The tale "The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffmann tells the story of Nathanael, who suffers from childhood memories of dark experiences, and unsolved family secrets, that dispose him to despair and madness. A key role in those memories is played by his father's secret alchemistic experiments, conducted with a mysterious stranger during the night, which lead to the father's death at the end. Nathanael is not supposed to know anything about those nightly activities and is sent to the bed by his mother with the words: "Now go to bed, children! The Sandman is coming, I can feel it!" When asking the mother who this Sandman is, she denies his existence. Only the nanny tells Nathanael: "He is an evil man, who comes for the children that don't want to go to bed and who throws sand into their eyes till the eyes bleed and fall out. He takes the eyes and feeds them during half-moon to his children who are sitting in a nest and eating the eyes with their crooked peckers that are formed like the peckers of an owl." Nathanael starts to associate the unknown man who comes to his family`s house during the night with the Sandman. One night while hiding in his father´s room, Nathanael is detected by the unknown man who actually seems to be as dangerous as the Sandman from the nanny´s story. He punishes the child for his curiosity, shouting: "Give me the eyes, give me the eyes!" while trying to burn Nathanael´s eyes with the glow of a fire. Nathanael´s father rescues him, but the nightly event remains a silenced family secret and is surrounded by an aura of a social ban. Because Nathanael´s family threatens him with the Sandman and on the other hand denies the existence of this man, he is highly disoriented about what is real and what is not. The recurring narrative of the eye, and the prohibition of looking at reality, plays a central role in the novel. It can also be interpreted as the danger of disobedience against the commandment for concealment in a family that wants to hide a secret. As an ambiguous story about suppression and social prohibition of thinking and speaking openly, it serves as a analogy - for the memory in German families after 1945. The father´s dark involvement with the Sandman is silenced in Nathanael´s family, and so is the involvement of the ancestors of German families in the Nazi era. This essay deals with the large gap between the official commemorative culture concerning the time of National Socialism and the private engagement and entanglement with Nazi ideology of German families. I assert that there is a contradiction between the current German self-image of a nation that has worked through its own history successfully and the actual psychological reprocessing and integration of this time. It is true; that the outrages of those times are officially labelled as unprecedented crimes against humanity and as a fraction of civilization ("Zivilisationsbruch"), and Germany is often regarded as a model of commemorative culture. But it is overlooked, that most of German families don´t seem to identify themselves as perpetrators or beneficiaries of Nazi Germany. Rather, it seems as if an amalgam of self-pity, self-identification as a victim and a conspiracy of silence is established in families. When the American historian Saul K. Padover travelled through Germany in 1944 as a secret Officer to investigate the psychosocial consciousness of the Germans, he met self-absorbed people who considered themselves as Hitler´s victims, but not as part of a nation guilty of incomprehensible crimes. Because all his interview partners presented themselves as victims, he came to the ironical conclusion, that Hitler must have been "a really great man": "We have been here for two months [in Germany], we have conducted a lot of interviews and we haven´t met one Nazi yet. All the people are against Hitler. They have always been against him. What are the consequences? It means that Hitler must have done everything on his own, without the support of anyone. He started the war on his own, he conquered Europe and big parts of Russia on his own, he killed five million Jews, he starved six to eight million polish and Russian people to death, built 400 concentration camps, organised the biggest army in Europe and let all the trains arrive on time. Someone who can achieve this on his own must be quite good." I do not deny that there has been a shift since 1945 in the juridical and historical engagement with the Nazi era, as well as in the political and medial discourse and the educational policy. Monuments, historical sites and commemoration days were established, as well as textbooks, educational programs and research projects. After the war and unification of the GDR and BRD, a new German self-concept developed, which is framed as a democratic state that respects human rights and regards its own commemorative culture as a guarantee and proof for historical responsibility and betterment. In a strange twist Germany`s own inglorious past becomes fundamental to a new nationalistic overconfidence, which claims that the Germans are the world champions of commemoration. But the required self-image as a fully bettered nation is put into question by the continuity of nationalistic and racist tendencies, like the restricted immigration laws, the rise of the AfD, terroristic attacks by right wing extremists, antidemocratic and racist structures in the police and army and the reproduction and normalisation of right-wing ideology by politicians of the so-called moderate parties. It remains unnoticed in the official mainstream discourse, how it is possible that so much knowledge can be circulating regarding the Holocuast and the 2nd World War, while fewer and fewer descendants of the perpetrator-generation identify this knowledge as part of their family´s past. In a survey by the foundation "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft" in 2019, a majority of the German interview partners said, that memory regarding the victims of the National Socialism is very important. But only 23,1 % regarded their ancestors as perpetrators of the regime and 67,9 % denied any entanglements of their ancestors with the Nazi regime. 