While Bowen and McGoldrick were shaping the genogram in the USA and family therapy counted as an American invention, something was happening in an old university town on the Neckar that one might describe as a quiet counter-revolution.
Helm Stierlin (1926–2021), born in Mannheim, was the central figure, and his biography reads like that of a cultural ambassador travelling in the opposite direction. From 1965 to 1974 he headed the psychotherapy unit of the Family Studies Section at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in the USA – the very place where Bowen had conducted his famous family experiments. He then returned to Germany and in 1974 took over the Department of Psychoanalytic Basic Research and Family Therapy at the University of Heidelberg.
What Stierlin built there became the Heidelberg School – the epicentre of systemic therapy in the German-speaking world. He brought American concepts with him, but rather than simply translating them into German, he developed them further, and sometimes in directions that no one in the USA had contemplated. His concept of "delegation" described how parents unconsciously pass assignments on to their children: the assignment to achieve the career the parents did not manage, or the assignment to remain loyal even though one's own marriage has long since expired. Assignments that no one has issued and that are nonetheless reliably carried out.
From Stierlin's circle emerged an entire generation of significant therapists, including Fritz B. Simon, who consistently transferred systems theory to organisations and companies – and thereby showed that the patterns genograms make visible in families repeat themselves in firms with astonishing precision, as though org charts and genograms have more in common than one might suppose.
The German Dimension
The Heidelberg School also brought with it a sensitivity that would not have been necessary in the USA: a sensitivity to German family history. In a country where three generations within thirty years had been shaped by two world wars, the Holocaust, flight, expulsion, and division, genogram work had a dimension that extended far beyond therapeutic curiosity – it became a tool of coming to terms with the past, and sometimes the only tool that worked, because words could not reach what suddenly became visible in images and lines.
Genograms of German families from this period display a recurring pattern with its own eloquence: broken lines where fallen sons should stand; forced migrations entered into family history as flight and expulsion; taboo zones concealing entanglements in National Socialism; and over everything a persistent silence that passes from generation to generation as emotional distance – more reliably than any inherited possession.
