During one of the regular walks organized by the circle for the promotion of an industry museum in Geesthacht, my home town, Förderkreises für ein Industriemuseum Geesthacht, I learnt a lot about the history of the gun powder factory in Düneberg, a neighborhood in Geesthacht. It was very interesting. I flew in from Barcelona for the purpose of participating in the event. The title was "German Gun Powder for the World".
In the last few years several events had made it clear to me that the gun powder factory was a blind spot in my life and that it would be advisable to find out more about it. I have the feeling that during the weekend of my visit I delved into deep roots of my life which give me strength and resistence and food for my spirit and my soul. While these roots were stuck in oblivion, they emanated emotions like shame, fear, anger and guilt. It was only when I managed to let go a bit of the fist in my stomach that has been holding on tightly since my early childhood, that it became possible to name those emotions, to question them, and to discover tracks leading back to the context of their origin. They would often come up without any apparent reason or would be set off by circumstances that did not match the intensity of their onslaught. They belonged to a pattern that repeated itself again and again, with a negative impact on my health and wellbeing and making life difficult both in the work place and at home. The work with the patterns in my body revealed tracks that led me to the site of the gun powder factory, when I found out that my grandfather had been an officer of the guard there during WWII. From his behavior in later years it became clear that he had not been able to assimilate whatever it must have been like to fulfill that function. He repressed those feelings and I absorbed them on our walks directly body to body, mind to mind, automatically, without being aware of it, because that is human nature.
The offical walk during that morning, 55 years later, was about the buildings that are still standing and others that do not exist any longer.
Here I have a memory of my own life: on this yard I received my first kiss of romantic love from a guy called Carlos, who I cannot remember anything else about, other than his beautiful brown eyes and dark curly hair and that he was Spanish. The buildings housed a part of the offices of the factory. I didn't know that until the day of the walk. I had also learnt only in recent years from a history book I inherited from my father that the high school I went to had been a company store for the factory workers.
The guide, Jochen Meder, told us many things about all those buildings, those still standing and those that are no longer there, about production procedures and many other things. This building had something to do with energy generation and after the war it was a center where scrap metal was collected as repair payment to England. Now it houses a café with an arts and crafts gallery. In the context of the upcoming 800th anniversay of Geesthacht and the Alfred Nobel Days in December 2016 I will give a talk there about how to recognize the tracks of history in one's own body and how to learn from them to treat oneself and others lovingly, to protect and care for one's own health as well as that of our successors and nature in general, how to engage, within the limits of our possibilities, in tending the wounds that our predecessors left open... in all, to create a satisfactory and happy life.
The perl, this building housed the high ranking administration and the living quarters of the director and his familiy. In the 70s, when I had already left Geesthacht, a community of artists moved in.
In the afternoon, the president of the circle, Ulrike Neidhöfer, took me on a second walk, available upon request, which was the more important part for me, because it took me on paths like those I used to walk on with my grandfather. I had found out about him being an officer of the guard at the factory only a few years ago, when I found a photo of him in the uniform of an officer of the Wehrmacht. I had thought he hadn't been in the war. In my family it was not spoken about, at least not in front of me. I asked an aunt, the last one alive who was able to tell me what little she knew about it. She was a young girl at the time.
Here we found the ruins I remembered from my childhood and adolescence that I had always taken for bombed out bunkers. Now I learnt they were workshops for presses, turning lathes, transfer stations, ammunition storehouses, blown up a few years after the war...
For many years now I have been practicing, through breathing, to let go of things my body holds onto with involuntary tension. Breathing is regulated by the same autonomous part of the nervous system as the tone of our tissues, the involuntary tension of our muscles. Breathing out is a movement of relaxation; here the muscles that have done the work of breathing in let go. If you give yourself a little bit of time to feel how you rest inwards and towards the ground, you can feel how the ground supports your innermost being; that means, you can rest within the depth of the lving being you are and in the material world we all are a part of.
That is how I discovered the tracks of history in my body, because when I manage to let go a bit of involuntary tension, information comes to the surface. You only have to learn how to understand this information and find its context. When you hit home, the tension is released. It is as if the body held onto memories and sensations that want to be known and acknowledged. When the message is delivered, the messenger can rest. It can then be included in conscious experience and it becomes possible to draw conclusions, recognize contexts, understand the behaviors of others as well as one's own, take care of things that have been waiting to be taken care of, sometimes for generations, for solutions to be found or, at least, acknowledgement to be given.