59,6 % thought that their family members were the victims of the Nazis and 32,2% assumed that their parents or (great-)great parents had helped the victims of National Socialism. Actually, historians estimate that the real percentage of those who were in the resistance or who helped the victims of the regime lies at 0,2 %. If you look at all this data you may feel just like Padover during his investigations: Hitler must have done a lot of work on his own or at least with the marginal help from a German minority, while fighting against a lot of brave members of the resistance. That the data do not reflect the reality can easily be seen by looking at the results of the election in 1933, the enthusiasm for the war or the continuously rising number of party members in the NSDAP, which reached 8.5 million people in 1945. What and why is something remembered in German families, and in which ways? Furthermore, what are the consequences for the appraisal of victims and the self-image of the families? I was offered a glimpse into private ways of commemoration through my work as a psychologist in a geriatric ward of a hospital, where I worked with patients who were well advanced in their years, and who had experienced the time of the National Socialism. I realised that for almost all of the patients, the years in question had been a very formative time. While discussing this, I recognised a pattern in the narratives of the patients that almost always began with the end of the war and the post-war period, while completely decontextualizing from the reasons, why the war took place. It was a one-sided narrative of victimhood and a masking of their own responsibility for the war and the role of the perpetrator they had before losing the war. This became very obvious to me when they turned their narrative towards the brutality and cruelty of the Soviet army while keeping quiet about the atrocities of the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe. The things they mentioned were as important as all the things they didn´t mention: the reason why the Soviet army and the other "Siegermächte" had to come to Germany, and that a large part of the German population had supported the war, especially the war in Eastern Europe, as long as they thought that they would win. I think the reason these blind spots in the narrative became so obvious to me is due to my background as the child of a Russian mother and a Russian-German (Russlanddeutscher) father. I also know the other side of the narrative, the devastations of the war in Eastern Europe, and the aim of the war to decimate the Eastern population, to erase the Jewish population, to conquer a new land for a nation without ("ein Volk ohne Land") and to enslave the Slavic subhuman being ("slavischer Untermensch"). The negative description of the soviet army was eye-catching because I couldn´t get rid of the feeling, that the patients were projecting the aggressions that the German population had felt against the Slavic population on "the brutal Russians". I also felt that the stories were not only about what had happened to them as individuals, but what "the Germans" as a collective had to suffer. While official discourse proclaims a responsible engagement with the past, the personal commemoration is characterized by a self-absorbed view and a complete lack of empathy for those who had been eliminated from the "Volksgemeinschaft" during the Nazi time. There is an eminent political aspect regarding the concept of trauma that can be used for an ideology of victimhood: not only the concept of trauma is widespread, but also the idea that a whole collective or society can be traumatised, especially through political persecution. By putting oneself into the role of the victim, one asks for compassion and the focus is put on one owns suffering and not on his/her misdoings. It also makes it possible to demand compensation for one´s suffering and to excuse further aggressions that one may develop in response to the suffering. By using the concept of collective traumatisation, the old but now forbidden self-identification as a "Volksgemeinschaft" can be re-established, compassion with this "Volksgemeinschaft" can be reclaimed and the initial aggression can be justified in a reversal of perpetrator-victim-roles. A growing number of publications show that my observations made in the hospital are not singular, but rather based on a general and recurring pattern. Those publications put the proclaimed integration of history into question. Instead, they show inclination to the victim-based narrative of the Germans and a victim-identified memory, a projection of the role of the perpetrator onto a few persons, the "flight" into over-identification with the victims of the Holocaust, a spread and transmission of falsified and embellished family stories about the supposedly resistant behaviour of grandparents and great-grandparents, as well as a duty for loyalty felt in German families that produces silence. In the interview study "Grandpa wasn´t a Nazi" ("Opa war kein Nazi. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis") by Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall, they examine the transmission of historical awareness and remembrance in German families. They investigated the way in which the memory of the Nazi era is passed through generations within German families, and arrived by the conclusion that mainly stories of suffering, personal heroism and resistance are reported, which has the effect of ancestors being seen as heroes of resistance or victims of National Socialism. Members of the German "Volksgemeinschaft" use aspects and narratives from Holocaust films and reports from Holocaust victims to tell and reframe their own story of suffering during the end of the war. This leads to narratives, where they experience "deportations in trains", see "piles of corpses" everywhere after the bombings, and have to use strategies of survival, as they are known from the stories of concentration camp inmates. In addition, the study shows how generations of children and grandchildren ignore clear indications for Nazi criminals in the family in order to completely forget them, and show narrative platitudes that are gratefully accepted and cultivated in families. These include: 1. "We didn't know anything about the KZs." 2. "We couldn't do anything; otherwise we would have ended up in the concentration camps." (Which one does not want to have known about.) 