Where Germans Make Peace with Their Dead
Germany’s secrets run dark and deep.
德国的秘密既黑暗又深刻。
How can a people bent on silence for so long learn their true history?
一个长期保持沉默的民族如何才能了解他们的真实历史？
Illustration by Miguel Porlan My great-grandmother Luise Gönner had a keen eye for dead people.
米格尔·波兰 (Miguel Porlan) 绘制的插图 我的曾祖母路易斯·高纳 (Luise Gönner) 对死者有着敏锐的洞察力。
She would see them sitting by the side of the road sometimes when she worked in her garden in the morning, or waiting by the village crossroads at dusk, a look of mournful reproof in their eyes.
有时早上她在花园里干活的时候，她会看到他们坐在路边，黄昏时分，他们会在村子的十字路口等待，眼中带着悲伤的责备。
Whether the sight alarmed or consoled her, I can’t say.
我不能说这一景象是让她惊慌还是让她感到安慰。
Luise was born in 1871 and died six months after my mother’s birth, in 1935.
路易斯出生于 1871 年，在我母亲出生后六个月即 1935 年去世。
I know only the stories about her that my mother heard growing up.
我只知道我母亲在成长过程中听到的关于她的故事。
She says that Luise was in most ways a sturdy, commonsensical soul, so I like to imagine that she took her visitations in stride: old friends and neighbors stopping by to pick up the conversation where they’d left off.
她说路易丝在大多数方面都是一个坚强、理智的灵魂，所以我喜欢想象她对来访从容不迫：老朋友和邻居停下来继续他们中断的谈话。
Herzogenweiler, the village where Luise was born and spent nearly every day of her life, lies in the heart of the Black Forest, hemmed in on three sides by dark ranks of pines.
赫尔佐根韦勒 (Herzogenweiler) 村是路易斯出生的地方，也是她生命中几乎每一天都在这里度过的地方，位于黑森林的中心地带，三边被深色的松树包围。
The land belonged to the Prince of Fürstenberg in Luise’s day and was worked by tenant farmers not much better off than serfs.
在路易斯时代，这片土地属于菲尔斯滕贝格亲王，由佃农耕种，他们的生活并不比农奴好多少。
Although the people of Herzogenweiler were deeply devout, theirs was a pre-Reformation sort of Catholicism—a murky brew of folklore, superstition, and pitiless religion.
尽管赫尔措根韦勒的人民非常虔诚，但他们信奉的是宗教改革前的天主教——一种民间传说、迷信和无情宗教的阴暗混合体。
Even the boldest farmers hurried home before nightfall, lest some dire spirit overtake them, and the Devil was more than an idle threat.
即使是最勇敢的农民也会在夜幕降临前匆忙回家，以免可怕的幽灵袭击他们，而魔鬼可不仅仅是一个无用的威胁。
He was the dark stranger who might come knocking at your door some windy night; the man with the hooded eyes at the end of the bar, lazily flipping a coin in the air.
他是那个皮肤黝黑的陌生人，可能会在某个刮风的夜晚来敲你的门；吧台尽头那个蒙着眼睛的男人，懒洋洋地在空中抛着一枚硬币。
Luise was the village midwife, so mortality was never far from her mind.
路易斯是村里的助产士，所以死亡一直在她的脑海里。
The closest doctor was in Villingen, two hours away on foot in the next valley, so she took care of all but the most grievous injuries.
最近的医生在维林根，步行两个小时即可到达下一个山谷，所以她处理了除了最严重的伤以外的所有伤势。
The villagers cut lumber for added wages, often in the depths of winter, so mishaps were common: falling timbers, piercing splinters, blades that skipped off bark and bit into ankles and thighs.
村民们为了增加工资而砍伐木材，通常是在深冬，所以事故很常见：木材掉落、碎片刺穿、刀片从树皮上跳下来咬到脚踝和大腿。
Luise got used to sending bodies large and small to the walled-in graveyard in the meadow below the village, only to meet them again later on the road.
路易丝习惯了把大大小小的尸体送到村庄下面草地上用围墙围起来的墓地，只是稍后在路上再次遇到他们。
My mother and my eldest daughter owe Luise their middle name—a keepsake of the Old Country, like a lock of hair or a finger bone.
我的母亲和我的大女儿都拥有路易斯的中间名——一个古老国家的纪念品，就像一缕头发或一根指骨。
Although they haven’t been known to socialize with the dead, a strain of second sight is said to run in the family.
尽管人们不知道他们会与死者交往，但据说这个家族有复明的倾向。
My great-aunt Regina, who was born in Romania, worked as a fortune-teller in Herzogenweiler during the Second World War, scanning coffee grounds and tarot cards for news of fallen soldiers.
我的曾祖母雷吉娜出生在罗马尼亚，第二次世界大战期间，她在黑措根韦勒担任算命师，通过扫描咖啡渣和塔罗牌寻找阵亡士兵的消息。
My mother, too, has had her share of strange premonitions: accidents foretold, telephones answered before the first ring.
我的母亲也有过一些奇怪的预感：预示着会发生事故，电话铃响之前就有人接听。
She’s a historian by training and a sober thinker by nature, but she has never quite shaken her belief in ghosts.
她是一位受过训练的历史学家，也是一位天生清醒的思想家，但她从未完全动摇过对鬼魂的信仰。
It’s an old German habit of mind, this mixing of the mystical and the scientific.
这是神秘与科学的混合，这是德国人古老的思维习惯。
You can see it in medieval sages like Meister Eckhart and Hildegard von Bingen, and in the aisles of any German drugstore, where modern pharmaceuticals sit side by side with homeopathic tinctures.
你可以在梅斯特·艾克哈特和希尔德加德·冯·宾根等中世纪圣贤身上看到它，也可以在任何德国药店的过道里看到它，现代药品与顺势疗法酊剂并排放置。
“To our modern way of thinking, this all sounds quite insane,” Rudolf Steiner, the patron saint of organic agriculture and alternative schooling, declared in 1924.
“以我们现代的思维方式来看，这一切听起来都很疯狂，”有机农业和替代教育的守护神鲁道夫施泰纳 (Rudolf Steiner) 于 1924 年宣称。
He had just urged an audience of Silesian farmers to fertilize their fields with cow intestines stuffed with chamomile blossoms, and stag bladders filled with yarrow root (stag bladders being “almost an image of the cosmos”).
他刚刚敦促西里西亚农民用塞满洋甘菊花的牛肠和塞满蓍草根的鹿膀胱来给他们的田地施肥（鹿膀胱“几乎是宇宙的图像”）。
Steiner claimed that he, too, could see spirits in his waking life.
斯坦纳声称他在清醒的时候也能看到灵魂。
“Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception,” he wrote, “so does a man develop in himself spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him.”
“正如身体、眼睛和耳朵发展为感知器官一样，”他写道，“人自身也发展出精神感知器官，通过这些器官，灵魂和精神世界向他敞开。”
To my mother, the best evidence of this was a story she often told about her grandmother.
对我母亲来说，最好的证据就是她经常讲的关于她祖母的故事。
In the spring of 1918, Luise was asleep one night in the upstairs bedroom of her farmhouse when she woke to the sound of footsteps outside.
1918 年春天，一天晚上，路易斯在农舍楼上的卧室里睡觉，突然被外面的脚步声吵醒。
The village was deserted at that hour, her daughter and husband asleep.
那个时候村子里空无一人，她的女儿和丈夫都在睡觉。
But she knew that shuffling gait and heavy footfall.
但她知道那拖着脚步的步伐和沉重的脚步声。
It could only be Josef, her eldest son, home at last from the war in France.
只能是她的长子约瑟夫终于从法国战争中回家了。
She lurched up in bed to greet him, then stopped and listened again, more intently this time.
她在床上摇摇晃晃地站起来迎接他，然后停下来再次听，这次更加专注。
No. It wasn’t him after all.
不，毕竟不是他。
It was just his spirit come back to pay them a last visit.
这只是他的灵魂回来对他们进行最后一次拜访。
She lay down and shook her husband by the shoulder.
她躺下，摇晃着丈夫的肩膀。
“ Jetzt isch de Josef gstorbe ,” she told him, in her soft Black Forest dialect.
“Jetzt isch de Josef gstorbe，”她用柔和的黑森林方言告诉他。
“Now Josef has died.”
“现在约瑟夫死了。”
A week later, they received word that he’d fallen at Flanders—on the same day that his ghost had passed by.
一周后，他们收到消息说他在佛兰德斯倒下了——就在他的鬼魂经过的同一天。
I thought of that story one morning last year, sitting in a small drawing room in Berlin.
去年的一天早上，当我坐在柏林的一间小客厅里时，我想起了这个故事。
It was on the ground floor of an ornate prewar building in the heart of the old western zone, along a leafy side street off Neue Kantstrasse.
它位于旧西部地区中心地带一栋华丽的战前建筑的底层，沿着新康德大街一条绿树成荫的小街。
The room was bare of furniture aside from a dozen mismatched chairs and a dresser of figured maple.
房间里除了十几把不相配的椅子和一个花纹枫木梳妆台外，什么家具都没有。
One tall window let in a wintry light.
一扇高高的窗户让冬日的光线透进来。
The chairs were occupied by a circle of silent, seemingly spellbound men and women, their eyes pinned on a woman at the center of the room.
椅子上坐着一圈沉默的、似乎着迷的男人和女人，他们的眼睛盯着房间中央的一个女人。
Her name was Gabriele Baring, and she was there to help them make peace with their dead.
她的名字叫加布里埃尔·巴林（Gabriele Baring），她来这里是为了帮助他们与死者和解。
A man across the room was telling Baring about his family history.
房间对面的一个男人正在向巴林讲述他的家族史。
He was a therapist like her and a veteran of this type of gathering, known as a Familienaufstellung , or family constellation.
他和她一样是一位治疗师，也是此类聚会的老手，这种聚会被称为 Familienaufstellung 或家庭星座。
Ulf, as I’ll call him, was a bearish man in a lumpy burgundy sweater.
乌尔夫（我称呼他为乌尔夫）是个悲观的人，穿着一件凹凸不平的酒红色毛衣。
He wore suède sandals with dark socks and had a child’s bright, confiding eyes—a face not made for sadness, somehow, though he couldn’t seem to escape it.
他穿着绒面革凉鞋和深色袜子，有着一双孩子般明亮、充满信任的眼睛——不知何故，这张脸并不适合悲伤，尽管他似乎无法逃避它。
He and his wife had lost their home of twelve years, on a beautiful farm, when the owner gave the property to his son.
当农场主将财产交给他的儿子时，他和他的妻子失去了他们在一个美丽农场上生活了十二年的家。
“It was like being driven from Paradise,” Ulf said.
“这就像被赶出了天堂，”乌尔夫说。
He’d twice been hospitalized for depression and panic attacks since then, and he’d lost twenty-five pounds.
从那时起，他曾两次因抑郁症和恐慌症住院，体重减轻了二十五磅。
“I’m wondering if this has something to do with my parents’ history as refugees during the war,” he said.
“我想知道这是否与我父母在战争期间作为难民的历史有关，”他说。
Baring jotted some lines in a black Moleskine as Ulf spoke, and sketched out the first branches of a “genogram”—a kind of overgrown family tree.
