News from Germany

We received an email from Marianne Verny with news from an interesting project in Germany. Marianne says…

My name is Marianne Verny and I speak on behalf of a group of German pw – affiliates, founded during the last Worldwork Seminar in London 2008. We called our project “The Search for a German Identity” since we realized in London, that specifically this perception of a national identity was not only missing in all of us but actually, many of us felt painfully shy to show up as German in  public and that we all were dealing with issues of tremendous unspoken pain and shame and trance states around our German roots. All of us are either second or third generation after the second world war.

During our meetings in London we were mainly telling each other stories of what our families experienced during the second world war, stories most of us had hardly ever talked about, since the majority of us had grown up in family-atmospheres, that were oppressive and silencing and putting under a taboo anything that had happened under the Nazi-regime.

We realized, that we needed much more time to build this new relationship among us as a condition to go deeper and to unfold and work with, what was marginalised for such a long time inside of each of us.

So we built an email-string to have an easy and ongoing way to communicate with each other. The condition in order to become part of this string was and still is, that one has some process oriented training or at least the experience of one pw-seminar and that one is willing to introduce oneself in a personal way on the string and to say something about what is moving one to search for one`s German-ness.

Furthermore we decided, that we had to meet personally in order to deepen our experiencial research – so we met three times so far in different cities (Berlin, München, Hamburg), where we worked with innerwork, earth work based exercises, group processes and fish bowl settings as well as a lot of storytelling. We addressed diverse other issues: the Nazi-role, the role of the “Mitläufer” / the follower, the flight / escape from East Prussia, the loss of homeland and processed feelings of guilt / shame and loss of dignity, being confronted with the German responsibility of the genocide of millions of people, our former neighbors.

We are still identified as an open group, so each time we meet, 2/3 of the people present had been there before and 1/3 was new or could come only once so far.

Contentwise we decided, to keep the experiences among us and not to document or publish them in public, since perception is so diverse and individual.

For that reason, of course, I will not interpret, what has happened so far in the group – but I can say, that meeting and researching with these wonderfull people has freed me in a deep way, daring to speak up and share with others, what my family is responsible for and has suffered of. This way, I feel connected and much more couragious to show and unfold, what is so painfull and terrifying and also enriching of having German ancestors.