3. "We weren´t convinced of Nazism. The Nazis were always the others" 4. "The Germans were victims of the brutal Russians." Jureit and Schneider's book "Felt Victims" ("Gefühlte Opfer: Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung") deals with the commemorational culture as it was established by the children of the generation of perpetrators, that is, the 68 movement. They assert that this culture is still highly influential today, and that this generation demanded remembrance of the cruelties of Nazi-Germany, but denied the reflection of personal entanglement with this time. The result was the condemnation and supposed dis-identification with the parents' generation, but also one's own flight into a victim-identified culture of remembrance, which portrays the Nazi era from the perspective of the persecuted and deliberately ignores the perspective of the perpetrators. The problem that arises from this development is the denied reflection on the transgenerational continuities with regard to the adoption of ideals, values and ideas of normality which are passed down through the generations. Those ideas and values can´t be overcome so easily, - but by creating a victim-identified way of remembering, it was possible to deny the influence of the parents' generation, as if one could simply slip away from one's socialization into a Jewish-aligned and therefore innocent identity. Jureit and Schneider describe the monument for the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as the best-known example for a victim-identified memorial. This monument is supposed to make the visitors feel isolated, disoriented and persecuted and thus lead to empathy with the victims of the Nazi regime. One of the architects describes the intended effect of the memorial on the visitors: "When a Japanese tourist who doesn´t know anything about the Holocaust will visit the monument in 50 years, he will feel something as soon as he enters the monument. Perhaps he will feel what it is like to go into the gas chamber". It must not be explained here that this is not only impossible, but also inappropriately in claiming the victims experience of the Holocaust. I do not deny that after the end of the Third Reich it was important to develop narratives that created empathy with all groups of victims of the Holocaust, the politically persecuted and groups classified as inferior. Empathy was exactly what the German national community had lacked. The paradox of remembering lies in the fact that no one wanted to become a victim of persecution during the Nazi era, but today everyone seems to be willing to accept the victims' perspective or to feel like the victim of this regime. The position of the victim is associated with a nimbus of innocence. One can identify oneself with innocence much more easily than with the blunt indifference of a "Mitläufer", or the willing obedience of the perpetrators and the individuals who were intoxicated with the feeling of superiority. The perpetrator's perspective and the related question of inter-generational continuity avert examination and produce victim-identified memory. Furthermore, in victim-centred remembrance there is also the hope of "redemption" from one's own guilt. There is a certain phantasy that if you remember the victims of the Nazi era with empathy and sincerity, everything will be remedied. This hope was propagated 1985 by the Bundespräsident Weizsäcker in his speech for the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. Weizsäcker rejected the idea of coming to terms with the past, but he still promised a lot to the German population. He said: "We as human beings seek reconciliation. It is precisely for this reason that we must understand that there can be no reconciliation without memory. The experience of millions of deaths is part of the heart of every Jew in the world. This is the case not just because people cannot forget such horror. Memory is part of the Jewish faith. The desire to forget extends exile, and the secret of salvation is memory." How convenient! If you remember the German past sincerely and intensely enough, you can even hope for salvation and reconciliation. This way of remembering does not question the ways that German society benefited from National Socialism and what kind of social and psychological transformations were necessary to create a unified "Volkskörper". Yet the only way to learn from the past is to examine the perspective of the perpetrator to fully understand how National Socialism could have happened. How can the defence mechanisms and deficiencies in German family narratives be explained? During my research for this text and the writing process, I passed through several phases of self-reflection and I have to admit that I didn't like all of them equally. It seemed easy to write and think in an ironical and slightly degrading language about "the insincere Germans". While thinking about which defence strategies they mobilized to escape their inconvenient cognitive dissonances, I had to realize bit by bit: those Germans who constantly talk about their ancestor´s suffering but withhold their crimes during National Socialism -those Germans - I´m a part of them! My father´s parents used to live as ethnic German emigrants in German settlements in the Ukraine, during the time of National Socialism these settlers were regarded as part of the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) by Nazi-Germany. This made me feel uncomfortable. So far, I had only seen my grandparents' story as the story of victims: after the attack by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, they were now considered enemies in the Soviet Union and were therefore deported to Siberia, where they were sentenced to do forced labour. I felt inner turmoil, when thinking about the possibility that they were not only innocent