乌尔夫讲话时，巴林在黑色 Moleskine 上写下了一些线条，并勾勒出了“基因图”（一种杂草丛生的家谱）的第一个分支。
Ulf’s paternal grandfather had died in a Russian prison camp in the First World War.
乌尔夫的祖父在第一次世界大战期间死于俄罗斯战俘营。
His father enlisted at seventeen, in 1939, and was sent to a boarding school for élite Nazi officers in training.
1939 年，他的父亲 17 岁入伍，并被送往一所培养纳粹精英军官的寄宿学校。
He wound up in a Russian prison camp as well.
他也被关进了俄罗斯战俘营。
By the time he got out, in 1946, his family had been driven from East Germany.
1946 年，当他出狱时，他的家人已被赶出东德。
Ulf’s mother was also a refugee, from Kiel, on the Baltic Sea.
乌尔夫的母亲也是一名来自波罗的海基尔的难民。
It was a lovely city before the war, Ulf said, laced with canals and bridges.
乌尔夫说，战前这是一座可爱的城市，运河和桥梁遍布。
But it had a naval base and a submarine factory, so Allied bombers reduced it to rubble.
但它有一个海军基地和一个潜艇工厂，因此盟军轰炸机将其夷为废墟。
His mother was nine when her family fled.
他的母亲九岁时全家逃离。
Baring looked up from her notebook and held Ulf’s eyes for a moment.
巴林从笔记本上抬起头，与乌尔夫的目光对视了一会儿。
At sixty-two, she still had the wholesome, high-spirited look of the German poster girls of the nineteen-thirties—apple cheeks and white-blond hair.
六十二岁的她仍然保持着十九世纪三十年代德国海报女郎的健康、精神抖擞的样子——苹果脸颊和白金色的头发。
But her voice had a smoky, conspiratorial warmth.
但她的声音却带着一种烟熏的、阴谋般的温暖。
Her own father had lost a leg on the Russian front and never truly recovered, and her home town of Hanover was nearly as devastated as Kiel.
她自己的父亲在俄罗斯前线失去了一条腿，从未真正康复，她的家乡汉诺威几乎和基尔一样遭到破坏。
“This country had fourteen million refugees,” she said.
“这个国家有一千四百万难民，”她说。
“The fact that we were able to absorb them has been called one of the great accomplishments of postwar Germany.
“我们能够吸收它们这一事实被称为战后德国的伟大成就之一。
There were all sorts of problems—prejudice, ostracism—but there was no civil war.”
存在各种各样的问题——偏见、排斥——但没有内战。”
Her listeners shifted in their seats.
她的听众在座位上动了动。
Most were middle-aged Germans like her, unaccustomed to self-pity and allergic to national pride.
大多数都是像她一样的中年德国人，不习惯自怜，对民族自豪感过敏。
Theirs was a country responsible for history’s bloodiest war and most efficient mass murder: sixty million killed, including two-thirds of all European Jews.
他们的国家造成了历史上最血腥的战争和最高效的大规模屠杀：六千万人被杀，其中包括三分之二的欧洲犹太人。
They were here to wrestle with that guilt, not to make excuses for it.
他们来这里是为了与这种罪恶感作斗争，而不是为此找借口。
Yet Baring believed that there’d been more than enough suffering to go around, and not nearly enough compassion.
然而巴林认为，人们所承受的苦难已经足够多，而同情心却远远不够。
Of those fourteen million German refugees, some were colonists in Nazi-occupied territories.
在这一千四百万德国难民中，有些是纳粹占领区的殖民者。
But the great majority were civilians fleeing bombed-out cities, or ethnic Germans who’d settled abroad long before the war.
但其中绝大多数是逃离被炸毁城市的平民，或者是战前很久就在国外定居的德国人。
They and their children had the same psychological issues as the refugees flooding into Germany from Syria today: depression, alienation, no sense of place.
他们和他们的孩子与今天从叙利亚涌入德国的难民有着同样的心理问题：抑郁、疏远、没有地方感。
“I’ve led whole sessions filled with nothing but people like you,” Baring said.
“我主持的整个会议除了像你这样的人之外什么都没有，”巴林说。
She asked Ulf if he was ready to start, and he nodded, gathering himself.
她问乌尔夫是否准备好开始，乌尔夫点点头，镇定下来。
Then he stood up and looked around the room.
然后他站起来，环视房间。
His eyes paused on each of us in turn, as if tapping a tuning fork and assessing the pitch.
他的目光轮流停在我们每个人身上，就像敲击音叉并评估音高一样。
When he’d gone the full round, he pointed at a tall, wiry man with a penetrating gaze.
当他绕了一圈后，他目光锐利地指着一个身材高大、精瘦的男人。
“Will you be me?” he said.
“你愿意成为我吗？”他说。
He asked another man to be his uncle and a woman nearby, with a pixie cut and sharp, birdlike features, to be Fear.
他请了另一个男人作为他的叔叔，并请了附近的一个女人作为恐惧，她有着精灵般的发型和锐利的鸟形特征。
What happened next is hard to categorize.
接下来发生的事情很难归类。
It was part theatre, part therapy, part séance—a measure of just how far Germans will go to come to terms with their past.
它一半是戏剧，一半是治疗，一半是降神会——衡量德国人在多大程度上接受他们的过去。
Ulf walked around behind each of his stand-ins and laid his hands on their shoulders.
乌尔夫走到每个替身后面，把手放在他们的肩膀上。
Then he closed his eyes and slowly pushed forward.
然后他闭上眼睛，缓缓向前推进。
“Just stop when you feel like they’re in the right spot,” Baring said.
“当你觉得他们处于正确的位置时就停下来，”巴林说。
Soon the center of the room was filled with people, frozen in place like statues in a war memorial.
很快房间的中央就挤满了人，他们像战争纪念馆里的雕像一样僵在原地。
For the next hour or so, they would try to channel the person or emotion they’d been asked to represent.
在接下来的一个小时左右的时间里，他们会尝试传达他们被要求代表的人或情感。
To let their spirits speak.
让他们的灵魂说话。
Ulf was about to sit down when his eyes lit on me and he did a double take, as if seeing someone there for the first time.
乌尔夫正要坐下，他的目光落在了我身上，他看了两眼，就好像第一次见到那里的人一样。
“Will you be my father?” he said.
“你愿意做我的父亲吗？”他说。
Like the others in the room, I was there to untangle a knot in my mind.
和房间里的其他人一样，我来这里是为了解开心中的一个结。
I’d come to Germany to research the life of my grandfather Karl Gönner, Luise’s second son.
我来到德国是为了研究我的祖父卡尔·高纳 (Karl Gönner)（路易斯的次子）的生活。
I’d known him a little when I was a boy.
当我还是个孩子的时候，我就对他有所了解。
My parents emigrated to the United States in 1962, but we still spoke German at home and often went back to see relatives in Weil am Rhein, the village along the French and Swiss borders where my grandfather lived.
我的父母于 1962 年移民到美国，但我们在家里仍然说德语，并经常回到莱茵河畔韦尔看望亲戚，这是我祖父居住的法国和瑞士边境的一个村庄。
He always made me a little nervous.
他总是让我有点紧张。
Tall and gaunt, with a shock of peppery blond hair, he had a glass eye that would swivel disconcertingly out of line as he spoke.
他身材高大，面容憔悴，一头浓密的金发，玻璃眼睛在说话时会令人不安地旋转。
He would ask me questions in a grave voice, like an anthropologist interviewing a Pygmy, and he sometimes gave me a piece of beeswax with honey to chew—strange, like him, with its chambered secrets, but also sweet.
他会用严肃的声音问我问题，就像人类学家采访俾格米人一样，有时他会给我一块加蜂蜜的蜂蜡让我咀嚼——像他一样奇怪，里面隐藏着秘密，但也很甜蜜。
I remember watching him tend to the hives behind his house in the mornings, never flinching as the bees swarmed over his neck and arms.
我记得早上看着他照料屋后的蜂巢，当蜜蜂蜂拥而至他的脖子和手臂时，他毫不退缩。
The older I grew, the more of a cipher he seemed.
我越长大，他就越显得神秘。
I knew that he’d fought in the First World War like his brother Josef, and that he’d lost an eye to a piece of shrapnel in the Ardennes.
我知道他和他的兄弟约瑟夫一样参加了第一次世界大战，而且他在阿登地区的一块弹片中失去了一只眼睛。
I knew that he was sent to Occupied France in the next war, to work as a schoolteacher in a village in Alsace, while his wife and four children stayed behind in Germany.
我知道他在下一次战争中被派往法国占领区，在阿尔萨斯的一个村庄担任教师，而他的妻子和四个孩子则留在德国。
But I also knew that he’d joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and that he eventually became the village’s Ortsgruppenleiter , or Party chief.
但我也知道他于 1933 年加入了纳粹党，并最终成为村里的党魁。
My mother rarely talked about his years in France, but she was well versed in the atrocities committed by men in his position.
我母亲很少谈论他在法国的岁月，但她深知处于他地位的男人所犯下的暴行。
She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Vichy regime.
她写了关于维希政权的博士论文。
It must have been a torment to her, trying to square what she learned with her memories of her father.
试图将她所学到的知识与她对父亲的记忆联系起来，这对她来说一定是一种折磨。
How could he have been both the man she knew and the monster history suggested?
他怎么可能既是她认识的那个人，又是怪物历史所暗示的那个人？
I’d put off answering that question for a long time.
我很长时间才回答这个问题。
Family history is an uneasy topic for a German-American.
对于德裔美国人来说，家族史是一个令人不安的话题。
You can hear it in people’s voices when you mention where your parents were born.
当你提到你父母的出生地时，你可以从人们的声音中听到这一点。
“How old are they?” they ask, then count back silently to 1939.
“他们多大了？”他们问道，然后默默倒数到 1939 年。
A sense of guilt by association hangs in the air, even for people of my generation.
即使对于我们这一代人来说，空气中也弥漫着一种与此相关的负罪感。
More than once, I’ve had friends or students confess that it took them a while to completely trust me, given my background.
我的朋友或学生不止一次承认，考虑到我的背景，他们花了一段时间才完全信任我。
To be German, it seems, is still to be one part Nazi.
作为德国人，似乎仍然是纳粹的一部分。
In my case, that part is my grandfather.
就我而言，那部分是我的祖父。
When I first arrived in Germany, the sheer quantity of research material—the inexhaustibility of the past—seemed overwhelming.
当我第一次到达德国时，研究材料的数量之多——过去的取之不尽用之不竭——似乎令人不知所措。
The two world wars had papered the Continent with scraps of their history, scattered across hundreds of archives in Germany alone.
两次世界大战在欧洲大陆上留下了历史的碎片，仅在德国就有数百个档案馆。
Seventy miles of files in the Bundesarchiv, in Berlin; nearly a hundred miles of files and microfiche in the Stasi archives, across town; thirty million documents in the Holocaust archives in Bad Arolsen—letters, diaries, and reams of statistics, maps, blueprints, and bills of lading.
柏林联邦档案馆内长达七十英里的档案；城镇对面的史塔西档案馆里有近一百英里的文件和缩微胶片；巴特阿罗尔森的大屠杀档案中有三千万份文件——信件、日记、大量统计数据、地图、蓝图和提货单。
I felt as if I’d stumbled into Borges’s Library of Babel, its shelves stretching infinitely in every direction.
