Healing Germania: Part One
Last weekend I taught the first of the Healing Germania class series which I unfortunately dropped the recording on… (There will probably be three classes, all in all, so make sure you attend the next one live, just to be sure.) But I think it was meant to be an intimate session – unrecorded – because of how intense this collective shadow work was, an introduction into decolonization as a White European. We had amazing conversations around an extremely difficult topic, we named unspeakable harm, and we tried to follow the threads of harm and pain back towards their source(s).
I started the class off with some details of modern-day Germany that many Americans find interesting: things like our parental leave laws, union laws, universal healthcare, free universities – you know, all those “socialist goodies.” I showed a short video of how Germany has changed shapes and sizes over the centuries – from inception until today – 2,000 years of many different faces and phases visible on her skin, in her curves, stretch marks and wrinkles and all.
I introduced the concept of Germania – Germany incarnated as an embodied archetype, my nation’s collective psyche.
I proceeded to paint a picture of Germania, today. It’s one of fragmentation, hypocrisy, and disconnection. We are painfully over-identified with the mind, the Father and the State (= the “Vaterland”), and those in power.
I took us back in time – from today through our darkest most violent perpetrator past.
We discovered that our need for belonging and community is completely natural and will always break through, no matter what trauma we experience or commit.
And we also discovered what this constant trauma paired with propagandist/moralist indoctrination, not facing our trauma, and not healing or integrating any of it will do to a psyche.
We have seen how all of that combined leads to distorted nationalistic ideals of unity and purity…
We ended in the Romantic Era – the time in which many of our favorite (modern) fairytales were collected and written down by the philologists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This is also where we learned how story and myth get corrupted, co-opted, abused, and misused for political agendas and nationalistic ideals. And this is where we asked the questions: What could a national psyche become if we rewrite those stories from a place of healing?
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This class had been a loooong time brewing. As it should. And will continue to. Decolonizing as a German (or as someone with European ancestry) – naming the cycles of harm and pain, digging deep into a nation's collective psyche (and my own ancestry), clawing myself/ourselves to the roots of this sick mix of shame and guilt and supremacy and overcompensation... Only to keep finding more and more trauma. This continent's past is riddled with centuries of intense trauma. I have many goals for doing this work. My own decolonization, adding nuance to the conversation around Eurocentricity, understanding how we might begin to heal and truly repair, reconciling or at least getting comfortable with paradox, and looking for the Mother. Above all, I am looking for the Mother in all of this. Through all that trauma, we've been telling our children stories with dead or missing mothers in them. Why? Why would we perpetuate this harm, instill this fear already in our youngest? Could you imagine what alternative stories we might tell each other from a place of healing? What would a fairytale sound like in which our kids individuate in a safe and responsible community? How would we be able to remember our wild natural truth?
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My process
I mostly worked with German books. I combined my own shadow work with intersectional prompts by bell hooks and Angela Davis, I added some historical context, I worked intensively with fairytales and mythology from online archives (mostly through the lens of folks like C.G.Jung and Marie Luise von Franz – who were both German natives, but also Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ work). I added some modern questions into the mix, like Sylvia Linsted’s and Perdita Finn’s question of “Where is the Mother [in European mythology]?”
1. I had access to a bunch of historical atlases of the European continent, how nations and borders changed due to conflicts and war across the centuries. That helped to create “geopolitical context” for the timeframes I wanted to highlight.
2. Next, I asked around for which fairytales and myths are the most common for fellow Germans. I asked neighbors, friends, family, acquaintances, anyone who’d answer, really. I researched the origin stories of these stories; when, where, and by whom they were first written down, since when we’ve been likely telling each other these stories, how they might have traveled from place to place. This was easier for the time period since the Enlightenment, and got harder to do during the middle ages, of course. But even there, it’s possible to find individual old Church archives online and work with those writings (even though I had to sift through quite a lot of Christian nonsense).
3. I then tried to overlap those two things as best I could. I did that by trying to answer two questions at the same time: What was going on geopolitically during a certain time period? And: What stories and myths were prevalent in those times?
4. And finally, I tried to reframe everything I found into a personification, a collective psyche. Since I first approached this topic and started asking these questions out of a very personal curiosity about what it means (to me, personally) to be German, how such deep (political and moral) hypocrisy can be present today, my personal understanding of how weaponized shame can really distort a person’s (/nation’s) mindset and beliefs, and just a general sense of “even Germans can’t really answer the question of what it means to be German”, I utilized the character Germania as my main storytelling device. Of course, I did not invent her as a character and it also bears saying that she is not without controversy. Her depictions and statues are closely connected to the rising nationalism during the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck and she was later corrupted by Nazi Germany as well. The name Germania dates back to Roman times, however, and it is crucial in our decolonial context, that we retell these stories, that we reshape our myths, and that we co-create new stories for a new future.
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Resources
* Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (roughly translates to “Dictionary of German Folk Beliefs”) by Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli and Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer
* Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Children's and Household Tales”) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
* The Interpretation of Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz
* Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz
* The Ethnic Origins of Nations by Anthony D. Smith
* Historischer Atlas Deutschland (roughly translates to “Historical Atlas of Germany”) by Manfred Scheuch
* Lexikon der Keltischen Mythologie (roughly translates to “Lexicon of Celtic Mythology”) by Sylvia and Paul F. Botheroyd
* Die Religion der Germanen (roughly translates to “The Religion of the Germanic Peoples”) by Bernhard Maier
* Germania – Zwei Jahrtausende Kulturgeschichte (modern reprint of the 1890 edition – translates to “Germania – 2 Millennia of Cultural History”) by Johannes Scherr
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All that being said, we are just getting started. There is much more myth and storytelling to be done and I cannot wait to dive even deeper with you all! This community feels like such a gift in my life - this is my way of offering something in return. I hope you can make the next one live (although I will make sure to record correctly!) because the magic really happens in the questions and discussions. And there is so much magic to be discovered - even in the bad stuff... Much love xx
