Revisiting Survival: Hilde O. Bluhm on Early Accounts of the Nazi Concentration Camps

In 1948, psychoanalyst Hilde O. Bluhm published an article in the American Journal of Psychotherapy entitled “How Did They Survive?” Essentially a collective review of 12 books and articles that had been published on the subject up to that point (including Bettelheim, Frankl, and Rousset but also several other now forgotten works by, inter alia, Ernst Wiechert, Rudolf Kalmar, and Georg Karst), Bluhm used the books as a jumping-off point for her own psychoanalytically informed explanation. In this chapter, I pick up on the themes of the first two chapters and reread the same texts in light of the last 80 years of historical research. Bearing in mind de Wind’s argument about “survival through stupor,” I ask to what extent the authors’ accounts have stood the test of time. I do so not to discredit or “unmask” them but to historicize them, asking why certain explanations seem more persuasive than others at different moments in time.