我感觉自己好像误入了博尔赫斯的巴别塔图书馆，它的书架向各个方向无限延伸。
It was hard to know where to start.
很难知道从哪里开始。
Yet wherever I went the archives were full of people.
然而无论我走到哪里，档案馆里都挤满了人。
They tottered past in the reading rooms, arms piled with leather-bound volumes, or sat hunched over handwritten documents, the pages yellowed by the acid in their fibres.
他们在阅览室里摇摇晃晃地走过，手臂上堆满了皮革装订的书籍，或者弓着背坐在手写的文件上，这些文件被纤维中的酸泛黄了。
Berlin is home not only to the Bundesarchiv, where the fastidious, half-mad files of the Nazi Party leadership can be found, but also to the Deutsche Dienstelle, where many of the German military’s records are kept.
柏林不仅是德国联邦档案馆的所在地，在那里可以找到纳粹党领导层一丝不苟、半疯狂的档案，而且也是德国军事档案馆的所在地，那里保存着许多德国军方的记录。
At the latter, the wait time had grown from six months to fifteen months within two years.
后者的等待时间在两年内从六个月增加到十五个月。
“We’ve just been flooded with inquiries,” one archivist told me.
“我们刚刚收到了大量的询问，”一位档案管理员告诉我。
“War veterans and their wives have priority—they’re often dying.
“退伍军人和他们的妻子有优先权——他们经常会死去。
But even their children aren’t so young anymore.
但就连他们的孩子也不再那么小了。
After that, who’s to decide who comes first?”
之后，谁来决定谁先来？”
They rarely liked what they found: an uncle in the Gestapo, another in the Waffen S.S., a family fortune built on confiscated goods.
他们很少喜欢他们所发现的东西：一个叔叔在盖世太保，另一个在武装党卫军，一个靠没收货物建立起来的家族财富。
I spoke to Matthias Neukirch, a successful actor in Berlin, who’d spent years researching his mother’s father, Hans Schleif.
我采访了柏林的一位成功演员马蒂亚斯·纽基希 (Matthias Neukirch)，他花了数年时间研究他的外公汉斯·施莱夫 (Hans Schleif)。
A noted architect and archeologist, Schleif had tried to steer clear of politics at first.
施莱夫是一位著名的建筑师和考古学家，起初曾试图避开政治。
But then he came under the patronage of Heinrich Himmler, the supreme mythmaker of the Nazi Party.
但后来他受到了纳粹党最高神话制造者海因里希·希姆莱的赞助。
Soon Schleif was excavating ancient Germanic sites in Poland, trying to help justify Hitler’s invasion there, and overseeing the looting of the Warsaw Archeological Museum.
很快，施莱夫开始在波兰挖掘古代日耳曼遗址，试图为希特勒的入侵辩护，并监督对华沙考古博物馆的抢劫。
When Neukirch requested Schleif’s files at the Bundesarchiv, the cart came back with folders stacked two feet high.
当诺伊基希在联邦档案馆索要施莱夫的文件时，推车回来了，里面堆满了两英尺高的文件夹。
Buried inside were architectural drawings for underground munitions plants, to be built by concentration-camp inmates.
里面埋着地下军火厂的建筑图纸，将由集中营的囚犯建造。
“I went through a phase where I just wanted it all to go away,” my cousin Karin told me, when I visited her in Bavaria.
“我经历了一个阶段，我只想让这一切都消失，”当我去巴伐利亚拜访我的表弟卡琳时，她告诉我。
“I hated that whole wartime generation.” Born in 1957, Karin grew up in the wake of the ’68ers—a generation of Germans fed up with their parents’ denials and willful amnesia, and intent on exposing and atoning for their country’s crimes.
“我讨厌整个战时一代。”卡琳出生于 1957 年，成长于 68 年代的时代——这一代德国人厌倦了父母的否认和故意失忆，一心想揭露和赎罪他们国家的罪行。
By the time Karin was in school, that meant field trips to Verdun and Dachau.
当卡琳上学时，这意味着要去凡尔登和达豪进行实地考察。
It meant hour after hour in darkened classrooms with clattering projectors, watching cities burn and grave sites filled with corpses.
这意味着在黑暗的教室里，投影仪发出咔哒声，一小时又一小时地看着城市被烧毁，墓地里堆满了尸体。
“Three times a week, we had Guilt,” as the German comedian Michael Mittermeier has put it.
正如德国喜剧演员迈克尔·米特迈尔所说，“我们每周都会有三次内疚感”。
“On Fridays, we had Shame.” When Karin, at sixteen, walked into the crematorium at Dachau and the guide wrenched open the oven door, she fainted.
“周五，我们有耻辱。”当十六岁的卡琳走进达豪火葬场时，导游猛地打开了炉门，她晕倒了。
“I just wanted all those old soldiers to go ahead and die,” she told me.
“我只是希望所有这些老战士都去死，”她告诉我。
“When the last one is dead, I thought, I won’t have to feel guilty anymore.”
“当最后一个死了之后，我想，我就不用再感到内疚了。”
And, of course, they did die, in time.
当然，他们确实及时死去了。
But then a strange thing happened.
但后来发生了一件奇怪的事情。
As the generations turned and the war loosened its grip, people began to realize how little they knew about their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and how much that silence had shaped their lives.
随着世代交替和战争的放松，人们开始意识到他们对父母和祖父母的生活知之甚少，而这种沉默对他们的生活产生了多大的影响。
They needed to hear those terrible old stories after all, and the last eyewitnesses were passing away.
毕竟他们需要听那些可怕的古老故事，而最后的目击者正在去世。
Germans of the Tätergeneration , or generation of perpetrators, were nearly gone.
德国的“Täter Generation”（即肇事者一代）几乎消失了。
But their children—too young to have fought or to understand the fighting but old enough to have been traumatized by it—were still alive by the million.
但他们的孩子——还太小，还没有参加过战斗，也不了解战斗，但年纪大了，已经受到过战争的创伤——仍然有数以百万计的人活着。
The drawing room in Berlin was one place where they told their stories.
柏林的客厅是他们讲述故事的地方。
Baring’s sessions grew out of the work of Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist and former Catholic priest.
巴林的课程源于德国心理治疗师、前天主教牧师伯特·海林格 (Bert Hellinger) 的工作。
Hellinger worked for sixteen years as a missionary in South Africa, where he became fascinated by Zulu ancestor worship—the belief that the spirits of the dead guide the living and must be consulted through the intercession of a sangoma , or diviner.
海林格在南非担任传教士十六年，在那里他对祖鲁祖先崇拜着迷——相信死者的灵魂会引导生者，并且必须通过桑戈玛（占卜师）的调解来咨询。
When Hellinger returned to Europe in 1969, at the age of forty-four, he studied psychotherapy in Vienna and eventually left the priesthood and married.
1969 年，44 岁的海灵格返回欧洲，在维也纳学习心理治疗，最终辞去神职并结婚。
But he never seems to have lost his religious belief.
但他似乎从未失去他的宗教信仰。
He just incorporated it into his practice.
他只是将其融入到自己的实践中。
Hellinger’s method is reminiscent of psychodrama—an early form of Viennese psychotherapy in which patients act out traumatic memories, often on stage or with props.
海灵格的方法让人想起心理剧——维也纳心理治疗的一种早期形式，患者通常在舞台上或借助道具来表演创伤记忆。
But it’s closest to family sculpting, a type of group therapy developed by the psychologist Virginia Satir in the early nineteen-sixties.
但它最接近家庭雕塑，是心理学家维吉尼亚·萨提尔 (Virginia Satir) 在十九世纪六十年代初期开发的一种团体疗法。
In Satir’s method, patients take turns posing one another in groups to depict key moments in their lives.
在萨提尔的方法中，患者轮流在一组中互相摆姿势来描绘他们生活中的关键时刻。
How and where people stand—whether a wife faces her husband or has her back to him, or a son is alone in a corner or encircled by siblings—embodies their relationship.
人们站立的方式和位置——无论是妻子面对丈夫还是背对着丈夫，或者儿子独自在角落里还是被兄弟姐妹包围——都体现了他们的关系。
Sometimes it helps people see that relationship clearly for the first time.
有时它可以帮助人们第一次清楚地看到这种关系。
A Familienaufstellung is both more impersonal and more weirdly intimate.
家庭住宅既更加客观，又更加亲密。
The people in the room take turns posing one another, as in family sculpting, but rather than work with actual family members, who might inhibit one another, Hellinger and his followers work with complete strangers.
房间里的人轮流摆姿势，就像在家庭雕塑中一样，但海林格和他的追随者不是与真正的家庭成员一起工作，因为他们可能会互相抑制，而是与完全陌生的人一起工作。
None of the people in the room with me had met before that weekend.
和我一起在房间里的人在那个周末之前都没有见过面。
We knew nothing about Ulf’s family aside from what he’d just told Baring.
除了乌尔夫刚刚告诉巴林的事情外，我们对他的家人一无所知。
Yet somehow we were supposed to intuit his deepest feelings and most painful family relations—to reveal things about his past that even he didn’t know.
然而不知怎的，我们应该凭直觉了解他最深的感受和最痛苦的家庭关系——揭示他自己也不知道的过去。
Baring’s retreats usually last two days and include ten to fifteen patients, who take turns working with her and acting as stand-ins for one another.
巴林的静修通常持续两天，包括十到十五名患者，他们轮流与她一起工作，并充当彼此的替身。
Each session follows roughly the same order, like a religious ritual: confession, supplication, revelation, reconciliation.
每场会议都遵循大致相同的顺序，就像宗教仪式一样：忏悔、恳求、启示、和解。
A malfunctioning family is wrenched into working order.
一个不正常的家庭被迫恢复正常运转。
The whole process takes less than two hours—a quick fix as therapy goes, which may account for some of its appeal.
整个过程不到两个小时——随着治疗的进行，这是一种快速修复，这可能是它的一些吸引力的原因。
Hellinger’s books have sold more than a million copies and have spawned thousands of practices like Baring’s.
海灵格的书已售出超过一百万册，并催生了数千种像巴林那样的做法。
“Bert Hellinger is Germany’s most prominent family therapist,” the newspaper Die Zeit declared, with some alarm, in 2003.
“伯特·海灵格是德国最著名的家庭治疗师，”《时代周报》在 2003 年宣称，有些惊慌。
“He is a kind of Dalai Lama of the psychoscene.”
“他是精神界的达赖喇嘛。”
Baring first met Hellinger in 1999 and trained with him off and on for more than ten years.
巴林于1999年第一次见到海灵格，并断断续续地与他一起训练了十多年。
She has become a well-known figure in her own right, a frequent speaker at conferences on post-traumatic stress and war survivors and the author of a book titled “The Secret Fears of Germans.” She works with the crisp professionalism of any mainstream psychologist, yet there is a mystical element in her work that would mark her in America as an outlier among therapists, if not a kook.
