Haunting legacies: trauma in children of perpetrators

Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 177–195, 2004 Haunting legacies: trauma in children of perpetrators GABRIELE SCHWAB when Iraq is bombed and I tell her how enraged I am at attacks at civilians no matter what the reasons because I remember how it feels to be a child of six and live in a city hit by carpet bombing surrounded by adults half crazed with terror and hunger and when I tell her how it feels to crawl out from under after an air raid to look down the street and see whose house was hit and how I cannot forget adults whispering in horror that phosphor bombs missed the railroad station and hit the slums instead and people running through the streets like living torches screaming until they jumped into the river to drown themselves my Greek friend leans back and I see in her eyes that I am the child of her enemies she remembers the atrocities committed by my people in her native village in the mountains of Greece Excerpts from Ursula Duba, Tales from the Child of the Enemy 1 The thoughts I am presenting here are a first attempt to formulate my ideas about the traumatic effects of growing up among a generation of children of a perpetrator nation. I was born in Germany after World War II and grew up in ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/04/020177–19  2004 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/1368879042000278861