carolina a distant place on some half-remembered map.  There I am, 16, lithe and perfect, but hunching my shoulders to protect my insecure heart.  And again, at 30, confident and sleek with new love.  My father, at forty, a few pounds overweight, with impossible dark hair.  With a shock, I  spot a once beloved dress that I haven’t thought about in years. 

What do these celluloid, soon to be digital, snippets mean?  Once watched, some of them enter the realm of memory as hand-me-downs - we remember seeing the movie of a fugitive event.  But they don’t have the texture of those moments deeply recorded in our cells.  You can’t smell your mother’s perfume, the way you can when you close your eyes and reconstruct a moment on the way to the airport to pick up your father. 

Which is real?