她凭借自己的能力成为了一位知名人物，经常在有关创伤后压力和战争幸存者的会议上发表演讲，并且是《德国人的秘密恐惧》一书的作者。她的工作方式与任何主流心理学家都具有鲜明的专业精神，但她的工作中有一种神秘的元素，这使得她在美国的治疗师中即使不是怪人，也是一个异类。
“There is a kind of family consciousness we share,” she told me.
“我们有一种共同的家庭意识，”她告诉我。
“Why does a mother go walking along a beach and suddenly know that her daughter in Canada or Asia just had an accident?
“为什么一位母亲沿着海滩散步时突然知道她在加拿大或亚洲的女儿刚刚发生了事故？
Why does a dog know that his master is coming home?
为什么狗知道主人回家了？
There are no coincidences.
没有巧合。
They have information we don’t have.
他们有我们没有的信息。
That’s what we’re trying to uncover—the family secrets that lie hidden in our cells.”
这就是我们想要揭开的——隐藏在我们细胞中的家庭秘密。”
When Ulf was done arranging his stand-ins, Baring began to wander among us.
当乌尔夫安排好他的替身后，巴林开始在我们中间徘徊。
She peered at this person’s expressions and that person’s body position.
她打量着这个人的表情，还有那个人的姿势。
Most of us were standing upright or slouched on one leg, our hands on our hips or hanging at our sides.
我们大多数人都直立着，或单腿无精打采地站立，双手放在臀部或垂在身体两侧。
But Ulf’s uncle was bent in half, as if racked by cramps.
但乌尔夫的叔叔弯成两半，好像抽筋了。
“What are you feeling?” Baring asked.
“你感觉怎么样？”巴林问道。
“I don’t know,” he said.
“我不知道，”他说。
“There’s just this tension in my gut.” Then he straightened up and pointed at me.
“我的内心充满了紧张。”然后他直起身来，指着我。
“Why were you always so distant, so cold?” he demanded, his face flushed and twisted.
“为什么你总是那么疏远、那么冷漠？”他问道，脸涨得通红，扭曲着。
I stared at him, not sure what to say.
我盯着他，不知道该说什么。
The thought crossed my mind that I wasn’t the best person for this sort of thing.
我的脑海中闪过这样的念头：我不是做这类事情的最佳人选。
If second sight runs in my family, I don’t seem to have inherited it—I can barely predict what I’m doing the next day.
如果我的家族遗传了复视，我似乎并没有遗传它——我几乎无法预测第二天我会做什么。
I’d hoped to come to this retreat as a neutral observer, quietly taking notes in the corner.
我本来希望以中立的观察者的身份来到这个静修处，在角落里静静地做笔记。
But Baring wouldn’t hear of it.
但巴林不肯听。
I was either in or out, she said—anything else would disrupt the group dynamic.
她说，我要么加入，要么退出——任何其他事情都会扰乱团队的活力。
So I did the best I could.
所以我尽力了。
When Baring asked what I felt, I told her that I wasn’t sure.
当巴林问我的感受时，我告诉她我不确定。
“What he’s saying isn’t really registering,” I said.
“他说的话并没有真正引起人们的注意，”我说。
“I just feel numb.” If Ulf’s ancestors were in the room, they weren’t talking to me.
“我只是感觉麻木了。”如果乌尔夫的祖先在房间里，他们就不会和我说话。
I glanced over at Baring, a little sheepishly, but my comments only seemed to have redoubled her interest.
我有点不好意思地看了巴林一眼，但我的评论似乎只增加了她的兴趣。
Why was I numb?
为什么我麻木了？
Was I repressing something?
我是在压抑什么吗？
Were those my own feelings or Ulf’s father’s transmitted through me?
这些是我自己的感受还是乌尔夫父亲通过我传达的感受？
As Baring moved on among the others, they joined in with their own thoughts and sensations.
当巴林在其他人中继续前进时，他们也加入了自己的想法和感觉。
At first, their exchanges had the cryptic, insinuating quality of lines in a Pinter play.
起初，他们的对话就像品特戏剧中的台词一样神秘、含沙射影。
But as the session wore on, a few clear story lines emerged.
但随着会议的进行，一些清晰的故事情节出现了。
The uncle and father had suffered a terrible rift, some people sensed, perhaps over a woman they’d both loved.
有些人感觉到，叔叔和父亲之间存在着可怕的裂痕，也许是因为他们都爱过的一个女人。
Others suspected that the uncle was hiding something much worse.
其他人则怀疑叔叔隐瞒了更糟糕的事情。
While they talked, Ulf sat slumped in his chair to one side, his face wet with tears.
他们说话的时候，乌尔夫颓然地坐在一侧的椅子上，满脸泪水。
From time to time, Baring would ask him what he thought.
巴林时不时地会问他的想法。
Did these stories ring true?
这些故事听起来真实吗？
Ulf would nod or shake his head.
乌尔夫会点头或摇头。
But even when he disagreed—“I don’t remember my uncle and father fighting like that”—Baring would ask him to keep an open mind.
但即使他不同意——“我不记得我叔叔和父亲那样打架”——巴林也会要求他保持开放的态度。
“I trust what your stand-ins are feeling.”
“我相信你的替身的感受。”
“I’m Monet.
“我是莫奈。
Who the hell is Manet?” Baring’s role in the session had shifted by then.
马奈到底是谁？”那时，巴林在会议中的角色已经发生了变化。
Instead of just asking questions and stirring up memories, she was actively shaping the story, suggesting lines for the stand-ins to tell one another: “It was your pain I was trying to escape.” “I accept you, despite what you did.” The uncle was a war criminal, the group eventually decided—though Ulf had made no mention of this earlier—and the rift in the family lay at the heart of Ulf’s rootlessness and depression.
她不只是提出问题和唤起记忆，而是积极地塑造故事，为替身者提供相互告诉对方的台词：“我试图逃避的是你的痛苦。” “我接受你，不管你做了什么。”小组最终决定，叔叔是一名战犯——尽管乌尔夫之前没有提及这一点——家庭中的裂痕是乌尔夫漂泊和沮丧的核心原因。
Baring took a blanket from one of the chairs and had three people lie on top of it, as if in a mass grave.
巴林从其中一张椅子上取下一条毯子，让三个人躺在上面，就像躺在万人坑里一样。
“I feel so cold all of a sudden,” one of the women said.
“我突然感觉很冷，”其中一位女士说道。
“It’s as if there’s a scream caught in my throat.”
“好像有一声尖叫卡在我的喉咙里。”
This wasn’t playacting, Baring insisted later.
巴林后来坚称，这不是在演戏。
She had warned us not to try to assume a role or analyze our characters’ motives.
她警告我们不要试图扮演一个角色或分析我们角色的动机。
Don’t think, just feel.
不要思考，只是感觉。
When I asked how her patients could know so much about total strangers, she admitted that it was a mystery.
当我问她的病人如何对完全陌生的人了解这么多时，她承认这是一个谜。
She mentioned quantum theory and the notion of “morphic resonance,” proposed by the British parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake.
她提到了英国超心理学家鲁珀特·谢尔德雷克提出的量子理论和“形态共振”的概念。
Just as two particles could affect one another across long distances or members of a species might inherit a collective memory, she suggested, so two strangers might communicate through time: “Our minds are energetically bound.
她认为，正如两个粒子可以远距离相互影响，或者一个物种的成员可以继承集体记忆一样，两个陌生人也可以通过时间进行交流：“我们的思想在能量上是紧密相连的。
Our unconscious is connected.”
我们的无意识是相连的。”
If sessions like Baring’s have found such a passionate following, it may be because her country’s secrets run so dark and deep.
如果像巴林这样的会议拥有如此热情的追随者，那可能是因为她的国家的秘密是如此黑暗和深刻。
Communing with your ancestors is more than a matter of mystical belief in Germany, Baring thinks.
巴林认为，在德国，与祖先交流不仅仅是神秘信仰的问题。
It’s a practical necessity.
这是实际需要。
How else can a people so bent on silence for so long ever learn their true history?
否则，一个长期保持沉默的民族怎么可能了解他们的真实历史呢？
Two months before the Familienaufstellung , I went to a national congress of Kriegskinder in Cologne.
在 Familienaufstellung 召开前两个月，我参加了在科隆举行的 Kriegskinder 全国代表大会。
The congress was held in a Lutheran church not far from the city’s Gothic cathedral—one of Germany’s oldest pilgrimage sites, where the bones of the Three Wise Men are said to lie.
大会在距离该市哥特式大教堂不远的路德教堂举行，哥特式大教堂是德国最古老的朝圣地之一，据说三圣人的骸骨就长眠于此。
More than twice as many people had requested tickets as were available, and the church was packed to a third over capacity.
索取门票的人数是现有门票人数的两倍多，教堂的拥挤程度达到了容量的三分之一。
The tight quarters and meagre rations would help set the mood, the organizer, Curt Hondrich, told us.
组织者柯特·洪德里奇 (Curt Hondrich) 告诉我们，狭小的宿舍和微薄的口粮有助于营造气氛。
“It will remind us of our theme,” he said.
“这会让我们想起我们的主题，”他说。
Hondrich was one of the founders of the Kriegskinder movement, and a war child himself.
洪德里奇是克里格斯金德运动的创始人之一，他本人也是一名战争儿童。
Red-faced and roundly built, with a bald pate fringed with gray, he looked like Freud’s jolly younger brother and had worked as a student pastor and journalist before becoming interested in psychoanalysis.
他脸色红润，身材圆润，秃头的头上镶着灰白的流苏，看起来就像弗洛伊德快乐的弟弟，在对精神分析产生兴趣之前，他曾担任过学生牧师和记者。
Born in 1939, Hondrich spent the war in a state of vague alarm, or so he imagined.
洪德里奇出生于 1939 年，他在战争期间处于一种模糊的惊慌状态，至少他是这么想象的。
His mother was Jewish by Nazi standards (one of her grandparents was a Jew).
按照纳粹的标准，他的母亲是犹太人（她的祖父母之一是犹太人）。
His father was a Party member who manufactured munitions cases for the Wehrmacht in Cologne; he used his work and political connections as a smoke screen to hide his wife’s identity.
他的父亲是一名党员，为科隆国防军制造弹药箱；他利用自己的工作和政治关系作为烟幕来隐藏妻子的身份。
“You can hardly imagine what it’s like to live in a family where there is a time bomb sitting inside it,” Hondrich told me.
“你很难想象生活在一个里面藏着定时炸弹的家庭里是什么感觉，”洪德里奇告诉我。
“My mother knew that at any moment she could be taken away.”
“我母亲知道她随时可能被带走。”
The memories sometimes came back to him in flashes: Cowering in a concrete bunker with other neighborhood kids, their parents too hysterical to pay them any mind, the ground above them shaking from phosphor bombs.
有时他的记忆会闪现出来：和邻居的孩子们一起蜷缩在一个混凝土掩体里，他们的父母歇斯底里地不理会他们，他们头顶上的地面因磷光弹而摇晃。
The sky afterward flaming red, flecked with white as British bombers bailed from stricken planes and drifted down to the burning city.
随后，天空一片火红，夹杂着白色的斑点，英国轰炸机从受损的飞机上跳伞，飘向燃烧的城市。
The bodies splayed like black puppets on the sidewalks.
尸体像黑色木偶一样散布在人行道上。
Then later, after the family had fled to northern Germany, bathing in the Weser River on a summer afternoon.
