Kriegsenkel Group
I convene a free monthly online group for Kriegsenkel living in English-speaking countries. It is open to Germans who grew up in an English-speaking country with one or two German parents, and to Germans who grew up in Germany and later migrated to an English-speaking country.
The group is a space to meet others who share this particular inheritance, and to explore together how the past can echo through the generations. We meet online on a Tuesday evening once a month, for two hours. The group is held in english. This is a support group rather than group therapy, a space to share experience and feel less alone with it, alongside others who understand this particular inheritance. If you would like to join, or just find out more, please get in touch at marit@go-to-therapy.org.
As a Kriegsenkel myself, this is a subject close to my heart. I know from my own experience how quietly this inheritance can shape a life, and how much can shift when it’s understood alongside others who recognise it.
What does “Kriegsenkel” mean?
The term refers to the grandchildren of the wartime generation in Germany, often born between 1960 and 1975. They are frequently the children of the “war children” (Kriegskinder) born between 1928 and 1946, who lived through the Nazi era, the Second World War and the immediate post-war years as children themselves.
It is now widely recognised that trauma connected with war and violence can reach into later generations. People sometimes carry within themselves fragments of events that took place years, even decades, before they were born.
The term “Kriegsenkel” was first used in Katharina Ohana’s autobiographical narrative Ich, Rabentochter (2006), and came into wider use with Anne-Ev Ustorf’s We Children of Wars (2008) and Sabine Bode’s Kriegsenkel (2009). Much of this thinking is drawn from the German site Kriegsenkel.de.