victims, but perhaps also followers of Hitler - and thus also a danger to the Soviet Union. At some point I had to realize that my grandmother's family actually had something to do with "the Nazis". My parents reported that my grandmother's brother had made a "career" in the Wehrmacht and that he had held a high post. After the war, due to his involvement in the war, he could neither return to the Soviet Union nor enter the Federal Republic of Germany and therefore immigrated to Canada. Until this day, I haven't had the courage to ask my parents in a more detailed way about this man, his position in the Wehrmacht and my grandmother's relationship with him. It took me about three weeks to overcome myself and to write these lines. Am I committing iniquity to my dead ancestors by writing this and making it public? Diffuse feelings of guilt accompany this text. Am I afraid of the Sandman who could punish me for my curiosity? I feel that I don't want to know exactly who this brother is and what he did and whether my grandma shared the same political opinions with him. I feel ashamed because of two reasons: shame for my ancestors´ deeds and shame for my conspiratorial not-wanting-to-know. It is difficult to deal with the role of the perpetrators, especially if they belong to ones' family and thus appear as familiar and "normal". The idea that the perpetrators are different, cruel and monstrous is much more comfortable. To think that they don´t have anything in common with oneself or one's family, and that they are guided by incomprehensible motives, gloomy urges, or "abnormal" character traits is a way to keep them far apart from oneself. But oftentimes the evil is not monstrous and "completely different", but rather banal, superficial, convenient and thoughtless. This can also make it clear, how easy and normal it is today to live at the expense of other people, to benefit from their oppression and persecution while being able to sleep well at night. It is as common as it is un-reflected to increase one's self-worth through the depreciation of other groups. It is as "normal" as our grandparents and parents are "normal". It's as "normal" as we are. It is time for this normality to end, 75 years after the war ended. I know that there are people who try to question this "normality", but I fear that they are a minority. For the descendants of all those who belong to the generation of perpetrators, their own family history is evidently painful and difficult to endure, like looking into the glistening light of a floodlight. It is destabilizing both internally and externally because it represents a break with the family and the breaking of ties of loyalty, as well as causing massive uncertainty about the validity of inherited values and thought patterns. Am I now too empathetic with the Germans and their "heavy burden"? To name the perpetrators of one's own family is a break of loyalty with the family; - it scares me and triggers childish fears of punishment and social exclusion. But this creates fundamental self-doubt: who am I if my ancestors were Nazis? And do I manage to live without idealized ancestors whom I may unconsciously rely on as figures of identification? A consistent examination of Nazi history also includes an intensive examination of oneself. A friend of mine once described this as "tracking down the traces of Nazi ideology in one's own heart and the deconstruction of one's socialization that has passed through you". While looking at the insincerity of family memory, the question of unconsciously internalized family morality also arises: have I learned that conspiratorial silence about injustice is good, while naming injustice is bad? I would like to end this text with an open question or a dilemma that I cannot resolve at the moment. It is the question of the meaning of shame, especially the shame of the subsequent generations for the deeds of their ancestors. Is shame essential for dealing with family history? On the one hand, shame can be a blocking and isolating affect that leads to defence and denial of reality in order to protect oneself. Isn't it precisely the moralizing way of speaking about the Nazi era that leads to excessive demands and defence, and to confabulation about resistance and sacrifice in one's own family? But on the other hand: isn't it downright scandalous how little shame the descendants of the perpetrator generation feel and how complacent, and therefore uncritical, they are with themselves, and thereby blindly reproduce the prejudices of their ancestors instead of distancing from them? In addition to shame that isolates and inhibits thinking and feeling, there is also a type of shame that opens me up to other persons and lets me feel my responsibility towards them. It is like a shout from outside that reminds me to integrate the needs and vulnerabilities of others into my thoughts and feelings instead of disregarding them. Those who ward off this kind of shame cannot learn from their mistakes and must continue to deny what has remained unpaid. Even 75 years after the end of the 3rd Reich, many German families, from the generation of great-grandparents to their great-grandchildren, are still unable to recognize the truth: - that they were enthusiastic about Nazi ideology and benefited from it, and that it was possible to deny empathy to certain groups and to become intoxicated with the feeling of belonging to the "Herrenrasse" (master race). After the war, a completely new narrative of democracy and human rights was established, therefore one's own perpetration became a taboo, but remained unprocessed and its ideological orientation therefore unbroken. To name oneself as a descendant of Nazi Ideology is dangerous. It is as dangerous as the curiosity of the main protagonist in Hoffmann's story "The Sandman". For it is precisely the desire to uncover the secrets of his father and the ominous Sandman that destabilize his world. In this respect, disobedience to the social prohibition of recognizing the truth is a momentous decision. It is the decision to put a lot at stake: social ties, cherished certainties about the family and, last but not least, the beloved self-image.