后来，一家人逃到德国北部，在一个夏日的下午在威悉河里洗澡。
Scrambling for cover as a squad of enemy fighters appeared above the trees, turned and dived and strafed him as he ran, the sand flying up to either side where the bullets struck.
当一队敌方战斗机出现在树林上方时，他争先恐后地寻找掩护，在他奔跑时转身俯冲扫射，沙子飞到子弹击中的两侧。
“It stayed with me,” he told me, “that deep experience of fear.”
“那种深深的恐惧体验一直伴随着我，”他告诉我。
What to do with memories like that?
面对这样的回忆该怎么办？
Tamp them down in your chest.
将它们压在你的胸口。
Bury them so deep that you forget they’re there, betrayed only by your hammering pulse.
把它们埋得太深，让你忘记它们的存在，只有你剧烈的脉搏才能背叛它们。
Hondrich had always been afraid to swim, but never connected that fear to his experience on the Weser.
洪德里奇一直害怕游泳，但从未将这种恐惧与他在威悉河上的经历联系起来。
Then one day in 1990, when he was working as a culture editor for Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne—the West German NPR—he saw a report on television about the Gulf War in Kuwait.
1990 年的一天，当他在科隆的 Westdeutscher Rundfunk（西德 NPR）担任文化编辑时，他在电视上看到了一篇有关科威特海湾战争的报道。
Ever since the fighting began, elderly Germans had been hoarding food and water, as if preparing for an attack.
自从战斗开始以来，德国老人就一直在囤积食物和水，好像在为袭击做准备。
The war was five thousand miles away, yet they could already hear boot steps approaching.
战事虽远在五千里之外，但他们已经听到了脚步声逼近。
What are they thinking?
他们在想什么？
Hondrich wondered as he watched the footage.
洪德里奇在观看录像时感到好奇。
It was a while before he noticed that he was crying.
过了一会儿，他才发现自己在哭。
Hondrich went on to assign a story on Kriegskinder to Sabine Bode, a reporter in Cologne who’d been investigating her own family history.
洪德里奇接着将有关克里格斯金德的报道交给科隆记者萨宾·博德，她一直在调查自己的家族史。
Germany still had more than fifteen million inhabitants born between 1930 and 1945 (they’re now dying at the rate of a third of a million a year), but Bode had trouble finding any who would talk about the trauma they’d experienced.
德国在 1930 年至 1945 年间出生的人口仍然超过 1500 万（他们现在以每年百万分之一的速度死亡），但博德很难找到任何人愿意谈论他们所经历的创伤。
“If I was on a train to Hamburg and saw a person with gray hair sitting alone, I’d ask if I could take a seat beside them,” she told me recently.
“如果我在去汉堡的火车上看到一个白发的人独自坐着，我会问我是否可以坐在他们旁边，”她最近告诉我。
“It wasn’t hard to get them to tell stories about the war.
“让他们讲述有关战争的故事并不难。
That was very easy.
那很容易。
But when I asked how it affected their lives—they couldn’t answer this question.
但当我问这对他们的生活有何影响时，他们无法回答这个问题。
‘No, no, no. It didn’t do us any harm,’ they’d say.
‘不，不，不。这对我们没有任何伤害，”他们会说。
‘We were just children—it was normal for us.’ ”
“我们只是孩子——这对我们来说很正常。”
The Kriegskinder belong to a generation raised with Schwarze Pädagogik , the German version of “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Bed-wetting, stuttering, slumping your shoulders: any deviance was swiftly corrected, any whining dismissed as weakness.
Kriegskinder 属于在 Schwarze Pädagogik 的陪伴下长大的一代，Schwarze Pädagogik 是德语版的“不打棍子，宠坏孩子”。尿床、口吃、塌肩：任何异常行为都会被迅速纠正，任何抱怨都会被视为软弱。
(In “Der Struwwelpeter,” the most famous German children’s book of that era, a character’s thumbs are chopped off because he won’t stop sucking them.) One of Bode’s respondents remembered her mother scolding her after a bombing raid: “Why can’t you be happy for once?
（在那个时代最著名的德国儿童读物《Der Struwwelpeter》中，一个角色的拇指被砍掉，因为他不停地吮吸它们。）博德的一位受访者记得她母亲在一次轰炸袭击后责骂她：“你为什么不能快乐一次？
Just be glad you’re alive.”
只要庆幸你还活着就行了。”
It took Bode ten years to gather and prepare the stories for her first book, “The Forgotten Generation.” Published in 2004, it sold poorly at first.
博德花了十年的时间来收集和准备她的第一本书《被遗忘的一代》的故事。该书于2004年出版，一开始销量不佳。
To speak openly of German war trauma—to play the victim in a country that had victimized so many—was still taboo.
公开谈论德国战争创伤——在一个曾造成如此多受害者的国家扮演受害者——仍然是禁忌。
“ O , das bischen Krieg!
“哦，das bischen Krieg！
Andere hatten es viel schlimmer ,” Bode’s respondents would tell her.
Andere hatten es viel shlimmer，”博德的受访者会告诉她。
“Oh, that bit of war!
“哦，那场战争！
Others had it much worse.” But then, slowly, word of the book began to spread, and the Kriegskinder grew older and lost their compunctions.
其他人的情况更糟。”但后来，这本书的消息慢慢地开始传播开来，克里格斯金德人也逐渐变老，不再感到内疚。
Their stories multiplied and with them their audience.
他们的故事成倍增加，观众也随之成倍增加。
Bode’s book is now in its tenth hardcover printing and has launched Kriegskinder groups across the country.
博德的书现已第十次精装印刷，并在全国范围内成立了 Kriegskinder 小组。
They came to Cologne from every corner of the country, pulling their past behind them like rattling oxcarts.
他们从全国各地来到科隆，像嘎嘎作响的牛车一样把过去抛在身后。
They came because they couldn’t sleep at night and their marriages had foundered.
他们来这里是因为他们晚上睡不着觉，而且他们的婚姻也破裂了。
Because they’d lived in the same town all their lives yet never felt at home.
因为他们一生都住在同一个城镇，却从未有宾至如归的感觉。
Because they were undone by loud noises and tight spaces, uneasy with intimacy and desperate with solitude.
因为他们被喧闹的噪音和狭小的空间所摧毁，对亲密感到不安，对孤独感到绝望。
Because they were seventy years old and still waiting for their lives to begin.
因为他们已经七十岁了，还在等待自己的生活开始。
“You can cast out a net and catch them,” the psychologist Bertram von der Stein declared, looking out over the crowd.
“你可以撒网并抓住他们，”心理学家伯特伦·冯德斯坦（Bertram von der Stein）看着人群宣称。
They were mostly women, many too young to remember the war but still prone to its aftershocks.
他们大多是女性，许多人还太年轻，不记得那场战争，但仍然容易受到余震的影响。
More than seven million Germans were killed in the Second World War, as many as three million of them civilians.
超过 700 万德国人在第二次世界大战中丧生，其中多达 300 万是平民。
They died in air raids, ground battles, labor camps, and refugee shelters, from beatings, exposure, starvation, and disease.
他们死于空袭、地面战斗、劳改营和难民收容所，死于殴打、暴露、饥饿和疾病。
In the occupations that followed, as many as two million women and children were raped, and suicide and abortion rates surged.
在随后的占领中，多达 200 万妇女和儿童被强奸，自杀和堕胎率激增。
“Put me on your do-not-call list.” Germans now suffer post-traumatic stress at more than three times the rate of the Swiss across the border, and many Kriegskinder have “limited psychic latitude,” as German psychologists put it.
“把我列入你的谢绝来电名单。”德国人现在遭受的创伤后压力是瑞士人的三倍多，正如德国心理学家所说，许多克里格斯金德人的“心理自由度有限”。
They avoid change and hold tight to their security.
他们避免改变并紧紧抓住自己的安全感。
It’s an instinct passed down for more than four centuries in Germany—an unbroken chain of fear and remembrance.
这是德国传承了四个多世纪的本能——恐惧和记忆的不间断链条。
Hardly a generation has been untouched by conflict since the Thirty Years War, when more than half the population was killed by marauding armies.
自三十年战争以来，几乎一代人都受到过冲突的影响，当时超过一半的人口被掠夺的军队杀害。
“That is the ur-trauma of the German people,” Curt Hondrich told me.
“这就是德国人民的创伤，”科特·洪德里奇告诉我。
“That is when the German character was formed.”
“德国人的性格就是在那时形成的。”
Inherited trauma was the topic of the hour in Cologne.
遗传性创伤是科隆的热门话题。
I spoke to one woman who traced her compulsive cleanliness to her grandmother, who lost a ten-day-old baby to infection in 1940.
我采访了一位女士，她将自己强迫性的清洁习惯追溯到了她的祖母，她的祖母在 1940 年因感染而失去了一个 10 天大的婴儿。
Another woman blamed her emotional extremes on Russian soldiers in Berlin, who molested her mother and her uncle as children.
另一位妇女将她的极端情绪归咎于柏林的俄罗斯士兵，他们在她还是孩子的时候猥亵了她的母亲和叔叔。
Some Germans see the smiting hand of a vengeful God in such stories.
一些德国人在这些故事中看到了复仇之神的严厉打击之手。
“He visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,” as more than one speaker reminded us.
正如不止一位发言者提醒我们的那样，“他追讨父亲的罪孽，直到第三代和第四代”。
But the line between war trauma and ordinary angst—between suffering and self-pity—gets harder to draw as conflict and consequence drift further apart.
但是，随着冲突和后果越来越疏远，战争创伤和普通焦虑之间的界限（痛苦和自怜之间的界限）变得越来越难划清。
“In my family, there is a competition to see who suffers most,” one young man told me, with a rueful smile.
“在我的家里，有一场比赛，看谁受的苦最深，”一位年轻人苦笑着告诉我。
“My mother is on pain and migraine medications, my father has a heart condition, and my sister is going blind.
“我的母亲正在服用止痛和偏头痛药物，我的父亲患有心脏病，我的妹妹快要失明了。
She hit the jackpot.”
她中了大奖。”
Sabine Bode has published two more books full of anecdotes like those: “Postwar Children” and “War Grandchildren.” In the process, she has “almost single-handedly begotten a new branch of the psychology industry,” a columnist for Die Welt complained two years ago.
萨宾·博德还出版了两本充满此类轶事的书：《战后儿童》和《战争孙子》。两年前，《世界报》的一位专栏作家抱怨道，在这个过程中，她“几乎凭一己之力开创了心理学行业的一个新分支”。
“It allows baby boomers and their children to feel like victims of trauma in the heart of plump, peaceful Germany.
“它让婴儿潮一代和他们的孩子感觉自己像在富裕、和平的德国中心地带遭受创伤的受害者。
.
。
.
。
.
。
Thus the great tragedy of the twentieth century is trivialized, made banal, instrumentalized, and perverted.”
因此，二十世纪的伟大悲剧被轻视、平庸、工具化和扭曲。”
Yet the evidence that the effects of trauma can reverberate through generations—that history can be “embodied”—has steadily mounted.
然而，越来越多的证据表明，创伤的影响可以影响几代人——历史可以“体现”。
Studies at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have found that the children of Holocaust survivors are three times more likely to develop P.T.S.D., and they’re more prone to depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.
