Preliminary Programme

Out of 13.5 million foreigners who worked in Germany and the lands occupied by the German Reich throughout the war, 8.4 million were civilians from various Western and Eastern European countries. As of 30 September 1944, nearly 2.5 million of the civilian workers in the Third Reich were citizens of the Soviet Union, the so-called “Eastern workers,” or Ostarbeiter (M. Spoerer).
The enslavement of Soviet forced laborers stopped with the end of the war. However, they attained recognition above all as victims of Nazi persecutions only after the dissolution of the USSR. In the public space of post-Soviet Ukraine the Ostarbeiter subject became topical in the early 1990s, above all on the state and public levels. The main direction of mass initiatives to study and popularize the history and experiences of forced labourers was channeled into rescuing from oblivion this component of society’s memory of the tragic events of the Second World War, which was “repressed” during the Soviet period.
The core point of this paper will be such. To what extent public discourse in contemporary Ukraine, determined by known “monetization” of memory and compensation payments to this category of victims of Nazi persecutions, influences the biographical memory and oral histories of former Ukrainian Ostarbeiters. And what role traumatic experience as the main component of this public discourse and society’s memory plays in this process.
To discuss this problem we’ll dwell on such questions:
- To what extent this discourse predetermined the actuality of topic of Ostarbeiter in historical writing, and massive recording of their oral histories.
- What do former Ostarbeiters as narrators understand as trauma, and what do we as researches interpret as trauma.
- What place in oral histories of former Ostarbeiters is occupied by issue of trauma (is it hidden or pushed forward, when and why it appears, what logic of recreation is used, etc.).
- How and with the help of what recourses the issue of trauma, recollected by Ostarbeiters in their oral histories, return back to public discourse.
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The forced recruitment of young men from Luxemburg, Eupen-Malmedy, Lorraine and Alsace into the army of the Nazi regime still lives on in the memory of the people concerned. War experience – no matter if in a hiding place or at one of the battle lines of the Second World War – coming home as well as the fight for payments of compensation or moral recognition that has lasted for decades, have left marks in the minds of the “forceful recruited”.
The intended talk presents the evaluation of interviews of contemporary witnesses, conducted by stage director Loretta Walz during 2009 and 2013 with former “forced recruited men” from the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, Lorraine and Eupen-Malmedy. The sources consist of biographic, filmic interviews with contemporary witnesses, conducted without a set catalogue of questions. The narrative character and the detailed descriptions are a big challenge and at the same time an excellent opportunity for historical research.
The crux of the talk will be the methodological approach, hence a qualitative evaluation of the interviews according to the principles of “Oral History”. The analysis is guided by the hypothesis that attributions and media discourse have formed particular “patterns of remembering” (“Erinnerungsmuster”, cf. Ulrike Jureit), which in turn structure individuals’ memory and which emerge across borders.
To identify “patterns of remembering”, the occurrence of different topics in the interviews of the corpus of sources is researched. The qualitative analysis of different codes (e.g. code “payments of compensation” and everything mentioned by the witnesses connected to this code, such as “compensation”, “reparation”, “equalisation”) is used to find out which aspects are especially prominent in the memory of the witnesses and how they remember them. The subsequent comparison of the interviews reveals “patterns of remembering”, forming the collective from individual memories. Of special interest are also gaps in the memory, which can be revealed by comparing the interviews to traditional, written historical sources. Hence, the research project intends to use the “Oral History” approach to learn about emotions, attitudes and ascriptions linked to the topic, which cannot be found, are biased or extraordinarily exposed in traditional sources.





The present project is supported by the National Research Fund, Luxembourg (Show less)

Political autobiographies and memoirs thrive after periods of historical crisis and often sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies. However, the genre tends to be neglected both by historians and literary scholars, as the historical reliability of those books is often put into question, as well as their literary and aesthetic value.
Thus, the role of autobiographies in identity construction of post-war societies is still a field that leaves lots of research to be done. The proposed paper will be based on autobiographies after World War II, which is the crisis that defined large parts of the 20th century. Relying on a rhetorical approach to autobiographies, the paper approaches the difficult subject of autobiographies by Nazi perpetrators. Thereby, it aims to show how strategies of justification and remorse are engrained in autobiography as a genre. The motif of justification will be discussed in particular as a literary and rhetorical topos that surfaces most visibly in autobiographical narrations of times of personal and cultural crisis.
The paper will therefore focus on the autobiographies of former Nazi leaders such as Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach, Karl Dönitz and Erich Raeder. Their autobiographies will not only be contrasted with their statements in the Nuremberg trials, but also be analyzed as apologetic literature. This includes the discussion of the impact that those books had on the German post-war society. However, the main emphasis of the paper will be on a text-based analysis that aims to reveal different textual strategies of implementing the motif of justification in autobiographies.
The following questions will be addressed:
- How is the Third Reich displayed in retrospective? How does this relate to the interplay of narrator and character in the autobiographies (identification, rejection)?
- Which historical events are considered 'worth telling', which are omitted? In what order are events narrated? How are they displayed?
- Which impact on the self-understanding of post-war German society did these autobiographies have?
- How do strategies of justification in these books fit in with the genre of autobiography? Are there culturally stable techniques of apologetic narration and presentation?
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My paper presents the results of an oral history and ethnographic research project on the memory of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-44). It critically examines how survivors of violent historical events could, in the framework of Soviet society, come to terms with their memories. The event’s idealization and official “heroization”, without doubt, offered advantages for survivors. Yet my research suggests that it also posed serious limitations and obstacles to the life-long process of dealing with a traumatizing experience at a young age.

Psychological trauma and the concept of “working through” traumatic memories are theories borrowed from psychoanalysis and applied to the reading of history in the West. Some historians of the Holocaust in particular have been preoccupied with the question of how to depict violent historical events in a way that takes into account not only historical facts, but also the emotional consequences of violence on individuals and societies. Saul Friedländer has suggested that the development of a coherent identity is bound to fail as long as long as trauma has not been addressed and that the adherence to a patriotic narrative prevents a shift to a universal memory based on general notions of human rights.

The object of my research was to look beyond the assumption that the role assigned to the survivors in Soviet society helped them overcome and work through their traumatic memories. While it is true that such roles have been a source of consolation: Many blockade survivors learned to tell their stories in ways that comfort rather than distress them and even those who did not wholeheartedly believe in the Soviet cause and its pompous collective rituals often used those very rituals as a substitute or a pretext for private and individual mourning. However, by abiding by a certain interpretation, no matter how comforting it may be and what social advantages it offers, survivors find themselves repeatedly confronted with conflicting situations and emotions. The suppression of certain aspects may prevent reaching a certain distance from, or reconciliation with the past. As Dominick LaCapra has put it: “The process of critically coming to terms with the past requires perspective on subject-positions and the ability to resist the total consumption of the self by a given identity that threatens to prevent any form of renewal.” (LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 1996)

By living through a whole circle of the commemoration calendar with individual survivors and survivors as groups, a wide range of memorial practices and narratives were observed and analyzed. They not only reflect the values and changes in Soviet society, but also the need of survivors to come to terms with their memories, by using, rejecting and controlling memorial practices and narratives.
The research conducted gives new insights into the insecurities, fractions, emotions and silences beyond the official story, and hopes to add those “loose ends” that have been eliminated by more than 65 years of viewing the past through the prism of distinct concepts. (Show less)