Long Shadows of the Past and Surviving Intergenerational Trauma

As hurts and grievances extend across generations in longstanding and escalating global conflicts, the issue of forgiveness seems more relevant than ever, however hard this is. Duncan Morrow, Hanneke Coates, Angela Findlay and Marian Liebmann explore the impact of trauma and war on their own families and communities. Ranging over war crimes and conflicts in Northern Ireland, Indonesia and Germany, they consider what it takes for people to take the journey from dehumanisation to re-humanisation.

Speaker biographies:

Duncan Morrow is Director of Community Engagement and a lecturer in Politics at the University of Ulster who has actively sought to address sectarianism in Northern Ireland for the last 20 years. Follow him on Twitter @duncan_morrow

Hanneke Coates was born just before the Second World War on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where her father was a tea planter. After the invasion of Java by the Japanese in 1942, she was forced to spend three and a half years of her childhood in one of over 300 concentration camps based around the Archipelago. She has recently been to Nagasaki to the unveiling of a memorial to commemorate the POWs and to explore making peace with her own experiences.

Angela Findlay is a professional artist, writer and freelance lecturer. Her Anglo-German roots, plus years of working as an artist in German and English prisons, have given her first hand experience of what it means to be, or to feel, ‘guilty’. Angela takes her audiences on a journey into the grey worlds of prison and World War Two Germany. Using extraordinary images she shines light into some of the darkest corners and reveals how pathways to forgiveness and redemption can be created through art. Her extensive research into her German family’s story and post-war Germany demonstrates the vital role art also plays in the culture of remembrance, apology and the ultimate goal of achieving inner and outer peace. Follow her on Twitter @angelas_talks.

Marian Liebmann was born to parents who were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and this has informed her extensive work in art therapy, mediation and restorative justice. She has worked with offenders and victims of crime and was director of Mediation UK. She has trained many people in restorative justice in the UK and several African and East European countries, and has given presentations at UN Crime Congresses. She also worked for many years as an art therapist in central Bristol, and runs workshops on using art with anger and conflict. She is involved in helping Bristol to become a restorative city. She has written/ edited 12 books, including Art Therapy and Anger and Restorative Justice: How It Works.

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