纽约西奈山医学院的研究发现，大屠杀幸存者的孩子患创伤后应激障碍的可能性是其他人的三倍，而且他们更容易抑郁、焦虑和滥用药物。
Studies of twins have backed this up: they suggest that vulnerability to P.T.S.D.
对双胞胎的研究支持了这一点：他们表明，容易患创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）。
is thirty to forty percent heritable.
百分之三十到百分之四十是可遗传的。
Rachel Yehuda, the psychologist and neuroscientist who led the Mount Sinai studies, has shown that a pregnant woman’s experience of trauma and P.T.S.D.
领导西奈山研究的心理学家和神经科学家雷切尔·耶胡达 (Rachel Yehuda) 表明，孕妇的创伤经历和创伤后应激障碍 (PTSD)
may affect her child’s development in the womb.
可能会影响孩子在子宫里的发育。
And a study at the University of Zurich has shown that stress in a male mouse can alter the RNA in his sperm, causing depression and behavioral changes that persist in his progeny.
苏黎世大学的一项研究表明，雄性小鼠的压力会改变其精子中的 RNA，导致其后代出现抑郁症和行为变化。
“I think of it this way,” a psychologist who works with German veterans of the Gulf War explained at the congress.
“我是这样想的，”一位与海湾战争德国退伍军人一起工作的心理学家在大会上解释道。
“Everyone who is in the war is probably infected, and they can infect their descendants.”
“参与战争的每个人都可能被感染，他们也可以感染他们的后代。”
How to break the chain?
如何打破链条？
German pacifism has made a good start—the effects of P.T.S.D.
德国和平主义已经有了一个良好的开端——创伤后应激障碍的影响。
fade with each generation.
随着每一代人的消逝。
And psychotherapy, like so much else, is both generously funded and strictly regulated in Germany: public health insurance pays for up to three hundred hours of counselling.
与其他许多事情一样，心理治疗在德国得到了慷慨的资助和严格的监管：公共健康保险可以支付长达三百小时的咨询费用。
There was much talk in Cologne of breakthroughs made after years of analysis.
在科隆，人们谈论了经过多年分析后取得的突破。
“A dream from the fifty-fourth hour,” a speaker from the Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Düsseldorf intoned, while describing one of her case histories.
“五十四小时的梦，”杜塞尔多夫精神分析和心理治疗研究所的一位演讲者在描述她的一个案例时吟诵道。
Another speaker noted that she’d needed six hundred hours of counselling just to start to come to terms with her family history.
另一位发言者指出，她需要六百小时的咨询才能开始接受她的家族史。
It was late in the day by then, after many hours of grim statistics and tragic stories, and I could feel the crowd getting impatient.
经过几个小时的严峻统计数据和悲惨故事后，当时已经很晚了，我能感觉到人群变得不耐烦了。
Were these troubles really so intractable?
这些麻烦真的那么棘手吗？
But then the last speaker began to talk about her own practice in Berlin.
但随后最后一位发言者开始谈论她自己在柏林的实践。
She used a much more efficient method these days, she said, and it had proved extremely effective.
她说，这些天她使用了一种更有效的方法，事实证明它非常有效。
It was called a Familienaufstellung .
它被称为 Familienaufstellung 。
The speaker was Gabriele Baring.
演讲者是加布里埃尔·巴林。
“When I hear some of these case histories, I just shake my head,” Baring told me the next morning.
“当我听到其中一些案例时，我只是摇摇头，”巴林第二天早上告诉我。
“When they say, ‘After a year and a half, we discovered .
“当他们说，‘一年半后，我们发现……。
.
。
.
。
’ I think, My God, we do that in three weekends!” We were sitting in a café a few blocks from the church, Baring with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other.
’我想，天啊，我们三个周末就能做到！”我们坐在距离教堂几个街区的一家咖啡馆里，巴林一手拿着香烟，另一只手拿着一杯黑咖啡。
She peered over her small horn-rimmed frames as she talked, and punctuated her confidences with a low, husky laugh.
说话时，她凝视着自己那小小的角框身材，并用低沉、沙哑的笑声打断了她的倾诉。
Before she became a therapist, ten years ago, Baring was a senior editor at Merian , a well-known travel magazine in Germany.
十年前，在成为治疗师之前，巴林是德国知名旅游杂志《Merian》的高级编辑。
Her husband, Arnulf Baring, is one of the country’s foremost political scientists and the scion of an Anglo-German line that has produced dozens of peers and baronets.
她的丈夫阿努尔夫·巴林（Arnulf Baring）是该国最重要的政治学家之一，也是英德血统的后裔，该血统产生了数十名贵族和男爵。
Gabriele’s patients tend to come from the same élite circles, as does her frank, pungent talk.
加布里埃尔的病人往往来自同一个精英圈子，她坦率、辛辣的谈话也是如此。
Her method depends on it.
她的方法取决于此。
“The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break,” she’d told the crowd in Cologne, quoting from “Macbeth” in German.
“不言而喻的悲伤/低声细语着那颗充满忧伤的心，让它破碎，”她在科隆对人群说道，引用了德语的《麦克白》。
A Familienaufstellung is a machine for processing grief.
Familienaufstellung 是一台处理悲伤的机器。
It’s designed to find the broken parts in a family’s history and fix them.
它的目的是找到家族历史中破损的部分并修复它们。
Like Catholic confession, it’s not about exploring feelings; it’s about seeking absolution.
就像天主教的忏悔一样，它不是探索感受；而是探索感受。这是关于寻求赦免。
Bert Hellinger, the former priest, imbued his method with traditional family values.
前牧师伯特·海林格 (Bert Hellinger) 在他的方法中融入了传统的家庭价值观。
The father is the head of the household; the mother takes care of the children; the children must honor and forgive their elders.
父亲是一家之主；母亲照顾孩子；孩子们必须尊敬并原谅他们的长辈。
Any disruption in this structure—whether from adultery, abuse, indifference, or abandonment—must be set to rights.
这种结构的任何破坏——无论是通奸、虐待、冷漠还是遗弃——都必须赋予权利。
Any broken ties, even to the unborn, may haunt the descendants.
任何破裂的关系，即使是对未出生的人来说，都可能困扰着后代。
When I told Baring that my great-grandmother was a midwife in the Black Forest, she nodded gravely: “In those days, midwives also performed abortions,” she said.
当我告诉巴林我的曾祖母是黑森林的助产士时，她严肃地点点头：“那时候，助产士也做堕胎手术，”她说。
“They called them angel-makers.”
“他们称他们为天使制造者。”
Hellinger is now ninety and still leads the occasional Familienaufstellung , at home and abroad, sometimes drawing audiences of several hundred.
海灵格现在已经九十岁了，仍然偶尔领导国内外的家庭活动，有时会吸引数百名观众。
He has become a guru of sorts, and his views have grown correspondingly capricious—even perverse at times.
他已经成为某种意义上的大师，他的观点也相应地变得反复无常——有时甚至是反常的。
In a session cited by Die Zeit in 2003, one of Hellinger’s patients mentioned that she’d divorced her first husband, who was a philanderer.
《时代周报》在 2003 年引用的一次会议中，海灵格的一位患者提到她已经与她的第一任丈夫离婚了，而她的第一任丈夫是一个花花公子。
“This will have bitter consequences for you,” Hellinger told her.
“这会给你带来痛苦的后果，”海灵格告诉她。
“When a woman treats a man this way, she often contracts breast cancer.” In another session, in Leipzig, a separating couple reportedly asked Hellinger which of them should have custody of their four children.
“当女人这样对待男人时，她常常会患上乳腺癌。”据报道，在莱比锡举行的另一场会议上，一对分居夫妇询问海灵格，他们中的哪一个应该拥有四个孩子的监护权。
Hellinger pondered for a moment and pointed at the husband.
海灵格沉吟片刻，指着丈夫。
“There sits love,” he said.
“那里有爱，”他说。
Then he pointed at the wife.
然后他指着妻子。
“And here sits the cold heart.
“这就是一颗冰冷的心。
The children aren’t safe with the wife.
孩子们和妻子在一起并不安全。
They belong to the husband.”
它们是属于丈夫的。”
“It’s crazy,” Thomas Fydrich, a professor of psychotherapy at Humboldt University in Berlin, told me when I asked him about summary judgments like these.
“这太疯狂了，”柏林洪堡大学心理治疗教授托马斯·费德里希（Thomas Fydrich）在我向他询问此类简易判断时告诉我。
“If you have a weak person who is very sensitive, you can imagine how much fear it can create.” The stories told in a Familienaufstellung can define a reality of their own, he said.
“如果你有一个非常敏感的弱者，你可以想象它会产生多少恐惧。”他说，家庭故事中讲述的故事可以定义它们自己的现实。
“They may feel real but they may not be true.
“他们可能感觉很真实，但也可能不是真的。
That’s the dangerous part.
这就是危险的部分。
You can create a problem that may not be there.” The day after the session in Leipzig, the mother reportedly took her own life.
你可以创造一个可能不存在的问题。”据报道，在莱比锡举行会议后的第二天，这位母亲就结束了自己的生命。
Small wonder that Hellinger’s method has yet to be approved or regulated by the German public health-care system.
难怪海灵格的方法尚未得到德国公共卫生保健系统的批准或监管。
“It’s a colorful field,” Fritz Simon, Hellinger’s first publisher and a former professor of psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg, told me.
“这是一个丰富多彩的领域，”海灵格的第一位出版商、前海德堡大学精神病学教授弗里茨·西蒙 (Fritz Simon) 告诉我。
“You have some very experienced psychologists, and others who are truck drivers who learned to do it over a weekend.”
“有一些非常有经验的心理学家，还有一些是卡车司机，他们在周末就学会了这样做。”
Many of Hellinger’s followers have distanced themselves from their founder over the years.
多年来，海灵格的许多追随者已与他们的创始人保持距离。
Baring told me to concentrate on his earlier work—though her approach may be as prone as his to inventing false narratives—while other therapists have tried to put their method on firmer footing.
巴林告诉我要专注于他早期的工作——尽管她的方法可能和他的方法一样容易发明错误的叙述——而其他治疗师则试图让他们的方法站稳脚跟。
Two years ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Heidelberg published a controlled, randomized study of Familienaufstellungen .
两年前，海德堡大学的一组心理学家发表了一项关于 Familienaufstellungen 的对照随机研究。
They took two hundred and eight participants and divided them into two groups.
他们邀请了 208 名参与者，并将他们分成两组。
Half were kept on a waiting list; the other half were divided into groups of twenty-six and participated in a three-day-long session, led by an experienced therapist (a best-case scenario, given the haphazard quality of the field).
一半的人在等待名单上；另一半被分成二十六人一组，参加由经验丰富的治疗师领导的为期三天的会议（考虑到该领域的随意性，这是最好的情况）。
Two weeks after the session, members of the active group felt better, on average, about their social relations than seventy-three per cent of those in the control group.
会议两周后，平均而言，活跃组的成员对自己的社会关系的感觉比对照组的 73% 更好。
A Familienaufstellung owes much of its power to the secrets it reveals.
家族的力量很大程度上归功于它所揭示的秘密。
It’s like a visit to a psychic under the sober auspices of therapy.