We didn't talk much, when my grandfather took me along on his walks on this site. I was 5, 6, 7 years old. The bad feeling in my tummy was always there. It would never have occurred to me to relate it to him or anybody else. I thought it was something in me that was not as it should be. But I did not dare tell anyone about it. I simply did my best to be like what I thought to be normal.
When I try to imagine how people must have felt back then, when gun powder was manufactured on that site, people who worked there deliberately, happy to be able to make a living, and other who worked there as forced labor, captured in occupied territories, I am certain that efforts to dominate feelings leading to knots or fists in people's stomachs were a common occurrance. I cannot really imagine what it must have been like for my grandfather to be a guard there. I have seen documentaries and movies about the two great wars and the Third Reich. When I put what I saw on the screen together with the silence weighing tons on my childhood and adolescence, I get a glimpse of the things nobody wanted to talk about. It is no wonder my grandfather did not want to tell a little girl anything about all that. It is no wonder nobody wanted to think about it and that everybody wanted to leave it behind the sooner the better and orient towards the future.
But how can you build a future without assimilating what happened? How can you assimilate something you do not want to talk about or even think about? The more people strive to push something outside their awareness, the tension they use to do so holds it back. Even though it may be true that they no longer experience it directly, underneath the threshold of consciousness it keeps on smoldering. People have made an effort to dominate what they feel and have managed to get over the horror. They believe they have left it behind. But the truth is they carry it around with them at all times. Since they no longer recognize it as something of their own, they only see its shadow fall on others. The stuff one does not tolerate in oneself gets projected onto others.
Little children are highly sensitive. They feel even the things adults have tried to get over by pulling themselves together, what they try to cover by overeating, what they try to drown in alcohol or strive to anesthesize by other means. Children feel it in their own bodies, without the least possibility of understanding that what they are feeling, actually, are sensations their parents or other adults in their environment cannot bear. The truth is that we all are as sensitive, not only children. Think about sometime when you stood next to someone who was angry or sad or afraid. We actually do feel it in our own bodies. It is called empathy. Some people may have more of it than others. Personally, I believe that some people allow themselves to be more empathetic than others. There are people who simply cannot bear feeling themselves, much less others.
The fist in my stomach has let go quite a bit. The week after my trip to Germany was pretty stressful, but there was no trace of any knot in my stomach. I was actually amazingly at ease about a couple of things that would at other times have made me quite nervous. I believe I managed to leave a fair amount of the old tension from my childhood in that forest or, at least, the way it manifests has changed.
Thanks to the Förderkreises für ein Industriemuseum Geesthacht many buildings in Geesthacht are now protected as historic monuments and many of the documents that have not been destroyed are being collected. The creation of this museum seems quite important. For many people it is an unpleasant subject they do not want to remember. That is probably why it is so difficult to convince the competent public administration and, in the case of the dynamite factory in Krümmel, the Swedish company Vattenfall, to restore the old water tower as the site for this museum before any more gets lost. Even though it is an explosive and probably also embarrasing subject, it is especially important to keep the memory alive, because what people do not want to remember, they repeat.
To manage the flow of emotions that come to the fore during the process of discovering a blind spot and zeroing in on it is something that can be learnt. When they remain in the body underneath the threshold of consciousness, they keep on smoldering until they become a source of illness. Even when they have already become manifest as symptoms, it is healing and a relief to be able to leave the emotions we absorbed from earlier generations through sensations directly from body to body, mind to mind, with the people they belong to. When seen in the greater context of one's personal and collective historical background, these sensations help to understand many things in another way and end up quieting down.
It is not about blaming others for one's own feelings nor about rejecting one's own responsibility. Quite to the contrary, it is about taking the reins of one's own life and about assimilating what is in our power to assimilate, whether it is our own sensations or those absorbed from others. It is about learning to distinguish one from the other. Sensations have the function of getting our attention with respect to our wants and needs and their degree of satisfaction. The satisfaction of egotistic desires and needs, at best, bring about momentary relief and feeling of satisfaction. The only thing that really does the job is the truth that wants to be known.The truth is that every living being belongs to the same family. What is harmful for others, creates suffering. What is good for everybody, creates wellbeing.
Even though this lamp post no longer gives any light, may the light of consciousness illuminate the actions of human beings so that the manufacture of arms and ammunitions and all kinds of harmful products be ended right now in the whole world! Trees generate the oxygen we need to breathe. Many people create things we need to live well. Let us all act in such a way that it helps others to also live well, so that we can all be well together!
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