Interesting Emendations: Burkhard Bilger's "Fatherland"

I’m currently reading Burkhard Bilger’s absorbing family memoir Fatherland (2023). I’ve just finished chapter 8, called “Ghost.” It’s about Bilger’s participation in a Familienaufstellung. Reading it, I recall that Bilger wrote about this experience before in a New Yorker piece titled “Ghost Stories” (September 12, 2016). Comparing the two versions, I see a number of interesting changes. For example, both versions define a Familienaufstellung as “part theatre, part therapy, part séance—a measure of just how far Germans will go to come to terms with their past.” Both versions compare it to “family sculpting, in which patients take turns posing one another in groups to depict key moments in their lives.” Both versions note that a Familienaufstellung is “both more impersonal and more weirdly intimate” than family sculpting. Where the two versions differ is that the New Yorker piece is more detailed about the origins of the Familienaufstellung. Bilger notes that it “grew out of the work of Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist and former Catholic priest.” He writes,

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. But it’s closest to family sculpting, a type of group therapy developed by the psychologist Virginia Satir in the early nineteen-sixties. In Satir’s method, patients take turns posing one another in groups to depict key moments in their lives. 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. Sometimes it helps people see that relationship clearly for the first time.

At times, the behavior in these sessions is bizarre. Bilger says,

By the end of the second day, I’d been a brother, a grandfather, Restlessness, and the country of Germany. I’d watched people burst into tears, climb into one another’s laps, and pretend to be God. I’d heard a woman scream that she was bleeding from her vagina and that crows had eaten her baby. At times, the sobs and shouting rose to such a pitch that I worried that the police might come. 

Bilger is skeptical of the process, but not dismissive. He says, “The very act of empathizing so deeply could help people understand themselves.” But in the magazine version, he also says,

Whether it’s true, I can’t say. I never found any trace of those victims in German or French archives. Like a lot of the revelations in Baring’s sessions, this one struck me as a little too convenient. 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. But it’s rarely that simple.

Bilger’s “Ghost Stories” is one of the most personal pieces he’s ever written, and one of his best. It’s great to see a version of it preserved between hard covers.