这就像在清醒的治疗主持下拜访通灵者。
How does it work, if not by spiritual means?
如果不是通过精神手段，它是如何运作的？
Thirteen years ago, Peter Schlötter, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Witten/Herdecke, designed a study to find out.
十三年前，维滕/赫德克大学心理学博士研究生彼得·施洛特 (Peter Schlötter) 设计了一项研究来找出答案。
A former engineer, Schlötter began by videotaping a session and marking exactly where the participants stood and what they said.
施洛特曾是一名工程师，他首先录制了一次会议，并准确标记了参与者的立场和他们所说的内容。
Then he set up life-size statues in their place and had volunteers take turns replacing them.
然后他在原来的地方竖起了真人大小的雕像，并让志愿者轮流更换它们。
When asked how they felt at different spots, the volunteers gave remarkably consistent answers.
当被问及在不同地点的感受时，志愿者给出了非常一致的答案。
They felt powerful in some places and weak in others, connected to certain people and disconnected from others.
他们在某些地方感到强大，在另一些地方感到软弱，与某些人有联系，而与其他人却疏远。
When volunteers in a follow-up study were asked where they felt best in the group, they were drawn to the same spots.
当后续研究中的志愿者被问及他们在小组中感觉最好的地方时，他们被吸引到相同的地方。
Schlötter repeated the experiment last year in China, with employees of the German engineering firm Bosch.
施洛特去年在中国与德国工程公司博世的员工重复了这一实验。
(Eva Madelung, the daughter of the company’s founder, Robert Bosch, is a Kriegskind , born in 1931, and a devotee of Familienaufstellungen .) The results followed the same pattern.
（伊娃·马德隆 (Eva Madelung) 是公司创始人罗伯特·博世 (Robert Bosch) 的女儿，出生于 1931 年，是 Kriegskind 家族成员，也是 Familienaufstellungen 的拥护者。）结果也遵循同样的模式。
There is a hidden language in how we stand together, Schlötter told me—a body language writ large that’s so rich and specific that even strangers can decipher it.
施洛特告诉我，我们站在一起的方式中有一种隐藏的语言——一种明显的肢体语言，它是如此丰富和具体，甚至陌生人也能解读它。
Schlötter recently led a session in which one of the stand-ins sensed that the patient had a half brother, born out of wedlock.
施洛特最近主持了一次治疗，其中一名替身感觉到患者有一个非婚生的同父异母的兄弟。
Afterward, the patient repeated the story to one of his aunts, who confirmed that it was true.
随后，病人向他的一位阿姨重复了这个故事，阿姨证实这是真的。
“The patient had this idea in his subconscious, and the stand-in recognized it,” Schlötter told me.
“病人的潜意识里有这个想法，替身也认出了它，”施洛特告诉我。
No ghosts necessary.
不需要鬼魂。
Late this past winter, almost exactly a year after my first Familienaufstellung , I found myself back in Berlin, standing in front of Baring’s studio off Neue Kantstrasse.
去年冬天末，几乎是在我第一次 Familienaufstellung 一年后，我发现自己回到了柏林，站在 Neue Kantstrasse 附近的 Baring 工作室前。
A year of researching my family history had done little to convince me that I could communicate with the dead, but I couldn’t get the last session out of my head.
对我的家族史进行了一年的研究并没有让我相信我可以与死者沟通，但我无法忘记上次的经历。
So much of what the stand-ins had said seemed to strike a chord with the people listening.
替身所说的很多话似乎引起了听众的共鸣。
I’d learned a great deal about my grandfather since then, but there was much more that I would never know, and I wondered what a roomful of ordinary Germans might make of him.
从那时起，我对祖父有了很多了解，但还有更多我永远不会知道的事情，我想知道一屋子的普通德国人会如何看待他。
The group in the drawing room included two doctors, a therapist, a seminarian, a computer scientist, and a philosophy student.
客厅里的人包括两名医生、一名治疗师、一名神学院学生、一名计算机科学家和一名哲学学生。
Some were there to work through their family issues, others just to serve as stand-ins— Familienaufstellung junkies, people call them.
有些人在那里解决家庭问题，另一些人只是充当替身——人们称他们为家庭迷。
The intensity of the sessions seems to be addictive, and, according to the Heidelberg study, they’re almost equally therapeutic for patients and stand-ins.
治疗的强度似乎会让人上瘾，而且根据海德堡的研究，它们对患者和替身几乎同样具有治疗作用。
The very act of empathizing so deeply seems to help people understand themselves.
如此深刻的同理心似乎可以帮助人们了解自己。
Still, it’s exhausting.
尽管如此，还是很累。
Baring’s sessions run from nine in the morning till six at night.
巴林的会议从早上九点持续到晚上六点。
By the end of the second day, I’d been a brother, a grandfather, Restlessness, and the country of Germany.
到第二天结束时，我已经是一个兄弟、一个祖父、一个焦躁不安的国家和一个德国了。
I’d watched people burst into tears, climb into one another’s laps, and pretend to be God.
我看到人们泪流满面，爬到彼此的腿上，假装自己是上帝。
I’d heard a woman scream that she was bleeding from her vagina and that crows had eaten her baby.
我听到一个女人尖叫着说她的阴道流血了，乌鸦吃了她的孩子。
At times, the sobs and shouting rose to such a pitch that I worried that the police might come.
有时，抽泣和喊叫声变得如此强烈，让我担心警察可能会来。
(Germans tend to be eerily quiet at home, at least by American standards.) There were moments, I’ll admit, when I would rather have had all my molars pulled than be asked to play another Nazi war criminal.
（德国人在家里往往出奇的安静，至少按照美国的标准是这样。）我承认，有些时候我宁愿拔掉所有的臼齿，也不愿被要求扮演另一个纳粹战犯。
But if catharsis was what was required, then Baring surely provided it.
但如果需要的是宣泄，那么巴林肯定能提供它。
When my turn came, I felt a twinge of performance anxiety.
当轮到我时，我感到一阵表演焦虑。
All the others had ended their sessions in tears.
所有其他人都以泪水结束了他们的会议。
Would I have to do the same?
我也必须这样做吗？
I imagined my stand-ins circling the room for hours, telling dismal tales about my ancestors until I finally broke down.
我想象我的替身在房间里转了几个小时，讲述着我祖先的悲惨故事，直到我最终崩溃。
Baring is a canny judge of character and a skilled stage manager.
巴林是一位精明的人物判断者和一位熟练的舞台监督。
She knows how to strip the nerves in a group and then soothe them, tease out complications and swiftly resolve them.
她知道如何消除团队的紧张情绪，然后安抚他们，找出复杂的问题并迅速解决。
“Let’s just see how we can get out of this mess,” as she put it in one session.
正如她在一次会议上所说，“让我们看看如何摆脱这种混乱局面”。
But what if there was no trauma to unearth?
但如果没有可挖掘的创伤呢？
No guilty party to absolve?
没有可以赦免的罪人吗？
The more I’d learned about my grandfather, the more contradictory he seemed.
我对祖父了解得越多，他看起来就越矛盾。
He’d studied to be a priest, but lost his faith on the battlefield.
他曾学习成为一名牧师，但在战场上失去了信仰。
He’d been arrested as a war criminal, but was sent home without a sentence.
他作为战犯被捕，但没有被判刑就被遣送回家。
He’d served as a teacher and Nazi administrator, but seemed to have played a dangerous double game.
他曾担任过教师和纳粹行政官员，但似乎玩起了危险的双重游戏。
Among the few personal effects that he left behind when he died, in 1979, was a batch of letters from the village in Alsace where he was stationed.
1979 年，他去世时留下的为数不多的个人物品之一，是来自他驻扎的阿尔萨斯村庄的一批信件。
They were handwritten by local farmers and villagers and addressed to the French military authorities in Strasbourg, where my grandfather was in solitary confinement after the war.
它们是当地农民和村民手写的，寄给斯特拉斯堡的法国军事当局，战后我的祖父在那里被单独监禁。
They were pleading for his release.
他们恳求释放他。
“Of the eighteen hundred souls in our village, not one was exiled,” a villager named Joseph Merzisen wrote.
“我们村里的一千八百人中，没有一个人被流放，”一位名叫约瑟夫·默齐森的村民写道。
Another wrote that his son had been arrested while fleeing Alsace and was sent to a concentration camp.
另一位写道，他的儿子在逃离阿尔萨斯时被捕并被送往集中营。
“But Herr Gönner, after many appeals, was able to secure his freedom for us.” He had even helped the same boy stay hidden from German authorities when he was later drafted.
“但是，经过多次上诉，格纳先生为我们确保了他的自由。”当这个男孩后来应征入伍时，他甚至帮助他躲避德国当局。
Yet, in other ways, my grandfather had stayed a loyal German to the end.
然而，在其他方面，我的祖父直到最后仍然是一个忠诚的德国人。
A few months earlier, I’d tracked down some of his former students in Alsace, now in their eighties.
几个月前，我在阿尔萨斯找到了他以前的一些学生，现在已经八十多岁了。
They all described him in the same confounding way.
他们都用同样令人困惑的方式描述他。
“Your grandfather was a good man,” one of them told me.
“你的祖父是一个好人，”其中一位告诉我。
“He was a just man.
“他是一个正义的人。
But he was a fanatical Nazi.”
但他是一个狂热的纳粹分子。”
The obvious spot to put his stand-in was trapped in a corner, facing the wall.
最明显的替身位置是在一个角落里，面朝墙壁。
I placed my grandmother behind him—the supportive wife, abandoned for war—and my mother beside her.
我把我的祖母放在他身后——这位支持我的妻子，因战争而被遗弃——我的母亲放在她旁边。
Then I put my three uncles in a wedge behind them all.
然后我把我的三个叔叔挤在他们后面。
They stood there for a moment in silence, as if humming to the same vibration—an arrow shot into an oak.
他们静静地站了一会儿，仿佛随着同样的振动而嗡嗡作响——一支箭射进了橡树。
Then everyone seemed to move and talk at once.
然后每个人似乎都同时动起来并说话。
I remember my mother falling to her knees and laying her forehead on the ground; my grandmother kneeling beside her and putting a hand on her shoulder; my grandfather saying, “You have to believe in something.
我记得母亲跪倒在地，把额头放在地上。我的祖母跪在她旁边，将一只手放在她的肩膀上。我的祖父说：“你必须相信一些东西。
If not God, then Hitler.” But it’s hard to recall how it all fit together.
如果不是上帝，那就是希特勒。”但很难回忆起这一切是如何组合在一起的。
There is a kind of dream logic to a Familienaufstellung that’s lost in the retelling.
《家族》中有一种梦的逻辑，但在重述中却消失了。
It took Baring, as usual, to get us back to the plot.
像往常一样，巴林让我们回到了情节。
She chose one woman from the group to represent my grandfather’s victims, and another to represent those he’d saved.
她从人群中选择了一名女性代表我祖父的受害者，另一名女性代表他所拯救的人。
The first stand-in was an elderly therapist with hollow, deep-set eyes.
第一个替身是一位年长的治疗师，他的眼睛凹陷而深陷。
She lay on the ground and pointed a long, thin finger at him.
她趴在地上，用一根细长的手指指着他。
“Acknowledge us!” she said.
