Introduction

Welcome. Willkommen. Bien venidos. Benvenuti. . Ahalan vesahalan. Willkhomme (Swiss German). Dobro pozhalovat, Velkomen, Välkomen: Suahili: Kuwakaribisha, Benvinguda. Begrissen.

I welcome the participants of the 17th Symposium of the International Group Analytic Society in Berlin. GASi offers meetings and discussion, the WW, the Foulkes lecture, a summer school—and also a Journal of GA, which celebrates 50 years, and now you can enjoy 50-days’ free online access to all Group Analysis content.

The GASi, in a successful cooperation with the German D3G and the Berlin Institute of Group Analysis made it possible to create a space in which we can exchange knowledge and discuss group analysis. We thank those who worked to create it.

Meeting in small, median and large groups, in the key-note lectures, sub-plenaries, presentations and workshops will make our Symposium a significant personal and communal experience.

Many of us, even our German hosts, will have now crossed borders and made the ‘journey’ to this Berlin Symposium. This is a special journey, crossing also the borders of time and social and personal limits. Our local colleagues expect us open-heartedly, with joy and maybe some anxiety, and we, who have arrived here to Berlin, have probably a similar mix of emotions. Because we are likely to have significant group analytic ‘moments of meeting’, confronting together the most demanding subjects. I want to share with you why I think we are just now, here in Berlin, taking part in a unique social process, one of the most inspiring moments in European and the world’s social history.

What is the ‘journey’ and who participates in the journey? By ‘we’ I mean those who not only cherish Berlin as a wonderful city, with the potential of providing great fun, shopping, art and museums. Probably for many of us, Berlin represents also a whole complex history, mixing a horrendous past with a fascinating interpersonal, social and political transformation in the past decades. For many of ‘us’ we have now travelled to a once monstrous place, which is a reminder of ‘hell’. Many of us, visitors and Germans, both the children and grandchildren of victims and soldiers, and the children and grandchildren of perpetrators, grew up with feelings of being enemies. The post-war emotional world was split between ‘us and them’ for generations, no matter ‘I am a Berliner’. From ‘the Germans’ against ‘the world’, it became ‘the world’ against ‘the Germans’ for more than half a century. We lived in a matrix of rejection, where hate, revenge and shame dominated. Examples? Every football match in which Germany played, the rest of the world sided with the opponent . . . As I said, for many of us, to come here it is a ‘journey’.

How did it change, how come we can now choose sides and young and old come to Berlin? This development started in the 1960s. Instead of trying to forget and repress, Germans and the rest of the world slowly worked-through hate, rejection and estrangement. In order to meet the former enemy with increasing acceptance, tolerance and dialogue, millions of people, Germans and non-Germans, were ready to separate themselves from that matrix of rejection, in a unique and often painful social process. It meant emotionally to distance ourselves from parents, grandparents, teachers, from a whole culture of pain and hate.

The children of the German Soldier’s Matrix took the opportunity to work-through their parents’ huge atrocities. Their challenge was immense, like the Prophet Jeremiah said: ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth got rotten’. Many, many Germans who sit here have made this ‘journey’. Now we join those who were ready to suffer for their ancestors’ ‘sour grapes’. Will we manage to move further away from rejection, revenge to closeness and inclusion? The work that you have done through the decades, mostly in groups and different social settings, through concrete and symbolic reparation, is extraordinary and courageous. You de-identified with your matrix, we witnessed decades of mourning, we all had to give up omnipotence and false glory, and the continuation of poisoning feelings.

Non-Germans had to work through their own hate, rejection, and scapegoating by being able to reintroduce guilt, shame and empathy towards Germans and, eventually, the Germans’ suffering. This complex social process will be continued in the here-and-now of our Symposium, if we create a relationship in which we exchange and reciprocally influence emotions.

Maybe some of us will never be ‘neutral’ towards Germany, but I think coming here in such numbers means that we want to be part of this admirable transformation from a monstrous self-glorifying and totalitarian war matrix, to a partner in democracy and openness. And yes—we do not fool ourselves thinking this work is finished, we want to walk hand in hand to continue this change.

Wars, violence and exile are all connected with our conference theme: emigration and emigrants. Are the emigrants’ existential fears, the shadows of violence and rejection only in their mind, body? My experience tells me emigration is part of our human collective experience. We all unconsciously carry with us ‘being an emigrant’, we somehow know what it is to escape from trauma, to be excluded and rejected. It is deep universal knowledge to hope for a refuge, where it would be possible to experience survival, security, and where trauma can be cured first by inclusion, by belonging, by ‘feeling at home’.

The suffering and hopes of the millions who escaped and crossed borders is mirrored in our collective mind, even if they emigrated decades ago. Their ‘journey’ went through a lifetime, and their legacy usually into the next generation. I’ll share with you a typical emigration history: my own parents, like the parents of many, many in this audience, managed to flee their homes. By sheer luck they found a refuge in a welcoming country, they even re-created their lost family as my favourite aunt did. But even after 20 or 30 years, only a few of the immigrants felt really included and at ‘home’ in their new community. Partly as a consequence of this issue, I continued their emigration at 13, to search for my own home.

If anyone can contribute to transform a hating and fearful group into a dialoguing and healthier society, it is group analysts who understand the importance of the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and rejection.

I want to emphasize the significance of inclusion. Humans are such social beings that rejection from a group makes you sick, while inclusion in a group cures. The rejecters of the Second World War and its aftermath, were or became sick, even if for a while expulsing, exiling and annihilating seemed to be good solutions.

Of course, the victims of rejection, the homeless, the ones whose parents were scapegoated, carry deep emotional scars. Having lived through rejection may become a disorder, it fills the body and the mind with the poison of hate, fantasized revenge and homesickness for decades, often forever. That is in essence why helping emigrants to feel included in their new matrix, helping them to identify with a ‘home’, may be a significant part of the recovery, along with the work on trauma and mourning. For all parties, ‘cure’ may actually not happen unless some kind of ‘re-belonging’, a ‘re-inclusion’ in small or large groups will take place.

Thus, I think that for more than a few of us here, who chose to ‘make the journey’ to Berlin, under these unique social processes, our Group Analytic Symposium will provide an opportunity to take part of this process, in this cure, by a dialogue which includes instead of the exclusion and rejection of the past. We may have come to Berlin not only to have an exchange about group analysis, but to further grow ourselves out of former, often inter-generational hate and rejection into an inclusion space where conflicts do not annihilate. Let us enjoy this Symposium.