Preliminary Programme

In this paper I would like to present the oral history project called ‘Double Exposure’ (exhibition and film) which deals with the emigration and settlement of 25 Viennese Jews who fled to the UK following the ‘Anschluss’ (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany). I will look at the narratives of rupture and closures among the narratives of the interviewees but would also like to investigate the underlining narrative framework of my exhibition and film. This meta-narrative is often not explored and in this paper I will try to critically analyse my own points of reference. Among the 25 interviewees from Austria who settled in Britain, some had come on a Kindertransport, some came with their parents, and some came on domestic visas. They settled in different parts of Britain and had many different experiences, during and after the war. In this paper I will investigate which factors seem to increase or decrease the experience and the narration of rupture within one person’s life history. (Show less)

In 2010 the "Jawne Learning and Memorial Centre" in Cologne started an Oral History project on the rescue of Jewish children in 1938/39, mainly with the "kindertransport" to Great Britain. The Jawne Centre preserves the history of the only Jewish High School in the Rhine Area, the Jawne, which existed from 1919 until 1941/42. Our still proceeding project has a special focus on children rescued from Cologne and from the region of North Rhine Westphalia.
Many of our respondents, living in Great Britain, in Israel or in the USA, now in their eighties or even nineties, do not narrate their biographies for the first time. They give a nuanced account of their experiences, reflecting on their lives and considering what they want to tell. But nevertheless there are moments of discomposure and sudden silence. Those ruptures in many interviews concern remembrances of a brother or a sister, who stayed in Germany or in an occupied country and could not be rescued.
Mrs. S., 87 years old and living in a little town in the east of Tel Aviv, talked about her absolutely horrible experience during the November pogrom of 1938 in her hometown Essen, when an axe had been thrown through a window and banged in the wall directly beneath her head. She told this story calmly and composed. But when she later talked about a dream she dreamt in a hostel night in London, a dream symbolising the death of her brother, she could not speak further on.
The silence, the discomposure tell about pains still present today.
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In the 21st century we are heading towards a shift, where the eye witnesses of the Nazi-era are passing away but their children and grandchildren carry on their legacies. My interdisciplinary interest in contemporary research is therefore focused on their descendants. How the past was mediated and inscribed into family-memories is the central question in this regard. Specific consequences and trans-generational long-term-effects in family histories can be detected as psychological and sociological studies in Germany, the US and Israel show. The trauma of the Holocaust and persecution as well as feelings of rootlessness were passed on to the next generation.
This process of transmission is visible in family-structures, -myths -legends, fears and free associations. These factors hardly show up in conscious statements in interviews and have therefore be detected "between the lines": The challenge lies in recognize the above mentioned aspects in a meta-linguistic interview- or text-analysis.
Approximately 2.300 Jewish Austrians managed to escape the national socialist persecution to Argentina. In 2012 I conducted several interviews with their offspring, investigating their individual life experiences as second and third generation from émigrés families.
For them it is not only of fundamental importance, how the experiences of persecution and expulsion of their parents were transmitted, but also how they integrated into the society of the country where they were born. The question of identity is of immanent concern. On the one hand they grew up in the environment of the German speaking community, on the other hand they are Argentine citizens automatically by birth and attended schools where classes are taught in Spanish. Their knowledge of Vienna is reduced to the stories of their parents and maybe to holiday-travels. What do they know about Austria, what is their attitude towards that country? Which way of life and which language do they prefer? What does Jewishness mean to them? What are the nationalities and religious believes of their marriage partners and circle of friends?
„Some, like the survivors who swelled the populations of [...] New York, formed strong survivors communities where several of their children grew up thinking that ‚everyone’s’ parents had been in concentration camps,“ writes Helen Epstein in her book „Children of the Holocaust.“ Is her statement also valid for the children of the Austrian emigrants which grew up in Belgrano, the mainly German speaking neighborhood in Buenos Aires? (Show less)