“承认我们吧！”她说。
One of my uncles tried to intervene.
我的一位叔叔试图介入。
“He did better than almost anyone!” he said.
“他比几乎任何人都做得更好！”他说。
But my grandfather shook his head.
但爷爷摇了摇头。
His stand-in was a pale, ponytailed art-history student in his twenties—nothing like the stern figure I’d known, with his unblinking glass eye.
他的替身是一个二十多岁、脸色苍白、扎着马尾辫的艺术史学生——完全不像我认识的那个有着玻璃眼睛、一眨不眨的严肃人物。
But for a moment I could almost see a resemblance.
但有那么一刻我几乎看出了相似之处。
“I could have saved them, but I didn’t,” he said.
“我本可以救他们，但我没有，”他说。
“I passed along their coördinates, and they died.”
“我传递了他们的坐标，然后他们就死了。”
“Every guy out there is either married, gay, or a human suit zipped around a column of ants.” Whether it’s true, I can’t say.
“那里的每个人要么已婚，要么是同性恋，要么穿着人类服装绕着一列蚂蚁。”是否属实，我不能说。
I never found any trace of those victims in German or French archives.
我从未在德国或法国的档案中找到这些受害者的任何踪迹。
Like a lot of the revelations in Baring’s sessions, this one struck me as a little too convenient.
就像巴林会议中的许多启示一样，这个让我觉得有点太方便了。
When you’re haunted by an ancestor’s past, you want nothing more than to hear him confess his sins—to condemn or forgive him once and for all, and then banish his ghost to history.
当你被祖先的过去所困扰时，你只想听他承认自己的罪孽——一劳永逸地谴责或原谅他，然后将他的鬼魂驱逐到历史中。
But it’s rarely that simple.
但事情很少这么简单。
What did ring true were much quieter details.
真正真实的是一些更安静的细节。
The mutual devotion of my mother and grandmother, for instance, and the eerie way that the stand-ins captured my three uncles.
例如，我母亲和祖母的相互忠诚，以及替身以怪异的方式捕捉我的三个叔叔。
I’d positioned my mother’s two older brothers side by side, with their little brother behind them, and from that minimal geometry a familiar portrait emerged.
我将母亲的两个哥哥并排放置，他们的弟弟在他们身后，从那个最小的几何形状中出现了一幅熟悉的肖像。
The middle son talked about his deep connection to his father, which I’d learned about only recently from their letters.
二儿子谈到了他与父亲的深厚联系，这是我最近从他们的信中得知的。
The youngest bemoaned his sense of disconnection, of being cast aside: “Why can’t he see me?” he said.
最年轻的孩子哀叹自己与世隔绝、被抛弃的感觉：“为什么他看不到我？”他说。
Yet I’d never told the group that my uncle felt this way, or that he was sent from home at age eight, to live with relatives in the Black Forest after the war, when the rest of the family was starving.
但我从来没有告诉大家我叔叔有这种感觉，或者说他在八岁时被从家里送到战后黑森林的亲戚那里，当时家里的其他人都在挨饿。
A lucky guess, it’s tempting to say—the psychic’s usual shot in the dark.
人们很容易说这是一个幸运的猜测——通灵者通常在黑暗中进行射击。
But any good divination starts with a close study of the seeker, and unconscious cues of the sort that Peter Schlötter documented.
但任何好的占卜都始于对求知者的仔细研究，以及彼得·施洛特记录的那种无意识的线索。
That’s what has stayed with me most from Baring’s sessions: the careful attention people paid to one another—their hunger for these stories and the ardor with which they abandoned themselves to them.
这是巴林会议中给我印象最深的一点：人们对彼此的细心关注——他们对这些故事的渴望，以及他们对这些故事的热情。
These weren’t just strangers in a room.
这些不仅仅是房间里的陌生人。
They were the Germans I’d known growing up, stoics and stiff-upper-lippers of long standing.
他们是我从小就认识的德国人，长期坚忍不拔、坚忍不拔。
How reserved they were on the street, even in Berlin!
即使在柏林，他们在街上也是多么矜持啊！
How cautious with their feelings compared with the average oversharing New Yorker.
与一般过度分享的纽约人相比，他们的感情是多么谨慎。
Yet here they were, sobbing in one another’s arms, divided and united, accused and forgiven, reënacting their sorrows with people they’d never met.
然而他们却在这里，互相拥抱哭泣，分裂又团结，指责又宽恕，与素未谋面的人重演他们的悲伤。
Before coming to Berlin, I’d stopped off in Frankfurt to see Sabine Bode.
在来柏林之前，我曾在法兰克福停留去看望萨宾·博德。
She was giving a talk on Kriegskinder at the local health ministry, and the lecture hall was full, mostly with elderly listeners.
她正在当地卫生部就 Kriegskinder 发表演讲，演讲厅里挤满了人，其中大部分是老年听众。
(“A little louder!” a hoarse voice called out from the crowd.) Bode stood before them with her long, unbound hair and blunt, earthy manner—the very picture of the ’68er, come to upbraid them for their sins.
（“大声一点！”人群中传来一个嘶哑的声音。）波德站在他们面前，长发散开，举止直率、朴实——这正是 68 年代的人的写照，来谴责他们的罪过。
But she was there to offer comfort instead.
但她却在那里提供安慰。
“When we were growing up, we had memories of the war, but we didn’t work with them,” she said.
“在我们成长的过程中，我们有战争的记忆，但我们并没有和他们一起工作，”她说。
“We agreed that terrible things happened to us, but we couldn’t give them weight.
“我们一致认为可怕的事情发生在我们身上，但我们无法重视它们。
My wish is that in reading my books people develop a sense of community.
我的愿望是人们在阅读我的书时培养一种社区意识。
That they think, I’m not alone.
他们这么想，我并不孤单。
I’m not crazy.”
我没有疯。”
Afterward, over dinner, Bode told me that she could understand why my parents had emigrated to the United States in 1962: “When I look back at the Germans of the fifties and sixties, they were cold, they were impolite to each other, there was no empathy.
后来，晚餐时，博德告诉我，她可以理解为什么我的父母在 1962 年移民到美国：“当我回顾五六十年代的德国人时，他们很冷漠，彼此不礼貌，没有同理心。
I was raised in a climate of silence and fog.
我是在寂静和迷雾的气氛中长大的。
But now that fog is breaking up.” The change is easiest to see in the country’s response to the refugee crisis, she said.
但现在迷雾正在消散。”她说，这种变化最容易在该国应对难民危机的措施中看到。
Anti-immigrant groups have been on the rise since the attacks in Paris and Cologne last year.
自去年巴黎和科隆袭击事件以来，反移民团体不断增加。
Yet Germany has taken in well over a million asylum seekers in the past two years and has pledged to resettle more refugees than all other European countries combined.
然而，德国在过去两年中接纳了超过一百万寻求庇护者，并承诺安置的难民数量比所有其他欧洲国家的总和还要多。
“When the last wave of refugees arrived from Bosnia in the nineties, they were received differently,” Bode said.
“九十年代最后一波难民从波斯尼亚抵达时，他们受到了不同的对待，”博德说。
“There were a lot of people willing to help back then, and it was very well organized.
“当时有很多人愿意提供帮助，而且组织得很好。
But it felt like an obligation, a moral duty.
但这感觉像是一种义务，一种道德责任。
There wasn’t this empathy which is so apparent today, and so touching and important.” Only twenty years have passed between the two waves, she said, but the Germans know so much more about their family histories now.
当时没有这种今天如此明显、如此感人且重要的同理心。”她说，两次浪潮之间只过去了二十年，但德国人现在对他们的家族历史了解得更多了。
Many have learned how their own parents and grandparents suffered as refugees once, and that it was only by taking in that ragged flood of the war-torn and homeless, wounded and despairing, that the country began to heal itself.
许多人都知道自己的父母和祖父母曾经作为难民遭受过怎样的痛苦，只有通过接纳那些饱受战争蹂躏、无家可归、受伤和绝望的人，这个国家才开始自我治愈。
“Fourteen million refugees!
“一千四百万难民！
Can you imagine?” she said.
你能想象吗？她说。
By learning to live with our memories, Bode believed, we learn to live with each other.
博德相信，通过学会与我们的记忆共处，我们就学会了与彼此共处。
My session in Berlin ended without undue drama.
我在柏林的会议没有过度戏剧性地结束。
The stand-ins could tell that I was worn out, I think, and unprepared for any new revelations.
我想，替身们可以看出我已经疲惫不堪，对任何新的揭露毫无准备。
Or maybe they were just relieved at the chance for a happier ending.
或者也许他们只是因为有机会获得更幸福的结局而松了一口气。
“I think it’s good what you’re doing,” the ponytailed art-history student told me, clasping my arm.
“我认为你所做的很好，”扎着马尾辫的艺术史学生握住我的手臂告诉我。
Then Baring had us join the others in the middle of the room.
然后巴林让我们和其他人一起到房间中央。
We stood there for a moment shoulder-to-shoulder—gathered so close that we left no room for coded messages or forgotten children—and faced forward, smiling, as if for a camera: a family portrait.
我们肩并肩地站了一会儿——聚集得如此之近，以至于我们没有留下密码信息或被遗忘的孩子的空间——然后面向前方，微笑着，仿佛在拍摄一张全家福。
Then we all took our seats and began again.
然后我们都入座并重新开始。
♦
❖
Burkhard Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2001.
布克哈德·比尔格 (Burkhard Bilger) 自 2001 年起担任《纽约客》特约撰稿人。
He is a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.
他是纽约公共图书馆卡尔曼中心研究员。
More: Ancestors Berlin Culture Dead Family Histories Germans Germany Grandfathers Grandmothers Grief Guilt History Memories Memory Nazis Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.) Secrets Spirits Stories Therapists Therapy This Week’s Issue Never miss a big New Yorker story again.
更多：祖先柏林文化死者家庭历史德国人德国祖父祖母悲伤内疚历史记忆记忆纳粹创伤后应激障碍（P.T.S.D.）秘密精神故事治疗师治疗本周的问题再也不会错过《纽约客》的重大故事。
Sign up for This Week’s Issue and get an e-mail every week with the stories you have to read.
订阅本周的期刊，每周都会收到一封电子邮件，其中包含您必须阅读的故事。
Letter from Berlin The Last Trial A great-grandmother, Auschwitz, and the arc of justice.
来自柏林的信最后的审判曾祖母、奥斯维辛和正义之弧。
Letter from Dresden Embers Will a prideful city finally confront its past?
来自德累斯顿余烬的信 一座骄傲的城市最终会面对它的过去吗？
under-review The Miseducation of Maria Montessori Her method was meant for the public.
正在审查 玛丽亚·蒙台梭利的错误教育 她的方法是为公众准备的。
Then it became a privilege.
然后它变成了一种特权。
By Jessica Winter
杰西卡·温特
dispatches The Russians Fleeing Putin’s Wartime Crackdown Resisters are leaving Russia because the country they worked to build is disappearing—and the more people who leave, the faster it vanishes.
逃离普京战时镇压的俄罗斯人正在离开俄罗斯，因为他们努力建设的国家正在消失——离开的人越多，它消失的速度就越快。
By Masha Gessen
玛莎·格森