Third Reich in the Unconscious by Volkan Vamik D.;Ast Gabriele;Greer William F. Jr.;

Author:Volkan, Vamik D.;Ast, Gabriele;Greer, William F., Jr.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Uta's Personal History

Uta was born in a small, conservative German town close to Frankfurt, where, at the time of her birth, her mother was a manual worker in a shoe factory. Her father worked as a laborer in various food processing companies whenever jobs were available. In his late 40s, when Uta was 10 years old, he retired after suffering a heart attack. Uta’s father’s surname clearly identified his family as Gypsies in the eyes of the settled German population. Uta did not know how her parents had survived the Nazi period, though her mother had hinted that the family had passed as non-Gypsy/non-Traveler. Indeed, all of Uta’s information about her parents’ lives before she was old enough to observe them herself was rather sparse.

Married to a non-Traveler German who was a railroad conductor in a small town near Frankfurt, Uta’s Traveler maternal grandmother had given birth to 13 children, of whom Uta’s mother and her mother’s elder sister were the oldest. Because nomadic people were not allowed to go to school during this time, Uta’s mother barely knows how to read and write; Uta’s father was also functionally illiterate. At the age of 6, Uta’s mother went to work on a German farm from which she would return to her home each night. It is not clear if her “home” was in a slave labor camp for nomadic persons; Uta’s mother would not reveal direct information about this question. Nevertheless, she recalled how, as a small child, she would look from a window of their “home” and see a light in a distant house. Where she lived, it seems, there was no light at night; she described the distant light as providing her an orientation in time and space. To this day, Uta’s mother gazes at lights in the houses in her neighborhood before going to sleep.

At the end of the war, when she was 13, Uta’s mother began to work on another German-owned farm, where she slept with the animals in the barn; she recalled “learning to speak with the animals.” At this time, Uta’s mother’s parents were separated, leaving the abandoned wife with many young children to raise. To help her beleaguered mother, Uta’s mother often brought food from the farm to her younger siblings; in fact, from 1945 on, Uta’s mother essentially fended for herself. In 1950, Uta’s mother married Uta’s father, who was three years older. It was around this time that she became obsessed with cleanliness. So ashamed of being called a Gypsy as a child, she decided that her children should never experience such shame.

When she began her analysis, Uta had even less information about her father’s side of the family before his marriage to her mother. Originally, Uta’s father was married to her mother’s older sister, and the couple had had one child. When the child was 3 years old, his mother (Uta’s aunt) was killed in a motorcycle accident after a party. The motorcycle was driven by one of the father’s brothers.

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