Preliminary Programme

In this paper I use different functions of collective, social and cultural memory in analyzing the narratives of young Germans regarding the Nazi past and the Holocaust. My research is based on 30 interviews conducted during several stays in Berlin at 2001-2002 with male and female students from diverse study-disciplines. The interviewees come from different parts of Germany and were all born between 1970 and 1980.
My interviews analysis concentrates on using various narratives of collective memory as reflected in schoolbooks, children's literature, films, rituals and sites of memory. I examine the way in which they are interpreted, perceived and combined by the interviewees to create a new narrative.
Based on the historical method of discourse analysis, I look for a personal ‘Archeology of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”’ in these interviews, transmitted through the multiple and various 'agents of memory' and juxtaposing several ‘layers’ in individuals. By ‘layers’ I mean the different narratives imbedded in the historical context of their time of shaping; for example, the architectural and textual narration of monuments erected since the late 1940s, the patterns of children’s books written mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, etc., as reinterpreted in the context of post-unification Germany.
By deconstructing the interviews into their primal narrative layers, and by comparing them to the original meaning expressed by the ‘agents of memory’ I try to establish the way the latter are “read” by young Germans today, and to compare between the specific characteristics of individuals growing up in the former East Germany and West Germany. (Show less)

1. About 7000 Dutchmen and women were transported between 1941 and 1945 to Neuengamme Concentration camp near Hamburg on different grounds (resistance, hostages, sinti, jews, black marketeers etc.). About 10% of them returned after the war. Very few are alive today. The Vriendenkring Neuengamme is an organization to commemorate the Neuengamme prisoners. It consists mainly of 2nd and 3rd generation. The Vriendenkring has initiated a project to collect as much information on the former camp-prisoners as possible, and integrate this in a data-base Survivors are interviewed.

2. In my paper I propose to discuss the personal histories from and about the camp as part of an ongoing debate on what is allowed to be discussed and remembered about the camps, and what is taboo. This changes over time, and with the personal state life of the people involved. Many people were already dead in the camp, so they will be remembered as victims only; other people survived to tell their stories; while many people have died since 1945 and will be remembered through their children and grandchildren only.

3. DEAD. A particular group of Dutch victims were the male population of the little village of Putten, who were collectively taken to Neuengamme as a reprisal for a resistance attack on a high German officer. Only 10% of them survived. A psychiatrist, himself a former inmate, suggested that it was due to their severe protestant faith that so few of them survived. Were they martyrs to their faith , or was what happened to them simply the result from their being in the KZ at the very end?
4. SURVIVING personal accounts of former inmates, focusing on the question what in their view made them survive the camp.
5. ALIVE
This last part focuses on accounts from 2nd and 3rd generations about their parents and grandparents. There are three kinds of stories to be recognized:
- the guilty (die Bosen): SS, NSB, black marketeers, homosexuals
- the innocent : jews, jehovah witnesses, the people from Putten
- the good ones: resistance fighters. (Show less)

This project looks at how Holocaust memory-work is structured generationally within families, among survivors and their descendents. Reconstructing the fragments of families shattered by war, generational memory-work addresses the problem of "ambiguous loss": the psychological presence but bodily absence of family members (Boss 1999). These dynamics are commonly present among immigrants who leave their homes and families behind; they are amplified in the case of Holocaust survivors whose homes and families of origin have been destroyed. Acts of memory-work—such as the exchange of family stories, photographs and letters, the taking trips to places of origin in prewar Europe-- represent collective efforts to resolve ambiguous loss and reconstruct some semblance of generational continuity. But these acts are always fraught with trauma, silences and gaps in knowledge of the past.

My paper focuses upon a case study of one family: its stories, silences, and the fragmentary ways Holocaust memory was transmitted from generation to generation. It draws primarily upon a series of letters, recently recovered and translated from Polish, written by family members trapped in the Warsaw ghetto during WWII, sent to relatives living in New York City, supplemented by additional archival materials. It intersperses different voices and selves in the text, allowing for "interaction" between the letter writers, the recipients of the letters, and the second-generation interpreters of the letters. (Show less)

Andrea Strutz/Manfred Lechner:
The paper/proposal discusses the transformation of memories and narratives from jewish Austrian refugees about their former home and the Austrian culture, that were passed on to their grandchildren. This work is based on Video-Interviews that were done in the year 2001 and at this time they all were living in the area of New York City. This Video project "Erinnerungen aus der Ferne" was inspired by another Video History Project "Emigration. Austria - New York" (the specific goal of the project was the collection and scientific analyses of experiences and lifestories of people who were forced to leave Austria in order to flee from the National Socialists in 1938/39 and did not want to return to Austria after 1945 because of what they had endured; their stories and their todays relationship with Austria are shown in the video documentation "continental divide - geteilte leben",1997 (S-VHS, Farbe, 47 min, see: http://www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/zg/cd/cd1.htm ).
During the interviews with the Austrian emigrants it turned out that it would be also very interesting to do future work also with the grandchildren and to search for the transformation of the memories and the impact on the identity of the grandchildren.
The grandchildren we interviewed were 18 years or older and had at least one jewish grandparent, who had to flee Austria after the "Anschluss". Migrants have an important role as carriers of cultural codes and images. The Collective Memory is partly built by communication in the everyday life and spans three to four generations, that is also the scope of Oral History (Jan Assman). Besides that intentional way of dealing with memories, there also other forms of the transgenerational transmission of memories and narratives through other things or activities like talks in the family, photographs, films, letters, literature, music, architecture etc. As we could see, that non intentional form was more dominant in our interviews. The memories of the Holocaust did not play a big role, although the grandparents were traumatized by their forced emigration from Austria. For the grandchildren there had been other formative impacts that shaped their identity and memory: like the living situation (some lived in the same household for a while), the German language, cultural habbits like literature, music but also manners and especially the Austrian food and the way of cooking. (Show less)